Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of different methods for monitoring incipient carious lesions in smooth surfaces under fluoride varnish therapy.

BACKGROUND There are only a few studies relating visual inspection methods and laser fluorescence when monitoring regression of incipient carious lesions. AIM The purpose of this study was to monitor incipient carious lesions in smooth surfaces under varnish fluoride therapy using visual inspection methods and laser fluorescence (LF). DESIGN Active white spot lesions (n = 111) in upper front teeth of 36 children were selected. The children were subjected to four or eight applications of fluoride varnish in weekly intervals. The visual systems were activity (A) and maximum dimension in millimetres (D). They were applied together with LF readings (L) in the beginning of the study (W1), in the 5th week (W5), and in the 9th (W9) week. RESULTS The mean (SD) of L values in W5 and W9 were 5.6 (3.8) and 4.5 (3.3), respectively; both were significantly different from the initial score of 7.4 (5.1) in W1. There was a positive correlation between D and L in W5 (r = 0.25) and W9 (r = 0.36; P < 0.05). The mean (SD) values of L were lower following the activity criteria. CONCLUSIONS Our findings support the finding that incipient carious lesions in smooth surfaces under fluoride therapy can be monitored by laser fluorescence and visual inspection methods.
National youth team football players between the conflicting priorities of sports success and vocational training

Abstract In view of the risks involved in relying on a professional career in football as a way of making a future living, most players of Swiss national youth football teams pursue some form of vocational training at the same time. This paper investigates the question under what conditions a successful football career is possible when faced with such a dual burden. In order to examine the development process as holistically as possible, a person-oriented approach was chosen. 159 former Swiss national youth team players were retrospectively interviewed about their careers, and the data were analysed using the LICUR method (Bergman, Magnusson & El-Khouri, 2003). This involves identifying certain patterns in the relevant variables of sports career, vocational career and family support, and then comparing these with the performance at the age of peak performance. Through this, it was possible to identify promising patterns of development. It turns out that the critical transition, at the age of about 15-16 years, is characterised overall by stability. The most successful patterns display above-average family support accompanied by above-average professional talent promotion in the clubs. In this constellation, the football players who are later successful pursue vocational training courses leading to low levels of educational qualification.
Numerical integrators based on modified differential equations

Inspired by the theory of modified equations (backward error analysis), a new approach to high-order, structure-preserving numerical integrators for ordinary differential equations is developed. This approach is illustrated with the implicit midpoint rule applied to the full dynamics of the free rigid body. Special attention is paid to methods represented as B-series, for which explicit formulae for the modified differential equation are given. A new composition law on B-series, called substitution law, is presented.
Infliximab Restores the Dysfunctional Matrix Remodeling Protein and Growth Factor Gene Expression in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Background:Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs), a disintegrin and metalloprotease with thrombospondin motifs [ADAM(TS)s] and growth factors are involved in inflammation and tissue damage and repair, all occurring in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). We studied the impact of anti-inflammatory therapy with infliximab on mucosal expression of these tissue remodeling genes in patients with IBD. Methods:Mucosal gene expression of 23 MMPs, 4 TIMPs, 50 ADAM(TS)s, and 158 growth factors was investigated in 61 patients with IBD before and after the first infliximab therapy and in 12 controls, with microarrays and quantitative RT-PCR. Protein localization, mucosal gelatinase levels, and net gelatinolytic activity were investigated by immunohistochemistry, zymography analysis, and gelatin degradation assay, respectively. Results:In patients with active IBD before infliximab versus controls, gene expression of many MMPs, TIMPs, ADAM(TS)s, and growth factors was upregulated, whereas colonic expression of MMP28 and TGFA and ileal expression of ADAMDEC1 and AGT were downregulated. After controlling inflammation with infliximab, most gene dysregulations observed at baseline were restored in responders. Increased ratio of MMP1/TIMP1 expression at baseline in active IBD was restored in responders with colonic mucosal healing. With immunohistochemistry, protein localization differences of MMP1, MMP3, REG1A, and TIMP1 were shown between active IBD and control mucosa. With zymography analysis and gelatin degradation assay, higher gelatinase levels and net gelatinolytic activity were measured before infliximab and levels normalized after infliximab. Conclusions:Our data suggest that suppression of inflammation results in the arrest of epithelial damage and subsequent mucosal healing. Therefore, the therapeutic potential of agents targeting MMPs or growth factors as primary therapy seems rather complex.
Stochastic Simulation Optimization - An Optimal Computing Budget Allocation

