Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Dynamic Contour Tonometry and Non-contact Tonometry in Older Patients Presenting with Headache or Vision Loss

Background: Dynamic Contour Tonometry (DCT) is touted to be the most accurate tonometer for Intraocular Pressure (IOP) measurement. Non-Contact “air puff” Tonometry (NCT) may be the most commonly used tonometer for screening of IOP. Elevated IOP is important to exclude in patients presenting with headache or vision loss. Objective: To determine the agreement between DCT and NCT. Methods: The IOP of adult patients 50 years of age or older presenting with headache or vision loss for possible temporal artery biopsy were prospectively recorded. NCT and DCT measurements were obtained within thirty minutes. The right eye IOP measurements were compared with paired t-test, and Bland- Altman plot analysis. The left eye IOP measurements were subsequently analyzed for confirmation of results. Results: There were 106 subjects with complete right eye data, and 104 subjects with complete left eye data. The average age was 72 years, and 70% were female. The NCT IOP was on average 3.9 mm Hg lower in the right eye, and 3.5 mm Hg lower in the left eye compared with DCT. (p<.001) In the right eye the Bland-Altman analysis showed the 95% agreement interval between the two tonometers was -2.5 to 10.4 mmHg and in the left eye -3.0 to 9.9 mmHg. Conclusion: The IOP from NCT and DCT should not be used interchangeably because their level of disagreement includes clinically important discrepancies of up to 10 mm Hg.
When is a carbon price floor desirable

The EU carbon price lies well below estimates of the social cost of carbon and “target-consistent” carbon prices needed to deliver ambitious targets such as the 40% reduction target for 2030. In light of this, the UK introduced a carbon price floor (CPF) for its electricity sector in 2013 and the new Dutch Government has recently made a similar commitment, while successive French Governments have called for an EU-wide CPF. This paper analyzes the impacts and design of a power-sector CPF, both at the EU and national level, using a political-economy approach. We find a good case for introducing such a price-based instrument into the EU ETS. We suggest that a CPF should be designed to “top up” the EUA price to €25–30/tCO2, rising annually at 3–5% above inflation, at least until 2030. We argue that the new EU Market Stability Reserve enhances the value of a CPF in terms of delivering climate benefits, and discuss the potential for a regional CPF in North-West Europe. We also review international experience with price floors (and ceilings).
Apparent total tract digestibility and Ileal digestibility of dry matter, nitrogen, energy and amino acids in conventional, Bacillus subtilis fermented and enzyme treated soybean meal fed to weanling pigs

Apparent total tract digestibility (ATTD), apparent ileal digestibility (AID) and standardised ileal digestibility (SID) of dry matter, nitrogen, energy and amino acids were evaluated in six weanling barrows [(Landrace × Yorkshire) × Duroc] fed soybean meal diet (SBM), fermented soybean meal A diet with 50% solubility in potassium hydroxide (FSMA), fermented soybean meal B diet with 60% solubility in potassium hydroxide (FSMB), fermented soybean meal C diet with 70% solubility in potassium hydroxide (FSMC), enzyme-treated soybean meal (ETSM) and nitrogen-free diet. Pigs having body weights of 8.99 ± 0.40 kg were surgically equipped with T-cannulas of approximately 15 cm prior to the ileo-cecal junction and randomly allotted to one of five dietary treatments and a nitrogen-free diet in 6 × 6 Latin squares. With regards to the ATTD of essential amino acids, the ATTD of arginine, isoleucine, lysine, methionine and total essential amino acids was greater in pigs fed FSMB, FSMC, and ETSM diets than in SBM and FSMA diets. The ATTD of leucine, phenylalanine, threonine and valine in the FSMC diet was non-significant compared with the values of ATTD in FSMB and ETSM diets. With respect to non-essential amino acids the ATTD of aspartic acid, cysteine, glutamic acid, proline, tyrosine and total amino acids was greater in pigs fed the FSMC diet compared with the SBM diet and not different from the values of pigs fed the ETSM diet. The AID of dry matter, nitrogen and energy in the FSMC diet was greater (P < 0.05) than in pigs fed SBM and FSMA diets but was equal to the values of FSMB and ETSM diets. With regards to the AID of essential amino acids, the AID of histidine, lysine, methionine and threonine was greater in pigs fed FSMB, FSMC and ETSM diets than in SBM and FSMA diets (P < 0.05). The AID of isoleucine was greater in pigs fed FSMB and ETSM diets than the FSMA diet. The AID of arginine, phenylalanine and valine was greater in pigs fed the FSMC diet compared with the SBM diet. With respect to non-essential amino acids the AID of aspartic acid, glutamic acid, glycine, tyrosine and total amino acids was the same as in pigs fed FSMB, FSMC, ETSM diets and greater (P < 0.05) than in pigs fed SBM and FSMA diets. The SID of all essential amino acids in pigs fed the FSMC diet was greater than for the FSMA diet. In the case of non-essential amino acids, the SID of all amino acids except for cysteine was greatest in pigs fed FSMB, FSMC and ETSM treatments. In conclusion, dietary supplementation of FSMB, FSMC and/or ETSM diets can improve the ATTD, AID and SID of dry matter, nitrogen, energy, total amino acids and most of the essential amino acids in weanling pigs.
Nano-Strategies to Fight Multidrug Resistant Bacteria—“A Battle of the Titans”

