Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Refractory and Resistant Hypertension: Antihypertensive Treatment Failure versus Treatment Resistance

Resistant hypertension has for many decades been defined as difficult-to-treat hypertension in order to identify patients who may benefit from special diagnostic and/or therapeutic considerations. Recently, the term "refractory hypertension" has been proposed as a novel phenotype of antihypertensive failure, that is, patients whose blood pressure cannot be controlled with maximal treatment. Early studies of this phenotype indicate that it is uncommon, affecting less than 5% of patients with resistant hypertension. Risk factors for refractory hypertension include obesity, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and especially, being of African origin. Patients with refractory are at high cardiovascular risk based on increased rates of known heart disease, prior stroke, and prior episodes of congestive heart failure. Mechanisms of refractory hypertension need exploration, but early studies suggest a possible role of heightened sympathetic tone as evidenced by increased office and ambulatory heart rates and higher urinary excretion of norepinephrine compared to patients with controlled resistant hypertension. Important negative findings argue against refractory hypertension being fluid dependent as is typical of resistant hypertension, including aldosterone levels, dietary sodium intake, and brain natriuretic peptide levels being similar or even less than patients with resistant hypertension and the failure to control blood pressure with use of intensive diuretic therapy, including both a long-acting thiazide diuretic and a mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist. Further studies, especially longitudinal assessments, are needed to better characterize this extreme phenotype in terms of risk factors and outcomes and hopefully to identify effective treatment strategies.
The Role of Moral Beliefs, Memories, and Preferences in Representations of Identity

People perceive that if their memories and moral beliefs changed, they would change. We investigated why individuals respond this way. In Study 1, participants judged that identity would change more after changes to memories and widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., about murder) versus preferences and controversial moral beliefs (e.g., about abortion). The extent to which participants judged that changes would affect their relationships predicted identity change (Study 2) and mediated the relationship between type of moral belief and perceived identity change (Study 3). We discuss the role that social relationships play in judgments of identity and highlight implications for psychology and philosophy.
Early psychological interventions to treat acute traumatic stress symptoms.

BACKGROUND The amelioration of psychological distress following traumatic events is a major concern. Systematic reviews suggest that interventions targeted at all of those exposed to such events are not effective at preventing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Recently other forms of intervention have been developed with the aim of treating acute traumatic stress problems. OBJECTIVES To perform a systematic review of randomised controlled trials of all psychological treatments and interventions commenced within three months of a traumatic event aimed at treating acute traumatic stress reactions. The review followed the guidelines of the Cochrane Collaboration. SEARCH STRATEGY Systematic searches were performed of of CCDAN Registers up to August 2008. Editions of key journals were searched by hand over a period of two years; personal communication was undertaken with key experts in the field; online discussion fora were searched. SELECTION CRITERIA Randomised controlled trials of any psychological intervention or treatment designed to reduce acute traumatic stress symptoms, with the exception of single session interventions. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Data were entered and analysed for summary effects using Review Manager 5.0 software. Standardised mean differences were calculated for continuous variable outcome data. Relative risks were calculated for dichotomous outcome data. When statistical heterogeneity was present a random effects model was applied. MAIN RESULTS Fifteen studies (two with long term follow-up studies) were identified examining a range of interventions.In terms of main findings, twelve studies evaluated brief trauma focused cognitive behavioural interventions (TF-CBT). TF-CBT was more effective than a waiting list intervention (6 studies, 471 participants; SMD -0.64, 95% CI -1.06, -0.23) and supportive counselling (4 studies, 198 participants; SMD -0.67, 95% CI -1.12, -0.23). Effects against supportive counselling were still present at 6 month follow-up (4 studies, 170 participants; SMD -0.64, 95% CI -1.02, -0.25). There was no evidence of the effectiveness of a structured writing intervention when compared against minimal intervention (2 studies, 149 participants; SMD -0.15, 95% CI -0.48, 0.17). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS There was evidence that individual TF-CBT was effective for individuals with acute traumatic stress symptoms compared to both waiting list and supportive counselling interventions. The quality of trials included was variable and sample sizes were often small. There was considerable clinical heterogeneity in the included studies and unexplained statistical heterogeneity observed in some comparisons. This suggests the need for caution in interpreting the results of this review. Additional high quality trials with longer follow up periods are required to further test TF-CBT and other forms of psychological intervention.
Response Time as a Function of Uncertainty

The purpose of this study was to compare uncertainty among simple reaction time, compatible reaction time and disjunctive reaction time for 25 students. The results indicated variable differences in length of reaction time, i.e., simple RT < compatible RT < disjunctive RT. A sign test, performed for both mean and median scores, was significant. It was concluded that reaction time did increase as a function of uncertainty.
Book Reviews : Measurement for Mental Health: Contributions From the College Research Unit

QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS. AN EXPANDED SOURCEBOOK, 2nd EDITION Matthew B. Miles & Michael Huberman Sage Publications, 1994. Pp. 338, Pb. &pound;19.95. ISBN 0-8039-5540-5 I had the good fortune of using this book as my main source of reference for an ongoing qualitative research project. The authors declare that they ’do not consider it to be a comprehensive handbook’ and naturally, anyone planning on venturing into qualitative research for the first time would be advised to access as much of the corpus of literature on the subject as possible. Whilst the book’s coverage is usefully broad, key concepts and methods such as grounded theory are not explored in sufficicnt depth to be employed without further reference to more detailed and specific texts. This book’s principle strength lies, however, in it’s being an eminently practical source of ideas, tactics and advice as well as a sound and user-friendly introduction to qualitative research and analysis. I found the layout especially helpful; Miles and Huberman present each research and analysis method according to the stage at which it might be used in a study and introduce it with an example of the particular problems it can be used to solve. This assists in the discovery and application of new techniques considerably. Illustrative examples abound throughout and prove useful in demonstrating the power of fairly advanced data analysis and display methods. However, I found the major working example Miles and Huberman use, that of a study of the implementation of an ’innovation’ in a school setting, to be rather di#hcult to transpose to more usual psychological research topics. The writing style is informal and never dry, although it occasionally verges on the excessively ’wordy’. As a consequence, however, researchers trained in quantitative methods will hopefully find that gradually the theoretical stance of the qualitative approach is reinforced and becomes more persuasive and familiar. Highly recommended. Patrick J. Hopkinson Honorary Researcher, Institute of Psychiatry, London
Effect of ethylene on the uptake, distribution, and metabolism of indoleacetic Acid-1-C and -2-C and naphthaleneacetic Acid-1-C.

The effect of ethylene on the uptake, distribution, and metabolism of indoleacetic acid (IAA)-1-(14)C, IAA-2-(14)C, and naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA)-1-(14)C in cotton stem sections (Gossypium hirsutum L., var. Stoneville 213) was studied. Stem sections excised from plants pretreated with ethylene for 15 hours transported significantly less (14)C-IAA and (14)C-NAA than control sections. Concomitant features of the reduction of (14)C-IAA transport were an increase in decarboxylation and a trend toward a reduction in total uptake. With (14)C-NAA, however, total uptake was significantly increased, and decarboxylation was unaffected. (14)C-IAA was rapidly converted to indoleacetylaspartic acid and many other metabolites in both control and ethylene-pretreated stem sections. Following transport, similar amounts of (14)C-IAA were recovered in the apical absorbing portion of the control and ethylene-pretreated sections. Significantly more (14)C-IAA metabolites, however, were recovered in this region of the ethylene-pretreated sections.Conversely, (14)C-NAA was metabolized more slowly than (14)C-IAA under identical experimental conditions, with the only major metabolite being naphthaleneacetylaspartic acid. Following transport the apical absorbing portion of ethylene-pretreated stem sections contained significantly more (14)C-NAA than the controls. These results suggested that the disruption of auxin transport by ethylene cannot be explained in terms of a more rapid metabolism of auxin in the treated sections. The increased (14)C-IAA metabolites in the absorbing portion of ethylene-pretreated sections appear to be the result, rather than the cause, of the ethylene-mediated disruption of IAA transport.
Context information modelling for Internet of Things (Invited paper)

The number of sensors deployed at each and every place is growing at a faster rate to meet the current needs of modern society. The uninterrupted huge amount of data generated from sensors and other devices in Internet of Things (IoT) is to be captured and inferred into meaningful information. Context-aware computing is one of the key research issues in IoT paradigm and it is evident that it is successful in understanding each sensor data. As the physical world is highly dynamic the sensed context information is inherently imperfect or imprecise. Therefore the challenge here is to design a context information modelling and reasoning technique so as to extract meaningful information from raw sensor data. In this paper, we propose a rich and unique classification of context information from the perspective of IoT. Our research findings indicate the importance of the proposed context information classification and modelling process.
Fully Integrated On-Chip Coil in 0.13 $\mu {\rm m}$ CMOS for Wireless Power Transfer Through Biological Media

Delivering milliwatts of wireless power at centimeter distances is advantageous to many existing and emerging biomedical applications. It is highly desirable to fully integrate the receiver on a single chip in standard CMOS with no additional post-processing steps or external components. This paper presents a 2 × 2.18 mm2 on-chip wireless power transfer (WPT) receiver (Rx) coil fabricated in 0.13 μm CMOS. The WPT system utilizes a 14.5 × 14.5 mm2 transmitter (Tx) coil that is fabricated on a standard FR4 substrate. The on-chip power harvester demonstrates a peak WPT efficiency of -18.47 dB, -20.96 dB and -20.15 dB at 10 mm of separation through air, bovine muscle and 0.2 molar NaCl, respectively. The achieved efficiency enables the delivery of milliwatts of power to application circuits while staying below safe power density and electromagnetic (EM) exposure limits.
Unsupervised language filtering using the latent dirichlet allocation