With the advance of new computing technology, simulation is becoming very popular for designing large, complex and stochastic engineering systems, since closed-form analytical solutions generally do not exist for such problems. However, the added flexibility of simulation often creates models that are computationally intractable. Moreover, to obtain a sound statistical estimate at a specified level of confidence, a large number of simulation runs (or replications) is usually required for each design alternative. If the number of design alternatives is large, the total simulation cost can be very expensive. Stochastic Simulation Optimization addresses the pertinent efficiency issue via smart allocation of computing resource in the simulation experiments for optimization, and aims to provide academic researchers and industrial practitioners with a comprehensive coverage of OCBA approach for stochastic simulation optimization. Starting with an intuitive explanation of computing budget allocation and a discussion of its impact on optimization performance, a series of OCBA approaches developed for various problems are then presented, from the selection of the best design to optimization with multiple objectives. Finally, this book discusses the potential extension of OCBA notion to different applications such as data envelopment analysis, experiments of design and rare-event simulation.
‘Saying it without words’: a qualitative study of oncology staff's experiences with speaking up about safety concerns

Objectives To explore the experiences of oncology staff with communicating safety concerns and to examine situational factors and motivations surrounding the decision whether and how to speak up using semistructured interviews. Setting 7 oncology departments of six hospitals in Switzerland. Participants Diverse sample of 32 experienced oncology healthcare professionals. Results Nurses and doctors commonly experience situations which raise their concerns and require questioning, clarifying and correcting. Participants often used non-verbal communication to signal safety concerns. Speaking-up behaviour was strongly related to a clinical safety issue. Most episodes of ‘silence’ were connected to hygiene, isolation and invasive procedures. In contrast, there seemed to exist a strong culture to communicate questions, doubts and concerns relating to medication. Nearly all interviewees were concerned with ‘how’ to say it and in particular those of lower hierarchical status reflected on deliberate ‘voicing tactics’. Conclusions Our results indicate a widely accepted culture to discuss any concerns relating to medication safety while other issues are more difficult to voice. Clinicians devote considerable efforts to evaluate the situation and sensitively decide whether and how to speak up. Our results can serve as a starting point to develop a shared understanding of risks and appropriate communication of safety concerns among staff in oncology.
Alignment of Ontologies: WordNet and Goi-Taikei

This paper describes a method of alignment between the noun part of WordNet and Goi-Taikei’s Ontology. The result of the automatic alignment shows that matching words in Japanese as well as in English is highly efficient in extracting correct matches. Analyses of correct alignments by hand illustrate that, in ontology alignment, it is not always possible to preserve relative relations between concepts such as hyponymy or antonymy.
The corpus luteum of the guinea pig. II. Cytochemical studies on the Golgi complex, GERL, and lysosomes in luteal cells during maximal progesterone secretion

This study characterizes the cytochemical properties of the Golgi complex, the structure which corresponds to Golgi complex-endoplasmic reticulum-lysosomes (GERL), and the granule population in luteal cells of guinea pigs at the time of maximum progesterone secretion, in material fixed by vascular perfusion, a method particularly suited for preserving both fine structure and enzyme activity. The distribution of several marker enzymes was determined by electron microscope cytochemistry. Acid phosphatase (ACPase) and arylsulfatase were used to identify structures containing lysosomal proteins. To resolve specific problems, additional cytochemical markers were employed: localization of thiamine pyrophosphatase (TPPase) (in the Golgi complex) and alkaline phosphatase (ALPase) (a plasma membrane marker), and prolonged osmication (a generally accepted method of marking the outer cisterna of the Golgi complex). The results demonstrate that at the time of peak steroid secretion the Golgi complex in luteal cells, in marked contrast to that of most other cell types, typically displays intense ACPase activity in all of its cisternae. Similarly, all Golgi cisternae stain after prolonged osmication and may show TPPase activity. On the other hand, GERL in luteal cells of this age, unlike that in most cells, commonly shows low levels of, or lacks, ACPase activity. However, GERL resembles that of other cell types in being TPPase-negative and in being unstained by treatment with aqueous OsO4. GERL and some Golgi cisternae are reactive for ALPase. The granule population in luteal cells of this stage consists of lysosomes, multivesicular bodies, electrontransparent vacuoles, and microperoxisome-like bodies. These results form a base line with which luteolytic changes described in the companion study (Paavola, L.G. 1978. The corpus luteum of the guinea pig. III. Cytochemical studies on the Golgi complex and GERL during normal postpartum regression of luteal cells, emphasizing the origin of lysosomes and autophagic vacuoles. J. Cell. Biol. 79:59--73.) can be compared.
What can the pure‐tone audiogram tell us about a patient's SNR loss?

