Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk Factors for Colorectal Cancer in Thailand.

BACKGROUND Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide. This study aimed to investigate the risk factors for colorectal cancer in the Thai population. MATERIALS AND METHODS A cohort study was carried out in Khon Kaen, Thailand, including 71 cases of histologically confirmed CRC patients among 19,861 participants, aged 30-69 years, who were recruited for a cohort study during the period 1990-2001. Participants were followed-up until 31 December, 2013. To identify factors associated with the incidence of colorectal cancer, hazard ratios were evaluated using Cox proportional hazard regression. RESULTS No environmental variables could be shown to be significantly related to the risk of CRC. Although in our sample, CRC was more prevalent among males, ex-smokers, and those who drank alcohol beverages ≥ 50 gram/day, but we could not demonstrate significantly associations (HRmale= 1.67, 95% CI, 0.80-3.49, HR ex-smokers = 1.34, 95% CI, 0.52-3.46, and HRalc≥ 50 = 1.08, 95% CI, 0.43-2.71). Individuals within the sample with a family history of cancer, working hour >8 hours per day, and current-smokers appeared to have decrease risk of CRC, but again these relationship could not be shown to be significantly associated (HRfam cancer= 0.96, 95% CI, 0.85-1.09, HRwork>8= 0.84, 95% CI, 0.36-1.93, and HRcurrent-smoker = 0.51, 95% CI, 0.18-1.38). CONCLUSIONS We found no evidence of environmental factors effecting the risk of CRC. There is a need for further research to determine why factors identified risk in other populations appear to not be associated with CRC risk in Thais.
Predicting the evolution of communities in social networks using structural and temporal features

During the last years, there is increasing interest in analyzing social networks and modeling their dynamics at different scales. This work focuses on predicting the future form of communities, which represent the mesoscale structure of networks, while the communities arise as a result of user interaction. We employ several structural and temporal features to represent communities, along with their past form, that are used to formulate a supervised learning task to predict whether a community will continue as currently is, shrink, grow or completely disappear. To test our methodology, we created a real-life social network dataset consisting of an excerpt of posts from the Mathematics Stack Exchange Q&A site. In the experiments, special care is taken in handling the class imbalance in the dataset and in investigating how the past evolutions of a community affect predictions.
On Particle Acceleration around Shocks. II. A Fully General Method for Arbitrary Shock Velocities and Scattering Media

The probability that a particle, crossing the shock along a given direction, is reflected backward along another direction was shown to be the key element in determining the spectrum of nonthermal particles accelerated via the Fermi mechanism around a plane-parallel shock in the test-particle limit. Here an explicit equation for this probability distribution is given for both the upstream and downstream sections. Although analytically intractable, this equation is solved numerically, allowing the determination of the spectrum in full generality, without limitation to shock speed or scattering properties. A number of cases are then computed, making contact with previous numerical work, in all regimes: Newtonian, transrelativistic, and fully relativistic.
A Server Selection Method for Web-Based Multiserver Systems

In our previous work, we proposed a dynamic data reallocation method for Web-based multiserver Multiplayer On-line Role-Playing Game (MORPG) systems. This method handles the data allocation as a combinational optimization problem. It is solved by using a tabu search that is a well-known meta-heuristic algorithm. Our system has some Web servers and an additional computation server. The computation server solves algorithm and decides the data allocation. However, each load of server is not completely balanced. This means that some Web server might have free computing resources. We aim to use these resources effectively. Therefore, our system handles a Web server that has free resources as a computation server. In this paper, we propose a selection method of a computation server in the Web servers. The server loads might be predicted because the data allocation is decided according to the last server loads and the user requests. Therefore, our system predicts the load of each server and selects a Web server. This selected server acts the computation server and decides the data allocation for the next term. After that, the computation server predicts the server load and selects the next computation server. We evaluates the performance of our system by measuring the latency values for game users and the server loads.
Brain tuned to music.

Music is the art of thinking in sounds.1 With its power to evoke and communicate emotions it has long intrigued philosophers, but only recently has it claimed the attention of neuroscientists. Even today, there are some who see it as a mere epiphenomenon.2 Many others, however, are exploring the neurological foundations of music perception. In this review article we focus on mechanisms by which music is processed by the brain.
Courtship behaviour and mating success of wild-caught
 Drosophila silvestris
 males

