Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk factors and clinical relevance of nosocomial maxillary sinusitis in the critically ill.

The incidence of infectious maxillary sinusitis (IMS) and its clinical relevance was prospectively studied in 162 consecutive critically ill patients who were mechanically ventilated for a period longer than 7 d. All had a paranasal computed tomographic (CT) scan within 48 h of admission and were divided into three groups according to the radiologic aspect of their maxillary sinuses: Group 1 = normal maxillary sinuses (n = 40), Group 2 = maxillary mucosal thickening (n = 26), Group 3 = radiologic maxillary sinusitis (RMS) defined as the presence of an air fluid level and/or opacification of maxillary sinuses (n = 96). Group 1 patients were randomized between nasal and oral endotracheal intubation with a gastric intubation performed via the same route and had a second paranasal CT scan 7 d later. Endotracheal and gastric tubes were left in their original position in Group 2 patients and a second paranasal CT scan was performed 7 d later. All patients of Group 3 underwent a transnasal puncture for bacteriologic analysis of maxillary sinus content. Forty-five spontaneously breathing patients served as a control group. In all patients with RMS, the occurrence of bronchopneumonia (BPN) was prospectively assessed for 7 d following the initial CT scan. Upon inclusion, only 25% of the patients had normal maxillary sinuses whereas all patients in the control group had normal paranasal CT scans. After 7 d, 46% of Group 2 patients had evidence of RMS. Risk factors for RMS were nasal placement and duration of endotracheal and gastric intubation. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Ecosystem Consequences of Cyanobacteria in the Northern Baltic Sea

Abstract Cyanobacteria of the Baltic Sea have multiple effects on organisms that influence the food chain dynamics on several trophic levels. Cyanobacteria contain several bioactive compounds, such as alkaloids, peptides, and lipopolysaccharides. A group of nonribosomally produced oligopeptides, namely microcystins and nodularin, are tumor promoters and cause oxidative stress in the affected cells. Zooplankton graze on cyanobacteria, and when ingested, the hepatotoxins (nodularin) decrease the egg production of, for example, copepods. However, the observed effects are very variable, because many crustaceans are tolerant to nodularin and because cyanobacteria may complement the diet of grazers in small amounts. Cyanobacterial toxins are transferred through the food web from one trophic level to another. The transfer rate is relatively low in the pelagic food web, but reduced feeding and growth rates of fish larvae have been observed. In the benthic food web, especially in blue mussels, nodularin concentrations are high, and benthic feeding juvenile flounders have been observed to disappear from bloom areas. In the littoral ecosystem, gammarids have shown increased mortality and weakening of reproductive success under cyanobacterial exposure. In contrast, mysid shrimps seem to be tolerant to cyanobacterial exposure. In fish larvae, detoxication of nodularin poses a metabolic cost that is reflected as decreased growth and condition, which may increase their susceptibility to predation. Cyanobacterial filaments and aggregates also interfere with both hydromechanical and visual feeding of planktivores. The feeding appendages of mysid shrimps may clog, and the filaments interfere with prey detection of pike larvae. On the other hand, a cyanobacterial bloom may provide a refuge for both zooplankton and small fish. As the decaying bloom also provides an ample source of organic carbon and nutrients for the organisms of the microbial loop, the zooplankton species capable of selective feeding may thrive in bloom conditions. Cyanobacteria also compete for nutrients with other primary producers and change the nitrogen (N) : phosphorus (P) balance of their environment by their N-fixation. Further, the bioactive compounds of cyanobacteria directly influence other primary producers, favoring cyanobacteria, chlorophytes, dinoflagellates, and nanoflagellates and inhibiting cryptophytes. As the selective grazers also shift the grazing pressure on other species than cyanobacteria, changes in the structure and functioning of the Baltic Sea communities and ecosystems are likely to occur during the cyanobacterial bloom season.
Two-Stage 3D Codebook Design and Beam Training for Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Hybrid beamforming architecture that combines analog beamforming and digital beamforming has been widely accepted in the emerging millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems with large antenna arrays. However, the design of codebooks and beam training procedures at the analog stage is problematic in mmWave system. In this study, we propose a feasible two-stage 3D codebook design consisting of a primary codebook and an auxiliary codebook. The primary codebook generates a basic directional beam, and the number of phase shifts is quite limited in order to keep low hardware complexity. The small-size auxiliary codebook creates the finer beams that are centered on each primary beam. Furthermore, a beam search scheme designed for the two- stage codebook is proposed. We use a binary tree search method with antenna selection for the primary beam search, and a directed beam scan for the auxiliary beam search. Simulation results verify the performance advantages of our proposed codebook in beamforming gain and spectral efficiency for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. Moreover, training complexity comparisons indicate that our specially designed two-stage beam search scheme significantly outperforms other existing solutions.
Understanding the Healthy Immigrant Effect and Cardiovascular Disease: Looking to Big Data and Beyond

