Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can Avoiding Light at Night Reduce the Risk of Breast Cancer?

Excessive exposure to artificial light at night (ALAN) suppresses nocturnal melatonin (MLT) production in the pineal gland and is, therefore, associated with an increased risk of breast cancer (BC). We examined indoor and outdoor light habits of 278 women, BC patients (n = 93), and controls (n = 185; 2010-2014). Cases and controls were age and residential area matched. Data regarding behavior in the sleeping habitat in a 5-year period, 10 to 15 years prior to disease diagnosis, were collected using a questionnaire. Sleep quality, bedtime, sleep duration, TV watching habits, presleeping reading habits, subjective illumination intensity, and type of illumination were collected. Binary logistic regression models were used to calculate odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals (ORs with 95% CIs) for BC patients in relation to those habits. OR results revealed that women who had slept longer (controls), 10 to 15 years before the time of the study, in a period of 5 years, had a significant (OR = 0.74; 95% CI = 0.57-0.97; P < .03) reduced BC risk. Likewise, women who had been moderately exposed to ALAN as a result of reading using bed light (reading lamp) illumination and women who had slept with closed shutters reduced their BC risk: OR = 0.81, 95% CI = 0.67-0.97, P < . 02, and OR = 0.82, 95% CI = 0.68-0.99, P < . 04, respectively. However, women who had been exposed to ALAN as a result of living near strong illumination sources were at a significantly higher BC risk (OR = 1.52; 95% CI = 1.10-2.12; P < .01). These data support the hypothesis that diminishing nighttime light exposure will diminish BC risk and incidence. This hypothesis needs to be tested directly using available testing strategies and technologies that continuously measure an individual’s light exposure, its timing, and sleep length longitudinally and feed this information back to the individual, so that BC risk can be distinguished prospectively.
On the nature of mixed cultures of Chlorella pyrenoidosa TX 71105 and various bacteria.

SUMMARY: The growth of several selected micro-organisms in rapidly dividing cultures of Chlorella pyrenoidosa TX 71105 was studied. Bacterial proliferation was a function of algal growth and bacterial growth occurred, at least in part, as a result of the excretion of organic substances into the culture medium by rapidly dividing algae. These substances capable of supporting bacterial oxidation and growth were varied in kind and were utilized selectively by the different bacteria. Only a small fraction of the soil and air bacteria grew in the algal cultures. The majority of soil and air bacteria survived in mixed culture for several days but did not increase in numbers. On the other hand, 6 out of 8 bacteria pathogenic for man died promptly in cultures of Chlorella pyrenoidosa; but Salmonella typhi and S. paratyphi grew well for extended periods of time. Fungi capable of producing macrocolonies on potato glucose agar at pH 3.5 did not increase in numbers during 8 days. Yeasts and actinomycetes were not detected by the methods used; bacteriophages were observed with some regularity.
Model predictive control algorithm for consensus in multi-agent systems under dynamically changing interaction networks

This paper addresses model predictive control (MPC) schemes for consensus in multi-agent systems (MASs) with discrete-time single-integrator dynamics under switching directed interaction graphs. The control horizon is extended to more than one which endows the closed-loop system with extra degree of freedom. We propose a concise stability analytical method for the MPC scheme and derive sufficient conditions related to the sampling period and the proximity topology to achieve consensus by using the properties of stochastic matrices. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
Constitutive and inducible kappa B binding activities in the cytosol of v-Rel-transformed lymphoid cells

Constitutive and inducible kapp B binding activities associated with v-Rel and c-Rel in the cytosol of v-Rel-transformed cells have been identified. These activities were resolved by electrophoretic mobility shift assay and chromatographic techniques into a high-molecular-weight protein-DNA complex designated complex I containing v- and c-Rel and lower-molecular-weight complexes II, III and IV which contained only v-Rel and which were stimulated by nucleotides, low pH, and detergent. These experiments suggest that interaction of v-Rel and c-Rel decreases the DNA-binding activity of each.
The association of smartphone‐based activity space measures with cognitive functioning and pain sickle cell disease

