Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating the global disease burden due to ultraviolet radiation exposure.

BACKGROUND WHO's global burden of disease studies, undertaken since 1996, apportion the total global disease burden, measured in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), to specific diseases and injuries. Recent assessments of the relative burden due to specific environmental risk factors, plus an understanding of the nature of the risk factor, may guide resource allocation in risk factor management. We report here the global disease burden due to ultraviolet radiation (UVR) exposure. METHODS A systematic literature review identified nine diseases with sufficient evidence of a causal relationship with UVR exposure and for which the population attributable fraction (PAF) for UVR could be estimated. For cutaneous malignant melanoma and cataract, the PAF was directly applied to disease burdens already calculated by WHO. For seven other diseases, we developed population-level exposure-disease relationships and used these to calculate disease incidence and mortality, and thence disease burden. We also estimated the disease burden from rickets, osteomalacia and osteoporosis that might result if global UVR exposure was reduced to very low levels. RESULTS UVR exposure is a minor contributor to the world's disease burden, causing an estimated annual loss of 1.6 million DALYs; i.e. 0.1% of the total global disease burden. A markedly larger annual disease burden, 3.3 billion DALYs, might result from reduction in global UVR exposure to very low levels. CONCLUSIONS Sun protection messages are important to prevent diseases of UVR exposure. However, without high dietary (or supplemental) intake of vitamin D, some sun exposure is essential to avoid diseases of vitamin D insufficiency.
Emergence of Electronic Markets: Implication of Declining Transport Costs on Firm Profits and Consumer Surplus

Electronic coordination may drastically reduce transport costs, especially for digital or digitalizable products where local markets may actually shrink to a point in space. In the present paper we use a model with differentiated products to analyze the impact of declining transport costs on profits and consumer surplus. While consumers always gain, the effect on producers depends on the degree of product differentiation and the magnitude of transport costs in the electronic market mode. Profits do only rise if products are substantially differentiated – in this case the positive effect of an extended consumer base due to the preference for product differentiation dominates the negative effect of intensified competition. This result is amplified if transport costs in the electronic market mode are substantial. In this case profits only increase if products are almost independent.
Universal correlations of trapped one-dimensional impenetrable bosons

We calculate the asymptotic behaviour of the one-body density matrix of one-dimensional impenetrable bosons in finite size geometries. Our approach is based on a modification of the replica method from the theory of disordered systems. We obtain explicit expressions for oscillating terms, similar to fermionic Friedel oscillations. These terms are universal and originate from the strong short-range correlations between bosons in one dimension.
Heterojunction Waveguide Photodetectors

Conventional PIN detectors have bandwidth efficiency products of up to 38 GHz. This product is primarily limited by the hole transit time through the depleted layer. We describe a pInP/nInGaAsP/nInP heterojunction waveguide PIN photodetector that provides for light absorption perpendicular to current collection, a feature that results in high-speed, high-efficiency and relatively bias-insensitive operation. The 30 μm waveguide length corresponds to 6 absorption lengths, assuming an optical confinement of 30% and a material absorption coefficient of 0.7 μm. -1 Our uncoated, packaged device has an impulse response of 40 ps (Tektronix S-4 sampling head) and efficiency of 25% at zero bias.
Family context in muscular dystrophies: psychosocial aspects and social integration