Although most of us know that you can’t use a patient’s audiogram to predict the amount of trouble he or she will have hearing in noise, many of us still enjoy guessing. In other words, many of us look at an audiogram and estimate the degree of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss that our patient will have,1,2 and then act on our guess as if it were reality, i.e., as if we knew from our guess what difficulty the patient will have hearing in noise. This article looks at hair cell microphotographs taken by Dunn and by Harrison, at histological evidence obtained by Schuknecht on 44 human ears,3 and at direct experimental evidence on the relationship between SNR loss and audiometric loss. All evidence suggests our guessing game won’t (and probably can’t) work very well.
Bloscpack: a compressed lightweight serialization format for numerical data

This paper introduces the Bloscpack file format and the accompanying Python reference implementation. Bloscpack is a lightweight, compressed binary file-format based on the Blosc codec and is designed for lightweight, fast serialization of numerical data. This article presents the features of the file-format and some some API aspects of the reference implementation, in particular the ability to handle Numpy ndarrays. Furthermore, in order to demonstrate its utility, the format is compared both feature- and performance-wise to a few alternative lightweight serialization solutions for Numpy ndarrays. The performance comparisons take the form of some comprehensive benchmarks over a range of different artificial datasets with varying size and complexity, the results of which are presented as the last section of this article.
Use of a yeast assay to detect functional alterations in p53 in prostate cancer: Review and future directions

While many studies have suggested that p53 mutations are common in human cancers, the functional activity of these mutant alleles has not yet been fully addressed. We believe that information about the functional status of individual p53 mutants will prove to be important for a better understanding of the role of p53 in tumor development and progression. Ultimately, this information could also influence treatment decisions for individual cancer patients.
Some new distances between intuitionistic fuzzy sets

In the application of intuitionistic fuzzy sets, similarity measures play very important roles. But they bear a relation to distances in many cases. Therefore, it is significant to study the methods of measuring distances between intuitionistic fuzzy sets. In this paper, we firstly present a new formula which can unify the distances suggested by Atanassove and Grzegorzewski. Then we propose another group of distances between intuitionistic fuzzy sets. An application instance is showed finally.
Is Trust Rigid or Malleable? A Laboratory Experiment

An important debate within the trust literature is whether trust is modified by social experiences or resistant to change despite changing social circumstances. We address this debate by designing and implementing an experiment that exposes participants to a high or low trust environment and compares their change in generalized trust. We find that the experimental condition influences change in generalized trust, particularly for participants whose prior level of trust was mismatched with their experimental condition. The implications of these results for theories on the sources of trust are discussed.
Interleukin-1 pretreatment protects against endotoxin-induced hypotension in rabbits: association with decreased tumor necrosis factor levels.

Rabbits were infused with either low-dose recombinant human interleukin (IL)-1 beta or vehicle 16 h prior to receiving lipopolysaccharide (LPS). In controls pretreated with vehicle, mean arterial pressure decreased to 68% of the baseline value by 90 min after LPS infusion and remained low for the duration of the study period. In IL-1-pretreated animals, a similar decrease in mean arterial pressure to 69% was observed at 60 min but returned to 90% of baseline after 180 min (P < .05). IL-1-pretreated animals showed no significant rise in serum tumor necrosis factor after LPS infusion compared with vehicle-treated animals (P < .05). Rabbits were pretreated as above with IL-1 and, 40 h later, plasma was transfused into a second group of rabbits just prior to LPS infusion. An infusion of post-IL-1 plasma did not reduce LPS-induced hypotension. Thus, pretreatment with IL-1 reduces the hypotension in response to LPS by a mechanism that is not plasma-mediated but that is associated with reduced serum tumor necrosis factor levels.
Race-acting: The varied and complex affirmative meaning of “acting Black” for African-American adolescents

In the field of psychology, deficit theoretical frameworks for studying African-American students dominate mainstream psychological theorizing and research. This is particularly the case within research explaining the academic achievement gap between African-American and White students. The aims of the present study are to adopt a culturally responsive theoretical framework to study one of the most widely used explanations for the African-American achievement gap, “the ‘acting White’ hypothesis,” as well as to further interrogate the more globally generalizable concept of “race-acting” and what specifically it means to “act Black. ” The data were generated from an open-ended survey question as part of a larger longitudinal mixed-method study. One hundred and fifteen African-American middle school students participated. Researchers used a thematic content analysis to systematically analyze the data and concluded, based on their multiple interpretations, that the meaning of race-acting is varied and complex. Academic Intelligence was discovered as a prominent and affirmative theme for what it means to these adolescents to “act Black” and, with the exception of two themes (i.e., Ghetto and Superiority), what it means to these adolescents to “act Black” and to “act White” was the same. One implication of the study is that the concept of “race-acting” has utility for guiding future theoretical and methodological development about racialized belief systems of all groups living in racialized societies and culturally specific identity processes for African-Americans.
Performance Analysis of a Hybrid Incremental and Cyclic A/D Conversion Principle