To automatically build from scratch the language processing component for a speech synthesis system in a new language a purified text corpora is needed where any words and phrases from other languages are clearly identified or excluded. When using found data and where there is no inherent linguistic knowledge of the language/languages contained in the data, identifying the pure data is a difficult problem. We propose an unsupervised language identification approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation where we take the raw n-gram count as features without any smoothing, pruning or interpolation. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model is reformulated for the language identification task and Collapsed Gibbs Sampling is used to train an unsupervised language identification model. We show that such a model is highly capable of identifying the primary language in a corpus and filtering out other languages present.
Regulation of a strong F9 cryptic 5′ss by intrinsic elements and by combination of tailored U1snRNAs with antisense oligonucleotides

Mutations affecting specific splicing regulatory elements offer suitable models to better understand their interplay and to devise therapeutic strategies. Here we characterize a meaningful splicing model in which numerous Hemophilia B-causing mutations, either missense or at the donor splice site (5′ss) of coagulation F9 exon 2, promote aberrant splicing by inducing the usage of a strong exonic cryptic 5′ss. Splicing assays with natural and artificial F9 variants indicated that the cryptic 5′ss is regulated, among a network of regulatory elements, by an exonic splicing silencer (ESS). This finding and the comparative analysis of the F9 sequence across species showing that the cryptic 5′ss is always paralleled by the conserved ESS support a compensatory mechanism aimed at minimizing unproductive splicing. To recover splicing we tested antisense oligoribonucleotides masking the cryptic 5′ss, which were effective on exonic changes but promoted exon 2 skipping in the presence of mutations at the authentic 5′ss. On the other hand, we observed a very poor correction effect by small nuclear RNA U1 (U1snRNA) variants with increased or perfect complementarity to the defective 5′ss, a strategy previously exploited to rescue splicing. Noticeably, the combination of the mutant-specific U1snRNAs with antisense oligonucleotides produced appreciable amounts of correctly spliced transcripts (from 0 to 20–40%) from several mutants of the exon 2 5′ss. Based on the evidence of an altered interplay among ESS, cryptic and the authentic 5′ss as a disease-causing mechanism, we provide novel experimental insights into the combinatorial correction activity of antisense molecules and compensatory U1snRNAs.
Automatic Music Transcription Considering Time-Varying Tempo

Time-varying tempo of a song is one of the error sources for the identification of a note duration in automatic music recognition. This paper proposes an improved music transcription scheme equipped with the identification of note duration considering the time-varying tempo. In the proposed scheme the measures are found at first and the tempo, the playing time of each measure, is then estimated. The tempo is then used for resizing each IOI(Inter Onset Interval) length and considered to identify the accurate note duration, which increases the degree of correspondence to the music piece. In the experiment the proposed scheme found the accurate measure position for 14 monophonic children songs out of 16 ones recorded by men and women. Also, it achieved about 89.4% and 84.8% of the degree of matching to the original music piece for identification of note duration and pitch, respectively.
Low-power floating-point encoding for signal processing applications

The IEEE defined a standard for floating-point arithmetic used by processing systems (ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985). This directive encodes floating point numbers using a maximum of 64 bits: 23 bits of fractional in single precision format and 52 bits of fractional in double precision format. The new multimedia terminals require low-power applications; the most important floating-point units (adders and multipliers) represent a significant part of total power wasted by a modern system-on-chip. They might dissipate less power by using a reduced format representation. To verify this possibility, floating-point operations are simulated by real systems using different formats. We discuss multimedia systems operating in different scenarios, such as wireless communication and image manipulation.
Evaluation of thermal process lethality in meat for non-pathogenic Escherichia coli as a surrogate for Salmonella

