Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inflammatory Measures in Depressed Patients With and Without a History of Adverse Childhood Experiences

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a complex psychiatric condition with different subtypes and etiologies. Exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACE) is an important risk factor for the development of MDD later in life. Evidence suggests that pro-inflammatory processes may convey this risk as both MDD and ACE have been related to increased levels of inflammation. In the present study, we aimed to disentangle the effects of MDD and ACE on inflammation levels. Methods: Markers of inflammation (plasma interleukin(IL)-6 and high sensitive C-reactive protein (hsCRP) concentrations, white blood cell (WBC) count and a composite inflammation score (CIS) combining all three) were assessed in 23 MDD patients with ACE, 23 MDD patients without ACE, 21 healthy participants with ACE, and 21 healthy participants without ACE (mean age: 35 ± 11 (SD) years). None of the patients and participants was taking psychotropic medication. ACE was assessed with the Early Trauma Inventory (ETI) and was defined as moderate to severe exposure to sexual or physical abuse. Results: Group differences in the different inflammatory measures were observed. MDD patients with ACE showed significantly higher IL-6 concentrations (p = 0.018), higher WBC counts (p = 0.003) and increased general inflammation levels as indicated by the CIS (p = 0.003) compared to healthy controls. In contrast, MDD patients without ACE displayed similar inflammation levels to the control group (p = 0.93). Conclusion: We observed elevated inflammation in MDD patients with a history of ACE, which could indicate a subtype of “inflammatory depression”. Accordingly, MDD patients with ACE might potentially benefit from anti-inflammatory therapies.
Wideband Probe-Type Waveguide-To-Microstrip Transition for 28 GHz Applications

A design of a broadband probe-type waveguide-to-microstrip transition operating in the 26-30.5 GHz band is presented. The transition is based on a combination of a simple low-profile waveguide adapter with the WR28 flange and a PCB containing a printed probe, a microstrip line and a short Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) section in-between that is used for impedance matching improvement. The transition is formed only on the top dielectric layer of a multilayer hybrid PCB which consists of a high frequency material Rogers RO4350B with the thickness of 0.168 mm and four layers of traditional low-frequency and low-cost FR4 material. Performance of the designed transition was optimized using full-wave electromagnetic simulations and experimentally verified on two back-to-back test structures each containing two designed transitions separated by a microstrip line with the length of 20 and 30 mm. Measurement results show that the designed waveguide-to-microstrip transition has the bandwidth of 26-30.5 GHz for the −15 dB level of the reflection coefficient with the insertion loss less than 0.8 dB.
Evolutionary history of fire‐stimulated resprouting, flowering, seed release and germination

Fire has shaped the evolution of many plant traits in fire‐prone environments: fire‐resistant tissues with heat‐insulated meristems, post‐fire resprouting or fire‐killed but regenerating from stored seeds, fire‐stimulated flowering, release of on‐plant‐stored seeds, and germination of soil‐stored seeds. Flowering, seed release and germination fit into three categories of response to intensifying fire: fire not required, weakly fire‐adapted or strongly fire‐adapted. Resprouting also has three categories but survival is always reduced by increasing fire intensity. We collated 286 records for 20 angiosperm and two gymnosperm families and 50 trait assignments to dated phylogenies. We placed these into three fire‐adapted trait types: those associated with the origin of their clade and the onset of fire‐proneness [primary diversification, contributing 20% of speciation events over the last 120 million years (My)], those originating much later coincident with a change in the fire regime (secondary diversification, 30%), and those conserved in the daughter lineage as already adapted to the fire regime (stabilisation, 50%). All four fire‐response types could be traced to >100 My ago (Mya) with pyrogenic flowering slightly younger because of its dependence on resprouting. There was no evidence that resprouting was always an older trait than either seed storage or non‐sprouting throughout this period, with either/both ancestral or derived in different clades and times.
Overview of Korean Community Health Survey