Individuals living with sickle cell disease (SCD) are at risk for significant health complications including chronic pain, neuropsychological dysfunction, depression and poor mobility (Vichinsky et al, 2010; Zempsky et al, 2013; Jonassaint et al, 2016). Monitoring the day-to-day health of patients often requires burdensome daily symptoms diaries or expensive, time-consuming clinical tests. There are limited objective methods for capturing health outcomes of patients outside the clinic. Location data obtained by global positioning systems (GPSs) are increasingly used to assess physical mobility and activity spaces (Loveday et al, 2015). Activity space was found to increase with improvements in functioning postsurgery (Barzilay et al, 2011) and is smaller in older adults with depressive symptoms (Kerr et al, 2012) and cognitive deficits (Wettstein et al, 2015). However, no reported studies have assessed the utility of GPS activity space measures in younger populations with a chronic condition, such as SCD. GPS could provide an objective measure of health and wellbeing for SCD patients, as well as a method for early identification of patients at risk for poor outcomes. We recruited adult patients with SCD, aged 18–65 years, enrolled in a longitudinal study examining brain functioning in SCD. Participants completed a neuropsychological battery, had clinical measures, and an application tracking their location was installed on their smartphone. It was emphasized that their identifying data would be kept confidential and their location linked only to their study identification. All participants provided informed consent. The application was compatible with both iOS and Android devices and recorded the location of the phone every two minutes based on GPS and Wi-Fi positioning capabilities. The data were processed and analysed using geographic information system software. Data were filtered for location accuracy. Participants with less than 2 weeks of valid data were excluded from analysis. A standard deviation ellipse (SDE) of each participant was calculated in km to represent the directional distribution of a series of location points. At one standard deviation, SDE will contain approximately 68% of all geographic points for an individual. The location samples and SDE of an example participant are visualized in Figure 1A.
Annual accumulation for Greenland updated using ice core data developed during 2000--2006 and analysis of daily coastal meteorological data

An updated accumulation map for Greenland is presented on the basis of 39 new ice core estimates of accumulation, 256 ice sheet estimates from ice cores and snow pits used in previous maps, and reanalysis of time series data from 20 coastal weather stations. The period 1950-2000 is better represented by the data than are earlier periods. Ice-sheetwide accumulation was estimated based on kriging. The average accumulation (95 confidence interval, or Â±2 times standard error) over the Greenland ice sheet is 30.0 Â± 2.4 g cm -2 a-1, with the average accumulation above 2000-m elevation being essentially the same, 29.9 Â± 2.2 g cm-2 a -1. At higher elevations the new accumulation map maintains the main features shown in previous maps. However, there are five coastal areas with obvious differences: southwest, northwest, and eastern regions, where the accumulation values are 20-50 lower than previously estimated, and southeast and northeast regions, where the accumulation values are 20-50 higher than previously estimated. These differences are almost entirely due to new coastal data. The much lower accumulation in the southwest and the much higher accumulation in the southeast indicated by the current map mean that long-term mass balance in both catchments is closer to steady state than previously estimated. However, uncertainty in these areas remains high owing to strong gradients in precipitation from the coast inland. A significant and sustained precipitation measurement program will be needed to resolve this uncertainty. Copyright 2009 by the American Geophysical Union.
Pastoral Research: Past, Present, and Future

In healthcare environments of excellence, clinically trained chaplains are valued members of the medical treatment team. There are skills and values they hold in common with medicine and allied health disciplines: enhancing the health and well-being of the patient as a unity of body, mind, and spirit within a unique family and cultural system. This article examines the past, present, and future of pastoral research, including the chaplain's moral imperative to examine practice and to share what is found.
Psychiatric Morbidity in First Time Stroke Patients in Hong Kong: A Pilot Study in a Rehabilitation Unit

