Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Characterization of Strict Positive Realness for General Matrix Transfer Functions

We present conditions which are necessary and sufficient for a transfer function (or transfer function matrix) to be strictly positive real. A counter-example is given to illustrate that the conditions presented here differ from those previously presented in the literature. The proof of our results differs from previous related proofs in that it only uses properties of analytic functions and matrices and does not require state-space realizations. Also, the results are not restricted to rational transfer functions with real coefficients.
Distributed Initialization-Free Cost-Optimal Charging Control of Plug-In Electric Vehicles for Demand Management

This paper considers the optimal charging problem of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) on demand side management. PEVs provide a promising alternative solution to reduction of environmental pollution and fuel emission. With a large number of PEVs connected to the grid, a well-designed charging coordination approach is needed to release the impacts on the power system. A distributed cooperative control strategy of PEVs is proposed to meet system interests while respecting each PEV's charging constraint. The proposed strategy is distributed, which only needs to be interacted with the neighboring agents. Our analysis shows that the proposed strategy solves the optimal charging problem of PEVs in an initialization-free approach, which avoids any procedure for initialization during PEVs’ charging process. Furthermore, the proposed strategy is robust to the time-varying available charging power and plug-and-play operations. The simulation studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed strategy.
Experience of primary care by racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to examine the experience of primary care by racial and ethnic groups and identify aspects of primary care where significant disparities in experience exist across racial and ethnic groups. METHODS Data for this study came from the Household Component of the 1997-1998 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), a nationally representative survey of the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States. Measures were identified within MEPS that denote race, ethnicity, experience of primary care, and socioeconomic covariates associated with access to care. RESULTS Racial and ethnic minorities experienced worse primary care, particularly in the first-contact aspect, than did white Americans. Their usual sources of care were more likely to be hospital settings than private clinics. They faced greater barriers accessing their usual source of care (USC), finding it more difficult to get an appointment and waiting longer during an appointment. Many of the significant differences persist after adjustment for sociodemographic and health-status characteristics. CONCLUSIONS Racial and ethnic disparity in primary care experience is not simply a reflection of sociodemographic and health-status differences across racial/ethnic groups. Efforts must be made to reduce nonfinancial as well as financial barriers to care and ensure that quality primary care is provided in all settings, public as well as private, and to individuals of all colors.
Integrins on rat osteoclasts: Characterization of two monoclonal antibodies (F4 and F11) to rat β3

Two monoclonal antibodies, F4 and F11, were raised to newborn rat bone cell suspensions. These antibodies are shown by immunocytochemistry on tissue sections to recognize an antigen shared between osteoclasts, megakaryocytes, and platelets. Immunoprecipitation analysis of the antigen from C6 rat glial cells followed by SDS‐PAGE showed a heterodimeric molecule with a characteristic integrin‐like shift in apparent molecular mass upon reduction (137/78 kD nonreduced; 118/100 kD reduced); the low‐molecular‐mass band comigrates with the β3 subunit precipitated with polyclonal antihuman vitronectin receptor antiserum, and the high‐molecular‐mass band comigrates with the αv subunit precipitated with a polyclonal antiserum to a C‐terminal amino acid sequence of human αv. Antibody F4 strongly cross‐reacts with human cells and is shown in cross‐blocking experiments and immunoprecipitation analysis with a human melanoma cell line DX3 to recognize a seemingly identical molecule as identified by anti‐αvβ3 monoclonal antibody 23C6. Expression of F4 and F11 is reduced in platelets from a patient heterozygous for Glanzmann's thrombasthenia. Taken together, these results indicate that F4 and F11 recognize rat CD61, the integrin β3 chain, which, as was confirmed with polyclonal anti CD61 antisera, is highly expressed in rat osteoclasts. These antibodies may be useful tools in investigating the biochemical nature and biologic function of β3 integrins in rat osteoclasts. Additionally, because high expression of β3 in vivo is restricted to osteoclasts, megakaryocytes, and platelets, these antibodies may be used to help identify osteoclasts in tissue sections and bone cell suspensions. Apart from β3, rat osteoclasts were found to express high levels of αv and β1 integrins.
Circularized Visualisation of Genetic Interactions

