Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“Their Sleep Means More Harmony”: Maternal Perspectives and Experiences of Preschoolers’ Sleep in Ethnically and Socioeconomically Diverse Families in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Viewing sleep through a socioecological lens, maternal perceptions, and experiences of preschoolers’ sleep were explored using semistructured interviews with 15 Māori (indigenous) and 16 non-Māori mothers, with low- and high socioeconomic position. Thematic analysis identified four themes: child happiness and health, maternal well-being, comfort and connection, and family functioning and harmony. Mothers perceived healthy preschooler sleep as supporting children’s mental and physical health, parents’ sleep/wake functioning, family social cohesion and emotional connectedness, and poor preschooler sleep as negatively influencing child, maternal and family well-being. Although many experiences were shared, some perceptions of sleep and sleep practices differed between mothers. Influences included health paradigms, socioeconomic circumstances, maternal autonomy, employment, parenting approaches, and societal expectations. Healthy preschooler sleep is valued by mothers and may play a protective role in family health and resilience. Preschooler sleep initiatives need to be responsive to maternal perspectives and address societal drivers of sleep experiences.
Efficient genetic transformation and CRISPR/Cas9‐mediated genome editing in Lemna aequinoctialis

Summary The fast growth, ease of metabolic labelling and potential for feedstock and biofuels production make duckweeds not only an attractive model system for understanding plant biology, but also a potential future crop. However, current duckweed research is constrained by the lack of efficient genetic manipulation tools. Here, we report a case study on genome editing in a duckweed species, Lemna aequinoctialis, using a fast and efficient transformation and CRISPR/Cas9 tool. By optimizing currently available transformation protocols, we reduced the duration time of Agrobacterium‐mediated transformation to 5–6 weeks with a success rate of over 94%. Based on the optimized transformation protocol, we generated 15 (14.3% success rate) biallelic LaPDS mutants that showed albino phenotype using a CRISPR/Cas9 system. Investigations on CRISPR/Cas9‐mediated mutation spectrum among mutated L. aequinoctialis showed that most of mutations were short insertions and deletions. This study presents the first example of CRISPR/Cas9‐mediated genome editing in duckweeds, which will open new research avenues in using duckweeds for both basic and applied research.
Big-Data Management: A Driver for Digital Transformation?

The rapid evolution of technology has led to a global increase in data. Due to the large volume of data, a new characterization occurred in order to better describe the new situation, namel. big data. Living in the Era of Information, businesses are flooded with information through data processing. The digital age has pushed businesses towards finding a strategy to transform themselves in order to overtake market changes, successfully compete, and gain a competitive advantage. The aim of current paper is to extensively analyze the existing online literature to find the main (most valuable) components of big-data management according to researchers and the business community. Moreover, analysis was conducted to help readers in understanding how these components can be used from existing businesses during the process of digital transformation.
Cloning and Characterization of Luciferase from the Chinese Firefly Lamprigera yunnana

Lamprigera (Lampyridae) is a small genus with only 17 species distributing in Asian countries. Its larviform females and alate males can produce continuously strong yellow‐green light at night. However, no luciferase gene was reported for this genus and its subfamily‐level phylogenetic position still remains uncertain. Here, we cloned the luciferase gene from one Chinese species, Lamprigera yunnana, by reverse transcription‐polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) and rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE). This luciferase includes 551 deduced amino acids (AA) with the sequence identity of 71.8–76.8%, 67.5–70.7%, 68.4–75.3%, 77.8% and 59.5% to those from Lampyrinae, Luciolinae, Ototretinae, Cyphonocerinae and Photurinae, respectively. Phylogenetic analyses of deduced AA of luciferases suggest that Lamprigera locates outside Lampyrinae, in which it was originally placed in traditional taxonomy. The luciferase was produced in vitro as recombinant protein, and its biochemical properties were characterized. It possesses significant luminescence activity at pH 7.8, and its KM for D‐luciferin and ATP are 61 μm and 122 μm, respectively. It shows the highest activity at 37°C and is completely inactivated at 55°C. It is pH‐sensitive with the maximum emission spectrum of 566 nm at pH 7.8. Our data provide new insights into Lamprigera luciferase and its phylogenetic position.
Gene activation by a CRISPR-assisted trans enhancer