Muscular dystrophies (MDs) are degenerative diseases which may led to marked functional impairment and reduced life expectancy. Being caregivers of a loved one with MD may be both a rewarding and a demanding experience that may have relevant impact on the quality of life of the whole family. In this short review we summarize the main findings of the first survey on family context in MD in Italy. The study was carried out on 502 key-relatives of patients suffering from Duchenne, Becker, or Limb-Girdle MD, aged between 4 and 25 years, and attending one of 8 participating Centers, all over 2012. The results revealed that practical difficulties were mainly related to relatives' involvement in helping the patient in moving and in relative's constraints of leisure activities. Furthermore, feelings of loss and perception of patient's condition as having negative effects on the family life were the psychological consequences more frequently complained. However, despite the difficulties, 88% of the key-relatives acknowledged the caregiving as a positive experience. In fact 94% of the respondents stated they could rely on friends in case of own physical illness, and 88% in case of psychological stress. Burden was found higher among relatives of patients with lower functional autonomy and longer duration of illness, and among relatives with lower professional and social support. Conversely, the positive aspects of the caregiving were more frequently acknowledged by those who received higher level of professional help and psychological social support. These results reveal that the caregiving experience has a positive impact on key-relatives quality of life despite the practical demands, and that the support of professionals is essential to help families in identifying the benefits of this experience without denying its difficulties.
Nasal Decongestant Therapy

St. Clair Thomson (1916) considered chronic rhinitis to be one of the commonest nasal affections; usually occurring secondary to other disorders. Simson Hall (1949) described chronic rhinitis as being characterized by nasal obstruction, discharge, headache, fullness and mouth breathing. Logan Turner (1952) recommended that in mild cases an attempt should be made to relieve the symptoms by the usc of nasal sprays. Angell James (1965) considered that after treating the cause, the objectives should be to counteract infection, reduce swelling, restore airways and ventilation and ciliary and gland activity. Scott Brown (1965) stated that a clear nasal airway was essential for the proper function of the cilia and the mucous glands which were responsible for maintaining the moisture on the surface of the mucosa and the movement of foreign bodies and bacteria toward the pharynx.
Common Subexpressions in Constraint Models of Planning Problems

Constraint Programming is an attractive approach for solving AI planning problems by modelling them as Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). However, formulating effective constraint models of complex planning problems is challenging, and CSPs resulting from standard approaches often require further enhancement to perform well. Common subexpression elimination is a computationally cheap and general technique for improving CSPs, which can lead to a great reduction in instance size, solving time and search space. In this work we identify general causes of common subexpressions from three modelling techniques often used to encode planning problems into constraints. We present four case studies of constraint models of AI planning problems. In each, we describe the constraint model, highlight the sources of common subexpressions, and present an empirical analysis of the effects of eliminating common subexpressions
An Automatic Voice Conversion Evaluation Strategy Based on Perceptual Background Noise Distortion and Speaker Similarity

Voice conversion aims to modify the characteristics of one speaker to make it sound like spoken by another speaker without changing the language content. This task has attracted con-siderable attention and various approaches have been proposed since two decades ago. The evaluation of voice conversion approaches, usually through time-intensive subject listening tests, requires a huge amount of human labor. This paper proposes an automatic voice conversion evaluation strategy based on perceptual background noise distortion and speaker similarity. Ex-perimental results show that our automatic evaluation results match the subjective listening results quite well. We further use our strategy to select best converted samples from multiple voice conversion systems and our submission achieves promising results in the voice conversion challenge (VCC2016).
Intratympanic Steroid Treatment for Idiopathic Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss after Failure of Intravenous Therapy

Purpose. The aim of this study is the investigation of the effectiveness of intratympanic steroids therapy (IST) in patients with idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSHL) who had not responded to intravenous treatment, evaluating the overall hearing recovery and comparing the results with different variables. Materials and Methods. Our study consisted of 55 patients with refractory ISSHL who, at the end of 10 days of therapy with intravenous steroids, had puretone 4-frequency average (PTA) of worse than 30 dB. The patients received 0.5 mL of methylprednisolone by direct intratympanic injection. The procedure was carried out up to 7 times within a 20-days period. Statistical analysis was carried out. Results. Overall 29 patients (52.7%) showed improvement in PTA, 24 (43.8%) had no change in hearing, and 2 (3.5%) worsened. There was a significant statistical correlation between hearing recovery and time to onset of symptoms, severity of hearing loss and frequency of hearing loss. Conclusions. IST is an effective and safe therapy in sudden sensorineural hearing loss cases that are refractory to standard treatment. The earlier IST, the hearing losses less than 90 dB and the involvement of the low frequencies seem to influence positively the hearing recovery.
The cost-effectiveness of methadone maintenance as a health care intervention.

