Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia with comorbid substance use disorder

ABSTRACT Introduction: While antipsychotics remain the cornerstone of treatment for schizophrenic patients with comorbid substance use disorder (SUD), such treatment is nonetheless complicated by frequent medical comorbidity and poor adherence to medication. Areas covered: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on the efficacy of antipsychotics for the treatment of schizophrenic patients with comorbid SUD are reviewed and analysed on the basis of a systematic literature search (PubMed) ranging from 1985 to 2015. On the same basis, findings from RCTs on the efficacy of psychotropic and other medications used for primary SUD are summarised, and the main issues liable to influence treatment choice are discussed, including pharmacodynamic as well as pharmacokinetic interactions, adherence, medical comorbidity and the impact on brain structure. Expert opinion: As far as the treatment of schizophrenic patients with SUD is concerned, direct and indirect evidence tends to stand in favour of the use of second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs), and particularly those with lower metabolic, cardiovascular and extrapyramidal side effects, as well as those with a depot formulation. A few of the usual medications for the treatment of primary SUD, such as naltrexone and disulfiram for alcohol use and bupropion for tobacco cessation, can also be safely and efficiently administered to schizophrenic patients with SUD.
Altered Tumor-Cell Glycosylation Promotes Metastasis

Malignant transformation of cells is associated with aberrant glycosylation presented on the cell-surface. Commonly observed changes in glycan structures during malignancy encompass aberrant expression and glycosylation of mucins; abnormal branching of N-glycans; and increased presence of sialic acid on proteins and glycolipids. Accumulating evidence supports the notion that the presence of certain glycan structures correlates with cancer progression by affecting tumor-cell invasiveness, ability to disseminate through the blood circulation and to metastasize in distant organs. During metastasis tumor-cell-derived glycans enable binding to cells in their microenvironment including endothelium and blood constituents through glycan-binding receptors – lectins. In this review, we will discuss current concepts how tumor-cell-derived glycans contribute to metastasis with the focus on three types of lectins: siglecs, galectins, and selectins. Siglecs are present on virtually all hematopoietic cells and usually negatively regulate immune responses. Galectins are mostly expressed by tumor cells and support tumor-cell survival. Selectins are vascular adhesion receptors that promote tumor-cell dissemination. All lectins facilitate interactions within the tumor microenvironment and thereby promote cancer progression. The identification of mechanisms how tumor glycans contribute to metastasis may help to improve diagnosis, prognosis, and aid to develop clinical strategies to prevent metastasis.
Effects of amino acid substitutions in and around the arginine‐glycine‐aspartic acid (RGD) sequence on fertilization and parthenogenetic development in mature bovine oocytes

Integrins have been shown to be involved in the process of fertilization and many integrin–ligand interactions are mediated through the recognition of an arginine‐glycine‐aspartic acid (RGD) sequence. Despite the fact the RGD domain is a principal player in determining the functional characteristics of an adhesive protein, increasing evidence has accumulated implicating the amino acids flanking the RGD sequence in determining the functional properties of the RGD‐containing protein. A set of linear peptides in which the amino acid sequence in and around the RGD tri‐peptide was modified was synthesized to better understand the specificity of the RGD–receptor interaction. Mature oocytes were fertilized in vitro in the presence of RGD‐containing and RGD‐modified peptides. Both the RGD‐containing and RGD‐modified peptides impaired the ability of sperm to fertilize bovine oocytes, illustrated by a reduction in cleavage. The linear modified RGD containing peptides were also examined for their ability to induce parthenogenetic development with the objective of providing a linear RGD peptide with greater biological activity than the one (GRGDSPK) used previously (Campbell et al., 2000 ). The data demonstrate the specificity of the receptor for the RGD sequence, further implicate the involvement of integrins in the process of bovine fertilization, and illustrate the importance of the amino acids surrounding the RGD sequence in determining the binding and functional properties of RGD‐containing peptides. The data support the findings that a linear RGD peptide can block fertilization and that amino acids around the RGD sequence have an impact on the biological activity of the receptor. Mol. Reprod. Dev. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Causal discovery with scale-mixture model for spatiotemporal variance dependencies