This paper presents a new hybrid A/D conversion principle based on the combination of an incremental conversion for the most significant part of the result and on a cyclic conversion for the least significant part. The proposed approach exhibits a resolution comparable to a multiorder sigma-delta A/D converter (ADC), but with a higher conversion rate (typically a factor of two) and/or a lower complexity, at the cost of a more stringent antialiasing filter requirement. After having presented the basic equations of the conversion principle, a theoretical analysis of the resolution limitations is given, based on nonidealities and noise considerations. Finally, a switched-capacitor implementation example is given with the corresponding simulations, consisting of a low-complexity 14-b ADC suited for applications requiring medium-speed and very compact ADC.
A CALCULATION METHOD OF DEEP WEB ENTITIES RECOGNITION

A great amount of duplicated entities exist in the heterogeneous data sources of Web. How to identify these entities is the most important prerequisite for pattern matching and data integration. To solve the deficiency of current entity recognition methods, such as low automatic level and poor adaptability, Deep Web entity recognition method based on BP neural network is proposed in this paper. To make full use of the characteristic of autonomic learning of BP neural network, the similarities of semantic blocks are used as the input of BP neural network. It obtains correct entity recognition model through training, and accomplishes the target of automated entity recognition of heterogeneous data sources. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified via experiments. The proposed method can reduce manual intervention and promote the efficiency and the accuracy of entity recognition simultaneously.
Improving the fairness of FAST TCP to new flows

It has been observed that FAST TCP, and the related protocol TCP Vegas, suffer unfairness when many flows arrive at a single bottleneck link, without intervening departures. We show that the effect is even more marked if a new flow arrives when existing flows share bandwidth fairly, and propose a simple method to ameliorate this effect.
Effect of Nitric Oxide on Anammox Bacteria

ABSTRACT The effects of nitrogen oxides on anammox bacteria are not well known. Therefore, anammox bacteria were exposed to 3,500 ppm nitric oxide (NO) in the gas phase. The anammox bacteria were not inhibited by the high NO concentration but rather used it to oxidize additional ammonium to dinitrogen gas under conditions relevant to wastewater treatment.
Decreased membrane fluidity during differentiation of human promyelocytic leukemia cells in culture.

The human promyelocytic leukemia cell line. HL-60. undergoes differentiation in the presence of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). phorbol esters, and other agents. Studies were undertaken to determine whether agents that promote differentiation influence membrane fluidity and to assess whether changes in membrane fluidity occur during the process of differentiation. Cells were grown in the presence of DMSO, 1 . 25%. or tetradecanolyl-phorbol 1 3-acetate (TPA). 1 . 6 x 10 5M. Surface membranes were isolated from cells by sucrose density sedimentation following cell disruption with nitrogen cavitation. Membrane fluidity was assessed by the fluorescence polarization of the membrane probe 1.6diphenyl-1 . 3,5-hexatriene (DPH). A progressive decrease in membrane fluidity was first observed on day 3 following exposure of HL-60 cells to DMSO. and this reached a maximum on day 5. coincident with morphological and cytochemical differentiation. Similar changes in membrane fluidity were observed in liposomes prepared from extracted membrane lipids. The ratio of membrane cholesterol to phospholipid was increased 37% on day 5, and there was a small increase in the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fatty acids, with no significant change in phospholipid composition. No changes in membrane fluidity were observed during 1 8 hr of exposure of HL-60 cells to TPA, after which these cells became glass adherent. These studies demonstrate that significant changes in membrane lipid composition and fluidity occur during the process of differentiation in vitro. However. agents that stimulate leukemic cells to differentiate do not themselves appear to perturb bulk membrane fluidity.
Protection of the Ischemic Myocardium by the Converting-Enzyme Inhibitor Zofenopril: Insight Into Its Mechanism of Action

Summary: We assessed whether local inhibition of myocardial converting enzyme by captopril and zofenopril reduces the functional and metabolic damage caused by ischemia and reperfusion. First we investigated the effects of zofenopril and captopril on the mechanical function, cellular redox state, and norepinephrine (NE) content of isolated and aerobically perfused rabbit hearts. Both drugs failed to modify the myocardial redox state. At concentrations >10-6M, zofenopril, but not captopril, caused a reduction in myocardial NE content. At 10-4M, both drugs caused a reduction in developed pressure and an increase in diastolic pressure and release of creatine phosphokinase (CPK). Second we investigated their effects on ischemic and reperfused myocardium. Both drugs exerted a cardioprotection; zofenopril was always more potent than captopril. Recovery of developed pressure on reperfusion improved, and peak release of NE was reduced, as was release of CPK. Calcium homeostasis and mitochondrial function were maintained. Captopril had no effect on occurrence of oxidative stress during reperfusion, whereas zofenopril reduced it. In hearts treated with the converting enzyme inhibitors, peak release of NE was correlated to mitochondrial calcium content, production of ATP, and recovery of mechanical function on reperfusion. These data suggest that the cardioprotective effect of zofenopril and captopril is independent of hemodynamic changes or reduction of the toxicity of oxygen free radicals and that it could be related to a reduction in release of NE