AIMS Cost-effectiveness analysis using life-years of survival as the measure of treatment benefit is widely used in the economic evaluation of health care interventions but has not been applied to substance abuse treatment. The cost-effectiveness of methadone maintenance was evaluated to demonstrate the feasibility of applying this method to substance abuse treatment. DESIGN A literature review was undertaken to determine the effect of methadone treatment on the rate of mortality associated with opiate addiction. Information was also obtained on the average cost and duration of treatment. A two-state Markov model was used to estimate the incremental effect of methadone on the life span and treatment cost of a cohort of 25-year-old heroin users. FINDINGS Providing opiate addicts with access to methadone maintenance has an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of $5915 per life-year gained (that is, for every year of life that is saved by providing methadone to opiate addicts, an additional $5915 in treatment costs are incurred). One-way sensitivity analysis determined that the ratio was less than $10,000 per-life year over a wide range of modeling assumptions. CONCLUSIONS The ratio determined for methadone is lower than that of many common medical therapies, and well within the $50,000 threshold for judging cost-effectiveness. Even if decision makers do not wish use the same ratio that is applied to the general population, this method allows substance abuse treatment enhancements to be compared to improvements in health services offered to individuals with substance abuse disorders. Future work will require information on the impact of methadone treatment on the cost of health care and public programs, the indirect costs incurred by patients, and adjustments to reflect quality of life.
An Unsupervised Model for Instance Level Subcategorization Acquisition

Most existing systems for subcategorization frame (SCF) acquisition rely on supervised parsing and infer SCF distributions at type, rather than instance level. These systems suffer from poor portability across domains and their benefit for NLP tasks that involve sentence-level processing is limited. We propose a new unsupervised, Markov Random Field-based model for SCF acquisition which is designed to address these problems. The system relies on supervised POS tagging rather than parsing, and is capable of learning SCFs at instance level. We perform evaluation against gold standard data which shows that our system outperforms several supervised and type-level SCF baselines. We also conduct task-based evaluation in the context of verb similarity prediction, demonstrating that a vector space model based on our SCFs substantially outperforms a lexical model and a model based on a supervised parser 1 .
Improving a statistical language model by modulating the effects of context words

We show how to improve a state-of-the-art neural network language model that converts the previous "context" words into feature vectors and combines these feature vectors to predict the feature vector of the next word. Significant improvements in predictive accuracy are achieved by using higher-level features to modulate the effects of the con- text words. This is more effective than using the higher-level features to directly predict the feature vector of the next word, but it is also possible to combine both methods.
Plasma Protein Carbonyl Response to Increasing Exercise Duration in Aerobically Trained Men and Women

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of aerobic exercise duration on plasma protein carbonyl concentrations, a marker of protein oxidation, in aerobically trained men and women. Eight men (age: 27 +/- 4 years, VO (2peak): 4.09 +/- 0.26 L x min (-1); mean +/- SD) and 7 women (age: 27 +/- 6 years, VO (2peak): 2.33 +/- 0.24 L x min (-1)) exercised on an electrically-braked cycle ergometer at 70 % VO (2peak) for 30, 60 or 120 minutes on three separate days. Plasma samples collected before and immediately, 30- and 60-minutes post-exercise were analyzed for protein carbonyls. Mean oxygen uptake was greater for men in all conditions (2.75 +/- 0.03 L x min (-1); 38 +/- 0.43 ml x kg (-1) x min (-1)) compared to women (1.57 +/- 0.03 L x min (-1); 24.1 +/- 0.47 ml x kg (-1) x min (-1)). Total work performed during the exercise sessions was also greater for men than for women during the 30 (368 +/- 11 versus 223 +/- 7 kJ), 60 (697 +/- 17 versus 423 +/- 18 kJ), and 120-minute conditions (1173 +/- 44 versus 726 +/- 28 kJ) (Mean +/- SEM). Although these comparisons were significant (p < 0.0001), sex differences in total work performed and mean VO (2) did not result in sex differences in protein carbonyls. However, a condition by time interaction was observed with greater post-exercise values following the 120-minute condition compared to both the 30- and 60-minute conditions. Protein carbonyl concentration was greatest immediately post-exercise for both men and women and generally declined in a linear trend through one hour of recovery. These data suggest that protein carbonyl concentration is elevated by cycling exercise performed at 70 % VO (2peak), is greater following longer duration rides, begins to recover within one hour following exercise, and is not different between men and women.
Constructing Symbolic Representations for High-Level Planning

