Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MR detection of hippocampal disease in epilepsy: factors influencing T2 relaxation time.

PURPOSE To assess the reproducibility and stability of hippocampal T2 relaxation times and examine the effects of patients' age, seizures, and duration of epilepsy on this measure. METHODS Hippocampal T2 relaxation times were measured in 63 patients with chronic epilepsy (55 with partial and 8 with idiopathic generalized seizures) using a Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill sequence, echo times 22 to 262 millisecond, on a 1.5-T clinical MR imaging system. Twenty-three patients on stable medication regimens underwent repeated T2 relaxometry after an interval of between 115 and 331 days. In 4 patients with partial seizures, hippocampal T2 relaxation times were measured interictally and again within 45 minutes of seizures. RESULTS In the 55 patients with partial epilepsy, hippocampal T2 relaxation times did not correlate with seizure frequency, duration of epilepsy, or age, but they were significantly more abnormal in those patients with a history of prolonged (more than 30 minutes) early childhood seizures than in those without. Eight patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy had normal MR and hippocampal T2 relaxation times. In the 23 patients who underwent repeated T2 relaxometry there was no evidence of qualitative changes in T2-weighted images of the hippocampi or systematic changes of hippocampal T2 relaxation times with time. In 4 patients recent complex partial or secondary generalized seizures did not acutely alter hippocampal T2 relaxation times. CONCLUSION Hippocampal T2 relaxation time is a precise, reliable, stable, noninvasive measurement sensitive to hippocampal disease. These results do not suggest progression of hippocampal disease in patients with intractable partial seizures during periods of up to 331 days.
Cannabis Reclassification: What is the Message to the Next Generation of Cannabis Users?

At the beginning of 2004 the UK government downgraded the legal status of cannabis from a Class B to a Class C drug. Following a review of this decision two years later, cannabis remained a Class C substance—which for some contrasted with the potential harmful social and health effects associated with its use, particularly for young people. These included its links with respiratory damage, problems during pregnancy and its potential to exacerbate mental health problems. When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007 his government decided to revisit this issue and requested a reexamination of its legal status. Despite the advice of its own scientific advisory body, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the UK government reclassified cannabis back to a Class B drug in May 2008. This paper examines the existing scientific evidence on the potential impact of cannabis use on young people within the context of the UK government's reclassification initiative over the past four years. This evidence remains inconclusive whilst the perception of young people to the effects of cannabis use during, and now after, the period of the reclassification debate is not yet known. This now makes it particularly challenging to communicate a clear message in the most effective manner with young people about the possible risks of cannabis use, and would appear to make it difficult to provide a clear and unambiguous statement on what message this initiative has sent to the next generation of cannabis users, as they see the government rethink its position on several occasions before eventually changing its mind.
Pseudo labels for imbalanced multi-label learning

The classification with instances which can be tagged with any of the 2L possible subsets from the predefined L labels is called multi-label classification. Multi-label classification is commonly applied in domains, such as multimedia, text, web and biological data analysis. The main challenge lying in multi-label classification is the dilemma of optimising label correlations over exponentially large label powerset and the ignorance of label correlations using binary relevance strategy (1-vs-all heuristic). The classification with label powerset usually encounters with highly skewed data distribution, called imbalanced problem. While binary relevance strategy reduces the problem from exponential to linear, it totally neglects the label correlations. In this artical, we propose a novel strategy of introducing Balanced Pseudo-Labels (BPL) which build more robust classifiers for imbalanced multi-label classification, which embeds imbalanced data in the problems innately. By incorporating the new balanced labels we aim to increase the average distances among the distinct label vectors. In this way, we also code the label correlation implicitly in the algorithm. Another advantage of the proposed method is that it can combined with any classifier and it is proportional to linear label transformation. In the experiment, we choose five multi-label benchmark data sets and compare our algorithm with the most state-of-art algorithms. Our algorithm outperforms them in standard multi-label evaluation in most scenarios.
The Educational Relevance of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Mahatma Gandhi in the 21st century

Contextualisation These research notes are based on my PhD study, which I am partway through. The study looks at the educational ideas of the Japanese educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944) and those of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) of India. In particular the study deals with the views of the above educators on ‘values’ in education and their role in opposing both the totalitarian values of National Shinto in Japan during World War II and the communal values that were being invoked during the same period by Hindu and Muslim political parties in India. The study then questions the relevance of the two dissident philosophers in the present-day context of the ongoing controversies that exist in history textbooks in both Japan and India, with respect to the representation of World War II in Japanese textbooks and the influence of Hindutva values in Indian textbooks.
An Adaptive Storage and Retrieval Mechanism to Reduce Response-Time in High Performance Computing Clusters