The deactivated CRISPR/Cas9 (dCas9) is now the most widely used gene activator. However, current dCas9-based gene activators are still limited by their unsatisfactory activity. In this study, we developed a new strategy, the CRISPR-assisted trans enhancer, for activating gene expression at high efficiency by combining dCas9-VP64/sgRNA with the widely used strong CMV enhancer. In this strategy, CMV enhancer DNA was recruited to target genes in trans by two systems: dCas9-VP64/csgRNA-sCMV and dCas9-VP64-GAL4/sgRNA-UAS-CMV. The former recruited trans enhancer by annealing between two short complementary oligonucleotides at the ends of the sgRNA and trans enhancer. The latter recruited trans enhancer by binding between GAL4 fused to dCas9 and UAS sequence of trans enhancer. The trans enhancer activated gene transcription as the natural looped cis enhancer. The trans enhancer could activate both exogenous reporter genes and variant endogenous genes in various cells, with much higher activation efficiency than that of current dCas9 activators.
Determination of risk factors affecting mortality in patients with gastrointestinal perforation after pediatric liver transplantation

Gastrointestinal perforation (GIP) is one of the most serious complications occurring after liver transplantation (LT), especially in pediatric patients. This study aimed to determine the risk factors affecting mortality in pediatric patients with GIP after LT. GIP developed in 37 (10%) of 370 pediatric patients who underwent LT at our institute. Patients were divided into two groups: alive (n = 22) or dead (n = 15), and both groups were compared in terms of demographic and clinical parameters using univariate analysis. There was no statistically significant difference between groups in either demographic or clinical parameters, except for perforation site (P = 0.001) and median follow‐up (P = 0.001). Stomas arose in 17 (45.9%) patients: 76% of patients with stomas and 45% of those without survived (P = 0.052). Kaplan‐Meier analysis indicated that patients with stomas had a significantly higher overall survival (P = 0.029) and that patients with duodenal and colonic perforation had a significantly lower overall survival. Multivariate analysis showed that re‐perforation was an independent risk factor for mortality (P = 0.035; OR: 17.674; 95% CI for OR: 1.233‐253.32). Although there are many options for management of GIP, including primary repair, resection plus anastomosis, and resection plus end or loop ostomy, gastrointestinal diversion is still the best option.
Kinetics of Left Ventricular Mechanics during Transition from Rest to Exercise.

PURPOSE At the onset of physical exercise, oxygen (O2) transport adapts to meet the working muscle O2 demands. Cardiac output abruptly increases through the concomitant changes of heart rate and stroke volume (SV), which is conditioned by the left ventricular (LV) function. The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of many LV diastolic and systolic function parameters, including twist-untwist mechanics, to SV adaptation during the first minutes after exercise onset. METHODS Diastolic and systolic myocardial strains and twist were monitored by two-dimensional (2D) speckle-tracking echocardiography with high temporal resolution in 28 young men (mean age: 23 ± 4 years) who performed five similar constant work-load exercises on a cycloergometer (target heart rate: 125 bpm). 2D cine-loops were recorded every 15 seconds during the first minute of exercise, and then every 30 seconds for the next 3 minutes. RESULTS During the first 60 seconds of exercise, SV (from 104 ± 15 to 126 ± 21 mL, p<0.001) increased concomitantly with LV strain and strain rates. Early filling was the main SV determinant during this phase, probably linked to the increase of venous return (at the very beginning of exercise), LV relaxation (from 1.5 ± 0.3 to 2.5 ± 0.4 s, p<0.001) and untwisting (from -78 ± 34 to -165 ± 61 deg.s, p<0.001). After the first minute, SV remained constant, while LV untwisting continued to increase (from -165 ± 61 to -187 ± 60 deg.s, p<0.001) and the other systolic and diastolic parameters reached a plateau. CONCLUSION This study gives new mechanical insights into LV kinetics to address the challenge of SV response at the onset of exercise.
Anxiety and depression in alcohol use disorder individuals: the role of personality and coping strategies

