Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Short-Term Particulate Air Pollution Exposure is Associated with Increased Severity of Respiratory and Quality of Life Symptoms in Patients with Fibrotic Sarcoidosis

This study aimed to determine if short-term exposure to particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone (O3) is associated with increased symptoms or lung function decline in fibrotic sarcoidosis. Sixteen patients with fibrotic sarcoidosis complicated by frequent exacerbations completed pulmonary function testing and questionnaires every three months for one year. We compared 7-, 10-, and 14-day average levels of PM2.5 and O3 estimated at patient residences to spirometry (forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1), to forced vital capacity (FVC), episodes of FEV1 decline > 10%) and questionnaire outcomes (Leicester cough questionnaire (LCQ), Saint George Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ), and King’s Sarcoidosis Questionnaire (KSQ)) using generalized linear mixed effect models. PM2.5 level averaged over 14 days was associated with lower KSQ general health status (score change −6.60 per interquartile range (IQR) PM2.5 increase). PM2.5 level averaged over 10 and 14 days was associated with lower KSQ lung specific health status (score change −6.93 and −6.91, respectively). PM2.5 levels were not associated with FEV1, FVC, episodes of FEV1 decline > 10%, or respiratory symptoms measured by SGRQ or LCQ. Ozone exposure was not associated with any health outcomes. In this small cohort of patients with fibrotic sarcoidosis, PM2.5 exposure was associated with increased severity of respiratory and quality of life symptoms.
Increased Survival After Resection of Pancreatic Cancer Liver Metastases

The prognosis for pancreatic adenocarcinoma has changed very little in recent decades and still continues to be dismal. It has been demonstrated that surgical resection is the only therapeutic option that is able to achieve greater long-term survival (18% 5-years post-pancreaticoduodenectomy [PD], and only 12% when there are metastases in the regional lymph nodes). Using these data, pancreatic resection is traditionally considered contraindicated when there are synchronous liver metastases at the time of surgery. We present a case of long-term survival after PD with simultaneous resection of synchronous liver metastases and deferred surgery for multiple metachronous liver metastases. A 38-year-old male with no prior medical history came to our emergency department in December 2006 with weight loss, jaundice and abdominal pain in the upper right abdominal quadrant. Computed tomography (CT) detected a space-occupying lesion measuring 15 mm 9 mm at the head of the pancreas, with no suspicion of extra-pancreatic disease. A malignant lesion was suspected, and a PD was proposed. During the surgery, a solitary superficial lesion in the liver was biopsied. As the intraoperative histopathologic study ruled out malignancy, we proceeded with the standard Whipple procedure. The postoperative period was uneventful, and the definitive pathology analysis reported ductal adenocarcinoma of the head of the pancreas measuring 25 mm with moderate differentiation (pT2), and absence of pathologic lymph nodes (pN0). The differed study of the biopsied liver nodule revealed the presence of pancreatic metastatic tumor cells. In a follow-up control in June 2007, 7 hepatic metastases were detected in segments II ( 1), III ( 3), IV ( 1), V ( 1) and VIII ( 1) (Fig. 1), and chemotherapy was therefore initiated with gemcitabine and capecitabine as palliative treatment. The patient presented good response to the protocol, with partial regression of the hepatic metastases and persistence of only 2 lesions in a CT done in November 2008. Given this situation, we re-considered the therapeutic strategy, and rescue surgery was proposed. During laparotomy, 6 subcentimeter metastases (segments II, III, IV, V, VIII) were identified and resected. In addition, a larger lesion was detected in the IVb-V segment, which was treated by means of radiofrequency ablation. The pathology study demonstrated the presence of pancreatic adenocarcinoma in all the resected lesions. The patient remained disease-free for 50 months after the pancreatic resection, 28 months after the second hepatic surgery (Fig. 2). In April 2011, a follow-up CT detected multiple bilateral c i r e s p . 2 0 1 3 ; 9 1 ( 6 ) : 3 9 0 – 3 9 9
Survey of miRNA-miRNA cooperative regulation principles across cancer types

