Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Severe Tinnitus and Depressive Symptoms: A Complex Interaction

Investigating the relationship between tinnitus and depression, Ooms et al focus on the overlap of many items in selfreport questionnaires for depression and tinnitus. Whereas they argue that this overlap may result in artificial overestimation of the correlation between depression and tinnitus severity, we propose that the overlap in the items of depression and tinnitus assessment instruments may be the direct consequence of the symptomatic similarity of stressful tinnitus and depression. In this context, it is of relevance that the items of tinnitus questionnaires are based on subjectively reported complaints of tinnitus patients, underscoring their ecologic validity. Moreover, the authors demonstrate impressively that the different subscales of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) differ largely in their correlation with the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI). They show that somatic symptoms determine tinnitus severity whereas other depressive symptoms are less relevant. This finding reflects nicely the clinical observation that the symptom spectrum of tinnitus patients is different from the symptom spectrum of patients with a full-blown depressive illness. Tinnitus patients frequently complain about fatigue, irritability, insomnia, exhaustion, and concentration difficulties, whereas core symptoms of depression, such as depressed mood or loss of interest, are often less pronounced. The authors suggest that further studies should differentiate between mood and an effect of tinnitus on mood. But how should this be done practically? For the patient, it is almost impossible to distinguish whether a symptom such as sleep disorder is related to tinnitus or not, and if yes, whether tinnitus causes sleep disorder or vice versa. The wording of many questionnaires implies that depressive symptoms emerge as a consequence of tinnitus; however, this directionality is far from being clear. The key question remains: Why are some people suffering more and others less from their tinnitus? Psychophysiologic characteristics of the tinnitus (eg, loudness, pitch) do not explain the difference, which has been demonstrated in the study of Ooms et al as well. The co-occurrence of depressive symptoms plays a role, and it is rather a semantic question whether these co-occuring depressive symptoms can be called depression even if the symptom spectrum differs from the typical major depression. Neurobiologic research may contribute to a deeper understanding of the interplay between tinnitus severity, distress, and depression. Coactivation of unspecific distress networks seem to play a role in subjectively perceived tinnitus severity and may even antecede tinnitus-related activity in the auditory pathways.
A comparison of indoor radio propagation characteristics at 910 MHz and 1.75 GHz

The results of temporally and spatially distributed wideband (impulse response) propagation measurements made on fixed indoor radio channels at center frequencies of 910 MHz and 1.7 GHz are presented. Impulse response parameters, as well as envelope fading statistics are presented and compared for the two bands. It is found that for a specific location in either of the two buildings, the temporal dynamics of the channel are slightly less random at 910 MHz than at 1.75 GHz. It is believed, with due consideration of the quasistatic nature of the fading, that this would result in marginally better performance on a given transmit/receive link in the 900 MHz band. However, the results show that the relative coverage capabilities and static performance characteristics of systems operating in the two bands differ for different buildings. <<ETX>>
A textile-based wearable system for the prolonged assessment of cardiac mechanics in daily life

Seismocardiogram, SCG, can be detected over the 24 hours in ambulant subjects by a textile-based wearable system together with the electrocardiogram, ECG and respiration. In this pilot study we explored the possibility to derive 24 h profiles of cardiac time intervals, i.e. indexes of heart mechanical function, from the SCG recordings performed in daily life conditions by the above wearable system. Two healthy subjects were recruited for the study. They worn the system for 24 hours during a working day. From each recording, every 30 minutes the following parameters were derived from the ECG and SCG signals: RR interval, RRI, Pre-Ejection Period, PEP, Isovolumic Contraction Time, ICT, Left Ventricular Ejection Time, LVET, Isovolumic Relaxation Time, IRT. From the analysis it appears that 1) all parameters are characterized by a coefficient of variation in the same order of magnitude, and 2) 24 h LVET time profiles mirrors the long term RRI behavior. Common trends in PEP and ICT profiles were observed in one subject. This study indicates that indexes of cardiac mechanics can be derived from SCG recordings performed over the 24 hours. The obtained positive results encourage further studies to refine this methodology and confirm the present findings.
Brain Control of Olfaction via Top-down Regulation on Adult Neurogenesis