We consider the problem of constructing a symbolic description of a continuous, low-level environment for use in planning. We show that symbols that can represent the preconditions and effects of an agent's actions are both necessary and sufficient for high-level planning. This eliminates the symbol design problem when a representation must be constructed in advance, and in principle enables an agent to autonomously learn its own symbolic representations. The resulting representation can be converted into PDDL, a canonical high-level planning representation that enables very fast planning.
Marr's Attacks: On Reductionism and Vagueness

It has been suggested that Marr took the three levels he famously identifies to be independent. In this paper, we argue that Marr's view is more nuanced. Specifically, we show that the view explicitly articulated in his work attempts to integrate the levels, and in doing so results in Marr attacking both reductionism and vagueness. The result is a perspective in which both high-level information-processing constraints and low-level implementational constraints play mutually reinforcing and constraining roles. We discuss our recent work on Spaun-currently the world's largest functional brain model-that demonstrates the positive impact of this kind of unifying integration of Marr's levels. We argue that this kind of integration avoids his concerns with both reductionism and vagueness. In short, we suggest that the methods behind Spaun can be used to satisfy Marr's explicit interest in combining high-level functional and detailed mechanistic explanations.
Psychosocial factors related to adolescent smoking: a critical review of the literature

OBJECTIVE To extend the analysis of psychosocial risk factors for smoking presented in the United States surgeon general’s 1994 report on smoking and health, and to propose a theoretical frame of reference for understanding the development of smoking. DATA SOURCES General Science Index, Medline, PsycLIT, Sociofile, Sociological Abstracts, and Smoking and Health. Holdings of the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario Library as well as the authors’ personal files. STUDY SELECTION Reviewed literature focused on studies that examined the association of sociodemographic, environmental, behavioural, and personal variables with smoking. DATA SYNTHESIS Adolescent smoking was associated with age, ethnicity, family structure, parental socioeconomic status, personal income, parental smoking, parental attitudes, sibling smoking, peer smoking, peer attitudes and norms, family environment, attachment to family and friends, school factors, risk behaviours, lifestyle, stress, depression/distress, self-esteem, attitudes, and health concerns. It is unclear whether adolescent smoking is related to other psychosocial variables. CONCLUSIONS Attempts should be made to use common definitions of outcome and predictor variables. Analyses should include multivariate and bivariate models, with some attempt in the multivariate models to test specific hypotheses. Future research should be theory driven and consider the range of possible factors, such as social, personal, economic, environmental, biological, and physiological influences, that may influence smoking behaviour. The apparent inconsistencies in relationships between parental socioeconomic status and adolescent disposable income need to be resolved as does the underlying constructs for which socioeconomic status is a proxy.
Genome Engineering in Vibrio cholerae: A Feasible Approach to Address Biological Issues

