Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical and Personality Correlates of a New Measure of Depression: A General Practice Study

Objective: There is a need for a brief, efficient depression screening measure for general practice settings, particularly for identifying those who are at high risk of depression. We therefore test the usefulness of a measure developed in a sample of medically ill hospitalized patients. Method: More than 600 patients attending six Sydney general practices completed the Depression in the Medically Ill (DMI-10) measure, in conjunction with sociodemographic, depression history and personality profile measures. The impacts of sociodemographic, personality and lifetime depression variables on DMI-10 scores (and identified ‘cases’) were examined as a measure of its usefulness. Results: Gender did not influence depression scores, while there were slight associations between DMI-10 scores and age, marital and occupational status. Higher scores were returned by those with more severe, lengthier and perceived stressful medical illnesses. Using a predetermined cut-off score, 36% rated as putative ‘cases’, a prevalence almost identical to our general hospital study. ‘Cases’ were distinctly more likely to have had previous depressive episodes, to have sought help for such episodes and to have received antidepressant medication. They also scored higher on measures of anxious (anxious worrying and irritability) and self-critical (‘depressive personality’) personality styles. Conclusions: The DMI-10 appears useful as a brief and acceptable screen for depression in a general practice setting, both identifying those who are likely to be currently depressed and those with a background of previous depression.
A High-Throughput VLSI Architecture for Real-Time Full-HD Gradient Guided Image Filter

Guided image filtering has been applied widely in recent years as a solution to the ever-increasing demand of high-performance filtering, especially for real-time image/video processing. The lately proposed gradient domain guided image filter (GDGIF) is one of the typical works focusing on improving the quality of the filtering result of the original guided image filter (GIF), dealing with the halo-artifacts problem for edge-preserving smoothing. However, due to the involvement of global pixel values in the computation, high computation complexity, and additional complex operation, there is no existing VLSI design for the gradient guided filter. This paper presents a high-throughput VLSI architecture for real-time full-HD ( $1920\times 1080$ ) GDGIF. Four techniques are used in the newly proposed design to reduce the computation complexity and increase the processing throughput. First, a pre-processing stage is introduced to address the problem of global parameters required in the GDGIF. Second, multi-scale down-samplings are adopted for reducing circuit size and processing time. Then, a parallel structure operated at a higher frequency is used at the output stage to restore the full image size and to achieve high throughput at the same time. At last, approximated computation is introduced to eliminate speed bottleneck by simplifying the complex exponentiation operation. Based on the STM 65-nm CMOS technology, the implementation results show that the proposed architecture is able to support full-HD image filtering at a throughput above 75 frame/s, with a design area of 586314 $\mu \text{m}^{2}$ and a power consumption of 18.5 mW.
Graphical Argumentation and Design Cognition

Many efforts have been made to exploit the properties of graphical notations to support argument construction and communication. In the context of design rationale capture, we are interested in graphical argumentation structures as cognitive tools to support individual and collaborative design in real time. This context of use requires a detailed understanding of how a new representational structure integrates into the cognitive and discursive flow of design, that is, whether it provides supportive or intrusive structure. This article presents a use-oriented analysis of a graphical argumentation notation known as QOC (Questions, Options, and Criteria). Through a series of empirical studies, we show that it provides most support when elaborating poorly understood design spaces, but is a distraction when evaluating well-constrained design spaces. This is explained in terms of the cognitive compatibility between argumentative reasoning and the demands of different modes of designing. We then provide an account based on the collaborative affordances of QOC in group design meetings, and extend this to discuss the evolution of QOC argumentation from short term working memory to long term group memory.
High Prevalence of USA300 Among Clinical Isolates of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus on St. Kitts and Nevis, West Indies

Limited information is available on antimicrobial susceptibility and clonal distribution of Staphylococcus aureus in the Caribbean region. The aims of this study were to determine the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance among S. aureus isolates and to reveal the frequency and population structure of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) in St. Kitts and Nevis, a small island country in the West Indies. A total of 152 S. aureus isolates were collected from consecutive samples submitted to the clinical microbiology laboratory of the main referral hospital from March 2017 to January 2018. Samples came from all units in the hospital and a small number came from external submissions, and comprised a total of 119 clinical specimens and 33 nasal swabs collected from staff and patients. All S. aureus isolates were confirmed by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Minimal Inhibitory Concentrations (MICs) of clinically relevant antimicrobials were determined by broth microdilution, and diversity of MRSA isolates was assessed by whole genome sequencing (WGS) analysis. MRSA accounted for 45% (69/152) of the isolates. The highest rates of resistance to non-β-lactam agents were observed for erythromycin (55%), moxifloxacin (41%), and levofloxacin (40%), whereas resistance to the other drugs tested was ≤6%. All isolates were susceptible to ceftaroline, linezolid, teicoplanin, telavancin, and vancomycin. WGS-based multilocus sequence typing (MLST) showed that approximately 88% of the MRSA isolates belonged to ST8. Phylogenetic analysis on 801 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) identified among the MRSA ST8 isolates indicates a large degree of genetic diversity. However, all ST8 strains clustered within the distinct clade that defines the USA300 North American Epidemic lineage (Panton-Valentine Leukocidin (PVL) +, arginine catabolic mobile element (ACME) +, Staphylococcal cassettes chromosome mec IVa (SCCmec IVa)). Our data show high levels of methicillin, macrolide, and fluoroquinolone resistance among S. aureus on St. Kitts and Nevis. The USA300 North American epidemic lineage is responsible for the vast majority of MRSA infections on this Caribbean island.
Clustering of Closely Adjacent Extended Objects in Radar Images using Velocity Profile Analysis