Overview of Korean Community Health Survey Young Taek Kim, MD·Bo Youl Choi, MD·Kay O Lee, PhD·Ho Kim, PhD·Jin Ho Chun, MD·Su Young Kim, PhD·DukHyoung Lee, MD·Yun A Ghim, MSN·Do Sang Lim, MSC·Yang Wha Kang, MPH·Tae Young Lee, PhD·Jeong Sook Kim, MSC·Hyun Jo, MSC·Yoojin Kim, MPH·Yun Sil Ko, MSC·Soon Ryu Seo, MPH·No-Rye Park, PhD·Jong-Koo Lee, MD Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Cheongju, Department of Preventive Medicine, Hanyang University College of Medicine, Seoul, Department of Business Statistics, Hannam University, Daejeon, Graduate School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul, Department of Preventive Medicine, Inje University College of Medicine, Busan, Department of Preventive Medicine, Jeju National University College of Medicine, Jeju, Graduate School of Public Health, Inje University, Busan, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
Methods in Psychophysics

Typically researchers in psychology are interested in substantive issues about the mind — how we see, hear, categorize or reason about the world. To answer the multitude of yet unanswered substantive questions about the mind one typically conducts experiments to collect data, analyses the data obtained, and then interprets them in the context of current theories and models. Here we look at some of the aspects of the first two steps, the collection and analysis of behavioral data from psychophysical experiments. We will concentrate on the various experimental designs for experiments of the threshold or just-noticeable difference (JND) type. Subsequent to data acquistion, we suggest to use Bayesian inference to estimate the psychometric function of a beta-binomial model as the default data analysis if there is a single independent variable. For multidimensional data and exploratory data analyses we briefly introduce multidimensional psychometric function estimation techniques making use of regularisation techniques from machine learning. We conclude our chapter with a discussion of the timeliness of the two commandments of psychophysics: "Know thy stimulus" by Wilson Geisler and "Thou shalt not be lazy (when gathering data)" we attribute to Karl Dallenbach.
Interaction design for home information applliances

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a prototypical information appliance for displaying and exchanging paper and electronic notes and pictures at home. This study addresses two research problems: how to provide minimal and relevant functionality to home users and to investigate novel interaction styles that rely on a combination of computer-vision based technology with commercial pen input devices in order to support easy and learnable interaction. Evaluation of the prototype application suggests that participants were quickly able to use the application and that they liked the idea of combining paper and electronic media.
Global albedo, BRDF and nadir BRDF-adjusted reflectance products from MODIS

Annual sequences of the first reprocessed albedo, bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF), and nadir BRDF-adjusted surface reflectance (NBAR) products are being evaluated. BRDF model parameters (or weights) are used to compute black sky albedo at local solar noon and white sky albedo and to compute surface reflectance at a common nadir geometry. In addition to these standard resolution albedo, BRDF, and NBAR products, which are provided in the integerized sinusoidal grid projection, the BRDF parameters, black sky albedos (at local solar noon), and white sky albedos are now also being operationally produced in a global geographic projection known as the Climate Modeling Grid (CMG). These are currently available at a 0.25 degree spatial resolution, although there is community interest in a 0.05 degree resolution. In addition to the operational CMGs, coarser 0.5 degree and 1 degree resolution versions of the reprocessed albedo data have also been produced for the ISLSCP-II initiative. The global distribution of these albedos (as they vary throughout the year) are presented, as well as discussions of the most recent evaluations of the quality of the standard products.
A Text Categorization Method Based on Features Clustering

Choosing Features of a text is an important part of text categorization. Its result can affect the quality and efficiency of the text categorizer. Since there are usually thousands of features of a text, it always needs to reduce the dimension of the feature space. Considering the semantic relationship among words, a new text categorization method based on features clustering is proposed in this paper. This method first uses word segmentation to split texts into words, then, remove stop words and words with low information, and then calculate the distribution of words in these texts to construct a matrix of co-occurrence words. After that, cluster algorithms are employed to reduce the dimension of the feature space. Finally some experiments are carried out on two corpuses using several text categorization algorithms. The results demonstrate that this new method can not only improve the precision and recall of text categorization, but also increase the efficiency.
A New Cervical Cytology Dataset for Nucleus Detection and Image Classification (Cervix93) and Methods for Cervical Nucleus Detection