Objective: There is a paucity of data on post-stroke psychiatric morbidity in Chinese populations. We examined the frequency of post-stroke psychiatric morbidity in Chinese first time stroke patients, including depressive and anxiety disorders, mania, and psychosis. Methods: One hundred and fifty-seven patients following their first stroke, who were consecutively admitted to a rehabilitation unit, participated in this prospective, cross-sectional study. All subjects were interviewed by a qualified psychiatrist using the SCID-DSM-III-R. Subjects’ cognitive function, neurological status, and level of functioning were also measured. Twenty-five (92.6%) of the subjects with the diagnosis of depression were followed up 6.0 ± 3.9 months after the initial assessment. Results: The frequency of all depressive disorders was 17.2%. Major depressive episodes, adjustment disorder with depressed mood, dysthymia, and generalized anxiety disorder were diagnosed in 7.6%, 8.2%, 1.3% and 0.6% of the subjects, respectively. No cases of other anxiety disorders, mania or psychosis were found. The majority of depressed subjects were in remission at the follow-up assessment. Conclusions: The low morbidity of affective disorders and their relatively favourable shortterm outcome in Chinese first time stroke patients warrants further investigation.
Prior Vaccination Increases the Epitopic Breadth of the Cytotoxic T-Lymphocyte Response That Evolves in Rhesus Monkeys following a Simian-Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection

ABSTRACT Although recent evidence has confirmed the importance of cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses in controlling human immunodeficiency virus type 1 and simian immunodeficiency virus replication, the relevance of the epitopic breadth of those CTL responses remains unexplored. In the present study, we sought to determine whether vaccination can expand CTL populations which recognize a repertoire of viral epitopes that is greater than is typically generated in the course of a viral infection. We demonstrate that potent secondary CTL responses to subdominant epitopes are rapidly generated following a pathogenic simian-human immunodeficiency virus challenge of rhesus monkeys vaccinated with plasmid DNA or recombinant modified vaccinia virus Ankara vaccines. These data indicate that prior vaccination can increase the breadth of the CTL response that evolves after an AIDS virus infection.
Nucleotide Sequence Database Policies

The International Nucleotide Sequence Databases (INSD) has been an international collaboration between DDBJ, EMBL, and GenBank for over 14 years. Its advisory board, the International Advisory Committee, is made up of members of each of the databases' advisory bodies. At their last meeting, members of this committee unanimously endorsed and reaffirmed the existing data-sharing policy of the three databases that make up the INSD, which is stated below. Individuals submitting data to the international sequence databases managed collaboratively by DDBJ, EMBL, and GenBank should be aware of the following:. The INSD is an outstanding example of success in building an immensely valuable, widely used public resource through voluntary cooperation across the international scientific community. This success has been achieved by following the guidelines and principles outlined above.
Weighing the Worth of Social Ties: Embeddedness and the Price of Legal Services in the Large Law Firm Market

The determination of prices is a key function of markets yet it is just beginning to be studied by sociologists. Most theories view prices as a consequence of economic processes. By contrast, we consider how social structure shapes prices. Building on embeddedness arguments and original fieldwork at large law firms, we propose that a firm’s embedded relationships influence prices by prompting private information flows and informal governance arrangements that add unique value to goods and services. We test our arguments with a separate longitudinal dataset on the pricing of legal services by law firms that represent corporate America. We find that embeddedness can significantly increase and decrease prices net of standard variables and in markets for both complex and routine legal services. Moreover, results show that three forms of embeddedness embedded ties, board memberships, and status affect prices in different directions and have different magnitudes of effects that depend on the complexity of the legal service.
A framework for high-level simulation and optimization of fine-grained reconfigurable architectures