Infectious diseases remain one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The WHO and CDC have expressed serious concern regarding the continued increase in the development of multidrug resistance among bacteria. Therefore, the antibiotic resistance crisis is one of the most pressing issues in global public health. Associated with the rise in antibiotic resistance is the lack of new antimicrobials. This has triggered initiatives worldwide to develop novel and more effective antimicrobial compounds as well as to develop novel delivery and targeting strategies. Bacteria have developed many ways by which they become resistant to antimicrobials. Among those are enzyme inactivation, decreased cell permeability, target protection, target overproduction, altered target site/enzyme, increased efflux due to over-expression of efflux pumps, among others. Other more complex phenotypes, such as biofilm formation and quorum sensing do not appear as a result of the exposure of bacteria to antibiotics although, it is known that biofilm formation can be induced by antibiotics. These phenotypes are related to tolerance to antibiotics in bacteria. Different strategies, such as the use of nanostructured materials, are being developed to overcome these and other types of resistance. Nanostructured materials can be used to convey antimicrobials, to assist in the delivery of novel drugs or ultimately, possess antimicrobial activity by themselves. Additionally, nanoparticles (e.g., metallic, organic, carbon nanotubes, etc.) may circumvent drug resistance mechanisms in bacteria and, associated with their antimicrobial potential, inhibit biofilm formation or other important processes. Other strategies, including the combined use of plant-based antimicrobials and nanoparticles to overcome toxicity issues, are also being investigated. Coupling nanoparticles and natural-based antimicrobials (or other repurposed compounds) to inhibit the activity of bacterial efflux pumps; formation of biofilms; interference of quorum sensing; and possibly plasmid curing, are just some of the strategies to combat multidrug resistant bacteria. However, the use of nanoparticles still presents a challenge to therapy and much more research is needed in order to overcome this. In this review, we will summarize the current research on nanoparticles and other nanomaterials and how these are or can be applied in the future to fight multidrug resistant bacteria.
The impact of the Wenchuan earthquake on early puberty: a natural experiment