Analyzing Pap cytology slides is an important tasks in detecting and grading precancerous and cancerous cervical cancer stages. Processing cytology images usually involve segmenting nuclei and overlapping cells. We introduce a cervical cytology dataset that can be used to evaluate nucleus detection, as well as image classification methods in the cytology image processing area. This dataset contains 93 real image stacks with their grade labels and manually annotated nuclei within images. We also present two methods: a baseline method based on a previously proposed approach, and a deep learning method, and compare their results with other state-of-the-art methods. Both the baseline method and the deep learning method outperform other state-of-the-art methods by significant margins. Along with the dataset, we publicly make the evaluation code and the baseline method available to download for further benchmarking.
Respiratory Symptoms in Relation to Living near a Crude Oil First Treatment Plant in Italy: A Cross-Sectional Study

Exposure to air pollution has been shown to increase the risk of developing chronic respiratory diseases. The largest crude oil first treatment plant in Italy emits harmful polluting substances. This cross-sectional study assesses the occurrence of respiratory symptoms in a sample of the adult population living near the plant. A proximal and a reference area were defined in order to recruit 200 subjects. Each subject performed a spirometry test and completed a questionnaire. Associations between the distance from the plant and selected respiratory outcomes were assessed (distance-based approach). The prevalence of outcomes between a proximal and a reference area (area-based approach) were also compared. Odds ratios were adjusted for potential confounders. Living near the plant was associated with a higher prevalence of respiratory symptoms, with significant associations for severe dyspnoea equivalent to the halving of risk as the distance of residence from the plant increased by 1 km (adjusted odds ratio (OR) 0.48, confidence interval at the 95% probability level (95% CI): 0.25–0.92). Several signals emerged for respiratory allergic symptoms. The area-based approach generally confirmed the results obtained with the distance-based approach. This is the first study to be carried out on a crude oil first treatment plant aimed at assessing the association with the occurrence of respiratory symptoms. These findings contribute to the evidence supporting the need for a space–time surveillance system in the investigated area.
Clinical application of advanced MR methods in children: points to consider

The application of both functional MRI and diffusion MR tractography prior to a neurosurgical operation is well established in adults, but less so in children, for several reasons. For this review, we have identified several aspects (task design, subject preparation, actual scanning session, data processing, interpretation of results, and decision‐making) where pediatric peculiarities should be taken into account. Further, we not only systematically identify common issues, but also provide solutions, based on our experience as well as a review of the pertinent literature. The aim is to provide the clinician as well as the imaging scientist with information that helps to plan, conduct, and interpret such a clinically‐indicated exam in a way that maximizes benefit for, and minimizes the burden on the individual child.
Budding of Ebola Virus Particles Requires the Rab11-Dependent Endocytic Recycling Pathway

Abstract The Ebola virus-encoded major matrix protein VP40 traffics to the plasma membrane, which leads to the formation of filamentous viral particles and subsequent viral egress. However, the cellular machineries underlying this process are not fully understood. In the present study, we have assessed the role of host endocytic recycling in Ebola virus particle formation. We found that a small GTPase Rab11, which regulates recycling of molecules among the trans-Golgi network, recycling endosomes, and the plasma membrane, was incorporated in Ebola virus-like particles. Although Rab11 predominantly localized in the perinuclear region, it distributed diffusely in the cytoplasm and partly localized in the periphery of the cells transiently expressing VP40. In contrast, Rab11 exhibited a perinuclear distribution when 2 VP40 derivatives that lack ability to traffic to the plasma membrane were expressed. Finally, expression of a dominant-negative form of Rab11 or knockdown of Rab11 inhibited both VP40-induced clusters at the plasma membrane and release of viral-like particles. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that Ebola virus exploits host endocytic recycling machinery to facilitate the trafficking of VP40 to the cell surface and the subsequent release of viral-like particles for its establishment of efficient viral egress.
Workload adaptive flow scheduling