Although bacteria with multipartite genomes are prevalent, our knowledge of the mechanisms maintaining their genome is very limited, and much remains to be learned about the structural and functional interrelationships of multiple chromosomes. Owing to its bi-chromosomal genome architecture and its importance in public health, Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of cholera, has become a preferred model to study bacteria with multipartite genomes. However, most in vivo studies in V. cholerae have been hampered by its genome architecture, as it is difficult to give phenotypes to a specific chromosome. This difficulty was surmounted using a unique and powerful strategy based on massive rearrangement of prokaryotic genomes. We developed a site-specific recombination-based engineering tool, which allows targeted, oriented, and reciprocal DNA exchanges. Using this genetic tool, we obtained a panel of V. cholerae mutants with various genome configurations: one with a single chromosome, one with two chromosomes of equal size, and one with both chromosomes controlled by identical origins. We used these synthetic strains to address several biological questions—the specific case of the essentiality of Dam methylation in V. cholerae and the general question concerning bacteria carrying circular chromosomes—by looking at the effect of chromosome size on topological issues. In this article, we show that Dam, RctB, and ParA2/ParB2 are strictly essential for chrII origin maintenance, and we formally demonstrate that the formation of chromosome dimers increases exponentially with chromosome size.
The expression of the growth associated protein B50/GAP43 in the olfactory system of neonatal and adult rats

B50/GAP43 is a neuron-specific phosphoprotein whose expression is associated with neural development and synaptic plasticity. Its postnatal ontogeny was investigated in the primary olfactory pathway of the rat using immunohistochemical methods. The unique ability of the olfactory neuroepithelium to generate new neurons from a population of precursor cells present in the basal cell layer of this tissue makes it a valuable model in the study of neural development. In newborn rats B50/GAP43 is present throughout the entire population of olfactory receptor neurons. These cells are stained throughout, from the ciliated dendritic knob to their axon terminals in the bulb. This appears to be the first example of unambiguous B50/GAP43 expression in dendritic processes. With increasing age the distribution of this protein becomes progressively restricted to a subpopulation of olfactory neurons. Comparison of the expression of B50/GAP43 and the olfactory marker protein (OMP), a polypeptide only present in mature olfactory neurons, revealed that during postnatal development of the olfactory system these 2 proteins are expressed in a nearly reciprocal fashion. In adult animals (3.5 months-6 months of age), B50/GAP43-positive cells are exclusively present adjacent to the basal cell layer of the neuroepithelium. Basal cells appear to be unstained. The region of the epithelium containing the B50/GAP43-positive cells is virtually devoid of OMP-positive neurons. A significant fraction of these B50/GAP43- containing cells bear dendritic and neuritic processes. However, these cells do not express olfactory cilia. It is probable that the olfactory neurons expressing the growth-associated B50/GAP43 protein may correspond to a particular subset of olfactory neurons at an intermediate state of maturation.
Cosmographic Thermodynamics of Dark Energy

Dark energy’s thermodynamics is here revised giving particular attention to the role played by specific heats and entropy in a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe. Under the hypothesis of adiabatic heat exchanges, we rewrite the specific heats through cosmographic, model-independent quantities and we trace their evolutions in terms of z. We demonstrate that dark energy may be modeled as perfect gas, only as the Mayer relation is preserved. In particular, we find that the Mayer relation holds if j − q > 1 2 . The former result turns out to be general so that, even at the transition time, the jerk parameter j cannot violate the condition: j t r > 1 2 . This outcome rules out those models which predict opposite cases, whereas it turns out to be compatible with the concordance paradigm. We thus compare our bounds with the Λ CDM model, highlighting that a constant dark energy term seems to be compatible with the so-obtained specific heat thermodynamics, after a precise redshift domain. In our treatment, we show the degeneracy between unified dark energy models with zero sound speed and the concordance paradigm. Under this scheme, we suggest that the cosmological constant may be viewed as an effective approach to dark energy either at small or high redshift domains. Last but not least, we discuss how to reconstruct dark energy’s entropy from specific heats and we finally compute both entropy and specific heats into the luminosity distance d L , in order to fix constraints over them through cosmic data.