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has been a powerful tool to investigate gene networks in biological sciences [1]. Visualisation of data produced by NGS is essential for the interpretation of the findings by biological scientists. Here we describe a workflow to image findings from a NGS sequencing methodology to investigate gene expression that can be visualised with Circus software [2]. Visualisation of these processes has provided biological scientists with valuable interpretation of high throughput data and identification of new transcripts.
Evaluation Of Movement With Mobilization On Independence Of Daily Living And Kinesiophobia Using Kartz Index And Tampa Scale In Patients With Lateral Epicondylitis – An Experimental Study

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Lateral epicondylitis is musculoskeletal condition of the myotendinous junction of the wrist extensors at the lateral epicondyle and is characterized by onset of severe pain, weak grip strength and limited extension at elbow joint which restricts activities of daily living. Kinesiophobia is defined as fear related to movement. Fear of movement is an important factor to result in disability, disuse and depression in subjects with musculoskeletal pain. Tampa scale of kinesiophobia is an outcome measure used to measure the fear with movements. Kartz index is a scale use to measure the degree of assistance needed in activity of daily living. Intervention of Movement with Mobilization combine a sustained manual `gliding' force to a joint with concurrent physiologic (osteo-kinematic) motion of the joint but there is dearth of literature on the effect of MWM on lateral epiconditytis. Hence, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of Movement with mobilization on kinesiophobia and activities of daily living in subjects with lateral epicondylitis using Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia and Kartz index. MATERIALS AND METHODOLOGY: Total number 30 subjects, embraces both the gender. A brief evaluation of the subject will be done using the clinical test for lateral epicondylitis. Subjects will be administered for Tampa scale and the Kartz index and after understanding it, the subject will be filling the form. To apply this treatment the physical therapist will use one hand to stabilize the distal end of the humerus on the lateral side just proximal to the elbow joint line while using the other hand to apply a laterally directed glide of the proximal ulna and radius. The hand applying the lateral glide will be situated just distal to the elbow joint line on the medial side of the ulna. The glide should be painlessly applied and sustained for approximately 6 seconds while the participant performed a pain-free gripping action. The gliding pressure will be then maintained until the participant completely released the grip. The following intervention is given every day for 7 days. This is given for approximately 10 repetitions for 3 sets with 30 seconds rest in between. The length of the treatment is 10 minutes. Post intervention both the outcome measures are administered again to record the change in the measures. RESULTS: Kinesiophobia showed statistical significant difference in reducing pain with ‘p’ value being 0.0001 after MWM, similar trend were seen in Kartz index. CONCLUSION: This study showed beneficial results, in effects of Mobilization with movement on kinesiophobia and activity of daily living in Lateral epicondylitis using the Tampa scale of kinesiophobia and the Kartz index of independence in activity of daily living.
A cross-sectional study of mental health in UK veterinary undergraduates

Wellbeing (positive mental health) and mental ill-health of veterinary students from a single UK school were quantified using validated psychological scales. Attitudes towards mental ill-health and suicide were also assessed. Results were compared with published data from the UK general population and veterinary profession. Of the total student population (N=1068), 509 (48 per cent) completed a questionnaire. Just over half (54 per cent) of the respondents had ever experienced mental ill-health, with the majority reporting a first occurrence before veterinary school. Student wellbeing was significantly poorer (p<0.0001) than general population estimates, but not significantly different (p=0.2) from veterinary profession estimates. Degree of mental distress in students was significantly higher than in the general population (p<0.0001). Despite the majority (94 per cent) agreeing that ‘Anyone can suffer from mental health problems’, students were significantly more likely than members of the general population to agree that ‘If I were suffering from mental health problems, I wouldn't want people knowing about it’ (p<0.0001). Students were more likely to have thought about suicide, but less likely to have made an attempt (p<0.001; p=0.005), than members of the general population. The possibility of non-response bias must be considered when interpreting findings. However, strong similarities between results from this study population and the UK veterinary profession, as well as other veterinary student populations internationally, suggest no substantial school-level bias.
Pulling Out the Stops: Rethinking Stopword Removal for Topic Models

