Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mania following organophosphate poisoning

Organophosphate poisoning is the most common poisoning in developing countries. Although the acute muscarinic and nicotinic side-effects of organophosphate poisoning are well known and easily recognized, but neuropsychiatric changes are rarely reported. We are reporting a case of a 33-year-old female who developed manic episode following acute organophosphate poisoning.
Novel therapeutic approach by nicotine in experimental model of multiple sclerosis.

BACKGROUND Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune, neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system. The cause of multiple sclerosis is still unknown, and there is no cure for multiple sclerosis. Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis is considered as an animal model for multiple sclerosis. The therapeutic role of nicotine has been proven to be effective in both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, thus we examined, for the first time, the role of nicotine in the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis model. METHODS Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis induction was performed according to Guang-Xian Zhang et al. Treatment with nicotine was started on Day 7 post-immunization. Prevention with nicotine was started on Day 7 pre-immunization. Also for in-vitro analysis, we used U-87 MG cell line to evaluate the inhibitory effect of nicotine in cell proliferation, pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-alpha, IL-lbeta, IL-6) and MMP-2 activity by MTT, ELISA, and zymoanalysis methods, respectively. Moreover, the brains of mice were removed for histological analysis. RESULTS Our findings showed that treatment with nicotine caused a significant reduction in the severity and onset of the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. Histological analysis indicated that there was very mild and mild plaque in the brain sections of nicotine prevention and treatment groups, respectively. CONCLUSION Our data indicate that nicotine can significantly improve the clinical score and attenuate the demyelinating pathology typically found in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, indicating that nicotine has protective effects in experimental model of multiple sclerosis.
Financial Institutions in Disadvantaged Areas: A Comparative Analysis of Policies Encouraging Financial Inclusion in Britain and the United States

The paper compares British and US government policy initiatives to combat financial exclusion and promote community reinvestment. Financial exclusion, a general term for those who lack financial products, is concentrated in a small number of deprived urban areas in larger cities that are also starved of private sector investment. British policies, though they have drawn on US experience, predominantly treat exclusion as an individual problem and pay insufficient attention to the wider interconnections between people and place that underlie financial exclusion. These are more prominent in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that has led to significant improvements in financial inclusion and community investment in the USA. The CRA is underpinned by a more compartmentalised and locally embedded system of financial regulation. Consolidation in the banking sector and the growth of competition between banks and other financial institutions in an increasingly integrated US financial sector threaten this. British policies seek to provide ‘joined-up’ solutions to financial exclusion in a manner that is more in tune with an integrated financial sector where a small number of large banks compete on a level playing field with other financial institutions. The paper highlights the difficulties that these policies face in enlisting the cooperation of financial institutions.
Sharply higher rates of iron deficiency in obese Mexican women and children are predicted by obesity-related inflammation rather than by differences in dietary iron intake.

BACKGROUND Obese individuals may be at increased risk of iron deficiency (ID), but it is unclear whether this is due to poor dietary iron intakes or to adiposity-related inflammation. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to examine the relations between body mass index (BMI), dietary iron, and dietary factors affecting iron bioavailability, iron status, and inflammation [C-reactive protein (CRP)] in a transition country where obesity and ID are common. DESIGN Data from the 1999 Mexican Nutrition Survey, which included 1174 children (aged 5-12 y) and 621 nonpregnant women (aged 18-50 y), were analyzed. RESULTS The prevalence of obesity was 25.3% in women and 3.5% in children. The prevalence of ID was significantly (P < 0.05) higher in obese women and children compared with normal-weight subjects [odds ratios (95% CIs): 1.92 (1.23, 3.01) and 3.96 (1.34, 11.67) for women and children, respectively]. Despite similar dietary iron intakes in the 2 groups, serum iron concentrations were lower in obese women than in normal-weight women (62.6 ± 29.5 compared with 72.4 ± 34.6 μg/dL; P = 0.014), and total-iron-binding capacity was higher in obese children than in normal-weight children (399 ± 51 compared with 360 ± 48 μg/dL; P < 0.001). CRP concentrations in obese women and children were 4 times those of their normal-weight counterparts (P < 0.05). CRP but not iron intake was a strong negative predictor of iron status, independently of BMI (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS The risk of ID in obese Mexican women and children was 2-4 times that of normal-weight individuals at similar dietary iron intakes. This increased risk of ID may be due to the effects of obesity-related inflammation on dietary iron absorption. Thus, ID control efforts in Mexico may be hampered by increasing rates of adiposity in women and children.
Interactive Segmentation of Pancreases in Abdominal Computed Tomography Images and Its Evaluation Based on Segmentation Accuracy and Interaction Costs