The courtship sequences of wild-caughtDrosophila silvestrismales paired with virgin females (the daughters of wild-caught females) were studied in the laboratory to examine behavioural characters affecting male mating success. Successful males courted the female persistently (without breaks) and spent more time in the head-under-wings position and in wing vibration than unsuccessful males. The relative durations of head-under-wings and wing vibration appeared to be consistent within males. Females were active and vigorous participants in courtship, contrary to the stereotype of femaleDrosophilabeing passive observers of male displays. The females could interrupt the courtship by flying away from the courting male, but they often returned to the male waving their wings. Receptive females waved their wings, and spent more time standing and less time preening than unreceptive females. After slashing at the male (or as a reaction to male circling) they stood still more often than unreceptive females. It appears that although receptive females do not have a particular signal that invariably indicates receptivity, they encourage male courtship throughout the sequence, by being active early, and standing still later. These results will serve as a baseline for comparisons with other species, and to stimulate experiments to examine female mating preferences.
<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$K$</tex></formula>-band High-PAE Wide-Tuning-Range VCO Using Triple-Coupled <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$LC$</tex></formula> Tanks

This brief presents a fully differential K-band voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) using commercial 0.18- μm SiGe BiCMOS process. By using triple-coupled LC tanks with strong coupling and varactor-controlled capacitor bank, the proposed VCO simultaneously achieves a wide tuning range, low phase noise, high output RF power, and high power-added efficiency (PAE). The implemented VCO demonstrates an oscillation frequency range from 22.50 to 26.23 GHz, a frequency tuning range of 15.3%, a phase noise of -107.7 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset, an output power of -3.1 dBm, PAE of 5.97%, and a figure of merit of -186.9 dBc/Hz with a dc power of 8.2 mW.
Heteropoda Toxin 2 Interaction with Kv4.3 and Kv4.1 Reveals Differences in Gating Modification

Kv4 (Shal) potassium channels are responsible for the transient outward K+ currents in mammalian hearts and central nervous systems. Heteropoda toxin 2 (HpTx2) is an inhibitor cysteine knot peptide toxin specific for Kv4 channels that inhibits gating of Kv4.3 in the voltage-dependent manner typical for this type of toxin. HpTx2 interacts with four independent binding sites containing two conserved hydrophobic amino acids in the S3b transmembrane segments of Kv4.3 and the closely related Kv4.1. Despite these similarities, HpTx2 interaction with Kv4.1 is considerably less voltage-dependent, has smaller shifts in the voltage-dependences of conductance and steady-state inactivation, and a 3-fold higher Kd value. Swapping four nonconserved amino acids in S3b between the two channels exchanges the phenotypic response to HpTx2. To understand these differences in gating modification, we constructed Markov models of Kv4.3 and Kv4.1 activation gating in the presence of HpTx2. Both models feature a series of voltage-dependent steps leading to a final voltage-independent transition to the open state and closely replicate the experimental data. Interaction with HpTx2 increases the energy barrier for channel opening by slowing activation and accelerating deactivation. The greater degree of voltage-dependence in Kv4.3 occurs because it is the voltage-dependent transitions that are most affected by HpTx2; in contrast, it is the voltage-independent step in Kv4.1 that is most affected by the presence of toxin. These data demonstrate the basis for subtype-specificity of HpTx2 and point the way to a general model of gating modifier toxin interaction with voltage-gated ion channels.
From DSL to HPC component-based runtime: a multi-stencil DSL case study

High performance architectures evolve continuously to be more powerful. Such architectures also usually become more difficult to use efficiently. As a scientist is not a low level and high performance programming expert, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are a promising solution to automatically and efficiently write high performance codes. However, if DSLs ease programming for scientists, maintainability and portability issues are transferred from scientists to DSL designers. This paper deals with an approach to improve maintainability and programming productivity of DSLs through the generation of a component-based parallel runtime. To study it, the paper presents a DSL for multi-stencil programs, that is evaluated on a real-case of shallow water equations.
Utility classes detection metrics for execution trace analysis

Execution trace analysis is particularly valuable in the context of object-oriented software comprehension for the maintenance tasks. It involves analyzing dynamic information and behaviors that are stored in the execution trace. However, the execution traces of current object-oriented software systems tend to be very large in terms of complexity and size. In particular, classes and coupling features form a very complicated interwoven lattice of the dynamic dependencies. This research focuses on detecting and removing utility classes from an execution trace. Utility detection and removal techniques are very useful in reducing the structural complexity of execution traces for software comprehension process. For this purpose, two new utility classes detection metrics based on dynamic coupling have been introduced to measure the extent to which a class can be considered as a utility.
Effects of exercise and environmental complexity on deficits in trace and contextual fear conditioning produced by neonatal alcohol exposure in rats.

