Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
C-reactive protein and features of the metabolic syndrome in a population-based sample of children and adolescents.

BACKGROUND C-Reactive protein (CRP) is a risk marker for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. In youth, limited data are available on the distribution of high-sensitivity CRP as well as on its association with components of the metabolic syndrome. METHODS In 1999, we conducted a school-based survey of a representative sample of youths 9, 13, and 16 years of age in the province of Quebec, Canada. Standardized clinical measurements and fasting plasma lipid, glucose, insulin, and CRP concentrations were available for 2224 individuals. RESULTS The distribution of CRP was positively skewed. The median and 95th percentile values by age and sex ranged from < 0.2 to 0.56 mg/L and from 2.72 to 6.28 mg/L, respectively. A total of 7.7% of 9-year-olds, 5.5% of 13-year-olds, and 12.8% of 16-year-olds had CRP concentrations > 3.0 mg/L, the threshold defining the adult high-risk category. We observed a strong relationship between CRP concentrations and both body mass index (BMI) and fasting insulin values. The association between CRP and insulin concentration was markedly attenuated after adjustment for BMI, whereas that between CRP and BMI remained unchanged after adjustment for insulin: a 1 SD increase in BMI was associated with a 52% increase in CRP concentration. An increased CRP concentration was independently associated with a worsening of the lipid profile, whereas the association between increased CRP values and high systolic blood pressure was no longer statistically significant after adjustment for BMI. CONCLUSIONS The metabolic correlates of excess weight, including a state of low-grade systemic inflammation, are detectable early in life. Their health impact in adults remains to be fully examined.
The CtBP binding domain in the adenovirus E1A protein controls CR1- dependent transactivation

The adenovirus E1A-243R protein has the ability to force a resting cell into uncontrolled proliferation by modulating the activity of key targets in cell cycle control. Most of these regulatory mechanisms are dependent on activities mapping to conserved region 1 (CR1) and the non-conserved N-terminal region of E1A. We have previously shown that CR1 functions as a very patent transactivator when it is tethered to a promoter through a heterologous DNA binding domain. However, artificial DNA binding was not sufficient to convert full-length E1A-243R to a transactivator. Thus, an additional function(s) of the E1A-243R protein modulates the effect of CR1 in transcription regulation. Here we demonstrate that a 44 amino acid region at the extreme C-terminus of ElA inhibited transactivation by a Gal4-CR1 fusion protein. Inhibition correlated with binding of the nuclear 48 kDa C-terminal binding protein (CtBP), which has been implicated in E1A-mediated suppression of the metastazing potential of tumour cells. This might suggest that CtBP binding can regulate E1A-mediated transformation by modulating CR1-dependent control of transcription.
Elements of a multi-level theory of presence: phenomenology, mental processing and neural correlates

Presence research is still at an early stage of development, and theoretical contributions are needed that integrate diverse insights relevant to understanding presence, emerging from different contributing areas. In this paper, we outline what we regard to be key elements of a theory of presence, addressing the experience at three distinct levels of explanation: phenomenology, mental processing, and underlying brain mechanisms.
The History of Computing Education Research

Teachers have been educating students about computing for many years. For almost as many years, computing education researchers have been studying, in particular, how students learn programming and how to improve that process. Programming languages such as Fortran (1957) and COBOL (1959) were originally invented to be easier than assembler and other early notations so that programming could be made available to a wider range of programmers. Programming languages such as BASIC (1964) and Pascal (1970) were invented explicitly to ease learning how to program. In the late 1960’s, researchers started gathering data, studying how learners were learning programming, when they did not, and how they experienced programming.
Role of Corticotropin-releasing Factor in Gastrointestinal Permeability

