Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ASH Position Paper: Evaluation and Treatment of Orthostatic Hypotension

This paper provides recommendations on the treatment of orthostatic hypotension (OH) as reviewed by the American Society of Hypertension. It focuses on recent reports on the evaluation and management of OH and provides practical advice for clinicians on how to screen, diagnose, and treat patients using behavioral, nonpharmacologic, and pharmacologic strategies. The authors also provide a stepwise approach on how to apply new findings to successfully control OH and reduce the risk of syncope and falls in these patients. Treatment of OH is also discussed in special situations such as in hypertensive and hospitalized patients. It should be noted, however, that research in this area is mostly limited to studies in small numbers of patients. Unfortunately, the trials of the type needed to develop evidence‐based guidelines are not available for this condition.
Developmental robot with ostensive cue sensitive learning for real-world interaction based on local contingency evaluation

Joint attention is one of the most important cognitive function for establishing successful communication in human interaction. It is even appeared during the interaction of the human infant with its caregiver, and plays essential roles for childhood development [1], [2], [3]. In the field of developmental psychology, cognitive science and even interactional robotics, studies on these behaviours have become one of the hot topics [4], [5], [6], [7]. On the other hand, some studies utilized synthetic approaches to understand the developmental process of joint attention related behaviours and social skills [8], [9], [10], [11]. In the previous work, Mahzoon et al. [12] proposed local contingency evaluation of the events for a learning robot model and showed that it can acquire simple and complex social skills during the interaction with the human caregiver model. However, it needs to gather lots of experiences to distinguish contingent events, and still non-accurate for implementing on a real world robot. In this study, we propose ostensive cue sensitive learning to solve the first problem, and cross-modal comparison of the contingency (CmC) for the second one.
Sensitive Detection of Escherichia coliO157:H7 in Food and Water by Immunomagnetic Separation and Solid-Phase Laser Cytometry

ABSTRACT Rapid, direct methods are needed to assess active bacterial populations in water and foods. Our objective was to determine the efficiency of bacterial detection by immunomagnetic separation (IMS) and the compatibility of IMS with cyanoditolyl tetrazolium chloride (CTC) incubation to determine respiratory activity, using the pathogenEscherichia coli O157:H7. Counterstaining with a specific fluorescein-conjugated anti-O157 antibody (FAb) following CTC incubation was used to allow confirmation and visualization of bacteria by epifluorescence microscopy. Broth-grown E. coli O157:H7 was used to inoculate fresh ground beef (<17% fat), sterile 0.1% peptone, or water. Inoculated meat was diluted and homogenized in a stomacher and then incubated with paramagnetic beads coated with anti-O157 specific antibody. After IMS, cells with magnetic beads attached were stained with CTC and then an anti-O157 antibody-fluorescein isothiocyanate conjugate and filtered for microscopic enumeration or solid-phase laser cytometry. Enumeration by laser scanning permitted detection of ca. 10 CFU/g of ground beef or <10 CFU/ml of liquid sample. With inoculated meat, the regression results for log-transformed respiring FAb-positive counts of cells recovered on beads versus sorbitol-negative plate counts in the inoculum were as follows: intercept = 1.06, slope = 0.89, andr2 = 0.95 (n = 13). The corresponding results for inoculated peptone were as follows: intercept = 0.67, slope = 0.88, andr2 = 0.98 (n = 24). Recovery of target bacteria on beads by the IMS-CTC-FAb method, compared with recovery by sorbitol MacConkey agar plating, yielded greater numbers (beef, 6.0 times; peptone, 3.0 times; water, 2.4 times). Thus, within 5 to 7 h, the IMS-CTC-FAb method detected greater numbers of E. coli O157 cells than were detected by plating. The results show that the IMS-CTC-FAb technique with enumeration by either fluorescence microscopy or solid-phase laser scanning cytometry gave results that compared favorably with plating following IMS.
A GPU accelerated Fast Directional Chamfer Matching algorithm and a detailed comparison with a highly optimized CPU implementation

In this work we present an efficient GPU implementation of the Fast Directional Chamfer Matching (FDCM) algorithm [10]. We propose some extensions to the original FDCM algorithm. In particular, we extend the algorithm to handle templates with variable size, to account for perspective effects. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to present a full implementation of a shape based matching algorithm on a GPU. Further contributions of our work consist of implementing a highly optimized CPU version of the algorithm (via multi-threading and SSE2), as well as a thorough comparison between pure GPU, pure CPU, and a hybrid version. The hybrid CPU-GPU version which turns out to be the fastest, achieves run-time of 44 fps on PAL resolution images.
Depletion of mitochondrial DNA in HIV‐1‐infected patients and its amelioration by antiretroviral therapy