In rodents, voluntary exercise and environmental complexity increases hippocampal neurogenesis and reverses spatial learning and long-term potentiation deficits in animals prenatally exposed to alcohol. The present experiment extended these findings to neonatal alcohol exposure and to delay, trace, and contextual fear conditioning. Rats were administered either 5.25 g/kg/day alcohol via gastric intubation or received sham-intubations (SI) between Postnatal Day (PD) 4 and 9 followed by either free access to a running wheel on PD 30-41 and housing in a complex environment on PD 42-72 (wheel-running plus environmental complexity; WREC) or conventional social housing (SHSH) from PD 30 to 72. Adult rats (PD 80 ± 5) received 5 trials/day of a 10-s flashing-light conditioned stimulus (CS) paired with . 8 mA footshock either immediately (delay conditioning) or after a 10-s trace interval (trace conditioning) for 2 days. Neonatal alcohol exposure impaired context and trace conditioning, but not short-delay conditioning. The WREC intervention did not reverse these deficits, despite increasing context-related freezing in ethanol-exposed and SI animals.
Comparison of Viral Shedding Following Vaccination With Inactivated and Live Newcastle Disease Vaccines Formulated With Wild-Type and Recombinant Viruses

Abstract Virulent Newcastle disease virus isolates from the 1971 and 2002 U.S. outbreaks are of the same serotype but a different genotype than current vaccine strains. Prior experiments with inactivated vaccines in chickens show significantly less virus shed in birds vaccinated with a homologous vaccine (same genotype as challenge) compared to chickens vaccinated with genotypically heterologous vaccines. Subsequent experiments have compared the protection induced in chickens by live vaccines of B1 and LaSota (genotype II), Ulster (genotype I), and recombinant viruses that express the hemagglutinin neuraminidase gene (HN) or the HN and fusion gene (F) of CA 2002 (genotype V). Vaccinates were challenged with virulent viruses CA 2002 (genotype V) or Texas GB (TXGB, genotype II). After challenge with CA 2002 the birds vaccinated with a live recombinant genotype V virus containing the HN of CA 2002 shed significantly less virus in oropharyngeal swabs compared to B1 and had fewer birds shedding virus compared to B1, LaSota, and Ulster vaccinates. After challenge with CA 2002 birds vaccinated with the recombinant containing both the HN and F of CA 2002 (rA-CAFHN) shed less virus, and fewer birds shed virus compared to LaSota-vaccinated birds. TXGB-challenged LaSota-vaccinated birds shed less virus, and fewer birds shed virus compared to TXGB-challenged rA-CAFHN–vaccinated birds. Genotypic differences between vaccine and challenge did not diminish ability of vaccines to protect against disease, but genotypic similarity did reduce virus shed and may reduce transmission. The development and use of vaccines of the same genotype as the expected field challenge may provide an additional tool for control of this important poultry pathogen.
Effectiveness of a counseling intervention after a traumatic childbirth: a randomized controlled trial.

UNLABELLED Adverse childbirth experiences can evoke fear and overwhelming anxiety for some women and precipitate posttraumatic stress disorder. The objective of this study was to assess a midwife-led brief counseling intervention for postpartum women at risk of developing psychological trauma symptoms. METHOD Of 348 women screened for trauma symptoms, 103 met inclusion criteria and were randomized into an intervention (n = 50) or a control (n = 53) group. The intervention group received face-to-face counseling within 72 hours of birth and again via telephone at 4 to 6 weeks postpartum. Main outcome measures were posttraumatic stress symptoms, depression, self-blame, and confidence about a future pregnancy. RESULTS At 3-month follow-up, intervention group women reported decreased trauma symptoms, low relative risk of depression, low relative risk of stress, and low feelings of self-blame. Confidence about a future pregnancy was higher for these women than for control group women. Three intervention group women compared with 9 control group women met the diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder at 3 months postpartum, but this result was not statistically significant. DISCUSSION A high prevalence of postpartum depression and trauma symptoms occurred after childbirth. Although most women improved over time, the intervention markedly affected participants' trajectory toward recovery compared with women who did not receive counseling. CONCLUSIONS A brief, midwife-led counseling intervention for women who report a distressing birth experience was effective in reducing symptoms of trauma, depression, stress, and feelings of self-blame. The intervention is within the scope of midwifery practice, caused no harm to participants, was perceived as helpful, and enhanced women's confidence about a future pregnancy.
Acute Respiratory Distress after Knee Arthroplasty Due to Undiagnosed Atrial Myxoma

Acute postoperative respiratory distress may be caused by pneumonia, pulmonary embolism, heart failure, pneumothorax or atelectasis. We present s case report of a 78-year-old female patient who developed acute respiratory distress one day following knee arthroscopy. Because of the suspicion of pulmonary embolism, a computed tomographic angiography was made, showing the presence of an unexpected large left atrial mass, suggestive for a myxoma. She underwent successful resection of a 10 × 5 cm myxoma one week later. The report discusses the clinical manifestations of an atrial myxoma and its potentially fast growth. Bedside echocardiography should be considered the preferred diagnostic modality in case of acute postoperative respiratory distress.
A Technique for Measuring Dose Equivalent and Neutron Fluxes in Radiation Environments Using Silicon Diodes

