Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prognostic Implications of Right Ventricular Remodeling and Function in Patients with Significant Secondary Tricuspid Regurgitation.

BACKGROUND In patients with significant (moderate and severe) tricuspid regurgitation (TR), the decision to intervene is influenced by right ventricular (RV) size and function. RV remodeling in significant secondary TR has been underexplored. The aim of this study was to characterize RV remodeling in patients with significant secondary TR and to investigate its prognostic implications. METHODS RV remodeling was characterized by transthoracic echocardiography in 1292 patients with significant secondary TR (median age 71 (62-78), 50% male). Four patterns of RV remodeling were defined according to the presence of RV dilation (tricuspid annulus≥40mm) and RV systolic dysfunction (<17 mm): pattern 1) normal RV size and systolic function; pattern 2) dilated RV with preserved systolic function; pattern 3) normal RV size with systolic dysfunction; pattern 4) dilated RV systolic dysfunction. The primary endpoint was all-cause mortality and the event rates were compared across the 4 patterns of RV remodeling. RESULTS A total of 183 (14%) patients showed pattern 1 RV remodeling, 256 (20%) showed pattern 2, 304 (24%) presented with pattern 3 and 549 (43%) had pattern 4 RV remodeling. Patients with pattern 4 RV remodeling were more frequently male, more often had coronary artery disease, worse renal function, impaired left ventricular ejection fraction and were more often symptomatic. Only 98 (8%) patients underwent tricuspid valve annuloplasty during follow-up. During a median follow-up of 34 (IQR 0-60) months, 510 (40%) patients died. The 5-year survival rate was significantly worse in patients presenting with patterns 3 and 4 RV remodeling compared with pattern 1 (52% and 49% vs. 70%; p=0.002 and p<0.001, respectively), and were independently associated with poor outcome on multivariable analysis. CONCLUSIONS In patients with significant secondary TR, patients with RV systolic dysfunction have worse clinical outcome regardless of the presence of RV dilation.
News in an online world: The need for an “automatic crap detector”

Widespread adoption of internet technologies has changed the way that news is created and consumed. The current online news environment is one that incentivizes speed and spectacle in reporting, at the cost of fact‐checking and verification. The line between user generated content and traditional news has also become increasingly blurred. This poster reviews some of the professional and cultural issues surrounding online news and argues for a two‐pronged approach inspired by Hemingway's “automatic crap detector” (Manning, 1965) in order to address these problems: a) proactive public engagement by educators, librarians, and information specialists to promote digital literacy practices; b) the development of automated tools and technologies to assist journalists in vetting, verifying, and fact‐checking, and to assist news readers by filtering and flagging dubious information.
Seasonal and Sexual Differences in the Microbiota of the Hoopoe Uropygial Secretion

The uropygial gland of hoopoe nestlings and nesting females hosts bacterial symbionts that cause changes in the characteristics of its secretion, including an increase of its antimicrobial activity. These changes occur only in nesting individuals during the breeding season, possibly associated with the high infection risk experienced during the stay in the hole-nests. However, the knowledge on hoopoes uropygial gland microbial community dynamics is quite limited and based so far on culture-dependent and molecular fingerprinting studies. In this work, we sampled wild and captive hoopoes of different sex, age, and reproductive status, and studied their microbiota using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and pyrosequencing. Surprisingly, we found a complex bacterial community in all individuals (including non-nesting ones) during the breeding season. Nevertheless, dark secretions from nesting hoopoes harbored significantly higher bacterial density than white secretions from breeding males and both sexes in winter. We hypothesize that bacterial proliferation may be host-regulated in phases of high infection risk (i.e., nesting). We also highlight the importance of specific antimicrobial-producing bacteria present only in dark secretions that may be key in this defensive symbiosis. Finally, we discuss the possible role of environmental conditions in shaping the uropygial microbiota, based on differences found between wild and captive hoopoes.
An Improved Approximation for Scheduling Malleable Tasks with Precedence Constraints via Iterative Method

The problem of scheduling malleable tasks with precedence constraints is one of the most important strongly <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {NP}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="chen-ieq1-2813387.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-hard problems, given <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="chen-ieq2-2813387.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> identical processors and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="chen-ieq3-2813387.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> tasks. A malleable task is one that runs in parallel on a varying number of processors. In addition, the processing sequences of tasks are constrained by the precedence constraints. The goal is to find a feasible schedule that minimizes the makespan (maximum completion time). This article presents an iterative method for improving the performance ratio of scheduling malleable tasks. The proposed algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of 4.4841 after 2 iterations. This improves the so far best-known factor of 4.7306 due to Jansen and Zhang. For a large number of iterations (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$>100$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="chen-ieq4-2813387.gif"/> </alternatives></inline-formula>), the approximation ratio of the proposed algorithm is tends toward <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2+\sqrt{2}\approx 3.4143$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="chen-ieq5-2813387.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>.
The Complexity of Monitoring Hyperproperties