Ever-increasing growth of high performance computing applications requires employment of novel methods in all aspects of computing systems. The response time of file storage and retrieval operations is one of the most important factors of storage systems and improving that will result higher computational power. Consequently, breathtaking efforts have been done and various file systems with different architectures have been proposed. Most of them are not aware of clusters’ execution state and do not consider variety of I/O operations’ response time on machines with different storage media, network traffic, and processing load. In this paper, we have proposed a mechanism to store and retrieve files with respect to the execution state of storage nodes and network topology of the cluster. Finally, the proposed architecture has been implemented and evaluated using Hadoop distributed file system.
Gatekeeper: providing secure interoperability between mobile web-browser and local resources

The most popular platforms being developed currently are those used in mobile devices. In particular, mobile Web-based services have attracted the attention of platform developers. However, mobile Web applications offer limited functionality. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a scheme called Gatekeeper, which offers secure interworking for mobile Web-browsers that maintains the convenience of normal Web use. In our scheme, a Web-browser calls Gatekeeper using a URL protocol handler. Gatekeeper then provides secure communication using pre-established keys shared between a remote server and local resource. Compared to related studies, the Gatekeeper scheme shows an improvement in security. Moreover, the scheme is not constrained to a specific environment.
Structure de la mortalité dans les familles consanguines

Résumé Poursuivant leurs recherches sur l'influence de la consanguinité, les auteurs étudient aujourd'hui la mortalité dans deux échantillons de familles consanguines prélevés dans deux départements français. L'enquête qui a permis de recueillir les données nécessaires ayant fait l'objet d'une étude globale antérieure, seules seront commentées ici les différences les plus significatives qui se manifestent, dans le même milieu, entre la population consanguine et la population non consanguine qui sert de témoin. Il ressort des résultats que les facteurs d'ordre génétique semblent avoir joué un rôle appréciable dans la diminution de la mortalité et l'allongement de la vie humaine depuis deux siècles.
Nonadhesive nanotopography: fibroblast response to poly(n-butyl methacrylate)-poly(styrene) demixed surface features.

It is becoming clear that cells do not only respond to micrometric scale topography, but may also respond to topography at the nanometric scale. Nano-fabrication methods such as electron beam lithography are, however, expensive and time consuming. Polymer demixing of poly(styrene) and poly(4-bromostyrene) has been found to produce nano-scale islands of reproducible height, and the islands have been previously shown to effect cell events such as adhesion, spreading, proliferation, and differentiation. This study uses demixed poly(styrene) and poly(n-butyl methacrylate) to produce nano-islands with closer packing and narrower widths compared with those previously studied. Observations have been made of morphological and cytoskeletal changes in human fibroblasts interacting with 10- and 50-nm-high islands. The methods used included scanning electron microscopy, fluorescent microscopy, and optical microscopy. The results indicated that the cells do not respond differently to the 10-nm islands compared with planar samples but, in contrast, the 50-nm islands are nonadhesive.
Epileptiform electroencephalogram during mask induction of anesthesia with sevoflurane.

BACKGROUND Sevoflurane is suggested as a suitable anesthetic agent for mask induction in adults. The authors recently found that hyperventilation during sevoflurane-nitrous oxide-oxygen mask induction is associated with cardiovascular hyperdynamic response. We tested the hypothesis that the hyperdynamic response can be explained by electroencephalography (EEG) findings. METHODS Thirty women were randomly allocated to receive sevoflurane-nitrous oxygen-oxygen mask induction using a single-breath method, followed by either spontaneous breathing (n = 15) or controlled hyperventilation (n = 15) for 6 min. EEG was recorded. Blood pressure and heart rate were recorded at 1-min intervals. RESULTS Epileptiform EEG activity (spikes or polyspikes) was seen in all patients with controlled hyperventilation, and in seven patients with spontaneous breathing (P < 0.01). Jerking movements were seen in three patients with controlled hyperventilation. In the controlled hyperventilation group, heart rate increased 54% from baseline at 4 min after induction (P < 0.001). Mean arterial pressure increased 17% (P < 0.05), peaking at 3 min. In the spontaneous breathing group, heart rate showed no change, and mean arterial pressure decreased by 14% (P < 0.01) at 6 min. Heart rate and mean arterial pressure differed significantly between the groups from 2 min after beginning of the induction to the end of the trial. An increase in heart rate of more than 30% from baseline always was associated with epileptiform EEG activity. CONCLUSIONS Sevoflurane mask induction elicits epileptiform EEG patterns. These are associated with an increase in heart rate in patients with controlled hyperventilation and also during spontaneous breathing of sevoflurane.
Factors affecting food choice in relation to fruit and vegetable intake: a review