As high resolution automotive radars become more common, so does their usage for next-generation functionalities like advanced driver assistant systems and autonomous driving. This creates the need for robust clustering techniques to distinguish among multiple extended objects like vehicles in the same scenario. One especially challenging scenario is that of separating two extended targets close to each other, each following its own trajectory. This paper proposes a clustering algorithm based on the analysis of the velocity profile to divide target points of multiple vehicles into sub-clusters. The theoretical background is explained and shown on simulation data. The algorithm is verified using radar measurements of two extended vehicular targets.
Risk Perception and Human Health Risk in Rural Communities Consuming Unregulated Well Water in Saskatchewan, Canada

Rural communities dependent on unregulated drinking water are potentially at increased health risk from exposure to contaminants. Perception of drinking water safety influences water consumption, exposure, and health risk. A community‐based participatory approach and probabilistic Bayesian methods were applied to integrate risk perception in a holistic human health risk assessment. Tap water arsenic concentrations and risk perception data were collected from two Saskatchewan communities. Drinking water health standards were exceeded in 67% (51/76) of households in Rural Municipality #184 (RM184) and 56% (25/45) in Beardy's and Okemasis First Nation (BOFN). There was no association between the presence of a health exceedance and risk perception. Households in RM184 or with an annual income >$50,000 were most likely to have in‐house water treatment. The probability of consuming tap water perceived as safe (92%) or not safe (0%) suggested that households in RM184 were unlikely to drink water perceived as not safe. The probability of drinking tap water perceived as safe (77%) or as not safe (11%) suggested households in BOFN contradicted their perception and consumed water perceived as unsafe. Integration of risk perception lowered the adult incremental lifetime cancer risk by 3% to 1.3 × 10−5 (95% CI 8.4 × 10−8 to 9.0 × 10−5) for RM184 and by 8.9 × 10−6 (95% CI 2.2 × 10−7 to 5.9 × 10−5) for BOFN. Probability of exposure to arsenic concentrations >1:100,000, negligible cancer risk, was 23% for RM184 and 22% for BOFN.
Housing Design and Community Care: How Home Modifications Reduce Care Needs of Older People and People with Disability

The extent to which housing design can minimise levels of community caregiving has remained largely unmeasured. This paper reports the potential for home modifications to reduce caregiving in the peoples’ homes, particularly older people and people with a disability. It contributes to new knowledge in understanding how housing can play a role in community caregiving and acknowledges the role of the built environment in managing care levels in ageing societies. This paper analyses self-reported care data from 157 Australian community care recipients (average age: 72 years) who had received home modifications within the past 6 months. A before/after comparison of care provided revealed that home modifications reduced hours of care provided by 42% per week. More detailed analysis revealed that the positive association of home modifications with care reduction is stronger with informal care (46% reduction) followed by formal care (16% reduction). These results suggest the role that home modifications, and housing design in general, play in reducing care needs in a community setting.
Ontology Based Arabic Opinion Mining

In Arabic language, studies in the area of opinion mining are still limited compared to that being carried out in other languages. In this paper, we highlight the problem for Arabic opinion mining techniques when analysing reviews having different features with different opinion strengths. The traditional works of opinion mining consider all features extracted from the reviews to be equally important, so they fail to determine the correct opinion of the review and make the review's sentiment classification less accurate. This research presents a technique based on an ontology that uses feature level classification to classify Arabic user-generated reviews by identifying the relevant features from the review based on the degree of these features in the ontology tree. Then, we exploit the important features extracted to determine the overall polarity of the review. Moreover, summarisation for each feature is done to determine which feature has satisfied or dissatisfied customers. To evaluate our work, we use public datasets which are hotels and books datasets. We used f-measure metrics to assess the performance and compare the results with other supervised and unsupervised techniques. Also, subjective evaluation is used in our method to demonstrate the effectiveness of feature and opinion extraction process and summarisation. We show that our method improves the performance compared with other opinion mining classification approaches, obtaining 78.83% f-measure in hotels domain and 79.18% in books domain. Furthermore, the subjective evaluation shows the effectiveness of our method by getting an average f-measure of 84.62% in hotels dataset and 86.31% in books dataset.
CKAP4 Regulates Cell Migration via the Interaction with and Recycling of Integrin