We study the runtime verification of hyperproperties, expressed in the temporal logic HyperLTL, as a means to inspect a system with respect to security polices. Runtime monitors for hyperproperties analyze trace logs that are organized by common prefixes in the form of a tree-shaped Kripke structure, or are organized both by common prefixes and by common suffixes in the form of an acyclic Kripke structure. Unlike runtime verification techniques for trace properties, where the monitor tracks the state of the specification but usually does not need to store traces, a monitor for hyperproperties repeatedly model checks the growing Kripke structure. This calls for a rigorous complexity analysis of the model checking problem over tree-shaped and acyclic Kripke structures. We show that for trees, the complexity in the size of the Kripke structure is L-complete independently of the number of quantifier alternations in the HyperLTL formula. For acyclic Kripke structures, the complexity is PSPACE-complete (in the level of the polynomial hierarchy that corresponds to the number of quantifier alternations). The combined complexity in the size of the Kripke structure and the length of the HyperLTL formula is PSPACE-complete for both trees and acyclic Kripke structures, and is as low as NC for the relevant case of trees and alternation-free HyperLTL formulas. Thus, the size and shape of both the Kripke structure and the formula have significant impact on the complexity of the model checking problem.
Copper promotes the migration of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells via Rnd3‐dependent cytoskeleton remodeling

The motility of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) is highly related to their homing in vivo, a critical issue in regenerative medicine. Our previous study indicated copper (Cu) might promote the recruitment of endogenous MSCs in canine esophagus defect model. In this study, we investigated the effect of Cu on the motility of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) and the underlying mechanism in vitro. Cu supplementation could enhance the motility of BMSCs, and upregulate the expression of hypoxia‐inducible factor 1α (Hif1α) at the protein level, and upregulate the expression of rho family GTPase 3 (Rnd3) at messenger RNA and protein level. When Hif1α was silenced by small interfering RNA (siRNA), Cu‐induced Rnd3 upregulation was blocked. When Rnd3 was silenced by siRNA, the motility of BMSCs was decreased with or without Cu supplementation, and Cu‐induced cytoskeleton remodeling was neutralized. Furthermore, overexpression of Rnd3 also increased the motility of BMSCs and induced cytoskeleton remodeling. Overall, our results demonstrated that Cu enhanced BMSCs migration through, at least in part, cytoskeleton remodeling via Hif1α‐dependent upregulation of Rnd3. This study provided an insight into the mechanism of the effect of Cu on the motility of BMSCs, and a theoretical foundation of applying Cu to improve the recruitment of BMSCs in tissue engineering and cytotherapy.
Statin Use and Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Incidence: A Nested Case–Control Study in Manitoba, Canada

Background: Recent studies have reported reduced risk of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) among statin users. However, the possibility that the effect of statins may differ by their chemical or pharmacodynamic properties has not been investigated. Methods: In this nested case–control study, all Manitobans ages ≥40 years when diagnosed with CLL (as a first cancer) from 1999 to 2014 (n = 1,385) were matched (on gender, age, residence, and duration of insurance coverage) to cancer-free controls (n = 6,841). Using conditional logistic regression, statin use was analyzed by individual statins and groups: hydrophilic, low-potency lipophilic (fluvastatin and lovastatin), and high-potency lipophilic statins. Results: Statin users constituted 27% and 28% of the CLL cases and controls, respectively. After adjusting for potential confounding by indication, patterns of healthcare utilization, and use of other drugs, CLL incidence was not associated with use of hydrophilic [odds ratio (OR) = 1.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.86–1.34] or high-potency lipophilic (OR = 0.94; 95% CI, 0.79–1.11) statins. Low-potency lipophilic statins were associated with a lower risk of CLL (OR = 0.64; 95% CI, 0.45–0.92), with stronger association (OR = 0.44; 95% CI, 0.22–0.88) observed with more regular use (half to full standard dose on average). Conclusions: We found an association between low-potency lipophilic statin use and reduced CLL risk, with a possible dose–response effect. Impact: Although requiring replication in future studies, our findings suggest that the effect of statins on CLL risk may depend on their specific chemical or pharmacodynamic properties.
Public Response Sentimental Analysis Model to Review Educational Program Seeking Academic Accreditation