Immigrant health is a growing area of study in epidemiology, and there is an obvious demographic imperative to examine immigrant health patterns. Immigrants and their children comprise sizable and growing minorities in developed countries.1 Immigrant flows are also a major driver of racial/ethnic and cultural diversity in receiving countries, with important implications for population health if immigrants are exposed to a hostile social climate and discriminatory treatment. But immigrant health is also of interest epidemiologically because patterns of cardiovascular disease (CVD) across immigrant groups, receiving contexts, and generations can provide potential etiologic insights that have broad applicability. Article see p 1549 In this issue of Circulation , Tu and colleagues2 present an analysis using the Cardiovascular Health in Ambulatory Care Research Team (CANHEART) resource, a large retrospective cohort, linking numerous medical and demographic data sets. They demonstrate that immigrants to Ontario, Canada experience lower risk of CVD in comparison with long-term residents, a healthy immigrant effect (HIE), although this protective effect appears to erode slightly over time. They also observe some heterogeneity in relative risks of CVD depending on the immigrant’s country of origin. Notably, traditional cardiovascular risk factors had a small role in explaining the protective effect of foreign nativity or the heterogeneity. The CANHEART findings align with a growing body of previous research documenting similar patterns, whereby foreign nativity (in comparison with the native-born population) is protective for health across different outcomes3 including CVD,4 particularly in North America. The article by Tu et al accomplishes 2 important goals. First, it documents the patterning of CVD among different groups of immigrants, and, second, it attempts to explain these patterns. We will discuss each in turn, highlighting specific contributions, and important areas for the field to tackle in coming years, as well. The sheer size and …
Masochism, Submission, Surrender

Tentative pour preciser le concept de reddition, etude de ses relations ou masochismes et a la soumission. Le masochisme en tant que perversion de la reddition le sadisme en tant que perversion de l'usage de l'objet (Winnicott). Quelques applications possibles du concept de reddition
Prognostic Factors Affecting Survival in Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma: Analysis of 125 Subjects

Aim of the Study Determining the pre-treatment prognostic factors in malignant pleural mesothelioma is important in terms of estimating the course of the disease and selecting patients who are candidate for multimodal therapy. The aim of the study was to determine the prognostic factors affecting survival in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma. Study Design One hundred and twenty-five patients who had been diagnosed histologically as having malignant pleural mesothelioma over the past 5 years were evaluated retrospectively. Relationships of survival of the patients with their age, gender, exposure to asbestos, smoking history, platelet, hemoglobin, leukocyte (WBC) and serum LDH values, histology, performance score and stage of disease were examined. Results Advanced clinical stage, N2 nodal involvement and the presence of distant metastasis were found to be related to survival. Sarcomatous histology was found to be a poor prognostic factor independently of other factors. Conclusions We showed that histological subtype and stage of disease were the most important parameters in planning the treatment, especially in determining the patients who were candidate for multimodal treatment and in estimating the prognosis.
Operationalizing the “atrocity prevention lens”: making prevention a living reality

In his closing remarks to the 2012 informal interactive dialogue of the United Nations General Assembly on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), UN Deputy Secretary-General, Jan Eliasson called for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities to be made a “living reality. ” Three years earlier, in his first report on implementing R2P, the Secretary-General had described “the ultimate purpose of the responsibility to protect” as being “to save lives by preventing the most egregious mass violations of human rights. ” Indeed, since the adoption of R2P at the 2005 World Summit, there have been many generic calls for a focus on the prevention of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (hereafter genocide and mass atrocities). This is unsurprising, given that the world’s commitment to R2P included a specific call for the prevention of these crimes. Since 2009, UN Member States of all types and from every region have voiced their support in the General Assembly for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities, recognizing that it not only saves lives but also reduces the need for enforcement further down the line. This sentiment echoes views expressed in the academy, which largely agrees that prevention is far better than cure. But although there is broad agreement about the normative and practical imperative of preventing genocide and mass atrocities, much less is understood about how this might be achieved in practice. Although work examining the incorporation of genocide and mass atrocity prevention into US foreign and defense policy has progressed apace, relatively little attention has been paid to the question of how to implement the preventive aspects of R2P more generally and less still to the specific role played by pivotal international organizations such as the UN. To date, academic work on the UN's role has tended to focus, understandably, on early warning and assessment, although an emerging body of work examines the role of the system's human rights mechanisms in helping to prevent genocide and mass atrocities. Thus far, the UN itself has focused on developing its mandate and capacity for early warning and assessment, as well as on the establishment of a convening authority designed to facilitate timely advice in crisis situations. The UN has also begun preliminary work, under the auspices of the Framework Team's Experts Reference Group on Prevention, on system-wide approaches to genocide and mass atrocity prevention.
Properties of naturally produced clear speech at normal rates and implications for intelligibility enhancement