In conventional causal discovery, structural equation models (SEM) are directly applied to the observed variables, meaning that the causal effect can be represented as a function of the direct causes themselves. However, in many real world problems, there are significant dependencies in the variances or energies, which indicates that causality may possibly take place at the level of variances or energies. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic causal scale-mixture model with spatiotemporal variance dependencies to represent a specific type of generating mechanism of the observations. In particular, the causal mechanism including contemporaneous and temporal causal relations in variances or energies is represented by a Structural Vector AutoRegressive model (SVAR). We prove the identifiability of this model under the non-Gaussian assumption on the innovation processes. We also propose algorithms to estimate the involved parameters and discover the contemporaneous causal structure. Experiments on synthetic and real world data are conducted to show the applicability of the proposed model and algorithms.
An Empirical Study of Univariate and Genetic Algorithm-Based Feature Selection in Binary Classification with Microarray Data

Background We consider both univariate- and multivariate-based feature selection for the problem of binary classification with microarray data. The idea is to determine whether the more sophisticated multivariate approach leads to better misclassification error rates because of the potential to consider jointly significant subsets of genes (but without overfitting the data). Methods We present an empirical study in which 10-fold cross-validation is applied externally to both a univariate-based and two multivariate- (genetic algorithm (GA)-) based feature selection processes. These procedures are applied with respect to three supervised learning algorithms and six published two-class microarray datasets. Results Considering all datasets, and learning algorithms, the average 10-fold external cross-validation error rates for the univariate-, single-stage GA-, and two-stage GA-based processes are 14.2%, 14.6%, and 14.2%, respectively. We also find that the optimism bias estimates from the GA analyses were half that of the univariate approach, but the selection bias estimates from the GA analyses were 2.5 times that of the univariate results. Conclusions We find that the 10-fold external cross-validation misclassification error rates were very comparable. Further, we find that a two-stage GA approach did not demonstrate a significant advantage over a 1-stage approach. We also find that the univariate approach had higher optimism bias and lower selection bias compared to both GA approaches.
On the Mathematical Properties of Linguistic Theories

Metatheoretical findings regarding the decidability, generative capacity, and recognition complexity of several syntactic theories are surveyed. These include context-free, transformational, lexical-functional, generalized phrase structure, tree adjunct, and stratificational grammars. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results with respect to linguistic theory.
A anti-jamming method for satellite navigation system based on multi-objective optimization technique

In this paper, an anti-jamming method, which turns the single objective optimization problem into a multi-objective optimization problem by utilizing 2-norm, is proposed. The proposed jamming suppression method can reduce the wide nulls and wrong nulls problems, which are generated by the common adaptive nulling methods. Therefore a better signal-noise-ratio (SNR) can be achieved, especially when the jammers are close to satellite signals. It can also improve the robustness of the algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by simulation and practical outdoor experiments with the GPS L1 band C/A signals. The experimental results show that with the dedicated method, the nulls targeting at the corresponding jammers become narrower and the wrong nulls can be eliminated.
End-to-End Known-Interference Cancellation (E2E-KIC) with Multi-Hop Interference

Recently, end-to-end known-interference cancellation (E2E-KIC) has been proposed as a promising technique for wireless networks. It sequentially cancels out the known interferences at each node so that wireless multi-hop transmission can achieve a similar throughput as single-hop transmission. Existing work on E2E-KIC assumed that the interference of a transmitter to those nodes outside the transmitter's communication range is negligible. In practice, however, this assumption is not always valid. There are many cases where a transmitter causes notable interference to nodes beyond its communication distance. From a wireless networking perspective, such interference is caused by a node to other nodes that are multiple hops away, thus we call it multi-hop interference. The presence of multi-hop interference poses fundamental challenges to E2E-KIC, where known procedures cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we propose an E2E-KIC approach which allows the existence of multi-hop interference. In particular, we present a method that iteratively cancels unknown interferences transmitted across multiple hops. We analyze mathematically why and when this approach works and the performance of it. The analysis is further supported by numerical results.
Adolescent Self-Reported Health in Relation to School Factors

The aim of the study was to examine school-related determinants of self-reported health among adolescents. Questionnaire survey data comprising 4,972 students, Grades 7 through 9, from 20 schools in northern Sweden were used. Also, complimentary data about each school were collected from the Swedish National Agency for Education. Using multilevel logistic regression analyses, results showed that most variation in self-reported health was explained by individual-level differences. Truancy, bullying, and poor relations with teachers significantly increased the odds ratio of reporting poor general health, for boys and for girls. Most variables at the school level, for example, school size and student–teacher ratio, did not render significant associations with students’ self-reported health. In conclusion, this study indicates that health promotion at school, including school health services, may benefit from focusing primarily on individual-level determinants of health, that is, students’ relations to peers and teachers, without ignoring that bullying and weak student–teacher relationships also may induce school-level interventions.
Daily Sitting Time and All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis

Objective To quantify the association between daily total sitting and all-cause mortality risk and to examine dose-response relationships with and without adjustment for moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Methods Studies published from 1989 to January 2013 were identified via searches of multiple databases, reference lists of systematic reviews on sitting and health, and from authors’ personal literature databases. We included prospective cohort studies that had total daily sitting time as a quantitative exposure variable, all-cause mortality as the outcome and reported estimates of relative risk, or odds ratios or hazard ratios with 95% confidence intervals. Two authors independently extracted the data and summary estimates of associations were computed using random effects models. Results Six studies were included, involving data from 595,086 adults and 29,162 deaths over 3,565,569 person-years of follow-up. Study participants were mainly female, middle-aged or older adults from high-income countries; mean study quality score was 12/15 points. Associations between daily total sitting time and all-cause mortality were not linear. With physical activity adjustment, the spline model of best fit had dose-response HRs of 1.00 (95% CI: 0.98-1.03), 1.02 (95% CI: 0.99-1.05) and 1.05 (95% CI: 1.02-1.08) for every 1-hour increase in sitting time in intervals between 0-3, >3-7 and >7 h/day total sitting, respectively. This model estimated a 34% higher mortality risk for adults sitting 10 h/day, after taking physical activity into account. The overall weighted population attributable fraction for all-cause mortality for total daily sitting time was 5.9%, after adjusting for physical activity. Conclusions Higher amounts of daily total sitting time are associated with greater risk of all-cause mortality and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity appears to attenuate the hazardous association. These findings provide a starting point for identifying a threshold on which to base clinical and public health recommendations for overall sitting time, in addition to physical activity guidelines.
Competition on Common Value Markets with Naive Traders - A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiring a company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition of both, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higher prices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers increases prices, competition of naive sellers promotes effciency enhancing trade. Our predictions are tested experimentally.
Effects of Modification of the Transcription Initiation Site Context on Citrus Tristeza Virus Subgenomic RNA Synthesis

ABSTRACT Citrus tristeza virus (CTV), a member of the Closteroviridae, has a positive-sense RNA genome of about 20 kb organized into 12 open reading frames (ORFs). The last 10 ORFs are expressed through 3′-coterminal subgenomic RNAs (sgRNAs) regulated in both amounts and timing. Additionally, relatively large amounts of complementary sgRNAs are produced. We have been unable to determine whether these sgRNAs are produced by internal promotion from the full-length template minus strand or by transcription from the minus-stranded sgRNAs. Understanding the regulation of 10 sgRNAs is a conceptual challenge. In analyzing commonalities of a replicase complex in producing so many sgRNAs, we examined initiating nucleotides of the sgRNAs. We mapped the 5′ termini of intermediate- (CP and p13) and low- (p18) produced sgRNAs that, like the two highly abundant sgRNAs (p20 and p23) previously mapped, all initiate with an adenylate. We then examined modifications of the initiation site, which has been shown to be useful in defining mechanisms of sgRNA synthesis. Surprisingly, mutation of the initiating nucleotide of the CTV sgRNAs did not prevent sgRNA accumulation. Based on our results, the CTV replication complex appears to initiate sgRNA synthesis with purines, preferably with adenylates, and is able to initiate synthesis using a nucleotide a few positions 5′ or 3′ of the native initiation nucleotide. Furthermore, the context of the initiation site appears to be a regulatory mechanism for levels of sgRNA production. These data do not support either of the established mechanisms for synthesis of sgRNAs, suggesting that CTV sgRNA production utilizes a different mechanism.
SynthAssist: Querying an Audio Synthesizer by Vocal Imitation

Programming an audio synthesizer can be a difficult task for many. However, if a user has a general idea of the sound they are trying to program, they may be able to imitate it with their voice. This paper presents SynthAssist, a system for interactively searching the synthesis space of an audio synthesizer. In this work, we present how to use the system for querying a database of audio synthesizer patches (i.e. settings/parameters) by vocal imitation and user feedback. To account for the limitations of the human voice, it uses both absolute and relative time series representations of features and relevance feedback on both the feature weights and time series to refine the query. The method presented in this paper can be used to search through large databases of previously existing “factory presets” or program a synthesizer using the data-driven approach to automatic synthesizer programming.
The role of water in the evolution of the continental crust