The present paper proposed an interactive segmentation method of pancreases in abdominal computed tomography (CT) images based on the anatomical knowledge of medical doctors and the statistical information of pancreas shapes. This segmentation method consisted of two phases: training and testing. In the training phase, pancreas regions were manually extracted from sample CT images for training, and then a probabilistic atlas (PA) was constructed from the extracted regions. In the testing phase, a medical doctor selected seed voxels for a pancreas and background in a CT image for testing by use of our graphical user interface system. The homography transformation was used to fit the PA to the seeds. The graph cut technique whose data term was weighted by the transformed PA was applied to the test image. The seed selection, the atlas transformation, and the graph cut were executed iteratively. This doctor-in-the-loop segmentation method was applied to actual abdominal CT images of fifteen cases. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method was more accurate and effective than the conventional graph cut.
Diverse cell stresses induce unique patterns of tRNA up- and down-regulation: tRNA-seq for quantifying changes in tRNA copy number

Emerging evidence points to roles for tRNA modifications and tRNA abundance in cellular stress responses. While isolated instances of stress-induced tRNA degradation have been reported, we sought to assess the effects of stress on tRNA levels at a systems level. To this end, we developed a next-generation sequencing method that exploits the paucity of ribonucleoside modifications at the 3′-end of tRNAs to quantify changes in all cellular tRNA molecules. Application of this tRNA-seq method to Saccharomyces cerevisiae identified all 76 expressed unique tRNA species out of 295 coded in the yeast genome, including all isoacceptor variants, with highly precise relative (fold-change) quantification of tRNAs. In studies of stress-induced changes in tRNA levels, we found that oxidation (H2O2) and alkylation (methylmethane sulfonate, MMS) stresses induced nearly identical patterns of up- and down-regulation for 58 tRNAs. However, 18 tRNAs showed opposing changes for the stresses, which parallels our observation of signature reprogramming of tRNA modifications caused by H2O2 and MMS. Further, stress-induced degradation was limited to only a small proportion of a few tRNA species. With tRNA-seq applicable to any organism, these results suggest that translational control of stress response involves a contribution from tRNA abundance.
Generating panorama image by synthesizing multiple homography

This paper presents a method to generate image mosaics of a panoramic scene. In general, the relation between images which is required for mosaicing cannot be expressed by a single homography due to geometrical condition of the scene, even if the images are taken at the same position. Many existing methods are using only one homography to make panorama image while ignoring the geometrical variations. Therefore, they experience a lot of distortions and misalignments from input images which contain several planes which cannot be handled by one homography. In this paper, we present a novel method that utilizes synthesis of multiple homography to warp the images. Moreover, our method determines the number of homography automatically, without user's input. By our method, various distortions of shapes and mismatches can be reduced.
Minocycline protects SH‐SY5Y cells from 6‐hydroxydopamine by inhibiting both caspase‐dependent and ‐independent programmed cell death

Minocycline, a tetracyclic antibiotic, exerts both antiinflammation by acting on microglia and a direct protection on neurons by inhibiting the apoptotic machinery at various levels. However, we are not aware of any study investigating the effects of minocycline on caspase‐independent programmed cell death (PCD) pathways. This study investigated these alternative pathways in SH‐SY5Y cells, a human dopaminergic cell line, challenged with 6‐hydroxydopamine (6‐OHDA). Minocycline exhibited neuroprotection and inhibition of the toxin‐induced caspase‐3‐like activity, DNA fragmentation, and chromatin condensation, hallmarks of apoptosis. Moreover, we revealed that 6‐OHDA also activated caspase‐independent PCDs (such as paraptosis), which required de novo protein synthesis. Additionally, by separately monitoring caspase‐dependent and caspase‐independent pathways, we showed that inhibition of apoptosis only partially explained the protective effect of minocycline. Moreover, we observed that minocycline reduced the protein content of cells but, unexpectedly, increased the protein synthesis. These findings suggest that minocycline may actually increase protein degradation, so it may also accelerate the clearance of aberrant proteins. In conclusion, we report for the first time evidence indicating that minocycline may inhibit PCD pathways that are additional to conventional apoptosis. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Hypoxia Tolerance in Sculpins Is Associated with High Anaerobic Enzyme Activity in Brain but Not in Liver or Muscle