Cooperative regulation among multiple microRNAs (miRNAs) is a complex type of posttranscriptional regulation in human; however, the global view of the system-level regulatory principles across cancers is still unclear. Here, we investigated miRNA-miRNA cooperative regulatory landscape across 18 cancer types and summarized the regulatory principles of miRNAs. The miRNA-miRNA cooperative pan-cancer network exhibited a scale-free and modular architecture. Cancer types with similar tissue origins had high similarity in cooperative network structure and expression of cooperative miRNA pairs. In addition, cooperative miRNAs showed divergent properties, including higher expression, greater expression variation and a stronger regulatory strength towards targets and were likely to regulate cancer hallmark-related functions. We found a marked rewiring of miRNA-miRNA cooperation between various cancers and revealed conserved and rewired network miRNA hubs. We further identified the common hubs, cancer-specific hubs and other hubs, which tend to target known anticancer drug targets. Finally, miRNA cooperative modules were found to be associated with patient survival in several cancer types. Our study highlights the potential of pan-cancer miRNA-miRNA cooperative regulation as a novel paradigm that may aid in the discovery of tumorigenesis mechanisms and development of anticancer drugs.
Leaders’ limitations and approaches to creating conditions for interaction and communication in parental groups: A qualitative study

The aim of this study was to describe and understand parental group (PG) leaders’ experiences of creating conditions for interaction and communication. The data consisted of 10 interviews with 14 leaders. The transcribed interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. The results showed that the leaders’ ambition was to create a parent-centred learning environment by establishing conditions for interaction and communication between the parents in the PGs. However, the leaders’ experience was that their professional competencies were insufficient and that they lacked pedagogical tools to create constructive group discussions. Nevertheless, they found other ways to facilitate interactive processes. Based on their experience in the PG, the leaders constructed informal socio-emotional roles for themselves (e.g. caring role and personal role) and let their more formal task roles (e.g. professional role, group leader and consulting role) recede into the background, so as to remove the imbalance of power between the leaders and the parents. They believed this would make the parents feel more confident and make it easier for them to start communicating and interacting. This personal approach places them in a vulnerable position in the PG, in which it is easy for them to feel offended by parents’ criticism, questioning or silence.
AdvEntuRe: Adversarial Training for Textual Entailment with Knowledge-Guided Examples

We consider the problem of learning textual entailment models with limited supervision (5K-10K training examples), and present two complementary approaches for it. First, we propose knowledge-guided adversarial example generators for incorporating large lexical resources in entailment models via only a handful of rule templates. Second, to make the entailment model—a discriminator—more robust, we propose the first GAN-style approach for training it using a natural language example generator that iteratively adjusts to the discriminator’s weaknesses. We demonstrate effectiveness using two entailment datasets, where the proposed methods increase accuracy by 4.7% on SciTail and by 2.8% on a 1% sub-sample of SNLI. Notably, even a single hand-written rule, negate, improves the accuracy of negation examples in SNLI by 6.1%.
Hyperelastic Tuning of One-Dimensional Phononic Band Gaps Using Directional Stress

In this paper, we show that acoustoelasticity in hyperelastic materials can be understood using the framework of nonlinear wave mixing, which, when coupled with an induced static stress, leads to a change in the phase velocity of the propagating wave with no change in frequency. By performing Floquet wave eigenvalue analysis, we also show that band gaps for periodic composites, acting as 1-D phononic crystals, can be tuned using this static stress. In the presence of second-order elastic nonlinearities, the phase velocity of propagating waves in the phononic structure changes, leading to observable shifts in the band gaps. Finally, we present numerical examples as evidence that the band gaps are tuned by both the direction of the stress and its magnitude.
Applying Quantification of Qualitative Verbal Data to Asynchronous Written Discourse