Cytoskeleton-associated protein 4 (CKAP4) is an endoplasmic reticulum protein that is also present in the cell surface membrane, where it acts as a receptor for Dickkopf1 (DKK1). In this study, we found that CKAP4 interacts with β1 integrin and controls the recycling of α5β1 integrin independently of DKK1. In S2-CP8 cells, knockdown of CKAP4 but not DKK1 enlarged the size of cell adhesion sites and enhanced cell adhesion to fibronectin, resulting in decreased cell migration. ABSTRACT Cytoskeleton-associated protein 4 (CKAP4) is an endoplasmic reticulum protein that is also present in the cell surface membrane, where it acts as a receptor for Dickkopf1 (DKK1). In this study, we found that CKAP4 interacts with β1 integrin and controls the recycling of α5β1 integrin independently of DKK1. In S2-CP8 cells, knockdown of CKAP4 but not DKK1 enlarged the size of cell adhesion sites and enhanced cell adhesion to fibronectin, resulting in decreased cell migration. When CKAP4 was depleted, the levels of α5 but not β1 integrin were increased in the cell surface membrane. A similar phenotype was observed in other cells expressing low levels of DKK1. In S2-CP8 cells, α5 integrin was trafficked with β1 integrin and CKAP4 to the lysosome or recycled with β1 integrin. In CKAP4-depleted cells, the internalization of α5β1 integrin was unchanged, but its recycling was upregulated. Knockdown of sorting nexin 17 (SNX17), a mediator of integrin recycling, abrogated the increased α5 integrin levels caused by CKAP4 knockdown. CKAP4 bound to SNX17, and its knockdown enhanced the recruitment of α5β1 integrin to SNX17. These results suggest that CKAP4 suppresses the recycling of α5β1 integrin and coordinates cell adhesion sites and migration independently of DKK1.
Intraindividual relationships between blood pressure level and emotional state.

BACKGROUND Because of the increasing attention to the association between emotion and blood pressure (BP) during activity, there is a need to examine the subjects' own description of feelings in relation to different levels of BP during activity. METHODS Fifty-eight Swedish subjects in six occupational groups were instructed to measure their own BP and subsequently record emotions at 1-hour intervals during waking hours. This was repeated during 4 different working days. Emotional states were recorded on a 4-point scale. Relationships between BP and each emotion were analyzed individually. RESULTS One fourth of the subjects were unable to relate BP variations to emotional states whereas more than one tenth reported correlations between at least five different adjectives and BP. The number of adjectives correlated with systolic BP in an individual was linearly related to the individual's variation in systolic BP-the more significant the adjective the more systolic BP variation. Systolic BP increase with increasing job strain showed a curvilinear relationship with number of adjectives related to systolic BP-those with no significant adjectives and those with excessively many were those who showed the most increase in systolic BP with increasing job strain. CONCLUSIONS Despite the fact that subjects recorded their emotions after the BP measurement, as many as 25% were unable to see any relationship between emotion and BP. This groups as well as those who described many emotion correlates had marked elevations in systolic BP with increasing job strain.
Perfusion Microfermentor Integrated into a Fiber Optic Quasi-Elastic Light Scattering Sensor for Fast Screening of Microbial Growth Parameters

This research presents a microfermentor integrated into an optical fiber sensor based on quasi-elastic light scattering (QELS) to monitor and swiftly identify cellular growth kinetic parameters. The system uses a 1310 nm laser light that is guided through single-mode silica optical fibers to the interior of perfusion chambers, which are separated by polycarbonate membranes (470 nm pores) from microchannels, where a culture medium flows in a constant concentration. The system contains four layers, a superior and an inferior layer made of glass, and two intermediate poly(dimethylsiloxane) layers that contain the microchannels and the perfusion chambers, forming a reversible microfluidic device that requires only the sealing of the fibers to the inferior glass cover. The QELS autocorrelation decay rates of the optical signals were correlated to the cells counting in a microscope, and the application of this microsystem to the monitoring of alcoholic fermentation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae resulted in the kinetic parameters of KM = 4.1 g/L and μm = 0.49 h−1. These results agree with both the data reported in the literature and with the control batch test, showing that it is a reliable and efficient biological monitoring system.
An Indoor Positioning Approach Based on Fusion of Cameras and Infrared Sensors