Educational institutions are pursuing for academic accreditation to assure the confidence of the programs' constituents. Onsite accreditation reviewers would like to see evidences of documented procedures for reviewing the programs performance periodically. Surveying the constituents and reflecting their feedback in the improvement plan is a fundamental step. Companies use sentiment analysis to get a clear understanding of the customer feeling and review on a product or a service. This research presents a novel approach to analyze public response to an educational program in Twitter; the most famous and influential microblogging. Such approach helps to follow and analyze what the program beneficiaries really feel, think and need for the purpose of program improvement. Program chair and quality assurance committee might document the sentiment analysis of the retrieved tweets as an evidence for the accreditation commission reviewer's onsite visit. Sentiment analysis divides the tweets into two groups objective and subjective. Experiments show that subjective tweets with smallest polarity confidence tend to negativity feeling. Hence, subjective tweets may contain critics, feedback, review and/or recommendations.
A Novel Multimean Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Nonlinear Continuous Optimization: Application to Feed-Forward Neural Network Training

Multilayer feed-forward artificial neural networks are one of the most frequently used data mining methods for classification, recognition, and prediction problems. The classification accuracy of a multilayer feed-forward artificial neural networks is proportional to training. A well-trained multilayer feed-forward artificial neural networks can predict the class value of an unseen sample correctly if provided with the optimum weights. Determining the optimum weights is a nonlinear continuous optimization problem that can be solved with metaheuristic algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel multimean particle swarm optimization algorithm for multilayer feed-forward artificial neural networks training. The proposed multimean particle swarm optimization algorithm searches the solution space more efficiently with multiple swarms and finds better solutions than particle swarm optimization. To evaluate the performance of the proposed multimean particle swarm optimization algorithm, experiments are conducted on ten benchmark datasets from the UCI repository and the obtained results are compared to the results of particle swarm optimization and other previous research in the literature. The analysis of the results demonstrated that the proposed multimean particle swarm optimization algorithm performed well and it can be adopted as a novel algorithm for multilayer feed-forward artificial neural networks training.
Clostridium difficile shedding by healthy dogs in Nigeria and Malawi

The objectives of this study were to determine the prevalence and characteristics of Clostridium difficile shedding in owned dogs in Nigeria and Malawi. Clostridium difficile was isolated from 31/120 (26%) dogs in Nigeria and 11/92 (12%) dogs in Malawi (p = 0.012). Overall, 22/42 (52%) isolates were toxigenic; 17/31 (55%) from Nigeria and 5/11 (45%) from Malawi. All toxigenic isolates possessing tcdA and tcdB, and only one also possessed cdtA/B. Sixteen different ribotypes were found, ten (63%) of which were non‐toxigenic. Most isolates corresponded to ribotypes that have been previously identified in humans or livestock. The role of dogs in transmission of C. difficile and the clinical implications of C. difficile shedding in dogs remain unclear. These data indicate that dogs could act as a source of C. difficile for exposure of other species, including humans; however, the true risk is unknown. Further study of the ecology of C. difficile and the role of dogs in disease of humans and other domestic animals is indicated.
Evolution of Communities with Focus on Stability (extended abstract)

The detection of communities is an important tool used to analyze the social graph of mobile phone users. Within each community, customers are susceptible of attracting new ones, retaining old ones and/or accepting new products or services through the leverage of mutual influences. The communities of users are smaller units, easier to grasp, and allow for example the computation of role analysis -- based on the centrality of an actor within his community. The problem of finding communities in static graphs has been widely studied. However, from the point of view of a telecom analyst, to be really useful, the detected communities must evolve as the social graph of communications changes over time -- for example, in order to perform marketing actions on communities and track the results of those actions over time. Additionally the behaviors of communities of users over time can be used to predict future activity that interests the telecom operators, such as subscriber churn or handset adoption. Similary group evolution can provide insights for designing strategies, such as the early warning of group churn. Stability is a crucial issue: the analysis performed on a given community will be lost, if the analyst cannot keep track of this community in the following time steps. This is the particular use case that we tackle in this paper: tracking the evolution of communities in dynamic scenarios with focus on stability. We propose two modifications to a widely used static community detection algorithm. We then describe experiments to study the stability and quality of the resulting partitions on real-world social networks, represented by monthly call graphs for millions of subscribers.
Unidirectional neuronal cell growth and differentiation on aligned polyhydroxyalkanoate blend microfibres with varying diameters