Existing flow scheduling schemes for data center networks optimize for a specific workload and performance metric. In this paper, we present 2D, a new scheduling policy that offers robustness across performance metrics and changing workloads - a ground existing scheduling policies are unable to cover. 2D combines basic scheduling building blocks of multiplexing and serialization in a principled way, ensuring tail optimal performance across workloads while also improving the average (and lower percentiles) completion times. To implement 2D for flow-level scheduling in a distributed setting, we break-up the scheduling decision into two parts: coarse time-scale decisions based on workload and load changes are made by a centralized controller while per-flow serialization decisions are made in a distributed fashion, involving the end-points and sequencer(s). Our testbed experiments show that, for realistic cloud workloads, 2D provides consistent gains at the tail and average flow completion times compared to basic scheduling techniques (e.g., FIFO and processor sharing) as well as heuristic-based schedulers (e.g., Aalo and Baraat).
Technology makes older adults feel older

Abstract The current study aims to examine the effect of technology use on the assessment of subjective age across the adult lifespan, with the assumption that using technology might make older people feel older. One-hundred and fifty-one participants (ages 18–83) assessed their subjective age before and after using familiar and unfamiliar applications on a touchscreen tablet. Subjective age was assessed either by line marking or by numerical response. The oldest participants felt older after the manipulation relative to their pre-manipulation baseline, unlike the youngest participants in the sample. This effect was stronger for the unfamiliar application than for the familiar application. We suggest that using technology evokes stereotype threat. Although this threat does not impair performance, it still changes self perception. These findings could have far-reaching implications for the well-being of older adults in an ever more technological world.
Progressive Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) transfers knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a fully-unlabeled target domain. To tackle this task, recent approaches resort to discriminative domain transfer in virtue of pseudo-labels to enforce the class-level distribution alignment across the source and target domains. These methods, however, are vulnerable to the error accumulation and thus incapable of preserving cross-domain category consistency, as the pseudo-labeling accuracy is not guaranteed explicitly. In this paper, we propose the Progressive Feature Alignment Network (PFAN) to align the discriminative features across domains progressively and effectively, via exploiting the intra-class variation in the target domain. To be specific, we first develop an Easy-to-Hard Transfer Strategy (EHTS) and an Adaptive Prototype Alignment (APA) step to train our model iteratively and alternatively. Moreover, upon observing that a good domain adaptation usually requires a non-saturated source classifier, we consider a simple yet efficient way to retard the convergence speed of the source classification loss by further involving a temperature variate into the soft-max function. The extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed PFAN exceeds the state-of-the-art performance on three UDA datasets.
Atividade in vitro de cinco drogas antimicrobianas contra Neisseria gonorrhoeae

FUNDAMENTOS: A utilizacao de antimicrobianos no tratamento da gonorreia iniciou-se em 1930 com a utilizacao das sulfonamidas. No decorrer dos anos outras drogas passaram a ser utilizadas em seu tratamento, como a penicilina, a espectinomicina, as tetraciclinas e outras. Embora altamente eficazes no inicio, essas drogas, ao longo do tempo, passaram a nao mais apresentar o resultado terapeutico esperado em virtude do aparecimento de quadros de resistencia cromossomica e plasmidial. Assim sendo, para se estabelecer um programa de combate e controle de determinada morbidade bacteriana, e necessaria a realizacao de um programa de vigilância epidemiologica estadiando o comportamento de sensibilidade dos agentes etiologicos aos diferentes agentes terapeuticos. OBJETIVOS E METODOS: Este trabalho teve por objetivo avaliar a sensibilidade das cepas de Neisseria gonorrhoeae as cinco drogas mais utilizadas no tratamento da gonorreia no Brasil (penicilina; cefoxitina; tetraciclina; tianfenicol e espectinomicina), atraves da concentracao inibitoria minima. RESULTADOS E CONCLUSAO: Concluimos que drogas como a cefoxitina, o tianfenicol e a espectinomicina ainda constituem excelentes farmacos para o tratamento da gonorreia. A penicilina, embora ainda eficaz, enseja maiores cuidados na sua utilizacao, frente ao surgimento de cepas resistentes, e a tetraciclina deve ser sobremaneira contra-indicada no tratamento da gonorreia.
Effect of Chemerin on Tissue Glucose Handling in Normal and Streptozotocin Induced Diabetic Rat

