Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Association Between Nutritional Adequacy and Long-Term Outcomes in Critically Ill Patients Requiring Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation: A Multicenter Cohort Study*

Objective:To examine the association between short-term nutritional adequacy received while in the ICU and long-term outcomes including 6-month survival and health-related quality of life in critically ill patients requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation. Design:Retrospective analysis of data prospectively collected in the context of a multicenter randomized controlled trial. Setting:An international sample of ICUs. Patients:Adult patients who were mechanically ventilated for more than 8 days in the ICU. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:Nutritional adequacy was obtained from the average proportion of prescribed calories received over the amount prescribed during the first 8 days. Survival status and health-related quality of life as assessed using the Short-Form 36 v2 were obtained at 3- and 6 months post ICU admission. Of the 1,223 patients enrolled in the randomized controlled trial, 475 met the inclusion criteria for this study. At 6-month follow-up, 302 of the 475 patients (64%) were alive. Survival time in those who received low nutritional adequacy was significantly shorter than those who received high nutritional adequacy while adjusting for important covariates (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.7; 95% CI, 1.1–2.6). At 3-month follow-up, a 25% increase in nutritional adequacy was associated with improvements in Physical Functioning and Role Physical of 7.3 (p = 0.02) and 8.3 (p = 0.004) points, respectively. At 6-month follow-up, adjusted increases in Physical Functioning and Role Physical scores for every 25% increase in nutrition adequacy became smaller and were no longer statistically significant (adjusted estimate for Physical Functioning = 4.2, p = 0.14; for Role Physical = 3.2, p = 0.25). Conclusions:Greater amounts of nutritional intake received during the first week in the ICU were associated with longer survival time and faster physical recovery to 3 months but not 6 months post ICU discharge in critically ill patients requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation. Current recommendations to underfeed critically ill patients may cause harm in some long-stay patients.
Envelope Structure of Starless Core L694-2 Derived from a Near-Infrared Extinction Map

We present a near-infrared extinction study of the dark globule L694-2, a starless core that shows strong evidence for inward motions in the profiles of molecular spectral lines. The J-, H-, and K-band data were taken using the European Southern Observatory New Technology Telescope. The best-fit simple spherical power-law model has index p = 2.6 ± 0.2, over the ~0.036-0.1 pc range in radius sampled in extinction. This power-law slope is steeper than the value of p = 2 for a singular isothermal sphere, the initial condition of the inside-out model for protostellar collapse. Including an additional component of extinction along the line of sight further steepens the inferred profile. A fit for a Bonnor-Ebert sphere model results in a supercritical value of the dimensionless radius ξmax = 25 ± 3. This unstable configuration of material in the L694-2 core may be related to the observed inward motions. The Bonnor-Ebert model matches the shape of the observed density profile but significantly underestimates the amount of extinction observed in the L694-2 core (by a factor of ~4). This discrepancy in normalization has also been found for the nearby protostellar core B335 (Harvey and coworkers). A cylindrical model with scale height H = 0.0164 ± 0.002 pc (13.″5 ± 5′′) viewed at a small inclination to the axis of the cylinder provides an equally good radial profile as a power-law model, and it also reproduces the asymmetry of the L694-2 core remarkably well. In addition, this model provides a possible basis for understanding the discrepancy in the normalization of the Bonnor-Ebert model, namely, that L694-2 has prolate structure, with the full extent (mass) of the core being missed by analysis that assumes symmetry between the profiles of the core in the plane of the sky and along the line of sight. If the core is sufficiently magnetized, then fragmentation may be avoided, and later evolution might produce a protostar similar to B335.
One-Dof cylindrical deployable structures with rigid quadrilateral panels

In this paper, we present a novel cylindrical deployable structure and variations of its design with the following characteristics: 1. Flat-foldable: The shape flattens into a compact 2D configuration. 2. Rigid-foldable: Each element does not deform throughout the transformation. 3. One-DOF: The mechanism has exactly one degree of freedom. 4. Thick: Facets can be substituted with thick or multilayered panels without introducing the distortion of elements.
Early Experience and Evaluation of File Systems on SSD with Database Applications

Flash SSDs are being incorporated in many enterprise storage platforms recently. However, the characteristics of the flash SSD are quite different from that of hard disk. The IO strategies in the existing systems should be carefully evaluated. This paper provides an evaluation on the flash-based transaction processing system. Two file systems, traditional in-place update-based file system and log-structured file system, are selected as the representative of two write strategies. Usually, the log-structured file system is believed to play better on flash SSDs. Our experiment shows that the performance results of two database applications are diverse with two file systems on different flash SSDs. We analyze the performance in different configurations. Based on the analysis, we provide our experience on building the flash-based database system to better utilize the performance benefits of flash SSDs.
Black Carbon Increases Cation Exchange Capacity in Soils