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) collected from Human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV‐1)‐infected patients and healthy controls were measured longitudinally using real‐time polymerase chain reaction to evaluate the effects of antiretroviral agents on mtDNA synthesis in vivo and to assess the value of monitoring mtDNA in PBMCs to predict adverse events amongst these patients. MtDNA levels in PBMCs were significantly decreased in treatment‐naive HIV‐1‐infected patients compared with healthy people. MtDNA levels were not only significantly correlated with CD4+ T‐cell count, but also inversely correlated with HIV‐1 viral load. MtDNA levels in untreated patients and healthy controls were stable during the period of observation. On the other hand, amongst patients treated with regimens containing AZT/3TC or d4T/3TC, mtDNA increased during treatment and recovered to levels comparable to healthy controls. In contrast, mtDNA decreased immediately after the initiation of an AZT/ddC‐containing regimen. We did not find a correlation between mtDNA levels and changes in clinical parameters. There was no significant difference in mtDNA levels between patients with and those without lipoatrophy. Furthermore, there was no obvious difference in mtDNA levels amongst those patients exhibiting signs and symptoms of peripheral neuropathy. In conclusion, the decrease in mtDNA levels in PBMCs amongst HIV‐1‐infected patients and its amelioration by antiretroviral therapy may suggest the influence of direct effects on mitochondria or mtDNA by HIV‐1 infection. Further investigations are needed to elucidate the mechanisms contributing to decreased mtDNA and the value of mtDNA measurement in the care of HIV‐1‐infected individuals. J. Med. Virol. 70:497–505, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Using Haptic Interfaces for User Verification in Virtual Environments

Haptics can characterize the complex sense of touch and kinesthetic stimuli through its technology of force or tactile feedback devices. Such technology is developing fast enough to become soon another human-machine interaction similar to computer keyboard or mice. However, currently commercial haptics interfaces are expensive and are typically applied to research projects or expensive systems. Fortunately the trend of the market is forcing haptic developers to release products that can be affordable in a similar fashion as some specialized computer peripherals. Haptics aim is to allow a user to touch, feel, manipulate, create, and/or alter simulated three-dimensional objects in a virtual environment. Most of the applications are dedicated to train physical skills such as medical procedure by using desktop haptic units. These human skills can be captured to model a particular human-behavioural pattern that can be used to build a biometric recognition system. The precision of such systems is reliant on the choice of biometric identifiers. For accurate identity recognition, identifiers must be chosen so that they are unique for each individual. Conventional choices of biometric identifiers include writing style, hand geometry, as well as iris, facial, and fingerprint features. In this paper, we are interested in identity recognition based on humans' manipulation of haptic devices such as PHANToMtrade. The purpose of our analysis is to evaluate the information content of this data source. Hence, we assess the uniqueness of each biometric identifier. Our analysis shows that the haptic data content of identifiers is more suitable in a verification mode rather than in identification mode
Early Adoption of Patient Portals by U.S. Hospitals

Customer-facing information systems have received very little research attention, especially in the context of healthcare. As hospitals begin to provide healthcare consumers with online patient portals to view and manage personal health records and diagnostic results, little is known about whether or not the ‘dominant paradigm’ (Fichman 2004) of diffusion of innovations theory is sufficient for explaining the characteristics of early adopters. We suggest that a more nuanced understanding of early adoption of patient portals is needed because early adopters are not only the largest hospitals with substantial resources and capabilities residing within competitive environments. Specifically, we suggest that patient-portals are impacted by market characteristics and require Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) systems to be adopted first. We develop a non-linear, two-stage, econometric model with sample selection correction that controls for EMR adoption and estimates the impact of diffusion of innovation and market characteristics on the early adoption of patient portals by U.S. hospitals.
Severed Molecules Functionally Define the Boundaries of the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator's Nh2-Terminal Nucleotide Binding Domain

The cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator is a Cl− channel that belongs to the family of ATP-binding cassette proteins. The CFTR polypeptide comprises two transmembrane domains, two nucleotide binding domains (NBD1 and NBD2), and a regulatory (R) domain. Gating of the channel is controlled by kinase-mediated phosphorylation of the R domain and by ATP binding, and, likely, hydrolysis at the NBDs. Exon 13 of the CFTR gene encodes amino acids (aa's) 590–830, which were originally ascribed to the R domain. In this study, CFTR channels were severed near likely NH2- or COOH-terminal boundaries of NBD1. CFTR channel activity, assayed using two-microelectrode voltage clamp and excised patch recordings, provided a sensitive measure of successful assembly of each pair of channel segments as the sever point was systematically shifted along the primary sequence. Substantial channel activity was taken as an indication that NBD1 was functionally intact. This approach revealed that the COOH terminus of NBD1 extends beyond aa 590 and lies between aa's 622 and 634, while the NH2 terminus of NBD1 lies between aa's 432 and 449. To facilitate biochemical studies of the expressed proteins, a Flag epitope was added to the NH2 termini of full length CFTR, and of CFTR segments truncated before the normal COOH terminus (aa 1480). The functionally identified NBD1 boundaries are supported by Western blotting, coimmunoprecipitation, and deglycosylation studies, which showed that an NH2-terminal segment representing aa's 3–622 (Flag3-622) or 3–633 (Flag3-633) could physically associate with a COOH-terminal fragment representing aa's 634–1480 (634-1480); however, the latter fragment was glycosylated to the mature form only in the presence of Flag3-633. Similarly, 433-1480 could physically associate with Flag3-432 and was glycosylated to the mature form; however, 449-1480 protein seemed unstable and could hardly be detected even when expressed with Flag3-432. In excised-patch recordings, all functional severed CFTR channels displayed the hallmark characteristics of CFTR, including the requirement of phosphorylation and exposure to MgATP for gating, ability to be locked open by pyrophosphate or AMP-PNP, small single channel conductances, and high apparent affinity of channel opening by MgATP. Our definitions of the boundaries of the NBD1 domain in CFTR are supported by comparison with the solved NBD structures of HisP and RbsA.
Escherichia coli-Salmonella typhimurium hybrid nusA genes: identification of a short motif required for action of the lambda N transcription antitermination protein

The Escherichia coli nusA gene, nusAEc, encodes an essential protein that influences transcription elongation. Derivatives of E. coli in which the Salmonella typhimurium nusA gene, nusASt, has replaced nusAEc are viable. Thus, NusASt can substitute for NusAEc in supporting essential bacterial activities. However, hybrid E. coli strains with the nusASt substitution do not effectively support transcription antitermination mediated by the N gene product of phage lambda. We report the DNA sequence of nusASt, showing that the derived amino acid sequence is 95% identical to the derived amino acid sequence of nusAEc. The alignment of the amino acid sequences reveals scattered single amino acid differences and one region of significant heterogeneity. In this region, called 449, NusAEc has four amino acids and NusASt has nine amino acids. Functional studies of hybrid nusA genes, constructed from nusAEc and nusASt, show that the 449 region of the NusAEc protein is important for lambda N-mediated transcription antitermination. A hybrid that has a substitution of the four E. coli codons for the nine S. typhimurium codons, but is otherwise nusASt, supports the action of the N antitermination protein. The 449 region and, presumably, adjacent sequences appear to compose a functional domain of NusAEc important for the action of the N transcription antitermination protein of phage lambda.
Direct vs. indirect evaluation of distributional thesauri

With the success of word embedding methods in various Natural Language Processing tasks, all the field of distributional semantics has experienced a renewed interest. Beside the famous word2vec, recent studies have presented efficient techniques to build distributional thesaurus; in particular, Claveau et al. (2014) have already shown that Information Retrieval (IR) tools and concepts can be successfully used to build a thesaurus. In this paper, we address the problem of the evaluation of such thesauri or embedding models and compare their results. Through several experiments and by evaluating directly the results with reference lexicons, we show that the recent IR-based distributional models outperform state-of-the-art systems such as word2vec. Following the work of Claveau and Kijak (2016), we use IR as an applicative framework to indirectly evaluate the generated thesaurus. Here again, this task-based evaluation validates the IR approach used to build the thesaurus. Moreover, it allows us to compare these results with those from the direct evaluation framework used in the literature. The observed differences bring these evaluation habits into question.
Entropy-driven spatial organization of highly confined polymers: Lessons for the bacterial chromosome

Despite recent progress in visualization experiments, the mechanism underlying chromosome segregation in bacteria still remains elusive. Here we address a basic physical issue associated with bacterial chromosome segregation, namely the spatial organization of highly confined, self-avoiding polymers (of nontrivial topology) in a rod-shaped cell-like geometry. Through computer simulations, we present evidence that, under strong confinement conditions, topologically distinct domains of a polymer complex effectively repel each other to maximize their conformational entropy, suggesting that duplicated circular chromosomes could partition spontaneously. This mechanism not only is able to account for the spatial separation per se but also captures the major features of the spatiotemporal organization of the duplicating chromosomes observed in Escherichia coli and Caulobacter crescentus.
3-D Vertical Dual-Layer Oxide Memristive Devices

Dual-layer resistive switching memory devices with WOx switching layer formed at the sidewall of the horizontal electrodes have been fabricated and characterized. The devices exhibit well-characterized analog switching characteristics and small mismatch in electrical characteristics for devices formed at the two layers. The 3-D vertical device structure allows higher storage density and larger connectivity for neuromorphic computing applications. We show that the vertical devices exhibit potentiation and depression characteristics similar to planar devices, and can be programmed independently with no crosstalk between the layers.
Energy and carbohydrate for training and recovery