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), due to their programmability, have become a popular design choice for control and processing blocks of modern-day digital design. However, this flexibility makes them larger, slower, and less power-efficient when compared to Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). On the other hand, ASICs have their own drawbacks, such as lack of programmability and inflexibility. One potential solution is specialized fine-grained reconfigurable architectures that have improved flexibility over ASICs and better resource utilization than FPGAs. However, designing a fine-grained reconfigurable architecture is a daunting task in itself due to lack of high-level design-flow support. This article proposes an automated design-flow for the system-level simulation, optimization, and resource estimation of generic as well as custom fine-grained reconfigurable architectures. The proposed framework is generic in nature as it can be used for both control-oriented and compute-intensive applications and then generates a homogeneous or heterogeneous reconfigurable architecture for them. Four sets of homogeneous and heterogeneous benchmarks are used in this work to show the efficacy of our proposed design-flow, and simulation results reveal that our framework can generate both generic and custom fine-grained reconfigurable architectures. Moreover, the area and power estimations show that auto-generated domain-specific reconfigurable architectures are 76% and 73% more area and power-efficient, respectively, than generic FPGA-based implementations. These results are consistent with the savings reported for manual designs in the literature.
VARIABLES SOCIODEMOGRÁFICAS Y PERMANENCIA DE DIFERENTES TIPOS DE VOLUNTARIADO

El objetivo de la presente investigacion es estudiar la relacion existente entre las variables sociodemograficas y la permanencia de distintos tipos de voluntariado, y analizar la posible influencia de la edad en dicha relacion. Para ello un total de 419 voluntarios contestaron a un cuestionario y participaron en dos seguimientos telefonicos a los seis meses y al ano. Los resultados muestran que la edad modificaba la significacion de las diferencias halladas y que a pesar de encontrarse discrepancias concretas en funcion del tipo de voluntariado, se pueden identificar una serie de tendencias generales respecto al papel de las variables sociodemograficas en la permanencia de los voluntarios: los voluntarios varones, de edad media, empleados a jornada completa y casados tienden a permanecer durante mas tiempo en las organizaciones estudiadas. En algunos casos las relaciones entre la permanencia y las variables sociodemograficas tienen un caracter no lineal.
Artificial Neural Networks and quadratic Response Surfaces for the functional failure analysis of a thermal-hydraulic passive system

In this paper, bootstrapped Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and quadratic Response Surface (RS) empirical regression models are used as fast-running surrogates of a thermal-hydraulic (T-H) system code to reduce the computational burden associated with the estimation of the functional failure probability of a T-H passive system. The ANN and quadratic RS models are built on few data representative of the input/output nonlinear relationships underlying the T-H code. Once built, these models are used for performing, in reasonable computational time, the numerous system response calculations required for failure probability estimation. A bootstrap of the regression models is implemented for quantifying, in terms of confidence intervals, the uncertainties associated with the estimates provided by ANNs and RSs. The alternative empirical models are compared on a case
Increased thallium-201 accumulation in the transplanted lung.

We present an interesting case of a 64-year-old man with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and known coronary disease who underwent a successful unilateral lung transplant. Postoperatively, the patient suffered a non-ST elevation myocardial infarction, and underwent a thallium-201 stress test. The nuclear study revealed differential lung uptake of thallium-201 with more tracer taken up by the newly transplanted lung. This finding and its clinical significance are discussed.
Tuning the influence of metal nanoparticles on ZnO photoluminescence by atomic-layer-deposited dielectric spacer

Abstract There is increasing interest in tuning the optical and optoelectronic properties of semiconductor nanostructures using metal nanoparticles in their applications in light-emitting and detection devices. In this work we study the effect of a dielectric Al2O3 gap layer (i.e., spacer) on the interaction of ZnO nanowires with metal nanoparticles. The Al2O3 spacer thickness is varied in the range of 1–25 nm using atomic layer deposition (ALD) in order to tune the interaction. It is found that ~5 nm is an optimum spacer thickness common for most metals, although the enhancement ratio of the near-bandedge emission differs among the metals. Consistent results are obtained from both photoluminescence (PL) and cathodoluminescence (CL) spectroscopies, with the latter being applied to the optical properties of individual semiconductor/metal nanoheterostructures. The interaction is primarily proposed to be related to coupling of ZnO excitons with local surface plasmons of metals, although other mechanisms should not be ruled out.
A Prospective Study Comparing Oral Sodium Phosphate Solution to a Bowel Cleansing Preparation with Nutrition Food Package in Children