It is often assumed that topic models benefit from the use of a manually curated stopword list. Constructing this list is time-consuming and often subject to user judgments about what kinds of words are important to the model and the application. Although stopword removal clearly affects which word types appear as most probable terms in topics, we argue that this improvement is superficial, and that topic inference benefits little from the practice of removing stopwords beyond very frequent terms. Removing corpus-specific stopwords after model inference is more transparent and produces similar results to removing those words prior to inference.
Interpretation of cerebrospinal fluid protein tests in the diagnosis of sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease: an evidence-based approach

Prion diseases are rare, lethal, untreatable degenerative brain disorders of humans and animals. They are linked to conversion of a specific brain protein from its normal form (PrPC) into a misfolded, pathologic form (PrPSc) and are transmissible between individuals by a novel protein-based
A probe prediction approach to overlay network monitoring

Nowadays the overlay network has greatly improved the performance of the Internet. The overlay network flexibly selects its communication paths and targets and thus can benefit from estimation of end-to-end network performances. For an overlay network with n end hosts, most of the existing systems have to send O (n2) probes into the network and then they calculate the performances of all links. Although these systems to some extent can determine the performances of the links, they have to send plenty of probes into the network, which has generated great traffic and imposed extra overload in the network. In order to address the problem, we propose a new approach based on probe prediction method by which we only need to measure a few probes in the probe set and predict out the responses of the rest probes and then we revise the final prediction results and find out the suspected congested links set. The experiments have shown that we only need to send about 20% of the total probes and infer all the responses of these probes with higher accuracy than ever before.
Attitudes of Whitehorse Canada Grade 12 Students towards Harm Reduction as An Intervention Strategy for Crack/Heroin Dependency

This study investigated the association between the psychological variables of conservatism, religiosity, sensation seeking, and health locus of control (HLOC) with Whitehorse Grade 12 students’ attitudes toward harm reduction as an intervention. A total of 138 high school students in Whitehorse Yukon, Canada voluntarily filled out a questionnaire designed to meet the objectives of the study. GLM multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that female participants reported higher levels of conservatism and religiosity than their male counterparts. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the impact of the psychological variables of conservatism, religiosity, sensation seeking, and HLOC on attitudes toward harm reduction as an intervention. The results indicated that only the variable of powerful others HLOC was significantly and negatively associated with the participants’ attitude toward harm reduction as an intervention. The findings were discussed in terms of the role that external HLOC, in particular, the belief that one’s life is controlled by powerful others, may play in the overall level of support for harm reduction as an intervention strategy for drug addiction.
Comet: An open‐source MS/MS sequence database search tool

Proteomics research routinely involves identifying peptides and proteins via MS/MS sequence database search. Thus the database search engine is an integral tool in many proteomics research groups. Here, we introduce the Comet search engine to the existing landscape of commercial and open‐source database search tools. Comet is open source, freely available, and based on one of the original sequence database search tools that has been widely used for many years.
Molecular Identification of Resistance Determinants, Integrons and Genetic Relatedness of Extensively Drug Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii Isolated From Hospitals in Tehran, Iran