Background The factors influencing pubertal timing have gained much attention due to a secular trend toward earlier pubertal onset in many countries. However, no studies have investigated the association between the Great earthquake and early puberty. We aimed to assess whether the Wenchuan earthquake is associated with early puberty, in both boys and girls. Methods We used data from two circles of a survey on reproductive health in China to explore the impact of the Wenchuan earthquake on early puberty , and a total of 9,785 adolescents (4,830 boys, 49.36%) aged 12–20 years from 29 schools in eight provinces were recruited. Wenchuan earthquake exposure was defined as those Sichuan students who had not experienced oigarche/menarche before May 12, 2008. Early puberty was identified as a reported onset of oigarche/menarche at 11 years or earlier. We tested the association between the Wenchuan earthquake and early puberty in boys and girls. Then, subgroup analysis stratified by the age at earthquake exposure also was performed. Results In total, 8,883 adolescents (4,543 boys, 51.14%) with a mean (SD) age of 15.13 (1.81) were included in the final sample. In general, children exposed to the earthquake had three times greater risk of early puberty (boys, RR [95% CI] = 3.18 [2.21–4.57]; girls: RR [95%CI] =3.16 [2.65–3.78]). Subgroup analysis showed that the adjusted RR was 1.90 [1.19–3.03] for boys and 2.22 [1.75–2.80] for girls. Earthquake exposure predicted almost a fourfold (RR [95%CI] = 3.91 [1.31–11.72]) increased risk of early puberty in preschool girls, whereas the increase was about twofold (RR [95%CI] = 2.09 [1.65–2.64]) in schoolgirls. Among boys, only older age at earthquake exposure was linked to early puberty (RR [95%CI] = 1.93 [1.18–3.16]). Conclusions Wenchuan earthquake exposure increased the risk of early puberty in boys and girls, and preschoolers were more at risk than schoolchildren. The implications are relevant to support policies for those survivors, especially children, to better rebuild after disasters.
Tracking bowfin with acoustic telemetry: Insight into the ecology of a living fossil

Little is known about the spatial ecology and behaviour of bowfin (Amia calva), despite the fact that it is an important freshwater carnivore, the last living member of the Amiiformes and effectively a living fossil. In the summer of 2013, acoustic telemetry transmitters were surgically implanted in ten bowfin captured in Toronto Harbour on Lake Ontario. Using a stationary acoustic telemetry array that covered most of the 18-km2 harbour, the residency and movement patterns of bowfin were tracked from their release until November 2014. Detected bowfin ranged in size from 562 to 725 mm total length and included six males and three females (one female was not detected). Bowfin showed high site fidelity with most fish detections concentrated in embayments and within the Toronto Islands, areas characterised by relatively high stable water temperatures and submerged vegetative cover. Statistical modelling revealed that bowfin residency was significantly affected by season, body size, site-specific estimates of vegetative cover and an interaction between body size and season. Bowfin residency increased with vegetative cover and was highest for large fish during the winter and fall months. Despite the overall high site fidelity exhibited by individuals, several bowfin were mobile over the spring and summer months and moved 5.2–12.9 km among telemetry receivers in the inner and outer harbours. The results of this study provide insight into the seasonal habitat preference, home range size and activity level of this unique fish.
Discourse-Wizard: Discovering Deep Discourse Structure in your Conversation with RNNs

Spoken language understanding is one of the key factors in a dialogue system, and a context in a conversation plays an important role to understand the current utterance. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of context within the dialogue for neural network models through an online web interface live demo. We developed two different neural models: a model that does not use context and a context-based model. The no-context model classifies dialogue acts at an utterance-level whereas the context-based model takes some preceding utterances into account. We make these trained neural models available as a live demo called Discourse-Wizard using a modular server architecture. The live demo provides an easy to use interface for conversational analysis and for discovering deep discourse structures in a conversation.
A Study on the Effects of Creativity Training Program on Creative Behaviors of Children 1

This study aimed to investigate the effects of creativity training program on children’s creative behaviors. In this study, a quasi-experimental model was used. The model was constituted with a pre-test and posttest control group. The study group which was chosen via typical sampling method consisted of totally 30 children who were students in two separate nursery classes. 16 of them were in experimental group and 14 of them were in control group. Creative Behavior Observation Form was applied to both groups as pre-test and post-test. Creative Training Program which consisted of 36 activities to support creative thinking of the children in the experimental group was applied 3 days a week for 12 weeks by the researcher. Control group students were applied Preschool Education Program of National Ministry Education by their teacher. After posttests, Creative Behavior Observation Form Activities were re-applied to experimental group to determined the retention of Creativity Training Program and children’s behaviors were evaluated by Creative Behavior Observation Form Paired sample t-test was used in order to determined if there were significant differences between pre-test and post-test obtained from observation form of the experimental and control group; independent sample t-test was used in order to determined if there was any difference between the mean scores in pre-tests of the experiment group and control group. ANCOVA analysis was used to compare post-test means based on the dimensions where significant differences were found as a result of pretest of the experimental and control groups. Significance level was identified as p<. 05 for all the analysis throughout the study. The results showed that the Creavity Training Program affected chidrens’ creavity behaviors in positive way. The results of retention test indicated that the effect of the program was effective.
A hybrid deep learning approach for medical relation extraction