domains and show early synaptic responses to glutamate before the establishment of synaptic connections with mitral cells at the more distal portions of their dendritic arbors ( Panzanelli et al., 2009 ). In addition, olfactory deprivation differentially affects spine density in the distal and proximal den-dritic domains, where respectively centrip-etal and centrifugal synaptic connections take place (Kelsch et al., 2009). Hence, the role of central brain activity is exceedingly likely to affect the fate of developing GCs, but the mechanisms of this effect have yet to be elucidated. Surprisingly, only a few reports have aimed to do so (Bauer et al., 2003; Cooper-Kuhn et al., 2004; Veyrac et al., 2005, 2009) and, although focusing on the local OB reveals why younger neurons may be preferable to older ones, the mecha-nisms by which the brain makes this choice can not be fully clarified without consider -ing its feedback modulatory activity.Moreno et al. (2012) have recently shed new light on this issue and analyzed the interaction between centrifugal innerva-tion and plasticity in the olfactory bulb in a sensory context meaningful for both. The authors investigated the involvement of the noradrenergic signaling in the olfac-tory perceptual learning, a form of learning in which previous experience like olfactory habituation allows discrimination between perceptually similar odorants.They showed that blocking the noradr-energic system during olfactory enrichment abolishes its positive effects on olfactory dis-criminatory ability while the stimulation of the noradrenergic system alone results in better performances in the discriminatory task. To complete the picture of the involve-ment of the noradrenergic system, they
Comparison of Bond Strength of Steel Bars in Normal- and High-Strength Concrete

A comparative analytical study of the average bond strength at failure of reinforcing bars embedded in unconfined normal-strength concrete (NSC) and high-strength concrete (HSC) is undertaken. The analysis makes use of an experimentally derived local bond stress-slip model and considers the progressive bond deterioration along the development/splice length with the increase in bar force. Results of the average bond strength (or development/splice strength) predicted by the analysis showed excellent agreement with experimental data for both NSC and HSC. The analysis predicted a highly nonuniform bond stress distribution at bond failure along the development/splice length, particularly for HSC. Below a certain limit of the development/splice length (about 15-20db), the average bond strength at failure, normalized to fc′1/2, is larger for HSC as compared to NSC. However, as the development length increases beyond this limit, the normalized bond strength of HSC becomes progressively smaller than that of NSC.
Bathymetry of the Pacific plate and its implications for thermal evolution of lithosphere and mantle dynamics

[1] A long-standing question in geodynamics is the cause of deviations of ocean depth or seafloor topography from the prediction of a cooling half-space model (HSC). Are the deviations caused entirely by mantle plumes or lithospheric reheating associated with sublithospheric small-scale convection or some other mechanisms? In this study we analyzed the age and geographical dependences of ocean depth for the Pacific plate, and we removed the effects of sediments, seamounts, and large igneous provinces (LIPs), using recently available data sets of high-resolution bathymetry, sediments, seamounts, and LIPs. We found that the removal of seamounts and LIPs results in nearly uniform standard deviations in ocean depth of $300 m for all ages. The ocean depth for the Pacific plate with seamounts, LIPs, the Hawaiian swell, and South Pacific super-swell excluded can be fit well with a HSC model till $80–85 Ma and a plate model for older seafloor, particularly, with the HSC-Plate depth-age relation recently developed by Hillier and Watts (2005) with an entirely different approach for the North Pacific Ocean. A similar ocean depth-age relation is also observed for the northern region of our study area with no major known mantle plumes. Residual topography with respect to Hillier and Watts' HSC-Plate model shows two distinct topographic highs: the Hawaiian swell and South Pacific super-swell. However, in this residual topography map, the Darwin Rise does not display anomalously high topography except the area with seamounts and LIPs. We also found that the topography estimated from the seismic model of the Pacific lithosphere of Ritzwoller et al. (2004) generally agrees with the observed topography, including the reduced topography at relatively old seafloor. Our analyses show that while mantle plumes may be important in producing the Hawaiian swell and South Pacific super-swell, they cannot be the only cause for the topographic deviations. Other mechanisms, particularly lithospheric reheating associated with ''trapped'' heat below old lithosphere (Huang and Zhong, 2005), play an essential role in causing the deviations in topography from the HSC model prediction. the Pacific plate and its implications for thermal evolution of lithosphere and mantle dynamics,
Automatic Semantic Classification for Chinese Unknown Compound Nouns