A method for infrared and cameras sensor fusion, applied to indoor positioning in intelligent spaces, is proposed in this work. The fused position is obtained with a maximum likelihood estimator from infrared and camera independent observations. Specific models are proposed for variance propagation from infrared and camera observations (phase shifts and image respectively) to their respective position estimates and to the final fused estimation. Model simulations are compared with real measurements in a setup designed to validate the system. The difference between theoretical prediction and real measurements is between 0.4 cm (fusion) and 2.5 cm (camera), within a 95% confidence margin. The positioning precision is in the cm level (sub-cm level can be achieved at most tested positions) in a 4×3 m locating cell with 5 infrared detectors on the ceiling and one single camera, at distances from target up to 5 m and 7 m respectively. Due to the low cost system design and the results observed, the system is expected to be feasible and scalable to large real spaces.
Differential Kinase Activation in Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells from Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Patients Treated with Nivolumab

In the era of precision medicine, research of biomarkers for identification of responders to nivolumab therapy is a major challenge. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) could be an interesting surrogate tissue for identifying pharmacodynamic biomarkers. The aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the global serine/threonine kinase (STK) activity in PBMC from non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients using a high throughput kinomic profiling method. PamChip® microarrays were used to explore the STK kinomic profile in PBMC from 28 NSCLC patients before nivolumab initiation (D0) and on day 14 (D14) of the first administration. Two clusters of patients (A and B) were identified at D0, median overall survival (OS) tended to be longer in cluster A than in B (402 vs. 112.5 days, respectively; p = 0.15). Interestingly, the PD-L1 tumor cell score (p = 0.045), the count of CD8+ cells (p = 0.023) and the total body weight (p = 0.038) were statistically different between the clusters. On D14, clusters C and D were identified. Greater activity of most STK, especially those of the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway, was noticed among cluster C. No significant difference between C and D was observed regarding OS. Considering the small number of patients, results from this preliminary study are not conclusive. However, the 4-fold longer median OS in cluster A paves the way to further investigate, in a larger cohort of NSCLC patients, the benefit of basal STK kinomic profile in PBMC to identify responders to nivolumab therapy.
Coping strategies for developmental prosopagnosia

ABSTRACT Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a cognitive condition characterised by a relatively selective deficit in face recognition. Some adults and children with DP experience severe psychosocial consequences related to the condition, yet are reluctant to disclose it to others. The remediation of DP is therefore an urgent issue, but has been met with little success. Given that developmental conditions may only benefit from compensatory rather than remedial training, this study aimed to examine (a) the positive and negative effects of DP disclosure, and (b) compensatory techniques that may circumvent recognition failure. Qualitative questionnaires and interviews were carried out with 79 participants: 50 adults with DP, 26 of their non-affected significant others, and three parents of DP children. Findings indicated positive effects of disclosure, yet most adults choose not to do so in the workplace. Effective compensatory strategies include the use of extra-facial information, identity prompts from others, and preparation for planned encounters. However, changes in appearance, infrequent contact, or encounters in unexpected contexts often cause strategy failure. As strategies are effortful and disrupted by heavily controlled appearance (e.g., the wearing of uniform), disclosure of DP may be necessary for the safety, wellbeing and optimal education of children with the condition.
Effect of Mass Shootings on Gun Sales - A 20 Year Perspective.

INTRODUCTION Granular data on gun sales has been historically difficult to obtain. In 2016, California (CA) made monthly data from 1996-2015 publically available. Control charts are a method to analyze how a process changes over time in response to non-routine events. We utilized this technique to study the impact of US mass shootings on CA gun sales. METHODS Monthly gun sales were provided by the CA Department of Justice and monthly fatalities from the CDC Wonder Death Certificate Registry. Mass shooting events were obtained from after-action reports, news media, and court proceedings. Time ordered data were analyzed with control charts with 95% CIs (UCL, LCL) using QiMacros. RESULTS 9,917,811 individual gun sales occurred in CA with a median monthly rate of 41,324 (range 20,057 - 132,903). A median 263 people lost their lives monthly from firearms (124 homicide, 128 suicide), totaling 53,975 fatalities from 1999-2015. 15/21 current deadliest mass shootings occurred during this study period with 40% from 2012-2015. Also, 36 school shootings occurred during the study (mean 5 deaths, range 0-33; 6 injuries, range 0-23) with 31% in 2012-2015 at rate of 3 events/year vs. 1.4 events/year in the 17 prior years (p<0.05). Sales were generally consistent from 1996-2011 (except post Columbine, Col). Starting in 2011, sales exceeded the 95% predicted UCL every single month. Before October 2011, there was no statistically significant sustained effect of mass shootings on sales (except Col); however, since a statistically significant proportional spike in sales occurred in the months immediately following every single deadliest mass-shooting event. Every year since 2012, CA has strengthened gun laws in response to mass shootings yet sales have risen immediately preceding enactment of these laws each January. CONCLUSION Gun sales are more frequent since 2012, with an additional increase following both mass shootings and legislative changes enacted in response to these shootings. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE Epidemiology, Level III.