As more and more universities start to implement online components, the need to build online learning communities grows. An important and widely used type of online community is the internet forum. Internet forums operate asynchronously and each member can create threads and reply to others threads. Examination of each member’s writings can give valuable insight into the online community and the learning that is taking place within. This paper systematizes a method for researchers to investigate discussions on online forums. More specifically this paper lays out an 8-step process that a researcher may follow when investigating discussions on online forums.
Generating Fine-Grained Open Vocabulary Entity Type Descriptions

While large-scale knowledge graphs provide vast amounts of structured facts about entities, a short textual description can often be useful to succinctly characterize an entity and its type. Unfortunately, many knowledge graphs entities lack such textual descriptions. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic memory-based network that generates a short open vocabulary description of an entity by jointly leveraging induced fact embeddings as well as the dynamic context of the generated sequence of words. We demonstrate the ability of our architecture to discern relevant information for more accurate generation of type description by pitting the system against several strong baselines.
Persistence of Salmonella Typhimurium in Well Waters from a Rural Area of Changchun City, China

Salmonella-contaminated well water could cause major infection outbreaks worldwide, thus, it is crucial to understand their persistence in those waters. In this study, we investigated the persistence of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium in 15 well waters from a rural area of Changchun City, China. Results illustrated that the time to reach detection limit (ttd), first decimal reduction time (δ), and the shape parameter (p) ranged from 15 to 80 days, from 5.6 to 66.9 days, and from 0.6 to 6.6, respectively. Principal component analysis showed that ttds of S. Typhimurium were positively correlated with total organic carbon, pH, NH4+–N, and total phosphate. Multiple stepwise regression analysis revealed that ttds could be best predicted by NH4+–N and pH. Canonical correspondence analysis and variation partition analysis revealed that NH4+–N and pH, and the rest of the water parameters, could explain 27.60% and 28.15% of overall variation of the survival behavior, respectively. In addition, ttds were found to be correlated (p < 0.01) with δ and p. Our results showed that the longer survival (>2.5 months) S. Typhimurium could constitute an increased health risk to the local communities, and provided insights into the close linkage between well water quality and survival of S. Typhimurium.
Faecalibacterium prausnitzii Produces Butyrate to Maintain Th17/Treg Balance and to Ameliorate Colorectal Colitis by Inhibiting Histone Deacetylase 1.

Background Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)-associated dysbiosis is characterized by a loss of Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, whose supernatant exerts an anti-inflammatory effect. However, the anti-inflammatory substances in F. prausnitzii supernatant and the mechanism in ameliorating colitis in IBD have not yet been fully investigated. Methods Experimental colitis models were induced and evaluated by clinical examination and histopathology. Levels of cytokines and ratio of T cells were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and flow cytometry analysis, respectively. F. prausnitzii supernatant was separated by macroporous resins. After extraction, the substances in supernatant were identified by gas chromatography-mass spectrometer. T-cell differentiation assay was conducted in vitro. Changes in signaling pathways were examined by immunoblot, immunohistochemistry, and immunofluorescent staining. Results We found that the supernatant of F. prausnitzii could regulate T helper 17 cell (Th17)/regulatory T cell (Treg) differentiation. Then, we identified butyrate produced by F. prausnitzii that played the anti-inflammatory effects by inhibiting interleukin (IL)-6/signal transducer and the activator of transcription 3 (STAT3)/IL-17 pathway and promoting forkhead box protein P3 (Foxp3). Finally, we demonstrated that the target of butyrate was histone deacetylase 1 (HDAC1). Conclusions It is butyrate, instead of other substances produced by F. prausnitzii, that maintains Th17/Treg balance and exerts significant anti-inflammatory effects in colorectal colitis rodents, by inhibiting HDAC1 to promote Foxp3 and block the IL-6/STAT3/IL-17 downstream pathway. F. prausnitzii could be an option for further investigation for IBD treatment. Targeting the butyrate-HDAC1-T-cell axis offers an effective novel approach in the treatment of inflammatory disease.
Smart grid communication over DC powerline: Evaluation of powerline communication OFDM PAPR for new types of destabilizing electrical loads