Abstract The present review provides an investigation into the food choice decisions made by individuals in relation to fruit and vegetable consumption. A comprehensive body of evidence now exists concerning the protective effect of fruit and vegetables against a number of diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease and certain forms of cancer. Current UK recommendations are to increase intakes of fruit and vegetables to 400 g/person per d. In the main body of the review the factors that affect food choice decisions of adults in relation to fruit and vegetable consumption are studied, following a suggested framework of food choice. Factors covered include sensory appeal, familiarity and habit, social interactions, cost, availability, time constraints, personal ideology, media and advertising and health. The content of the review shows just how complex the food choice process can be. Health promotion techniques can be better targeted towards certain groups of individuals, all holding similar sets of values, when making food choice decisions. Food choice, in relation to fruit and vegetable intake, needs to be studied in more depth, in order to provide effective nutrition education programmes, in particular the sets of priorities that different sub-groups of the population consider when making food choice decisions.
Parallel Skyline Queries on Multi-core Systems

The skyline query is an efficient data analysis tool for multi-criteria decision making that has received significant attention in the database community. As multi-core architectures have gone mainstream, we present a new parallel skyline query algorithm that can be applied to multi-core and multiprocessor systems, to progressively return skyline points as they are identified efficiently. In this paper, we proposed a parallel skyline algorithm which can eliminate redundant computations and improve parallelism of the skyline query. Experimental results show that our algorithm successfully exploits the features of multiple cores to improve the performance of skyline computation for large high-dimensional datasets.
Regulation of fatty acid synthesis during the cessation of phospholipid biosynthesis in Escherichia coli

In 1975, Cronan et al. (J. Biol. Chem. 250:5835-5840) reported that free fatty acids accumulated during glycerol starvation of an Escherichia coli glycerol auxotroph. On the basis of labeling experiments showing significant incorporation of [14C]acetate into the fatty acid fraction of glycerol-starved cells, these authors concluded that fatty acid synthesis proceeded normally in the absence of phospholipid synthesis. Since these findings might have been due to an increase in the intracellular specific activity of the [1-14C]acetyl coenzyme A pool of the glycerol-starved cells, we reexamined the effect of glycerol starvation on fatty acid synthesis. We found that (i) the incorporation of 3H2O and/or [2,3-14C]succinate into the fatty acid fraction of glycerol auxotrophs is severely reduced during starvation, (ii) the incorporation of [1-14C]acetate into the lipid fraction of an acetate-requiring glycerol auxotroph is inhibited by 95% during glycerol starvation, and (iii) the accumulation of fatty acids, as measured by microtitration, in glycerol-starved cells is less than 10% that of glycerol-supplemented cells. These results indicate that fatty acid synthesis is inhibited in the absence of phospholipid synthesis of E. coli.
ReportTutor - An Intelligent Tutoring System that Uses a Natural Language Interface

ReportTutor is an extension to our work on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for visual diagnosis. ReportTutor combines a virtual microscope and a natural language interface to allow students to visually inspect a virtual slide as they type a diagnostic report on the case. The system monitors both actions in the virtual microscope interface as well as text created by the student in the reporting interface. It provides feedback about the correctness, completeness, and style of the report. ReportTutor uses MMTx with a custom data-source created with the NCI Metathesaurus. A separate ontology of cancer specific concepts is used to structure the domain knowledge needed for evaluation of the student's input including co-reference resolution. As part of the early evaluation of the system, we collected data from 4 pathology residents who typed in their reports without the tutoring aspects of the system, and compared responses to an expert dermatopathologist. We analyzed the resulting reports to (1) identify the error rates and distribution among student reports, (2) determine the performance of the system in identifying features within student reports, and (3) measure the accuracy of the system in distinguishing between correct and incorrect report elements.
A pulsed GTEM system for UHF sensor calibration