Background: Chemerin was first described as an endogenous chemokine that, through the engagement of specific receptor, attracts pro-inflammatory cells. However, it is considered now as an adipokine that can regulate adipocyte differentiation, affect adipogenesis, insulin sensitivity and was suggested to modulate cellular glucose handling; however, many of its effects remain unclear with controversial research results. The present study was performed to elucidate chemerin actions on basal and insulin-stimulated glucose handling in isolated epididymal fat, diaphragmatic strips and liver slices in normal and Streptozotocin diabetic rats. Methods: In this study, 48 adult healthy Wistar albino male rats weighing 180-240g were used to test glucose uptake in isolated epididymal fat, diaphragmatic strips and liver slices. The animals were divided into two equal main groups: Group (A) Non-diabetic and Group (B) Diabetic, Streptozotocin (STZ) induced diabetes. Each main group was further subdivided into four sub-groups Group (I): control (no drug), Group (II): treated with insulin 100 µU/ml. , Group (III): treated with chemerin 100 n/ml, and Group (IV): treated with chemerin 100 n/ml and insulin 100µU/ml. Results: Chemerin administration in isolated rat epididymal fat did not cause any significant change in basal glucose uptake (mg/g wet weight/hour), while it significantly reduced insulin stimulated glucose uptake from 6.971±0.218 in to 5.964±0.3323 (p < 0.001) and from 6.098±0.373 to 5.061±0.3990 (p< 0.001) in diabetic and non-diabetic groups respectively. Similarly, in diaphragmatic strips chemerin administration had no effect on basal glucose uptake, while, it induced a significant decrease in insulin stimulated glucose uptake from 7.7421 ± 0.6531 to 5.124 ± 0.8316 (P<0.001) and from 6.993 ± 0.8316 to 3.876 ±0 . 8559 (P<0.001) in diabetic and non-diabetic groups respectively. On the other hand, Chemerin administration in liver slices had no effect on glucose output (mg/g wet weight / hour), either under basal conditions or in the presence of insulin hormone. Conclusions: Chemerin administration affected insulin stimulated and not basal glucose uptake in isolated epididymal fat and diaphragmatic strips. Moreover, it has no effect on glucose handling by liver slices.
CircRNA_0109291 regulates cell growth and migration in oral squamous cell carcinoma and its clinical significance

Objective(s): Circular RNAs (circRNAs), a new class of non-coding RNAs, have emerged as important regulators during tumorigenesis. However, the functions of circRNAs have not been completely clarified in the progression of cancers. In our study, a novel circRNA hsa_circ_0109291 was investigated in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) tissues and cell lines. Materials and Methods: The expression profile of circRNAs in OSCC tumor tissues was performed by high-throughput sequencing. The CCK-8 wound healing and apoptosis assay were measured in OSCC cell lines after transfection with si-0109291 or si-NC. Results: We discovered that hsa_circ_0109291 was significantly increased in OSCC tissues and cell lines compared with their corresponding control group. Knockdown of hsa_circ_0109291 inhibited proliferation and migration of OSCC cell lines in vitro. In addition, inhibition of hsa_circ_0109291 dramatically induced apoptosis of OSCC cells. We further found that high hsa_circ_0109291 levels in OSCC patients resulted in a poorer prognosis than in patients with low hsa_circ_0109291 levels. Conclusion: These findings indicated that hsa_circ_0109291 correlated with the progression of OSCC and might be a new therapeutic target for the treatment of OSCC.
GRAVITATIONAL FRAGMENTATION IN GALAXY MERGERS: A STABILITY CRITERION

We study the gravitational stability of gaseous streams in the complex environment of a galaxy merger, because mergers are known to be places of ongoing massive cluster formation and bursts of star formation. We find an analytic stability parameter for the case of gaseous streams orbiting around the merger remnant. We test our stability criterion using hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy mergers and obtain satisfactory results. We find that our criterion successfully predicts the streams that will be gravitationally unstable to fragmentation into clumps.