Black Carbon (BC) may significantly affect nutrient retention and play a key role in a wide range of biogeochemical processes in soils, especially for nutrient cycling. Anthrosols from the Brazilian Amazon (ages between 600 and 8700 yr BP) with high contents of biomassderived BC had greater potential cation exchange capacity (CEC measured at pH 7) per unit organic C than adjacent soils with low BC contents.Synchrotron-based near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy coupled with scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) techniques explained the source of the higher surface charge of BC compared with non-BC by mapping crosssectional areas of BC particles with diameters of 10 to 50 mm for C forms. The largest cross-sectional areas consisted of highly aromatic or only slightly oxidized organic C most likely originating from the BC itself with a characteristic peak at 286.1 eV, which could not be found in humic substance extracts, bacteria or fungi. Oxidation significantly increased from the core of BC particles to their surfaces as shown by the ratio of carboxyl-C/aromatic-C. Spotted and non-continuous distribution patterns of highly oxidized C functional groups with distinctly different chemical signatures on BC particle surfaces (peak shift at 286.1 eV to a higher energy of 286.7 eV) indicated that non-BC may be adsorbed on the surfaces of BC particles creating highly oxidized surface. As a consequence of both oxidation of the BC particles themselves and adsorption of organic matter to BC surfaces, the charge density (potential CEC per unit surface area) was greater in BC-rich Anthrosols than adjacent soils. Additionally, a high specific surface area was attributable to the presence of BC, which may contribute to the high CEC found in soils that are rich in BC.
Extending the Java Virtual Machine to Enforce Fine-Grained Security Policies in Mobile Devices

The growth of the applications and services market for mobile devices is currently slowed down by the lack of a flexible and reliable security infrastructure. The development and adoption of a new generation of mobile applications depends on the end user's ability to finely manage system security and control application's behavior. The virtual execution environment for mobile software and services should support the security needs of users and applications. This paper proposes an extension to the security architecture of the java virtual machine for mobile systems, to support fine-grained policy specification and run-time enforcement. Access control decisions are based on system state, application and system history data, as well as request specific parameters. The prototype implementation is running on desktops, as emulator, and on mobile devices, proving the high level of flexibility and security, with excellent performance provided by the extended architecture.
A population-based study of different antibiotic prescribing in different areas.

BACKGROUND Respiratory tract infections are the most common reason for antibiotic prescription in Sweden as in other countries. The prescription rates vary markedly in different countries, counties and municipalities. The reasons for these variations in prescription rate are not obvious. AIM To find possible explanations for different antibiotic prescription rates in children. DESIGN OF STUDY Prospective population based study. SETTING All child health clinics in four municipalities in Sweden which, according to official statistics, had high antibiotic prescription rates, and all child health clinics in three municipalities which had low antibiotic prescription rates. METHOD During one month, parents recorded all infectious symptoms, physician consultations and antibiotic treatments, from 848 18-month-old children in a log book. The parents also answered a questionnaire about socioeconomic factors and concern about infectious diseases. RESULTS Antibiotics were prescribed to 11.6% of the children in the high prescription area and 4.7% in the low prescription area during the study month (crude odds ratio [OR] = 2.67; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.45 to 4.93). After multiple logistic regression analyses taking account of socioeconomic factors, concern about infectious illness, number of symptom days and physician consultations, differences in antibiotic prescription rates remained (adjusted OR = 2.61; 95% CI = 1.14 to 5.98). The variable that impacted most on antibiotic prescription rates, although it was not relevant to the geographical differences, was a high level of concern about infectious illness in the family. CONCLUSIONS The differences in antibiotic prescription rates could not be explained by socioeconomic factors, concern about infectious illness, number of symptom days and physician consultations. The differences may be attributable to different prescription behaviour.
Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice

This book focuses on the kind of grief that is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. It addresses the unique psychological, biological, and sociological issues involved in disenfranchised grief. The contributing authors explore the concept of disenfranchised grief, help define and explain this type of grief, and offer clinical interventions to help grievers express their hidden sorrow.
Text-Dependent Speaker Recognition With Random Digit Strings

In this paper, we explore joint factor analysis (JFA) for text-dependent speaker recognition with random digit strings. The core of the proposed method is a JFA model by which we extract features. These features can either represent overall utterances or individual digits, and are fed into a trainable backend to estimate likelihood ratios. Within this framework, several extensions are proposed. First is a logistic regression method for combining log-likelihood ratios that correspond to individual mixture components. Second is the extraction of phonetically aware Baum-Welch statistics, by using forced alignment instead of the typical posterior probabilities that are derived by the universal background model. We also explore a digit-string-dependent way to apply score normalization that exhibits a notable improvement compared to the standard one. By fusing six JFA features, we attained 2.01% and 3.19% equal error rates on male and female, respectively, on the challenging RSR2015 (part III) dataset.
Decompilation of binary programs