In adverse listening conditions, talkers can increase their intelligibility by speaking clearly [45, 55, 42]. While producing clear speech, however, talkers often reduce their speaking rate significantly [46, 55]. A recent study [28] showed that speaking slowly is not responsible for the high intelligibility of clear speech, since talkers can produce clear speech at normal rates with training. This finding suggests that acoustical factors other than reduced speaking rate are responsible for the high intelligibility of clear speech. To gain insight into these factors, acoustical properties (global, phonological, and phonetic) of conversational and clear speech produced at normal speaking rates were examined. Three global acoustic properties associated with clear/normal speech were identified: increased energy near the second and third formants, higher average and greater range of F0, and increased modulation depth of low frequency modulations of the intensity envelope. In order to determine which of these acoustical properties of clear/normal speech contribute most to its high intelligibility, signal processing transformations of conversational speech were developed. Results of intelligibility tests with hearing-impaired listeners and normal hearing listeners in noise suggest that these properties may not fully account for the intelligibility benefit of clear/normal speech. Other properties important for highly intelligible speech may not have been identified in this study due to the complexity of the acoustic database and varying talker strategies. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Bending frustration of lipid-water mesophases based on cubic minimal surfaces.

Inverse bicontinuous cubic phases are ubiquitous in lipid−water mixtures and consist of a lipid bilayer forming a cubic minimal surface, thereby dividing space into two cubic networks of water channels. For small hydrocarbon chain lengths, the monolayers can be modeled as parallel surfaces to a minimal midsurface. The bending energy of the cubic phases is determined by the distribution of Gaussian curvature over the minimal midsurfaces which we calculate for seven different structures (G, D, P, I-WP, C(P), S, and F-RD). We show that the free-energy densities of the structures G, D, and P are considerably lower than those of the other investigated structures due to their narrow distribution of Gaussian curvature. The Bonnet transformation between G, D, and P implies that these phases coexist along a triple line, which also includes an excess water phase. Our model includes thermal membrane undulations. Our qualitative predictions remain unchanged when higher order terms in the curvature energy are included.
A Study on the Use of Word Embeddings and PageRank for Vietnamese Text Summarization

Automatic text summarization is the process of automatically reducing the length of documents without losing the primary ideas. Due to the flood of digital text-based information, there is a great demand for summarization systems. In this paper, we investigate a number of word-embedding based approaches for sentence representation which are combined with the PageRank algorithm to select sentences for summary construction. We compare these new methods with a range of other current approaches to summarization. While the same summarization approaches can generally be applied across different languages, we target Vietnamese because of the relative lack of previous work in this space and also because it provides a good example of a language which generally requires word segmentation. Our experiments find that a word-embedding and graph based approach is an effective strategy for Vietnamese summarization and that word segmentation is not necessary for achieving good summarization results.
Expressed sequence tags from the midgut of Epiphyas postvittana (Walker) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae)

The midgut is a key tissue in insect science. Physiological roles include digestion and peritrophic membrane function, as well as being an important target for insecticides. We used an expressed sequence tag (EST) approach to identify candidate genes and gene families involved in these processes in the light brown apple moth, Epiphyas postvittana (Walker) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae). Two cDNA libraries were constructed from dissected midgut of third to fifth instar larvae. Clustering analysis of 6416 expressed sequence tags produced 1178 tentative unique genes comprising 725 tentative contigs and 453 singletons. The sequences show similar codon usage to sequences from other lepidopterans, a Kozak consensus sequence similar to Drosophila and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were detected at a frequency of 1.35/kb. The identity of the most common Interpro families correlates well with major known functions of the midgut. Phylogenetic analysis was conducted on representative sequences from selected multigene families. Gene families include a broad range of digestive proteases, lipases and carbohydrases that appear to have degradative capacity against the major food components found in leaves, the diet of these larvae; and carboxylesterases, glutathione‐S‐transferases and cytochrome P450 monooxygenases, potentially involved in xenobiotic degradation. Two of the larger multigene families, serine proteases and lipases, expressed a high proportion of genes that are likely to be catalytically inactive.
Nosocomial calicivirus gastroenteritis in a pediatric hospital