Abstract Background: Anxiety and depression favor the maintenance and relapse of alcohol use disorders (AUDs). Some five factor model personality dimensions (e.g. high neuroticism, low extraversion, and conscientiousness) and coping strategies (e.g. high avoidant and low problem-focused) are associated with AUD and with anxiety and/or depression in AUD individuals. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate personality and coping in an AUD population as potential predictors of anxiety and depression. Methods: Through a cross-sectional and multicenter study, 122 AUD people (74 men and 48 women) responded to a sociodemographic interview and three self-questionnaires assessing personality (BFI), coping strategies (brief COPE), and anxiety-depression symptomatology (HADS). Comparative and correlational analyses, as well as hierarchical regressions, were performed. Results: AUD women show higher neuroticism, use more emotion-focused coping and less problem-focused coping than AUD men. They also present higher anxiety. Neuroticism is associated with an ineffective use of coping strategies. Other dimensions, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and conscientiousness, show negative relationships with avoidant coping and positive links with problem-focused strategies. Neuroticism, avoidant coping and gender are predictive for anxiety. Both avoidant and problem-focused coping, but no personality dimension, are predictive for depression. Conclusion: These findings underscore the importance of interventions involving specific coping strategies in AUD patients (whether or not anxiety and/or depression is present), both to reduce alcohol use and prevent relapse. Specific therapeutic support for women would be beneficial in the case of anxiety comorbidity.
The association between plasma cholesterol and the effect of tryptophan depletion on heart rate variability

Studies on the cholesterol‐serotonin hypothesis and its link to mood disorders are scarce. In addition, little is known about the association between cholesterol and the effects of tryptophan depletion (TD). The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between plasma cholesterol and changes in heart rate variability (HRV), an important marker of depression and anxiety, after TD. The plasma cholesterol levels of 28 healthy participants were noted, and their HRVs were measured by spectrum analysis. TD was carried out on testing day, and participants provided blood samples just before and 5 hours for tryptophan level after TD. HRV was measured again after TD. An association was found between plasma cholesterol levels and the change in HRV. Decreased high frequency HRV was marginally associated with lower levels of high‐density lipoprotein cholesterol, while increased low frequency HRV was significantly associated with lower levels of total and low‐density lipoprotein cholesterol. Our findings indicate that low cholesterol levels may play parts of role in the mechanism of the deactivation of parasympathetic, and activation of sympathetic, functions induced by altered serotonergic function.
Outcomes of Nasal Septal Perforation Repair Using Combined Temporoparietal Fascia Graft and Polydioxanone Plate Construct.