A system for measuring the sensitivity of electric field sensors at UHF using a novel gigahertz transverse electromagnetic (GTEM) cell is described. The system was developed to enable calibration of UHF couplers that are used to detect insulation defects in gas insulated substations. The frequency response of a sensor is determined using fast Fourier transform (FFT) processing of its output voltage when it is subjected to a step electric field with a rise time of less than 300 ps. Provided the step response of the sensor is relatively short, the absorbing termination of the GTEM cell can be dispensed with, simplifying its construction. The need for impedance matching at the cell input can be eliminated by using a signal source that absorbs the reflected energy. In addition, the use of a wire septum offers the potential for improving field uniformity. A description of the measurement system is given, and some typical results are presented.
Low-Fluoride Dentifrices with Reduced pH: Fluoride Concentration in Whole Saliva and Bioavailability

This double-blind study assessed the fluoride (F) concentration in whole saliva and F bioavailability after the use of low-F dentifrices with reduced pH. Whole saliva was collected from 10 volunteers after brushing with: experimental dentifrices (pH 5.5) 275, 550 and 1,100 ppm F; commercial 500 ppm F, pH 6.9 and a ‘gold standard’ 1,100 ppm F, pH 6.5. To analyze F bioavailability, 9 volunteers ingested weights of four dentifrices equivalent to 2 mg F: 1,500 ppm F/MFP/CaCO3, pH 9.5; 1,100 ppm F/NaF/silica, pH 5.5; 1,100 ppm F/NaF/silica, pH 7.0 and 1,100 ppm F/NaF/silica, pH 6.5 (‘gold standard’). Ductal saliva and urine were collected. F was analyzed by electrode. Data were tested using ANOVA and Tukey’s post hoc test (p < 0.05). The 550 ppm F/pH 5.5 dentifrice was similar to the ‘gold standard’ in its effect on whole saliva F concentration. The area under the curve of ductal saliva F concentration × time and urinary F excretion rates did not differ among the dentifrices. The results show that acidic low-F dentifrices are effective in increasing salivary F concentration and pH reduction does not seem to affect their F bioavailability.
Understanding microarray data through applying competent program evolution

Many researchers have used supervised categorization algorithms such as GP and SVMs, to analyze gene expression microarray data. Overall, the results in this area using SVMs have been stronger than those for GP. However, GP is sometimes preferable to SVMs because of the relative transparency of the models it produces. Studying the GP models themselves can indicate exactly how the classification is being performed, which can lead to biological insights. We ask here first whether the use of an alternate program evolution technique, MOSES (meta-optimizing semantic evolutionary search) [2], can improve GP’s results in this domain (in terms of both accuracy and model simplicity), and second, if MOSES might succeed in providing “important gene” lists with substantial biological relevance. Here we report results for two datasets: (1) distinguishing between types of lymphoma based on gene expression data [4]; and (2) classifying between young and old human brains [3]. Three issues are relevant to any classification approach to microarray analysis: (1) dealing with a huge number of problem variables; (2) dealing with noisy continuous data; (3) avoiding overfitting to the data. We dealt with (1) by selecting the 50 most-differentiating features to use in all experiments, (2) by considering gene expression levels as Boolean features determined by median-thresholding (to eliminates concerns regarding noise and scaling), and (3) by using TP +TN − s/2 as our fitness function, where s is the number of nodes in the classifier, TP is the number of true positives, and TN is the number of true negatives (i.e., high parsimony pressure). See [2] for details and justification, along with algorithm parameter settings (which were fixed across a variety of experiments). Results are presented in the
Specific impairments of emotion perception in multiple sclerosis.

OBJECTIVE Multiple sclerosis (MS) often results in demyelination of a network of frontal-subcortical tracts involved in processing emotional information. We investigated the effect of MS on the ability to identify emotional and nonemotional information from static and dynamic stimuli and determined whether difficulties in emotion perception related to quality of life. METHOD 32 MS and 33 control participants, matched for age and education, identified emotions and nonemotional information from static images of faces and dynamic videos of people interacting. They also completed cognitive assessment and quality of life ratings. RESULTS On the static face perception tasks, participants with MS performed more poorly than healthy controls on emotion perception, t(63) = 3.30, p < . 01, d = . 83, but not identity perception, t(63) = 1.18, d = . 30. For the dynamic tasks, the MS group were impaired on emotion perception, t(63) = 3.41, p = . 001, d = . 86, but not age/gender perception, t(63) = 0.15, d = . 04. Ratings of social and psychological aspects of quality of life in MS were related to emotion perception scores, controlling for disease severity and duration, age, depression, and cognitive function, with r2 ranging from . 17 to . 24. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate a specific deficit in decoding static and dynamic information about emotion in MS, as compared to nonemotional information. There were specific relationships between emotion perception problems and poor social and psychological quality of life, indicating that emotional skills should be considered when evaluating functioning in MS.