The paper describes a similarity-based model to present the morphological rules for Chinese compound nouns. This representation model serves functions of 1) as the morphological rules of the compounds, 2) as a mean to evaluate the properness of a compound construction, and 3) as a mean to disambiguate the semantic ambiguity of the morphological head of a compound noun. An automatic semantic classification system for Chinese unknown compounds is thus implemented based on the model. Experiments and error analyses are also presented.
Further Investigation of MDS as a Tool for Evaluation of Speech Quality of Synthesized Speech

The dissertation investigates MDS as a tool for the evaluation of the quality of synthesized speech. More specifically, it investigates the relations between Weighted Euclidean Distance Scaling and Simple Euclidean Distance Scaling, and how aggregating data affects the MDS configuration. It is investigated to what extent a subset of experimental participants and/or experimental stimuli are representative of a larger test set. For that purpose an experiment was conducted on the basis of a subset of stimuli used in the Blizzard Challenge 2008. Issues in the evaluation of Speech Synthesis are discussed and an overview of the basics of multi-dimensional scaling is given to an extent that allows comprehension of methods used in the application of Multi-dimensional scaling to speech synthesis evaluation. Based on the experimental findings, further experiments are suggested with the goal in mind that testing procedures can be optimized to such an extent that the number of experimental participants can be drastically reduced.
An improved genetic algorithm to minimal test cost reduction

Attribute reduction is a classical problem in rough sets. Test-cost-sensitive attribute reduction is a generalization of the problem. It aims to find a minimal test cost set which preserves the whole information of the decision system. Some heuristic reduction algorithms have been proposed to deal with it. However, the results are unsatisfactory especially on medium-sized datasets, such as Mushroom. In this paper, we propose a new attribute reduction approach called improved genetic algorithm. The new approach adopts the cross generational elitist selection strategy. It selects better individuals from the previous generation and the current population to produce the current generation. It can ensure better individuals maintained from one generation to the next. In addition, the fitness function is different from the existing ones. The proposed approach is compared with the two other existing genetic algorithms through experiments on four VCI datasets. The experimental results show that the new approach consistently outperforms the existing ones. Therefore it is more appropriate for medium-sized datasets.
Linear-time matrix transpose algorithms using vector register file with diagonal registers

Matrix transpose operation (MT) is used frequently in many multimedia and high performance applications. Therefore, using a faster MT operation results in a shorter execution time of these applications. In this paper we propose two new MT algorithms. The algorithms exploit diagonal register properties to achieve a linear-time execution of MT operation using vector processor that supports diagonal registers. We demonstrate the algorithms as well as proofs, examples, and various enhancements to the proposed algorithms A performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithms are at least twice as fast as one of the leading MT algorithms such as an algorithm that is implemented using Motorola's AltiVec architecture (n/spl ges/16). We believe that our work opens new doors to improve the execution time of many two-dimensional operations such as DCT, DFT, and Shearsort.
Quantitative Evaluation of Intel PEBS Overhead for Online System-Noise Analysis