Importance Numerous techniques are used for septal perforation repair, yet success rates remain variable. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of interposition grafts of polydioxanone plates combined with a temporoparietal fascia graft for septal perforation repair. Objective To investigate and describe the use of interposition grafts of polydioxanone plates combined with a temporoparietal fascia graft for septal perforation repair and the expansion of this technique to patients with more challenging comorbidities, including granulomatosis with polyangiitis. Design, Setting, and Participants A retrospective medical record review was performed of patients who underwent septal perforation repair using interposition grafts of polydioxanone plates combined with a temporoparietal fascia graft from January 1, 2015, to July 1, 2018, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and from January 1, 2017, to July 1, 2018, at the University of Iowa. Intervention All patients underwent septal perforation repair with interposition grafts of polydioxanone plates and a temporoparietal fascia graft. Main Outcomes and Measures Assessing closure of septal perforation was the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes were resolution of presenting symptoms of septal perforation, area of perforation, length of postoperative stent and silastic sheeting placement, postoperative complications and resolution, and duration of follow-up. Preoperative and postoperative Nasal Obstruction Symptom Evaluation (NOSE) scores were assessed. Results A total of 17 patients (12 women and 5 men; mean [SD] age, 45 [15] years) were included. The causes of perforations were iatrogenic (9 [53%]), rheumatologic (2 [12%]), and unknown or idiopathic (6 [35%]). Patients most commonly presented with nasal crusting (12 [71%]), whistling (9 [53%]), nasal obstruction (9 [53%]), and epistaxis (5 [29%]). Mean (SD) perforation size was 0.99 (1.04) cm2. Mean (SD) postoperative follow-up was 6.1 (4.1) months. A total of 15 patients (88%) had complete resolution of presenting symptoms at last follow-up. All perforations were closed with overlying mucosa at the most recent follow-up examination. Nine of 17 patients completed both preoperative and postoperative NOSE. There was a significant difference between the mean (SD) preoperative and postoperative NOSE scores (62.78 [27.74] vs 17.78 [15.83]; P = .004). Conclusions and Relevance Repair of symptomatic nasal septal perforations using a temporoparietal fascia graft combined with a polydioxanone plate was associated with positive outcomes. Repair of septal perforations caused by rheumatologic disease, including granulomatosis with polyangiitis, can be considered for repair using this technique. Resolution of symptoms appeared to be clinically more meaningful in evaluation of septal perforation repair than rate of perforation closure, and the NOSE scale has the potential to serve as an objective corroboration to patient-reported postoperative outcomes. Level of Evidence 4.
Increasing colour image segmentation accuracy by means of fuzzy post-processing

This paper presents a colour image segmentation method which attains a high segmentation accuracy even when regions of the image that have to be separated are very similar in colour. The proposed method classifies pixels into colour classes. Competitive learning with "conscience" is used to learn reference patterns for the different colour classes. A nearest neighbour classification rule followed by a block of fuzzy post-processing attains a high classification accuracy even for very similar colour classes. A correct classification rate of 97.8% has been achieved when classifying two very similar black colours, namely, the black printed with a black ink and the black printed with a mixture of cyan, magenta and yellow inks.
Controlling chaos and artificial neuron

This paper discusses chaos and its control in a periodically stimulated artificial neuron. The neuron includes bipolar hysteresis whose threshold is stimulated. The authors derive a one dimensional return map explicitly and prove chaos generation. Also, the authors propose a chaos control method that operates only in a linear region. It can stabilize any unstable periodic orbit embedded in chaotic attractor. <<ETX>>
Data Management Plan

Creator: Babajide Ojo Affiliation: Oklahoma State University Template: USDA NIFA: National Institute of Food and Agriculture Last modified: 07-14-2016 Copyright information: The above plan creator(s) have agreed that others may use as much of the text of this plan as they would like in their own plans, and customize it as necessary. You do not need to credit the creator(s) as the source of the language used, but using any of the plan's text does not imply that the creator(s) endorse, or have any relationship to, your project or proposal
“Oh, You Shouldn’t Have!” Understanding Key Factors Impacting Cut Flowers Gifting Preferences in Germany

Cut flower gifting preferences are relatively unexplored in Germany. This study proposes a model that investigates the impact of attitudinal, experiential, and socio-demographic factors on the cut flower gifting preferences of German consumers. For this purpose, an online survey with a representative sample of 978 German residents was conducted. Partial least squares structural equation modelling shows that active and passive engagement with plants and nature positively impact cut flower giving preferences through cut flower knowledge, cut flower fondness, and perceived versatility of cut flowers. For German women and men, the largest driver of cut flower giving preferences is the versatility of cut flowers. For women, cut flower fondness is the second largest driver of cut flower gifting preferences, whereas for men subjective knowledge was the second largest driver. Other socio-demographic factors (age, income, education) were not found to impact cut flower giving preferences.
Paxillin.