Background: Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as an important nosocomial pathogen. Hospital outbreaks of extensively drug resistant (XDR) A. baumannii are a great concern. Objectives: Aims of this study were to characterize the resistance determinants and genetic relatedness of (XDR) A. baumannii isolates in hospitals in Tehran, Iran. Materials and Methods: During a three-year study, clinical isolates of A. baumannii were collected from two hospitals in Tehran, Iran. Susceptibility testing to antibiotics was performed by disk diffusion method and XDR A. baumannii isolates were identified. Genes’ encoding for carbapenemase production and integrons were identified by PCR. MICs of imipenem and meropenem were determined by agar dilution. Multiple locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA) typing was used to determine genetic relationships of XDR isolates. Results: Using PCR for amplification of blaOXA-51, 93.9% (123.131) of isolates were identified as A. baumannii and 24.4% (30.123) were XDR. These isolates were resistant to gentamicin, ciprofloxacin, amikacin, cotrimoxazole, cefepime, cefotaxime, aztreonam and ceftazidime. Thirty percent of the isolates were resistant to tigecycline. All isolates were susceptible to colistin and polymyxin-B, while 93.3% (28.30) possessed blaOXA-23-like and 6.7% (2.30) possessed blaOXA-24-like. All isolates possessed insertion sequence (ISAba1) in the upstream region of the OXA-23-like gene. Almost 96.7% (29.30) of the isolates were positive for class I integron and 43.3% (13.30) for class II. These isolates were also positive for class I. Class III integron was not detected. MLVA typing of XDR isolates showed seven clonally complexes and 16 singletons. Conclusions: The population structure of the A. baumannii isolates in our hospitals was genetically diverse. A significant association between XDR pattern and presence of class 1 integron (P < 0.001) was found indicating that many antibiotic resistance determinants are involved in development of XDR strains.
Care, Autonomy, and Gender in Nursing Practice: A Historical Study of Nurses' Experiences.

BACKGROUND Care is the essence of the nursing role and is closely related to the concept of professional autonomy. Autonomy is implicated in power relations between doctors and nurses and between men and women. These relationships are closely linked to care practices and the inequality of nursing and medicine. PURPOSE The aim of this study was to analyze nursing discourse regarding the concept of care and its relationship to the concept of autonomy and gender. METHODS This is a historical study based on oral interviews that took place between November 2008 and February 2011. We interviewed 19 nursing professionals who currently worked at the Hospital of the Holy Spirit (near Barcelona) or had worked there between 1961 and 2010. Semistructured interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. RESULTS We highlight four main themes: "a real nurse"; "more technology, less care"; "the fragility of the autonomy"; and "the invisibility of nursing work. " These themes show the contradictions in the nursing profession that are based on the concept of care. However, in daily practice, the concept of care varies. Time pressure distances the nursing practice from its theoretical context. Changes in the concept of care are related to transformations in the health system and nursing work. CONCLUSIONS/IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Changes related to the autonomy of nursing are related to changes in the concept of care. In practice, care has a biomedical orientation. Care has become technologized and bureaucratized, which reduces the time that is spent with the patient. In a context in which medical authority predominates, nursing's struggle for autonomy is based on the recognition of the value of care. When care becomes invisible, the autonomy of nursing as a profession is threatened. This conclusion allows reflections about shifts in the concept of care and how they affect clinical practice and the autonomy of the nursing profession.
Multi-context voice communication in a SIP/SIMPLE-based shared virtual sound room with early reflections

An improved prototype of the "voiscape" voice communication medium has been developed and subjectively evaluated. Voiscape enables natural and seamless voice communication by using sound to create a virtual "sound room" in which people, who are represented by different sounds, can move freely. It features low-delay motion-tracking spatial audio with simulated early reflections that produce out-of-head sound localization and sound distance expression. It also features virtual-location-based selective communication: a user can walk freely in the sound room using a map- and cursor-key-based user-interface and can select whom to talk to or which sound sources to listen to. A third feature is SIP-presence-event-notification (SIMPLE)-based sound room management: when users move, their locations and directions are distributed using SIP SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY messages. The combination of these features creates a natural voice-communication space in which two or more parallel conversation contexts can coexist. Limited, subjective testing by around 200 people showed that this medium can be used for cocktail-party-like conversation; i.e., users could distinguish parallel conversations by paying attention to or by moving toward one of them.
Speech articulation assessment using dynamic magnetic resonance imaging techniques