In this paper, the channel peak-to-average-power-ratio (PAPR) of powerline communication (PLC) for smart grid and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) communication is evaluated in view of new types of destabilizing, non-stable, nonlinear electrical loads recently reported in literature. These types of loads may occur due to faults or varying bandwidth of controllers on the powerline and the presence of such loads always leads to spurious group delay, increasing channel distortion, noise and very high PAPR on the PLC channel. This work is an attempt towards better understanding of the impact of such load types on powerline communication over a direct current (DC) powerline channel. The effect of having such loads on powerline channel implementing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) scheme is also examined with the aid of Matlab. It is discovered that while PLC amplifiers normally introduce high PAPR, having first order lag loads will exacerbate this problem. The result of this study will be useful for more effective modulation, coding and signal processing for PLC. It will also be useful to other researchers working on designing more effective transmission channel's group delay equalizers, channel digital to analogue converters (DACs) and to standard bodies such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Long-term Large-scale Mapping and Localization Using maplab

This paper discusses a large-scale and long-term mapping and localization scenario using the maplab open-source framework. We present a brief overview of the specific algorithms in the system that enable building a consistent map from multiple sessions. We then demonstrate that such a map can be reused even a few months later for efficient 6-DoF localization and also new trajectories can be registered within the existing 3D model. The datasets presented in this paper are made publicly available.
Population dynamics of the diamondback moth Plutella xylostella L. (Lepidoptera: Yponomeutidae) in the Sydney Region of Australia

The population dynamics of the diamondback moth (DBM), Plutella xylostella L. (Lepidoptera: Yponomeutidae) was investigated at three farms on the Western side of the Sydney Basin, Australia, from November 2003 to October 2004. Adult populations were monitored fortnightly by counting the number that was trapped on yellow sticky traps, which peaked around November to December (summer) in all three farms, with virtually no trap catches in the winter months (June-August). The seasonal trend of adult DBM showed a higher number per trap in summer, ranging from 34.5-41.7 compared with the other seasons. Larval and pupal densities were highest in summer (2.0-4.0 and 3.3-5.1 per plant, respectively), while the lowest numbers were recorded in winter. Rainfall had a significant impact on the DBM populations. The activity (numbers and parasitism) of the DBM parasitoid Diadegma semiclausum Hellen (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) was recorded in all three farms, with the population showing a synchrony with that of the DBM. The highest number of parasitoids per trap (36.8-53.8) was recorded in summer compared with the other seasons. Parasitism was highest in the non-sprayed farm (56.3%) in summer compared with 16.4% and 31.5% in the other farms which have been sprayed with insecnticides. Canonical correspondence analysis showed environmental variables accounting for 11.2% of the variability in the insect data, out of which 83.9% was explained along the first canonical axis. © 2010 International Formulae Group. All rights reserved. Keywords: Diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella, Diadegma semiclausum , parasitism, brassica
Symmetry breaking in networks of nonlinear cavities

We demonstrate symmetry breaking in ring-like networks composed of three and four coupled nonlinear cavities such as photonic crystal resonators. With coupled mode theory we derive analytical conditions for the appearance of asymmetric states. The rich dynamical behavior is further demonstrated by time-domain calculations, which show a cyclical switching action that is useful for multi-stable all-optical flip-flops.
Surface plasmon polaritons on deep, narrow-ridged rectangular gratings

The dispersion diagrams of surface plasmon polaritons have been calculated for rectangular gratings, with very narrow wires, of varying depths. For gratings with a moderate height a family of vertical-standing-wave resonances may be excited, which consist of surface plasmons, oscillating on either vertical surface, coupling together through the metal wires. These modes evolve similarly to the manner in which shallow-grating surface-plasmon dispersion curves evolve into cavity modes in the grooves of the structure. However, on further increase in grating height these vertical standing waves evolve into a second resonant feature, which is independent of yet further increases in height. This new mode is shown to be equivalent to the resonances found on infinite multilayer metal/dielectric structures illuminated at normal incidence.
Disentangling compensation and employment risks using the behavioral agency model