Paxillin is a 68 kDa cytoplasmic protein that localizes to discrete sites of cell attachment to the extracellular matrix called focal adhesions. It is a multi-domain adapter protein capable of interacting with several structural and signaling proteins including vinculin, FAK, PYK2, Src and Crk. Phosphorylation of paxillin in response to integrin-mediated cell adhesion and growth factor stimulation regulates some of these interactions. Thus, paxillin functions as a scaffold for the recruitment of molecules into a signal transduction complex that is closely apposed to the plasma membrane. This is likely to facilitate the efficient processing of external stimuli that modulate important cellular events including cell adhesion, cell motility and growth control. Since paxillin interacts with several proteins known to cause cell transformation, the binding sites for these proteins on paxillin represent potential targets for therapeutic agents.
Research on Abnormal Detection Based on Improved Combination of K - means and SVDD

In order to improve the efficiency of network intrusion detection and reduce the false alarm rate, this paper proposes an anomaly detection algorithm based on improved K-means and SVDD. The algorithm first uses the improved K-means algorithm to cluster the training samples of each class, so that each class is independent and compact in class; Then, according to the training samples, the SVDD algorithm is used to construct the minimum superspheres. The subordinate relationship of the samples is determined by calculating the distance of the minimum superspheres constructed by SVDD. If the test sample is less than the center of the hypersphere, the test sample belongs to this class, otherwise it does not belong to this class, after several comparisons, the final test of the effective detection of the test sample.In this paper, we use KDD CUP99 data set to simulate the proposed anomaly detection algorithm. The results show that the algorithm has high detection rate and low false alarm rate, which is an effective network security protection method.
Anytime Minibatch: Exploiting Stragglers in Online Distributed Optimization

Distributed optimization is vital in solving large-scale machine learning problems. A widely-shared feature of distributed optimization techniques is the requirement that all nodes complete their assigned tasks in each computational epoch before the system can proceed to the next epoch. In such settings, slow nodes, called stragglers, can greatly slow progress. To mitigate the impact of stragglers, we propose an online distributed optimization method called Anytime Minibatch. In this approach, all nodes are given a fixed time to compute the gradients of as many data samples as possible. The result is a variable per-node minibatch size. Workers then get a fixed communication time to average their minibatch gradients via several rounds of consensus, which are then used to update primal variables via dual averaging. Anytime Minibatch prevents stragglers from holding up the system without wasting the work that stragglers can complete. We present a convergence analysis and analyze the wall time performance. Our numerical results show that our approach is up to 1.5 times faster in Amazon EC2 and it is up to five times faster when there is greater variability in compute node performance.
Data Cleaning of Speed Monitoring Based on Driving Behavior Characteristics for Commercial Vehicle

There are lots of speed monitoring data in the commercial vehicle monitoring system, and the accuracy of the data depends on accuracy of the analysis for driving behavior characteristics. In this paper, the driving behavior characteristics for commercial vehicles is analyzed so that six common types of errors for vehicle monitoring data are obtained, such as false date for time information, outlying high/low speed values, zero-speed signal drift, false zero-speed records, outlying acceleration/deceleration values, noise jamming data. Then data cleaning rules are made. Finally, we compare data cleaning effect through typical data source case. Results show that the data cleaning method is used for fitting the data, and correct the error signal from the vehicle driving curves more correspond with the real-world driving and road conditions.
Regularization networks for approximating multi-valued functions: learning ambiguous input-output mappings from examples

The regularization network (RN) is extended to approximate multi-valued functions so that the one-to-h mapping, where h denotes the multiplicity of the mapping, can be represented and learned from a finite number of input-output samples without clustering operations on the sample data set. Multi-valued function approximations are useful for learning ambiguous input-output relations from examples. This extension, which we call the multi-valued regularization network (MVRN), is derived from the multi-valued standard regularization theory (MVSRT) which is an extension of the standard regularization theory to multi-valued functions. MVSRT is based on a direct algebraic representation of multi-valued functions. By simple transformation of the unknown functions, we can obtain linear Euler-Lagrange equations. Therefore, the learning algorithm for MVRN is reduced to solving a linear system. The proposed theory can be specialized and extended to radial basis function (REP), generalized RBF (GRBF), and hyperBF networks of multi-valued functions. <<ETX>>