Objective: The inability of children to comply with bowel preparation regimens can result in inadequate visualization of the colon. This study compares the safety, efficacy, and patient acceptance of a prepackaged diet kit plus a magnesium citrate/bisacodyl bowel cleansing regimen with a clear liquid diet and sodium phosphate solution regimen in children undergoing colonoscopy. Methods: Children scheduled for a diagnostic colonoscopy, were randomly assigned to receive a prepackaged diet kit and a magnesium citrate/bisacodyl laxative (group 1), or clear liquids and sodium phosphate solution (group 2). The patients and their parents completed a questionnaire to evaluate acceptance of their assigned regimen before colonoscopy. The endoscopists, blinded to the type of bowel preparation, rated bowel cleansing. Results: Sixty two children (28 males, 34 females) with mean age 12.5 years participated. Thirty six and 26 patients were in groups 1 and 2 respectively. Overall cleansing was rated significantly superior in group 1 compared to group 2 as was amount of retained feces (P = .013 for both). The overall frequency of reported side-effects was lower in group 1 than (83.3%, 30/36) than in group 2 (100.0%, 26/26) (P = 0.03). The preparations were otherwise equivalent in regards to compliance and patient tolerance. Conclusions: Although both regimens were comparable in adequacy of colon visualization, preparation tolerance, side effects and compliance profile in this pilot study, the prepackaged diet kit with magnesium citrate/bisacodyl laxative resulted in superior colon cleansing.
Ensemble of multiresolution probabilistic neural network classifiers with fuzzy integral for face recognition

Probabilistic neural network (PNN) is simple and can be easily implemented. PNN has fast learning speed, and its outputs are posterior probabilities which facilitate the combination of classifiers with fuzzy integral. In this paper, we proposed a face recognition algorithm named EPNN, which combine PNN classifiers with fuzzy integral, and can make full use of the superiority of PNN and ensemble learning. The proposed method includes three stages: (1) the incomplete wavelet packet decomposition of face images; (2) training PNN classifiers with wavelet sub-images with low frequency components. (3) combination of the trained PNN classifiers by fuzzy integral. Compared with four matrix subspace algorithms, the proposed method can obtain competitive performance. Such as, it can improve the accuracy of face recognition with less CPU time. The experimental results on JAFFE, YALE, ORL and FERET confirm that the proposed method outperform the four matrix subspace algorithms.
A Dynamic Resource Allocation Scheme Based on Soft Frequency Reuse for OFDMA Systems

In this paper, we present a dynamic resource allocation algorithm, termed Dynamic Major group Allocation (DMA), based on Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR) which is an efficient method to mitigate inter-cell interference (ICI) in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems. DMA defines the method that Radio Network Controller (RNC) orthogonally assigns resource to Cell Edge Users (CEU) in neighboring cells (or sectors) firstly, and then each cell allocal.es its residual resource to Cell Center Users (CCU) according to PF scheduling. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DMA algorithm carries superior throughput performance of CEU over the traditional two-level resource allocation scheme (TLA) which simply combines SFR with PF.
Late-sown lentil performance in response to foliar application of zinc

Highest and lowest plant height at harvest was recorded with application of 0.08% Zn and in control treatment, respectively. Longest and shortest roots were recorded in the plots treated with 0.08% Zn and control respectively. Zn treatment of 0.04% produced maximum lentil seed whereas lowest was recorded under control. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3329/bjb.v44i1. 22734 Bangladesh J. Bot. 44 (1): 125-128, 2015 (March)