Mining relationships between treatment(s) and medical problem(s) is vital in the biomedical domain. This helps in various applications, such as decision support system, safety surveillance, and new treatment discovery. We propose a deep learning approach that utilizes both word level and sentence-level representations to extract the relationships between treatment and problem. While deep learning techniques demand a large amount of data for training, we make use of a rule-based system particularly for relationship classes with fewer samples. Our final relations are derived by jointly combining the results from deep learning and rule-based models. Our system achieved a promising performance on the relationship classes of I2b2 2010 relation extraction task.
A Multimodal Recommender System for Large-scale Assortment Generation in e-Commerce

E-commerce platforms surface interesting products largely through product recommendations that capture users' styles and aesthetic preferences. Curating recommendations as a complete complementary set, or assortment, is critical for a successful e-commerce experience, especially for product categories such as furniture, where items are selected together with the overall theme, style or ambiance of a space in mind. In this paper, we propose two visually-aware recommender systems that can automatically curate an assortment of living room furniture around a couple of pre-selected seed pieces for the room. The first system aims to maximize the visual-based style compatibility of the entire selection by making use of transfer learning and topic modeling. The second system extends the first by incorporating text data and applying polylingual topic modeling to infer style over both modalities. We review the production pipeline for surfacing these visually-aware recommender systems and compare them through offline validations and large-scale online A/B tests on Overstock. Our experimental results show that complimentary style is best discovered over product sets when both visual and textual data are incorporated.
Master Regulators Connectivity Map: A Transcription Factors-Centered Approach to Drug Repositioning

Drug discovery is a very expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Fortunately, recent omics technologies and Systems Biology approaches introduced interesting new tools to achieve this task, facilitating the repurposing of already known drugs to new therapeutic assignments using gene expression data and bioinformatics. The inherent role of transcription factors in gene expression modulation makes them strong candidates for master regulators of phenotypic transitions. However, transcription factors expression itself usually does not reflect its activity changes due to post-transcriptional modifications and other complications. In this aspect, the use of high-throughput transcriptomic data may be employed to infer transcription factors-targets interactions and assess their activity through co-expression networks, which can be further used to search for drugs capable of reverting the gene expression profile of pathological phenotypes employing the connectivity maps paradigm. Following this idea, we argue that a module-oriented connectivity map approach using transcription factors-centered networks would aid the query for new repositioning candidates. Through a brief case study, we explored this idea in bipolar disorder, retrieving known drugs used in the usual clinical scenario as well as new candidates with potential therapeutic application in this disease. Indeed, the results of the case study indicate just how promising our approach may be to drug repositioning.
An Efficient Solver for Two‐way Coupling Rigid Bodies with Incompressible Flow

We present an efficient solver for monolithic two‐way coupled simulation of rigid bodies with incompressible fluids that is robust to poor conditioning of the coupled system in the presence of large density ratios between the solid and the fluid. Our method leverages ideas from the theory of Domain Decomposition, and uses a hybrid combination of direct and iterative solvers that exploits the low‐dimensional nature of the solid equations. We observe that a single Multigrid V‐cycle for the fluid equations serves as a very effective preconditioner for solving the Schur‐complement system using Conjugate Gradients, which is the main computational bottleneck in our pipeline. We use spectral analysis to give some theoretical insights behind this observation. Our method is simple to implement, is entirely assembly‐free besides the solid equations, allows for the use of large time steps because of the monolithic formulation, and remains stable even when the iterative solver is terminated early. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on several challenging examples of two‐way coupled simulation of smoke and water with rigid bodies. To illustrate that our method is applicable to other problems, we also show an example of underwater bubble simulation.
In Silico Workflow for the Discovery of Natural Products Activating the G Protein-Coupled Bile Acid Receptor 1