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been successfully applied on real-time analysis of the articulators during speech production along the whole vocal tract, with good signal-to-noise ratio and without ionizing effects. Because speech dynamic events need a minimal sampling rate, an improvement on the temporal resolution of MRI systems is demanded. Our aim is to describe a dynamic MRI technique to acquire and assess the main articulatory events during the production of some European Portuguese utterances. Hence, novel perceptions for dynamic MRI technique using a 3.0 Tesla System are presented in order to study the shape of the vocal tract during speech production.
Priming of Long-Term Potentiation in Mouse Hippocampus by Corticotropin-Releasing Factor and Acute Stress: Implications for Hippocampus-Dependent Learning

In the present experiments, we characterized the action of human/rat corticotropin-releasing factor (h/rCRF) and acute stress (1 hr of immobilization) on hippocampus-dependent learning and on synaptic plasticity in the mouse hippocampus. We first showed that h/rCRF application and acute stress facilitated (primed) long-term potentiation of population spikes (PS-LTP) in the mouse hippocampus and enhanced context-dependent fear conditioning. Both the priming of PS-LTP and the improvement of context-dependent fear conditioning were prevented by the CRF receptor antagonist [Glu11,16]astressin. PS-LTP priming and improved learning were also reduced by the protein kinase C inhibitor bisindolylmaleimide I. Acute stress induced the activation of Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent kinase II (CaMKII) 2 hr after the end of the stress session. The CaMKII inhibitor KN-62 antagonized the stress-mediated learning enhancement, however, with no effect on PS-LTP persistence. Thus, long-lasting increased neuronal excitability as reflected in PS-LTP priming appeared to be essential for the enhancement of learning in view of the observation that inhibition of PS-LTP priming was associated with impaired learning. Conversely, it was demonstrated that inhibition of CaMKII activity reduced contextual fear conditioning without affecting PS-LTP priming. This observation suggests that priming of PS-LTP and activation of CaMKII represent two essential mechanisms that may contribute independently to long-term memory.
Validation of Urinary PD-1 and FOXP3 mRNA in a Cohort of Egyptian Renal Allograft Recipients.

BACKGROUND We investigated the diagnostic and prognostic value of urinary programmed death 1 (PD-1) and FOXP3 (Forkhead transcription factors) mRNA in acute renal allograft rejection. MATERIAL AND METHODS Urine samples from 31 acute renal allograft rejection subjects and 23 stable recipients were collected. Messenger RNA of PD-1 and FOXP3 were analyzed with real-time RT-PCR. The associations with acute rejection, disease severity, and outcome were investigated. RESULTS Both PD-1 and FOXP3 mRNA were higher in acute rejection than subjects with stable grafts. In acute rejection, PD-1 and FOXP3 mRNA were significantly correlated with serum creatinine and Banff histological grade. Both PD-1 and FOXP3 mRNA performed well in diagnosing acute rejection (AUC 0.81 and 0.91, respectively). However, a combination of both FOXP3 mRNA at cutoff level 1.5 and PD-1 mRNA at cutoff level 2.6 had 94% sensitivity, 97% specificity, and AUC 0.98 in diagnosing acute rejection. Only FOXP3 mRNA was correlated with rejection reversibility and predicted graft salvage (98% sensitivity, 87% specificity, and AUC 0.93) at cutoff level 1.7. CONCLUSIONS PD-1 and FOXP3 mRNA were high in acute rejection, and performed well in diagnosing rejection episodes, and were correlated with rejection severity. The combination of FOXP3 and PD-1 mRNA had better sensitivity and specificity in diagnosing acute rejection than each separately. Only FOXP3 anticipated rejection outcome.