The structure of a decompiler is presented, along with a thorough description of the different modules that form part of a decompiler, and the type of analyses that are performed on the machine code to regenerate high‐level language code. The phases of the decompiler have been grouped into three main modules: front‐end, universal decompiling machine, and back‐end. The front‐end is a machine‐dependent module that performs the loading, parsing and semantic analysis of the input program, as well as generating an intermediate representation of the program. The universal decompiling machine is a machine‐ and language‐independent module that performs data and control flow analysis of the program based on the intermediate representation, and the program's control flow graph. The back‐end is a language‐dependent module that deals with the details of the target high‐level language.
Millimeter Waves: The Evolving Scene

Over the course of the past year, millimeter wave-based (MMW) imaging systems have entered the market, been deployed, and been evaluated in various trial applications. The attractiveness of millimeter wave solutions is that they combine an excellent combination of technology maturity, low cost commercialization, and important performance attributes. These characteristics make them uniquely suited for many important types of concealed weapons and contraband threats, supporting a volume of potential applications. This paper will discuss the state of MMW imaging and likely forward trends.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in never-smoking animal farmers working inside confinement buildings.

BACKGROUND In animal farming, respiratory disease has been associated with indoor air contaminants and an excess in FEV1 decline. Our aim was to determine the characteristics and risk factors for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in never-smoking European farmers working inside animal confinement buildings. METHODS A sample of participants in the European Farmers' Study was selected for a cross-sectional study assessing lung function and air contaminants. Dose-response relationships were assessed using logistic regression models. RESULTS COPD was found in 18 of 105 farmers (45.1 SD 11.7 years) (17.1%); 8 cases (7.6%) with moderate and 3 cases (2.9%) with severe disease. Dust and endotoxin showed a dose-response relationship with COPD, with the highest prevalence of COPD in subjects with high dust (low=7.9%/high=31.6%) and endotoxin exposure (low=10.5%/high=20.0%). This association was statistically significant for dust in the multivariate analysis (OR 6.60, 95% CI 1.10-39.54). CONCLUSION COPD in never-smoking animal farmers working inside confinement buildings is related to indoor dust exposure and may become severe.
Zika Virus: Medical Countermeasure Development Challenges

Introduction Reports of high rates of primary microcephaly and Guillain–Barré syndrome associated with Zika virus infection in French Polynesia and Brazil have raised concerns that the virus circulating in these regions is a rapidly developing neuropathic, teratogenic, emerging infectious public health threat. There are no licensed medical countermeasures (vaccines, therapies or preventive drugs) available for Zika virus infection and disease. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) predicts that Zika virus will continue to spread and eventually reach all countries and territories in the Americas with endemic Aedes mosquitoes. This paper reviews the status of the Zika virus outbreak, including medical countermeasure options, with a focus on how the epidemiology, insect vectors, neuropathology, virology and immunology inform options and strategies available for medical countermeasure development and deployment. Methods Multiple information sources were employed to support the review. These included publically available literature, patents, official communications, English and Lusophone lay press. Online surveys were distributed to physicians in the US, Mexico and Argentina and responses analyzed. Computational epitope analysis as well as infectious disease outbreak modeling and forecasting were implemented. Field observations in Brazil were compiled and interviews conducted with public health officials.
Video Co-segmentation for Meaningful Action Extraction

Given a pair of videos having a common action, our goal is to simultaneously segment this pair of videos to extract this common action. As a preprocessing step, we first remove background trajectories by a motion-based figure ground segmentation. To remove the remaining background and those extraneous actions, we propose the trajectory co saliency measure, which captures the notion that trajectories recurring in all the videos should have their mutual saliency boosted. This requires a trajectory matching process which can compare trajectories with different lengths and not necessarily spatiotemporally aligned, and yet be discriminative enough despite significant intra-class variation in the common action. We further leverage the graph matching to enforce geometric coherence between regions so as to reduce feature ambiguity and matching errors. Finally, to classify the trajectories into common action and action outliers, we formulate the problem as a binary labeling of a Markov Random Field, in which the data term is measured by the trajectory co-saliency and the smoothness term is measured by the spatiotemporal consistency between trajectories. To evaluate the performance of our framework, we introduce a dataset containing clips that have animal actions as well as human actions. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in common action extraction.
Activation of Myosin Va Function by Melanophilin, a Specific Docking Partner of Myosin Va*