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are a family of prokaryotic‐derived biodegradable and biocompatible natural polymers known to exhibit neuroregenerative properties. In this work, poly(3‐hydroxybutyrate), P(3HB), and poly(3‐hydroxyoctanoate), P(3HO), have been combined to form blend fibres for directional guidance of neuronal cell growth and differentiation. A 25:75 P(3HO)/P(3HB) blend (PHA blend) was used for the manufacturing of electrospun fibres as resorbable scaffolds to be used as internal guidance lumen structures in nerve conduits. The biocompatibility of these fibres was studied using neuronal and Schwann cells. Highly aligned and uniform fibres with varying diameters were fabricated by controlling electrospinning parameters. The resulting fibre diameters were 2.4 ± 0.3, 3.7 ± 0.3, and 13.5 ± 2.3 μm for small, medium, and large diameter fibres, respectively. The cell response to these electrospun fibres was investigated with respect to growth and differentiation. Cell migration observed on the electrospun fibres showed topographical guidance in accordance with the direction of the fibres. The correlation between fibre diameter and neuronal growth under two conditions, individually and in coculture with Schwann cells, was evaluated. Results obtained from both assays revealed that all PHA blend fibre groups were able to support growth and guide aligned distribution of neuronal cells, and there was a direct correlation between the fibre diameter and neuronal growth and differentiation. This work has led to the development of a family of unique biodegradable and highly biocompatible 3D substrates capable of guiding and facilitating the growth, proliferation, and differentiation of neuronal cells as internal structures within nerve conduits.
Resource Representative Model for Educational Resource Recommendation

Educational resource recommendation has become an increasingly crucial problem. It is important for learners to find appropriate and high-quality educational resources in massively redundant information and educational resources of uneven quality. In this paper, a resource representative model based on user-resource network is proposed to select the representative resources from large user-resource network according to user's behaviors. The selected representative resources can provide coarse-grained resource recommendation for learning-beginners, and supply the resource pre-selection set for personalized recommendation of non-learning-beginners so as to offer better resources for personalized recommendation. The model defines the concept of resource representative degree and propose a method to calculate representative degree with considerations of relative influence, similarity and connectivity between resources. To optimize the proposed model effectively, we present a greedy heuristic algorithm with provable approximation guarantees on the public dataset "citeulike". Experimental results depict that proposed method significantly outperforms other traditional methods in representative resources selection.
Mediterranean Diet and Bladder Cancer Risk in Italy

Previous studies have reported that Mediterranean diet is inversely related to the risk of several neoplasms; however, limited epidemiological data are available for bladder cancer. Thus, we examined the association between Mediterranean diet and this neoplasm in an Italian multicentric case-control study consisting of 690 bladder cancer cases and 665 controls. We assessed the adherence to the Mediterranean diet via a Mediterranean Diet Score (MDS), which represents the major characteristics of the Mediterranean diet and ranges from 0 to 9 (from minimal to maximal adherence, respectively). We derived odds ratios (ORs) of bladder cancer according to the MDS score from multiple logistic regression models, allowing for major confounding factors. The ORs of bladder cancer were 0.72 (95% confidence interval, CI, 0.54–0.98) for MDS of 4–5 and 0.66 (95% CI, 0.47–0.93) for MDS of 6–9 (p for trend = 0.02) compared to MDS = 0–3. Results were similar in strata of sex, age, and education, while the risk appeared somewhat lower in never-smokers and patients with pT1–pT4 bladder carcinomas. Among individual components of the MDS, we observed inverse associations for greater consumption of legumes, vegetables, and fish. In our study, which was carried out on an Italian population, the higher adherence to the Mediterranean diet was related to a lower risk of bladder cancer.
A competitive drive? Same‐sex attentional preferences in capuchins

In primates, faces provide information about several characteristics of social significance, including age, physical health, and biological sex. However, despite a growing literature on face processing and visual attention in a number of primate species, preferences for same‐ or opposite‐sex faces have not yet been examined. In the current study, we explore the role of conspecific sex on visual attention in two groups of capuchin monkeys. Subjects were shown a series of image pairs on a Tobii Pro TX300 eye tracker, each depicting an unfamiliar male and an unfamiliar female face. Given the behavioral evidence of mate choice in both sexes, we hypothesized that capuchins would preferentially attend to images of unfamiliar conspecifics of the opposite sex. Our alternative hypothesis was that capuchins would preferentially attend to same‐sex individuals to assess potential competitors. Our results provide support for our alternative hypothesis. When comparing attention to each stimuli type across sexes, females spent significantly larger percentages of time than males looking at female photos, whereas males spent significantly larger percentages of time than females looking at male photos. Within each sex, females looked for significantly larger percentages of time to female versus male images. Males also looked for larger percentages of time to same‐sex images, though not significantly. To our knowledge, these data are the first to demonstrate significant sex‐biased attentional preferences in adult primates of any species, and suggest that, for capuchins, potential competitors garner more attention than potential mates. In addition, our findings have implications for studies of visual attention and face processing across the primate order, and suggest that researchers need to control for these demographic factors in their experimental designs.