Author: Redemann, Morgan, A. MS Institution: Purdue University Degree Received: December 2016 Title: Evaluation of Thermal Process Lethality in Meat for Non-Pathogenic Escherichia Coli as a Surrogate for Salmonella Major Professor: Manpreet Singh Non-typhoidal Salmonella is the leading cause of foodborne illness in the United States, resulting in about 20,000 hospitalizations and nearly 380 deaths annually. The meat processing industry has been especially plagued by Salmonella, from meat-inherent sources and more alarmingly, cross-contamination. For ready-to-eat (RTE) meat products specifically, this can cause significant problems in processing facilities ensuring safe product for consumption, resulting in foodborne illness. The development of standard lethality compliance guidelines by the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS) within Appendix A assists processors in confirming that Salmonella is inactivated in RTE beef and poultry products, based on a “worst case” raw product contamination condition. While this is beneficial, means of thermal process validation are limited. However, the identification of five non-pathogenic E. coli strains isolated from cattle may provide a method of validation for processors. Previous studies have investigated the behavior of the isolates individually in response to a variety of microbial interventions, including cooking, fermentation, freezing, refrigerated storage, and antimicrobial treatments as compared to the behavior E. coli O157:H7 as well as Salmonella. Based on the results of these studies, it was sensible to study the behavior of the combined non-pathogenic E. coli isolates in ground beef at varying fat contents under thermal processing conditions
Hybrid approaches for detecting credit card fraud

As a natural consequence of the multibillion dollar annual losses incurred as a result of credit card fraud, banks attach great importance to credit card fraud detection. In this paper, we proposed the use of six known models, namely, decision tree, random forest, Bayesian network, Naïve Bayes, support vector machine, and K* models, to form an ensemble for the detection of credit card fraud. We focused on the voting mechanisms used by the ensemble and proposed optimistic, pessimistic, and weighted voting strategies. The proposed model is called optimistic, pessimistic, and weighted voting in an ensemble of models. A dataset of real credit card transactions from a leading bank in Turkey was used to evaluate the performance of optimistic, pessimistic, and weighted voting in an ensemble of models. The results showed that the optimistic voting strategy enables the detection of 31.59% of fraudulent transactions with a false alarm rate of only 0.10%, the pessimistic voting strategy detects 93.92% of fraudulent transactions with a false alarm rate of 13.72%, and the weighted voting strategy detects 64.02% of fraudulent transactions with a false alarm rate of 0.75%. Banks can choose among these voting mechanisms depending on their preferred strategies for fraud detection and desired false alarm rates.
Emergence of Multidrug-Resistant Campylobacter Species Isolates with a Horizontally Acquired rRNA Methylase

ABSTRACT Antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter constitutes a serious threat to public health, and resistance to macrolides is of particular concern, as this class of antibiotics is the drug of choice for clinical therapy of campylobacteriosis. Very recently, a horizontally transferrable macrolide resistance mediated by the rRNA methylase gene erm(B) was reported in a Campylobacter coli isolate, but little is known about the dissemination of erm(B) among Campylobacter isolates and the association of erm(B)-carrying isolates with clinical disease. To address this question and facilitate the control of antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter, we determined the distribution of erm(B) in 1,554 C. coli and Campylobacter jejuni isolates derived from food-producing animals and clinically confirmed human diarrheal cases. The results revealed that 58 of the examined isolates harbored erm(B) and exhibited high-level resistance to macrolides, and most were recent isolates, derived in 2011-2012. In addition, the erm(B)-positive isolates were all resistant to fluoroquinolones, another clinically important antibiotic used for treating campylobacteriosis. The erm(B) gene is found to be associated with chromosomal multidrug resistance genomic islands (MDRGIs) of Gram-positive origin or with plasmids of various sizes. All MDRGIs were transferrable to macrolide-susceptible C. jejuni by natural transformation under laboratory conditions. Molecular typing of the erm(B)-carrying isolates by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST) identified diverse genotypes and outbreak-associated diarrheal isolates. Molecular typing also suggested zoonotic transmission of erm(B)-positive Campylobacter. These findings reveal an emerging and alarming trend of dissemination of erm(B) and MDRGIs in Campylobacter and underscore the need for heightened efforts to control their further spread.
Primary Class Size Reduction: How Policy Space, Physical Space, and Spatiality Shape What Happens in Real Schools

This article reviews the literature base on class size reduction and proposes a new analytic framework that we believe provides practically useful explanations of how primary class size reduction works. It presents descriptions of classroom practice and grounded explanations for how class size reduction affects educational core activities by considering the influences of policy space, physical space, and spatiality. By reporting on Ontario, Canada's Primary Class Size Reduction (PCS) Initiative, this article illuminates the factors that may occur in tandem with class size reduction—treating it not a simple policy change, but rather as a cluster of interrelated dynamics.
Assessing Students’ Conceptual Understanding in Science: An introduction about a national project in Taiwan

In this article, we discuss several aspects of the national project, the National Science Concept Learning Study, designed to assess elementary, middle, and secondary students’ conceptual understanding in science. After a short introduction to provide some history of the project, we describe the processes used in the integrative study, the participants in the research, the involvement of about 30 senior researchers and 80 research assistants, and the findings from the national data. Although the results of Taiwanese students’ conceptions in science are similar to those of western countries, some aspects of our students’ performance are unique to Taiwanese culture and language. This article concludes with some educational implications from the research findings.