It is known that melanophilin is a myosin Va-targeting molecule that links myosin Va and the cargo vesicles in cells. Here we found that melanophilin directly activates the actin-activated ATPase activity of myosin Va and thus its motor activity. The actin-activated ATPase activity of the melanocyte-type myosin Va having exon-F was significantly activated by melanophilin by 4-fold. Although Rab27a binds to myosin Va/melanophilin complex, it did not affect the melanophilin-induced activation of myosin Va. Deletion of the C-terminal actin binding domain and N-terminal Rab binding domain of melanophilin resulted in no change in the activation of the ATPase by melanophilin, indicating that the myosin Va binding domain (MBD) is sufficient for the activation of myosin Va. Among MBDs, the interaction of MBD-2 with exon-F of myosin Va is critical for the binding of myosin Va and melanophilin, whereas MBD-1 interacting with the globular tail of myosin Va plays a more significant role in the activation of myosin Va ATPase activity. This is the first demonstration that the binding of the cargo molecule directly activates myosin motor activity. The present finding raises the idea that myosin motors are switched upon their binding to the cargo molecules, thus avoiding the waste of ATP consumption.
Testing for Discrimination Against Lesbians of Different Marital Status: A Field Experiment

In this paper, a correspondence testing experiment is conducted to examine sexual orientation discrimination against lesbians in Germany. Applications for four fictional female characters are sent out in response to job advertisements: a heterosexual single, a married heterosexual, a single lesbian and a lesbian who is in a ‘same-sex registered partnership’. Different results are obtained for the two cities investigated, Munich and Berlin. While single lesbians and lesbians in a registered partnership are equally discriminated in comparison to the heterosexual women in the city of Munich, no discrimination based on sexual orientation has been found in Berlin. Furthermore, for a subset of our data we can compare the effects of a randomized versus a paired testing approach, which suggests that under certain conditions, due to increased conspicuity, the paired testing approach may lead to biased results.
Genomic Responses to Arsenic in the Cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803

Arsenic is a ubiquitous contaminant and a toxic metalloid which presents two main redox states in nature: arsenite [AsIII] and arsenate [AsV]. Arsenic resistance in Synechocystis sp. strain PCC 6803 is mediated by the arsBHC operon and two additional arsenate reductases encoded by the arsI1 and arsI2 genes. Here we describe the genome-wide responses to the presence of arsenate and arsenite in wild type and mutants in the arsenic resistance system. Both forms of arsenic produced similar responses in the wild type strain, including induction of several stress related genes and repression of energy generation processes. These responses were transient in the wild type strain but maintained in time in an arsB mutant strain, which lacks the arsenite transporter. In contrast, the responses observed in a strain lacking all arsenate reductases were somewhat different and included lower induction of genes involved in metal homeostasis and Fe-S cluster biogenesis, suggesting that these two processes are targeted by arsenite in the wild type strain. Finally, analysis of the arsR mutant strain revealed that ArsR seems to only control 5 genes in the genome. Furthermore, the arsR mutant strain exhibited hypersentivity to nickel, copper and cadmium and this phenotype was suppressed by mutation in arsB but not in arsC gene suggesting that overexpression of arsB is detrimental in the presence of these metals in the media.
Pincher-Mediated Macroendocytosis Underlies Retrograde Signaling by Neurotrophin Receptors

Retrograde signaling by neurotrophins is crucial for regulating neuronal phenotype and survival. The mechanism responsible for retrograde signaling has been elusive, because the molecular entities that propagate Trk receptor tyrosine kinase signals from the nerve terminal to the soma have not been defined. Here, we show that the membrane trafficking protein Pincher defines the primary pathway responsible for neurotrophin retrograde signaling in neurons. By both immunofluorescence confocal and immunoelectron microscopy, we find that Pincher mediates the formation of newly identified clathrin-independent macroendosomes for Trk receptors in soma, axons, and dendrites. Trk macroendosomes are derived from plasma membrane ruffles and subsequently processed to multivesicular bodies. Pincher similarly mediates macroendocytosis for NGF (TrkA) and BDNF (TrkB) in both peripheral (sympathetic) and central (hippocampal) neurons. A unique feature of Pincher-Trk endosomes is refractoriness to lysosomal degradation, which ensures persistent signaling through a critical effector of retrograde survival signaling, Erk5 (extracellular signal-regulated kinase 5). Using sympathetic neurons grown in chamber cultures, we find that block of Pincher function, which prevents Trk macroendosome formation, eliminates retrogradely signaled neuronal survival. Pincher is the first distinguishing molecular component of a novel mechanistic pathway for endosomal signaling in neurons.