Employing survey and archival data from a sample of IPO firms, and extending the ideas of the Behavioral Agency Model, this study examines the influence of various forms of risk bearing created within the compensation contract on perceived risk taking. The results show that employment risk and variability in compensation each corresponds to greater risk taking, while downside risk and the intrinsic value of stock options correspond to lower risk taking. Among the implications from these results are the importance CEOs attach to relatively stable forms of pay, and to drawing distinctions between the potential for loss of pay and uncertainty about the amount of future pay. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Dehumanizing Gender: The Debiasing Effects of Gendering Human-Abstracted Entities

The propensity to “gender”—or conceptually divide entities by masculinity versus femininity—is pervasive. Such gendering is argued to hinder gender equality, as it reifies the bifurcation of men and women into two unequal categories, leading many to advocate for a “de-gendering movement. ” However, gendering is so prevalent that individuals can also gender entities far removed from human sex categories of male and female (i.e., weather, numbers, sounds) due to the conceptual similarities they share with our notions of masculinity and femininity (e.g., tough, tender). While intuition might predict that extending gender to these (human-abstracted) entities only further reinforces stereotypes, the current work presents a novel model and evidence demonstrating the opposing effect. Five studies demonstrate that gendering human-abstracted entities highlights how divorced psychological notions of gender are from biological sex, thereby decreasing gender stereotyping and penalties toward stereotype violators, through reducing essentialist views of gender. Rather than “de-gendering” humans, we demonstrate the potential benefits of “dehumanizing gender. ”
Alcohol Effects on Response Inhibition: Variability Across Tasks and Individuals

Considerable research has investigated the acute effects of alcohol on response inhibition, but a number of issues remain unresolved. Given that most studies use only a single laboratory task to assess inhibition, it is often difficult to determine whether alcohol’s effects are task specific or generalize across measures of the same construct. Moreover, relatively few studies have directly compared effects of alcohol under ascending and descending blood alcohol concentrations (BACs), and those that have often failed to disentangle BAC limb effects from the effects of repeated testing. This study was intended to provide a test of alcohol’s effects on behavioral inhibition using multiple laboratory measures in a relatively large sample and comparing effects under ascending and descending BAC. Young adults (N = 216) completed three commonly used inhibition tasks (Stroop, antisaccade, and stop-signal) at baseline and again 1–3 weeks later under one of three beverage conditions (alcohol, placebo or control) and one of two BAC limb conditions (ascending/descending or descending only). Findings indicated considerable specificity in alcohol’s effects. Relative to control and placebo conditions, antisaccade performance suffered under both ascending and descending BAC and stop-signal reaction time (RT) suffered only under descending BAC. The Stroop RT interference effect was not affected by alcohol, though alcohol did impair response accuracy on incongruent Stroop trials. Baseline performance moderated effects of alcohol on both antisaccade accuracy and Stroop interference, suggesting the importance of individual differences. The current findings suggest that more specificity is required in characterizing acute effects of alcohol on inhibitory control.
Dirac Mass Dynamics in Multidimensional Nonlocal Parabolic Equations

Nonlocal Lotka–Volterra models have the property that solutions concentrate as Dirac masses in the limit of small diffusion. Is it possible to describe the dynamics of the limiting concentration points and of the weights of the Dirac masses? What is the long time asymptotics of these Dirac masses? Can several Dirac masses co-exist? We will explain how these questions relate to the so-called “constrained Hamilton–Jacobi equation” and how a form of canonical equation can be established. This equation has been established assuming smoothness. Here we build a framework where smooth solutions exist and thus the full theory can be developed rigorously. We also show that our form of canonical equation comes with a kind of Lyapunov functional. Numerical simulations show that the trajectories can exhibit unexpected dynamics well explained by this equation. Our motivation comes from population adaptive evolution a branch of mathematical ecology which models Darwinian evolution.