Abstract Soccer players should achieve an energy intake that provides sufficient carbohydrate to fuel the training and competition programme, supplies all nutrient requirements, and allows manipulation of energy or nutrient balance to achieve changes in lean body mass, body fat or growth. Although the traditional culture of soccer has focused on carbohydrate intake for immediate match preparation, top players should adapt their carbohydrate intake on a daily basis to ensure adequate fuel for training and recovery between matches. For players with a mobile playing style, there is sound evidence that dietary programmes that restore and even super-compensate muscle glycogen levels can enhance activity patterns during matches. This will presumably also benefit intensive training, such as twice daily practices. As well as achieving a total intake of carbohydrate commensurate with fuel needs, the everyday diet should promote strategic intake of carbohydrate and protein before and after key training sessions to optimize the adaptations and enhance recovery. The achievement of the ideal physique for soccer is a long-term goal that should be undertaken over successive years, and particularly during the off-season and pre-season. An increase in lean body mass or a decrease in body fat is the product of a targeted training and eating programme. Consultation with a sports nutrition expert can assist soccer players to manipulate energy and nutrient intake to meet such goals. Players should be warned against the accidental or deliberate mismatch of energy intake and energy expenditure, such that energy availability (intake minus the cost of exercise) falls below 125 kJ (30 kcal) per kilogram of fat-free mass per day. Such low energy availability causes disturbances to hormonal, metabolic, and immune function.
Measuring the emotional impact of websites: a study on combining a dimensional and discrete emotion approach in measuring visual appeal of university websites

In this paper a combined dimensional and discrete emotional approach is introduced for measuring emotions elicited by the visual appeal of websites. An online experiment was set out to measure the emotional experience of twelve screenshots of university websites. By indicating a position on the dimensions of pleasure and arousal, participants were asked to score corresponding emotion words that would relate to their position on the dimensions, plus random emotion words that were not related to their position. It was expected that scores on the corresponding emotion words would be higher than scores on the random emotion words. As expected, results showed that corresponding emotion words scored significantly higher, indicating that a combined dimensional and discrete emotion approach was feasible in measuring emotional experience elicited by visual appeal of websites.
Optimization of SPARQL by using coreSPARQL

SPARQL is becoming an important query language for RDF data. Query optimization to speed up query processing has been an important research topic for all query languages. In order to optimize SPARQL queries, we suggest a core fragment of the SPARQL language, which we call the coreSPARQL language. coreSPARQL has the same expressive power as SPARQL, but eliminates redundant language constructs of SPARQL. SPARQL engines and optimization approaches will benefit from using coreSPARQL, because fewer cases need to be considered when processing coreSPARQL queries and the coreSPARQL syntax is machine-friendly. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically transforming SPARQL to coreSPARQL, and develop a set of rewriting rules to optimize coreSPRQL queries. Our experimental results show that our optimization of SPARQL speeds up RDF querying.
The GPI‐anchored Gas and Crh families are fungal antigens

The cell wall is the first interface between a fungus and its extracellular environment. Glycosyltransferases involved in the formation and dynamic remodelling of the polysaccharide network of the cell wall have recently been identified. The best characterized ones belong to the Gas family, which elongates β(1,3)‐glucans, and to the Crh family, which are involved in the cross‐linking of chitin to β(1,6)‐glucan. All these proteins carry a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor. In this work, we show that recombinant soluble forms of Gas1–5 and Crh1p from Saccharomyces cerevisiae and their orthologous proteins Gel1‐Gel2 and Crf1 from Aspergillus fumigatus are specifically recognized by antibodies present in the sera of patients with Aspergillus or Candida infections. Quantification of the antibody titres against recombinant Gas/Gel and Crh/Crf proteins separated aspergilloma and candidiasis patients from non‐infected individuals. Cross‐reactivity was seen between the antibody response of patients with aspergillosis and candidiasis towards the Gas/Gel and Crh/Crf proteins. These results suggest that GPI‐anchored cross‐linking enzymes are relevant immunologically reactive constituents of the cell wall that may play a role during human fungal infections. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Clustering-Based Strategy to Identify Coincidental Correctness in Fault Localization

Coverage-based fault localization techniques leverage the coverage information to identify the faulty elements of a program. However, these techniques can be adversely affected by coincidental correctness, which occurs when the defect is executed but no failure is revealed. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based strategy to identify coincidental correctness in fault localization. The insight behind this strategy is that tests in the same cluster have similar behaviors. Thus a passed test in a cluster with many failed tests is highly possible to be coincidentally correct because it has the potential to execute the faulty elements as those failed ones do. We evaluated this technique from two aspects: the ability to identify coincidental correctness and the effectiveness to improve fault localization. The experimental results show that our strategy can alleviate the coincidental correctness problem and improve the effectiveness of fault localization.