At St. Göran's Children's Hospital (a tertiary center), we perform electron microscopy of feces in most cases of nosocomial gastroenteritis. From September 1987 through April 1992 we identified 32 episodes of calicivirus infection, 25 of which were nosocomial and, except for one outbreak, sporadic. Systematic study of the nosocomial outbreak of calcivirus gastroenteritis from November 1991 to January 1992, revealed calcivirus in the stools of 8 of 23 children with diarrhea and 0 of 10 without diarrhea. In 3 of 7 sampled after cessation of diarrhea, calicivirus excretion continued for 3 to 6 days. We found no calicivirus in 42 staff members or 9 members of infected patients' families. Nosocomial transmission of calicivirus can occur among infants.
Use of simple noninvasive biomarkers to predict liver fibrosis in HIV/HCV coinfection in routine clinical practice

Simple noninvasive tests to predict fibrosis, as an alternative to liver biopsy (LB), are needed. Of these, the aspartate aminotransferase (AST) to platelet ratio index (APRI) and the Forns index (FI) have been validated in HIV/hepatitis C virus (HCV) coinfection. However, these indexes may have lower diagnostic value in situations other than the circumscribed conditions of validation studies. We therefore examined the value of the APRI and FI in HIV/HCV‐coinfected patients for the detection of significant fibrosis in real‐life conditions.
Compatibility Studies Between Carbamazepine and Tablet Excipients Using Thermal and Non-thermal Methods

ABSTRACT Proper formulation is an important aspect of any dosage form design. As a part of preformulation studies, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was used to investigate the physicochemical compatibility between Carbamazepine and various excipients commonly used in tablet manufacturing, supported by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and x-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) studies. Compatibility studies were conducted on samples kept at room temperature and at an elevated temperature of 55°C for 3 weeks. Carbamazepine was found to be compatible with all lactose-based components, such as Granulac 230®, Flowlac 100®, and Microcelac 100®. Differential scanning calorimetry studies indicated incompatibility with mannitol, microcrystalline cellulose, starch, and stearic acid. However, XRPD and FTIR studies implied that all the above excipients are compatible with Carbamazepine. X-ray powder diffraction demonstrated incompatibility with stearic acid for samples stored at 55°C for 3 weeks, indicative of formation of a solid solution. Thus, DSC being a thermal method of analysis should not be used singly to detect any inherent incompatibility. It has to be supported sufficiently by other non-thermal techniques, such as XRPD and FTIR.
Linkage disequilibrium mapping with genotype data

Linkage disequilibrium mapping has proven a powerful tool for locating disease genes. Although all existing linkage disequilibrium mapping methods implicitly assume that individual haplotypes can be inferred, only genotypes are directly observable in practice, and haplotypes cannot always be uniquely resolved based on genotype data. In this article, we propose a likelihood‐based linkage disequilibrium mapping approach to analyzing multilocus genotype data arising from case‐control studies. Results from extensive simulation studies suggest that this approach may be a useful tool to fine map disease genes using case‐control data. Genet. Epidemiol. 22:66–77, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Rab escort protein‐1 is a multifunctional protein that accompanies newly prenylated rab proteins to their target membranes.

Rab proteins comprise a family of small GTPases that serve a regulatory role in vesicular membrane traffic. Geranylgeranylation of these proteins on C‐terminal cysteine motifs is crucial for their membrane association and function. This post‐translational modification is catalysed by rab geranylgeranyl transferase (Rab‐GGTase), a multisubunit enzyme consisting of a catalytic heterodimer and an accessory component, named rab escort protein (REP)‐1. Previous in vitro studies have suggested that REP‐1 presents newly synthesized rab proteins to the catalytic component of the enzyme, and forms a stable complex with the prenylated proteins following the transfer reaction. According to this model, a cellular factor would be required to dissociate the rab protein from REP‐1 and to allow it to recycle in the prenylation reaction. RabGDP dissociation inhibitor (RabGDI) was considered an ideal candidate for this role, given its established function in mediating membrane association of prenylated rab proteins. Here we demonstrate that dissociation from REP‐1 and binding of rab proteins to the membrane do not require RabGDI or other cytosolic factors. The mechanism of REP‐1‐mediated membrane association of rab5 appears to be very similar to that mediated by RabGDI. Furthermore, REP‐1 and RabGDI share several other functional properties, the ability to inhibit the release of GDP and to remove rab proteins from membranes; however, RabGDI cannot assist in the prenylation reaction. These data suggest that REP‐1 is per se sufficient to chaperone newly prenylated rab proteins to their target membranes.