Analyzing system-noise incurred to high-throughput systems (e.g., Spark, RDBMS) from the underlying machines must be in the granularity of the message- or request-level to find the root causes of performance anomalies, because messages are passed through many components in very short periods. To this end, we consider using Precise Event Based Sampling (PEBS) equipped in Intel CPUs at higher sampling rates than used normally is promising. It saves context information (e.g., the general purpose registers) at occurrences of various hardware events such as cache misses. The information can be used to associate performance anomalies caused by system noise with specific messages. One challenge is that quantitative analysis of PEBS overhead with high sampling rates has not yet been studied. This is critical because high sampling rates can cause severe overhead but performance problems are often reproducible only in real environments. In this paper, we evaluate the overhead of PEBS and show: (1) every time PEBS saves context information, the target workload slows down by 200-300 ns due to the CPU overhead of PEBS, (2) the CPU overhead can be used to predict actual overhead incurred with complex workloads including multi-threaded ones with high accuracy, and (3) PEBS incurs cache pollution and extra memory IO since PEBS writes data into the CPU cache, and the severity of cache pollution is affected both by the sampling rate and the buffer size allocated for PEBS. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to quantitatively analyze the overhead of PEBS.
O-demethylase from Acetobacterium dehalogenans--cloning, sequencing, and active expression of the gene encoding the corrinoid protein.

The ether-cleaving O-demethylase from the strictly anaerobic homoacetogen Acetobacterium dehalogenans catalyses the methyltransfer from 4-hydroxy-3-methoxy-benzoate (vanillate) to tetrahydrofolate. In the first step a vanillate :corrinoid protein methyltransferase (methyltransferase I) mediates the methylation of a 25-kDa corrinoid protein with the cofactor reduced to cob(I)alamin. The methyl group is then transferred to tetrahydrofolate by the action of a methylcorrinoid protein:tetrahydrofolate methyltransferase (methyltransferase II). Using primers derived from the amino-terminal sequences of the corrinoid protein and the vanillate:corrinoid protein methyltransferase (methyltransferase I), a 723-bp fragment was amplified by PCR, which contained the gene odmA encoding the corrinoid protein of O-demethylase. Downstream of odmA, part of the odmB gene encoding methyltransferase I was identified. The amino acid sequence deduced from odmA showed about 60% similarity to the cobalamin-binding domain of methionine synthase from Escherichia coli (MetH) and to corrinoid proteins of methyltransferase systems involved in methanogenesis from methanol and methylamines. The sequence contained the DXHXXG consensus sequence typical for displacement of the dimethylbenzimidazole base of the corrinoid cofactor by a histidine from the protein. Heterologous expression of odmA in E. coli yielded a colourless, oxygen-insensitive apoprotein, which was able to bind one mol cobalamin or methylcobalamin/mol protein. Both of these reconstituted forms of the protein were active in the overall O-demethylation reaction. OdmA reconstituted with hydroxocobalamin and reduced by titanium(III) citrate to the cob(I)alamin form was methylated with vanillate by methyltransferase I in an irreversible reaction. Methylcobalamin carrying OdmA served as methyl group donor for the methylation of tetrahydrofolate by methyltransferase II. This reaction was found to be reversible, since methyltranSferase II also catalysed the methylation of cob(I)alamin containing OdmA with methyltetrahydrofolate.
Role of axons in the regulation of PO biosynthesis by Schwann cells