Abstract: Aqueous fluids have a profound influence on the evolution of the crust, both as agents of chemical mass transfer and mineral reactions, and through modifying its rheology. This paper is particularly concerned with the composition and role of fluids through the crustal cycle of burial, metamorphism and uplift. Information now comes from both conventional geological studies and from geophysics, which has documented both the presence of fluid in active areas of the crust, and also its migration in response to faulting. This contrasts with the overall slow rate of some fluid processes: for example, devolatilization reactions are endothermic and limited by the rate of heat supply. There is no clear distinction between diagenetic and metamorphic fluids, and extensive equilibration with host rocks means that few chemical or isotopic characteristics survive to provide tracers for deep fluid origins. After the metamorphic peak, remaining pore fluid is consumed in hydration reactions resulting in strong, dry rock. Subsequently, infiltration may reintroduce fluids but these normally survive only briefly until consumed by hydration reactions. Metamorphic rocks are strongly overpressured during prograde metamorphism and therefore have a low permeability. Considerable doubt is therefore cast on some claims of widespread and pervasive large fluid fluxes accompanying metamorphism.
Tracking and classification using aspect-dependent RCS and kinematic data

The joint target tracking and classification using target-to-sensor aspect-dependent Radar Cross Section (RCS) and kinematic data for multistatic sonar network is presented in this paper. The scattered signals measured from different orientations of a target may vary due to aspect-dependant RCS. A complex target may contain several dozen significant scattering centers and dozens of other less significant scatterers. Because of this multiplicity of scatterers, the net RCS pattern exhibits high variation with aspect angle. Thus, radar cross sections from multiple aspects of a target, which are obtained via multiple sensors, will help in accurately determining the target class. By modeling the deterministic relationship that exits between RCS and target aspect, both the target class information and the target orientation can be estimated. Kinematic data are also very helpful in determining the target class as it describes the target motion pattern and its orientation. The proposed algorithm exploits the inter-dependency of target state and the target class using aspect-dependent RCS and kinematic information in order to improve both the state estimates and classification of each target. The simulation studies demonstrate the merits of the proposed joint target tracking and classification algorithm based on aspect-dependant RCS and kinematic information.
Design and Multiplierless Realization of Digital Synthesis Filters for Hybrid-Filter-Bank A/D Converters

This paper studies the optimal least squares and minimax design and realization of digital synthesis filters for hybrid-filter-bank analog-to-digital converters (HFB ADCs) to meet a given spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR). The problem for designing finite-impulse-response synthesis filters is formulated as a second-order cone-programming problem, which is convex and allows linear and quadratic constraints such as peak aliasing error to be incorporated. The fixed coefficients of the designed synthesis filters are efficiently implemented using sum-of-power-of-two (SOPOT) coefficients, while the internal word length used for each intermediate data is minimized using geometric programming. The main sources of error are analyzed, and a new formula of SFDR in terms of these errors is derived. The effects of component variations of analog analysis filters on the HFB ADC are also addressed by means of two new robust HFB ADC design algorithms based on stochastic uncertainty and worst case uncertainty models. Design results show that the proposed approach offers more flexibility and better performance than conventional methods in achieving a given SFDR and that the robust design algorithms are more robust to parameter uncertainties than the nominal design in which the uncertainties are not taken into account.
MK-pad: a Mouse+Keyboard input technique for distance interaction through a mobile tablet device

We introduce MK-Pad (Mouse+Keyboard Pad), a technique for entering text and performing mouse operations using a tablet device for distance interaction. MK-Pad uses the screen of a 10.1" tablet touchscreen to host a soft keyboard and turns the screen into a large multi-touch trackpad. The multi-touch capabilities of the tablet make it possible to avoid the need for explicit mode switching between text-entry and mouse operations. Similarly, because of the relatively large size of the tablet display, we are able to map the entire external screen onto the tablet display and this provides users with both absolute and relative cursor positioning: tapping causes the cursor to jump to the corresponding location, providing rapid movement across large distances, while clutching using relative mode supports fine positioning control. We conducted two studies. We use data from the first study to inform the design of MK-Pad. In the second study we compare MK-Pad against the standard mouse and keyboard. The results show that MK-Pad has potential and a good alternative to mouse and keyboard for distance interaction with large displays.