We assessed hypoxia tolerance in 11 species of fish from the superfamily Cottoidea (commonly called sculpins) that are known to differ in their critical O2 tensions (Pcrit) and examined whether hypoxia tolerance correlated with larger substrate stores and higher maximal activity of enzymes associated with anaerobic adenosine triphosphate production (especially glycolysis). Among the sculpins studied, there was large variation in time to loss of equilibrium (LOE50) at torr, with values ranging between 25 and 538 min, and the variation in LOE50 was correlated with Pcrit. Our measures of time to LOE50 and Pcrit were regressed against maximal enzyme activities of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), pyruvate kinase (PK), creatine phosphokinase (CPK), and citrate synthase (CS) as well as the concentrations of glycogen, glucose, and creatine phosphate in the brain, liver, and white muscle. In the brain, there was a phylogenetically independent relationship between Pcrit and tissue LDH, PK, CPK, and CS activities expressed relative to tissue mass. Hypoxia-tolerant sculpins (those with low Pcrit values) had higher levels of brain LDH, PK, CPK, and CS than did hypoxia-sensitive sculpins. Similarly, LOE50 regressed against brain LDH, PK, and CPK activities expressed relative to tissue mass, with the more hypoxia-tolerant species (i.e., those with higher LOE50) having higher enzyme activities. However, when the phylogenetic relationship among our sculpins was taken into account, only the relationship between hypoxia tolerance and LDH activity remained significant. When enzyme activities were expressed relative to total soluble protein in the tissue, the only relationships that remained were between brain LDH activity and Pcrit and LOE50. In liver and white muscle, there were no relationships between the measures of hypoxia tolerance and enzyme activity or metabolite content. Overall, our analysis suggests that hypoxia-tolerant sculpins maintain higher maximal activities of some of the enzymes involved in anaerobic metabolism in the brain, and this may be an adaptation to hypoxia.
Allopregnanolone Preclinical Acute Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Studies to Predict Tolerability and Efficacy for Alzheimer’s Disease

To develop allopregnanolone as a therapeutic for Alzheimer’s disease, we investigated multiple formulations and routes of administration in translationally relevant animal models of both sexes. Subcutaneous, topical (transdermal and intranasal), intramuscular, and intravenous allopregnanolone were bolus-administered. Pharmacokinetic analyses of intravenous allopregnanolone in rabbit and mouse indicated that peak plasma and brain levels (3-fold brain/plasma ratios) at 5min were sufficient to activate neuroregenerative responses at sub-sedative doses. Slow-release subcutaneous suspension of allopregnanolone displayed 5-fold brain/plasma ratio at Cmax at 30min. At therapeutic doses by either subcutaneous or intravenous routes, allopregnanolone mouse plasma levels ranged between 34-51ng/ml by 30min, comparable to published endogenous human level in the third trimester of pregnancy. Exposure to subcutaneous, topical, intramuscular, and intravenous allopregnanolone, at safe and tolerable doses, increased hippocampal markers of neurogenesis including BrdU and PCNA in young 3xTgAD and aged wildtype mice. Intravenous allopregnanolone transiently and robustly phosphorylated CREB within 5min and increased levels of neuronal differentiation transcription factor NeuroD within 4h. Neurogenic efficacy was achieved with allopregnanolone brain exposure of 300-500hr*ng/g. Formulations were tested to determine the no observable adverse effect level (NOAEL) and maximally tolerated doses (MTD) in male and female rats by sedation behavior time course. Sex differences were apparent, males exhibited ≥40% more sedation time compared to females. Allopregnanolone formulated in sulfobutyl-ether-beta-cyclodextrin at optimized complexation ratio maximized allopregnanolone delivery and neurogenic efficacy. To establish the NOAEL and MTD for Allo-induced sedation using a once-per-week intravenous regenerative treatment regimen: In female rats the NOAEL was 0.5mg/kg and MTD 2mg/kg. The predicted MTD in human female is 0.37mg/kg. In male rats the NOAEL and MTD were less than those determined for female. Outcomes of these PK/PD studies predict a safe and efficacious dose range for initial clinical trials of allopregnanolone for Alzheimer’s disease. These findings have translational relevance to multiple neurodegenerative conditions.
Distortions and deceptions in self presentation: Effects of protracted litigation in personal injury cases

The goal of diagnostic examinations in personal injury lawsuits is to ascertain genuineness and substantiality of claimed impairments so that 'damages' can be accurately defined. These examinations require consideration of the potential role of malingering and other deceptive response styles in determining the nature and extent of impairment. Involvement in litigation renders plaintiffs susceptible to stressors and to influences that may lead to increased impairment, biased reportage, and retarded recovery. Underlying personality patterns play a critical role in defining and shaping reactions to trauma, to the stress of litigation, and to treatment interventions. Protracted litigation creates conditions that promote mnemonic and attitudinal distortions, as well as conscious and unconscious motivations for secondary gain. The presence of non-legally relevant factors provides the opportunity for proportionate attribution of causation. An assessment model is proposed for analyzing elements of causation. Language: en
Energy Disaggregation via Clustered Regression Models: A Case Study in the Convenience Store