The G protein-coupled bile acid receptor (GPBAR1) has been recognized as a promising new target for the treatment of diverse diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and atherosclerosis. The identification of novel and potent GPBAR1 agonists is highly relevant, as these diseases are on the rise and pharmacological unmet therapeutic needs are pervasive. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a proficient workflow for the in silico prediction of GPBAR1 activating compounds, primarily from natural sources. A protocol was set up, starting with a comprehensive collection of structural information of known ligands. This information was used to generate ligand-based pharmacophore models in LigandScout 4.08 Advanced. After theoretical validation, the two most promising models, namely BAMS22 and TTM8, were employed as queries for the virtual screening of natural product and synthetic small molecule databases. Virtual hits were progressed to shape matching experiments and physicochemical clustering. Out of 33 diverse virtual hits subjected to experimental testing using a reporter gene-based assay, two natural products, farnesiferol B (27) and microlobidene (28), were confirmed as GPBAR1 activators reaching more than 50% receptor activation at 20 μM with EC50s of 13.53 μM and 13.88 μM, respectively. This activity is comparable to that of the endogenous ligand lithocholic acid (1). Seven further virtual hits showed activity reaching at least 15% receptor activation either at 5 or 20 μM, including new scaffolds from natural and synthetic origin.
Diel patterns of baseline glucocorticoids and stress responsiveness in a teleost fish (bluegill, Lepomis macrochirus)

Little is known about whether glucocorticoids (GC) and GC responsiveness vary on a diel basis in the wild, especially for fish. Using bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus Rafinesque, 1819) as a model freshwater teleost fish, we tested whether baseline concentration and stress responsiveness of GCs (i.e., plasma glucose and cortisol) varied over a 24 h period. Blood samples from lake-dwelling wild bluegill were obtained across six periods representing a complete circadian cycle to determine GC levels in newly captured fish (i.e., within 3 min of capture; baseline), the maximum value (maximum) 45 min following exposure to a standardized aerial exposure stressor, and determining responsiveness (by subtracting minimum from maximum). Our results revealed that baseline glucose concentration did not vary on a diel basis, whereas baseline cortisol concentration did. Maximum and stress-induced glucose responsiveness varied significantly among several time periods with lowest values recorded at midnight and higher values at mid-day. Maximum and stress-induced cortisol responsiveness were consistent across time periods. Collectively, these data suggest that baseline concentrations and stress-induced values of GCs in a freshwater temperate teleost fish tend to be consistent across diel periods such that there is apparently an absence of strong GC diel patterns.
On the parapatric existence of two species of the Pedioplanis undata group ( Reptilia : Sauria : Lacertidae ) in the central Namib desert ( Southwest Africa ) with description of the new species

In the course of a survey of the reptile fauna in the central Namib desert near the lower reaches of the rivers Khan and Swakop a yet undescribed lizard of the Pedioplanis undata complex was found to exist parapatrically with Pedioplanis undata inornata. Pronounced discontinuity of morphological and biochemical features of the specimens of the contact area proves that the new form is genetically sufficiently separated from Pedioplanis undata to be regarded as a species of its own {Pedioplanis husabensis n. sp. ) ZUSAMMENFASSUNG: Im Rahmen einer Untersuchung der Reptilienfauna der zentralen Namib Wüste im Bereich der Unterläufe der Flüsse Khan und Swakop wurde eine bisher unbeschriebene Eidechse aus dem Pedioplanis undata Komplex entdeckt. Die Form lebt parapatrisch mit Pedioplanis undata inornata. Die konstante Diskontinuität morphologischer und biochemischer Merkmale bei den Individuen in der Koniaktzone beweist eine sehr effektive genetische Isolation und damit die artliche Eigenständigkeit gegenüber Pedioplanis undata. Die neue Art wird als Pedioplanis husabensis n. sp. beschrieben.