The role of axons in the expression of the major myelin glycoprotein, PO, has been investigated using neuron/Schwann cell cultures. These cultures were either nonmyelinating or myelinating due to growth in defined medium or in medium containing serum and chick embryo extract, respectively. The neurons and Schwann cells used in the studies were derived from embryonic day 15 rat dorsal root ganglia (DRG), and the Schwann cells from these ganglia are shown not to synthesize appreciable levels of Po prior to growth in culture. Myelinating cultures of Schwann cells and neurons grown together for 18–21 days synthesize Po that is readily identified by immunoblotting. The nonmyelinating cultures, which do not assemble basal lamina, also synthesize Po that is detectable by either [3H]mannose precursor incorporation or by immunoblotting. The steady‐state level of Po in the nonmyelinating cultures is less than that of the myelinating cultures, and the Po that is synthesized by the former appears to be catabolized shortly after its biosynthesis. Since nonmyelinating Schwann cells synthesize Po when in contact with neurites in vitro, we have examined the ability of such nonmyelinating cells to express the glycoprotein in vivo. Very little steady‐state Po is detected in immunoblots of the adult rat cervical sympathetic trunk (CST), a nerve in which approximately 99% of the axons are nonmyelinated. Similarly, the amounts of [3H]mannose and [3H]amino acids that are incorporated into newly synthesized Po are much lower in the CST than in the adult sciatic nerve. The Schwann cells of the CST are induced to synthesize myelin after growth in serum‐containing medium with embryonic DRG neurites that are devoid of endogenous Schwann cells due to prior treatment with an antimitotic agent. Immunoblot analysis of these cultures reveals a level of Po that is comparable to that of myelinating DRG Schwann cell/neuron cultures. These data indicate that DRG neurites supply a signal that can initiate the synthesis of Po in the absence of basal lamina and myelination. Furthermore, this signal may be reduced or altered in the CST.
Safety and Antiviral Response at 12 Months of Lopinavir/Ritonavir Therapy in Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1-Infected Children Experienced With Three Classes of Antiretrovirals

Introduction. Many human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-infected children have already failed treatment with 2 or even 3 classes of antiretrovirals. Coformulation of lopinavir with low dose ritonavir exhibits a potent antiretroviral effect. However, the data in heavily pretreated children are still scarce. This study evaluated the safety and effectiveness of combination therapy including lopinavir/ritonavir in children with prior exposure to all classes of oral antiretrovirals. Methods. This was an open label multicenter observational study, in which data were reviewed according to a standardized protocol. The study population included all HIV-1-infected children with virologic failure (HIV-1 RNA >5000 copies/mL) followed in 12 Spanish hospitals for >12 months, experienced with the 3 classes of oral antiretrovirals, in whom a lopinavir/ritonavir-containing regimen was started. Results. By March 2003, 45 patients had been treated with lopinavir/ritonavir for a median of 18 months (range, 3–28). The median age at baseline was 9.7 years (range, 4.3–17.1). The median times of prior treatment were 88 months (range, 31–145) with nucleoside reverse transcription inhibitors and 42 months (range, 19–63) with protease inhibitors. Twenty-five patients were classified as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention clinical category C. Median values for absolute and percentage CD4 at baseline were 501 (range, 6–1512) and 19% (range, 0.5–49), respectively, and plasma HIV-RNA was 5.0 log10 copies/mL (range, 4.1–6.1). During follow-up, 11 (24%) children switched from liquid to solid formulation. At 48 weeks, the median values for absolute and percentage CD4 increased by 199 cells/μL and 3%, respectively, and median plasma viral load declined 1.75 log10 copies/mL. Forty-two percent of children achieved a plasma RNA of <400 copies/mL (intent to treat analysis). Baseline genotypic resistance was available in 40 children. Nonresponders had 7.0 ± 1.6 protease inhibitor-associated mutations at baseline compared with 4.8 ± 1.7 in children achieving virologic suppression (P = 0.06). Adverse events were described in 18 children. Three children permanently discontinued and 4 transiently withdrew lopinavir/ritonavir. At 12 months, there were mild but not significant increases in plasma cholesterol and triglycerides. Conclusions. Lopinavir/ritonavir when given as part of salvage regimen is well-tolerated, although switching to pills is frequently required. The regimen has a potent and durable antiretroviral activity in most heavily pretreated children, despite the presence of multiple mutations to all classes of oral antiretrovirals.