Global warming and the depletion of natural resources are two of the most difficult problems we have ever faced. To address this problem, people have begun paying more attention to carbon emission reduction and energy saving. For the residential electricity use, many studies have demonstrated that feedbacks, such as energy consumption of each appliance in the home, can help consumers reduce electricity consumption usage. In this article, we propose a novel framework for the disaggregation of energy consumption, which is looking forward to reaching reducing the number of smart meters installed and providing usage statistics as a feedback for consumers to decrease their energy cost. In our proposed framework, we have a chief meter which measures total energy consumption, and install smart meters at few key appliances. Based the energy consumption from these meters, we proposed a clustered regression models for energy disaggregation. More specifically, we first cluster appliances by the correlation between the using behavior of appliances, and select one of them as the key appliance in each cluster. By using the appliance with installed meter, we apply regression model to estimate the energy consumption for other appliances within each cluster. Our experimental results confirmed our proposed framework can achieve high accuracy for energy disaggregation while reducing the number of smart meters.
Stromelysin-1 Regulates Adipogenesis during Mammary Gland Involution

The matrix metalloproteinase MMP-3/stromelysin-1 (Str1) is highly expressed during mammary gland involution induced by weaning. During involution, programmed cell death of the secretory epithelium takes place concomitant with the repopulation of the mammary fat pad with adipocytes. In this study, we have used a genetic approach to determine the role of Str1 during mammary involution. Although Str1 has been shown to induce unscheduled apoptosis when expressed ectopically during late pregnancy (Alexander, C.M., E.W. Howard, M.J. Bissell, and Z. Werb. 1996. J. Cell Biol. 135:1669–1677), we found that during post-lactational involution, mammary glands from transgenic mice that overexpress the tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases, TIMP-1 (TO), or mice carrying a targeted mutation in Str1 showed accelerated differentiation and hypertrophy of adipocytes, while epithelial apoptosis was unaffected. These data suggest that matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) do not induce unscheduled epithelial cell death after weaning, but instead alter the stromal microenvironment. We used adipogenic 3T3-L1 cells as a cell culture model to test the function of MMPs during adipocyte differentiation. Fibroblastic 3T3-L1 progenitor cells expressed very low levels of MMPs or TIMPs. The transcription of a number of MMP and TIMP mRNAs [Str1, MT1-MMP, (MMP-14) collagenase-3 (MMP-13), gelatinase A (MMP-2), and TIMP-1, -2 and -3] was induced in committed preadipocytes, but only differentiated adipocytes expressed an activated MMP, gelatinase A. The addition of MMP inhibitors (GM 6001 and TIMP-1) dramatically accelerated the accumulation of lipid during differentiation. We conclude that MMPs, especially Str1, determine the rate of adipocyte differentiation during involutive mammary gland remodeling.
Credit risk modeling strategies: the road to serfdom?

This paper aims at presenting some practical issues in modeling default risk of a single commercial credit counterparty from the perspective of a large retail bank. We define default risk as the probability that a counterparty’s intrinsic credit quality deteriorates within a given time horizon such that contractual agreements cannot be honored. This work gives an insight into using scoring/rating models in a credit environment of a large European bank. Contrary to many banks, we did not define the segments in a first step with a view to developing the rating tools in a second step. Our approach has, to some extent, followed a different path. Iteratively, we both defined the borders for a particular segment and selected an appropriate rating tool. More particularly, customer segmentation has been carried out on the basis of various rating tools’ goodness-of-fit criteria. The topics cover customer segmentation using goodness-of-fit measures, data measurement levels and optimization algorithms, rating tool calibration to the central default tendency and communication to the end user. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evaluating School Library Services

ATTEMPTST O improve the school library through an appraisal of its present strengths and weaknesses are not new, but emphasis upon the effectiveness of its educational service rather than upon the adequacy of its facilities is of relatively recent origin. Changes in the instruments and procedures for evaluation of the school library have corresponded closely with changes in educational measurement and evaluation. Quantitative standards or norms for the secondary school library were adopted by regional accrediting associations and state education departments as a part of a larger schedule of regulations for the entire school program. Because these standards were stated in numerical terms they were easy to enforce and were useful in stimulating a school to supply the necessary framework around which an effective school and library program could be organized. Growing dissatisfaction with the rigidity and deadening effects of quantitative standards resulted in a comprehensive investigation of the problems of accrediting by representatives of the six regional educational associations, which was known as the Cooperative Study of Secondary School Standards. The Evaluative Criteria,l published as a result of the work of this group, sought to judge the worth of a school in terms of the achievement of its objectives. The detailed specifications of the quantitative standards were replaced by descriptive statements of acceptable educational practice, and schools were weighed in terms of these statements. Standards of regional associations and state agencies were influenced by the Evaluative Criteria, and many of the specific requirements for the library were replaced by general qualitative statements. These changes in standards resulted, in part, from the growing movement in education to broaden the scope of evaluation and measurement of student achievement. Educators had been stressing for