Radiation transport codes and multifacility empirical measurements are used to characterize a solid-state-based radiation monitor to provide measurements of dose equivalent in an aviation environment and neutron fluxes at accelerated testing facilities. A new millidosimetry technique for using millimeter-scale solid-state technology to assess dose equivalent in a mixed radiation field is described and validated in detail. Empirical data from aviation dose monitoring and test facility beam monitoring are presented.
End-of-Life Care Directives Among African Americans: Lessons Learned-A Need for Community-Centered Discussion and Education

African Americans appear to be less likely to know about advance directives and, even if known, to complete them. This small, exploratory study used a community-centered educational group discussion to assess African Americans' knowledge, attitudes, and utilization of end-of-life care directives before the occurrence of a health crisis. McNemar and paired t tests were computed to detect immediate changes in participants' initial and final perceptions about advance directives before and after the group discussion. Findings indicated further education is needed to clarify the terms used for advance directives. African Americans rely on a family-centered approach to end-of-life decision making, especially in the absence of written advance directives. They are open to community forums to discuss end-of-life care choices if presented the opportunity. Culture plays an essential role in this issue. There is a need for community health nurses to develop community-based educational programs that are not a "one-size-fits-all" approach.
International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology. LXXXIII: Classification of Prostanoid Receptors, Updating 15 Years of Progress

It is now more than 15 years since the molecular structures of the major prostanoid receptors were elucidated. Since then, substantial progress has been achieved with respect to distribution and function, signal transduction mechanisms, and the design of agonists and antagonists (http://www.iuphar-db.org/DATABASE/FamilyIntroductionForward? familyId=58). This review systematically details these advances. More recent developments in prostanoid receptor research are included. The DP2 receptor, also termed CRTH2, has little structural resemblance to DP1 and other receptors described in the original prostanoid receptor classification. DP2 receptors are more closely related to chemoattractant receptors. Prostanoid receptors have also been found to heterodimerize with other prostanoid receptor subtypes and nonprostanoids. This may extend signal transduction pathways and create new ligand recognition sites: prostacyclin/thromboxane A2 heterodimeric receptors for 8-epi-prostaglandin E2, wild-type/alternative (alt4) heterodimers for the prostaglandin FP receptor for bimatoprost and the prostamides. It is anticipated that the 15 years of research progress described herein will lead to novel therapeutic entities.
Energy Cooperation in Energy Harvesting Communications

In energy harvesting communications, users transmit messages using energy harvested from nature during the course of communication. With an optimum transmit policy, the performance of the system depends only on the energy arrival profiles. In this paper, we introduce the concept of energy cooperation, where a user wirelessly transmits a portion of its energy to another energy harvesting user. This enables shaping and optimization of the energy arrivals at the energy-receiving node, and improves the overall system performance, despite the loss incurred in energy transfer. We consider several basic multi-user network structures with energy harvesting and wireless energy transfer capabilities: relay channel, two-way channel and multiple access channel. We determine energy management policies that maximize the system throughput within a given duration using a Lagrangian formulation and the resulting KKT optimality conditions. We develop a two-dimensional directional water-filling algorithm which optimally controls the flow of harvested energy in two dimensions: in time (from past to future) and among users (from energy-transferring to energy-receiving) and show that a generalized version of this algorithm achieves the boundary of the capacity region of the two-way channel.
The Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System

The field of retinal prosthetics has seen significant advances in the past 3 decades. Encouraging results from different groups have shown coarse objective functional improvement, using a range of technological and surgical approaches. The Argus II retinal prosthesis system was the first of its kind to receive regulatory approval for commercial use in Europe and the USA. The device is designed to replicate the function of photoreceptors in converting visual information into electrical neural signals in patients with profound visual loss secondary to degenerative retinal disease. Results from a phase II study of 30 patients have demonstrated improved performance in basic tests of visual function, object recognition, letter reading, prehension, orientation and mobility tasks. It is now the most widely implanted retinal prosthetic device worldwide. This chapter provides an overview of the requirements of a retinal prosthetic system, the results from the Argus II device to date, and an insight into some of the challenges and future directions of visually restorative therapies.
Effect of Food Deprivation on Running-Wheel Activity in Naive Rats

The activity of 90 recently-weaned rats was recorded during their initial experience in the wheel, immediately following 0-, 24-, or 48-hr. food deprivation. Both deprived groups were significantly more active than the non-deprived group, but there was no clear difference between the effect of 24- and of 48-hr. deprivation. The results are compatible with the position that food deprivation exerts a directly energizing influence upon behavior.