The interface between the intestinal lumen and the mucosa is the location where the majority of ingested immunogenic particles face the scrutiny of the vast gastrointestinal immune system. Upon regular physiological conditions, the intestinal micro-flora and the epithelial barrier are well prepared to process daily a huge amount of food-derived antigens and non-immunogenic particles. Similarly, they are ready to prevent environmental toxins and microbial antigens to penetrate further and interact with the mucosal-associated immune system. These functions promote the development of proper immune responses and oral tolerance and prevent disease and inflammation. Brain-gut axis structures participate in the processing and execution of response signals to external and internal stimuli. The brain-gut axis integrates local and distant regulatory networks and super-systems that serve key housekeeping physiological functions including the balanced functioning of the intestinal barrier. Disturbance of the brain-gut axis may induce intestinal barrier dysfunction, increasing the risk of uncontrolled immunological reactions, which may indeed trigger transient mucosal inflammation and gut disease. There is a large body of evidence indicating that stress, through the brain-gut axis, may cause intestinal barrier dysfunction, mainly via the systemic and peripheral release of corticotropin-releasing factor. In this review, we describe the role of stress and corticotropin-releasing factor in the regulation of gastrointestinal permeability, and discuss the link to both health and pathological conditions.
Neuroleptic sensitivity in patients with senile dementia of Lewy body type.

OBJECTIVE--To determine the outcome of administration of neuroleptics to patients with senile dementia of Lewy body type confirmed at necropsy. DESIGN--Retrospective analysis of clinical notes blind to neuropathological diagnosis. SETTING--Specialist psychogeriatric assessment units referring cases for necropsy to a teaching hospital neuropathology service. PATIENTS--41 elderly patients with diagnosis of either Alzheimer type dementia (n = 21) or Lewy body type dementia (n = 20) confirmed at necropsy. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES--Clinical state including extrapyramidal features before and after neuroleptic treatment and survival analysis of patients showing severe neuroleptic sensitivity compared with the remainder in the group. RESULTS--16 (80%) patients with Lewy body type dementia received neuroleptics, 13 (81%) of whom reacted adversely; in seven (54%) the reactions were severe. Survival analysis showed an increased mortality in the year after presentation to psychiatric services compared with patients with mild or no neuroleptic sensitivity (hazard ratio 2.70 (95% confidence interval 2.50-8.99); (chi 2 = 2.68, p = 0.05). By contrast, only one (7%) of 14 patients with Alzheimer type dementia given neuroleptics showed severe neuroleptic sensitivity. CONCLUSIONS--Severe, and often fatal, neuroleptic sensitivity may occur in elderly patients with confusion, dementia, or behavioural disturbance. Its occurrence may indicate senile dementia of Lewy body type and this feature has been included in clinical diagnostic criteria for this type of dementia.
Blehavtlral Self-Regurntion of Telework Locatims : Irczrrupting Interruptions !

This study examines the impact of alternative telework strategies on professional and personal outcomes. The march design is a longitudinal between-participants field experiment with two manipulated factors: satellite office space available (no, yes) and downtown office space available (no, yes). In all four conditions, participants could telework from home. The design incorporated a fifth (control) condition with no telework, reflecting current company policy. One hundred sixty medical coders from a large health care company participated in the experiment. Archival data recorded work locations, task interruptions, quality adjusted task performance, and employee retention, while the experience sampling method (ESM) captured cognitive and affective responses. The findings help to explain the social dynamics of work location autonomy in the rich ecological settings of employees' organizational and personal environments. Data Availability: Data are available from 'author; however, requests for data should specify the intended use.
The visual compass: Performance and limitations of an appearance‐based method

In this article we present an algorithm to estimate the orientation of a robot relative to an orientation specified at the beginning of the process. This is done by computing the rotation of the robot between successive panoramic images, grabbed on the robot while it moves, using a subsymbolic method to match the images. The context of the work is simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in unstructured and unmodified environments. As such, very few assumptions are made about the environment and the robot's displacement. The algorithm's performance depends on the value of a number of parameters being determined to provide overall good performance of the system. The performance is evaluated in different situations (trajectories and environments) with the same parameters and the results show that the method performs adequately for its intended use. In particular, the error is shown to be drifting slowly, in fact much slower than unprocessed inertial sensors, thus only requiring infrequent realignment, for example, when relocalizing in a topological map. Limitations of the proposed methods are also shown and discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
~ ' Koa : ADecade of Growth Impacts of Hurricane Iniki on Koa Forests

On 11 September 1992, Hurricane Iniki struck koa forests we had studied along an elevation gradient (500 to 1300 m) on western Kaua'i. The hurricane decreased canopy leaf area by 29 to 80 percent, and damage was proportional to pre-hurricane leaf area and canopy height. At some sites, phyllodes were stripped from intact branches, leaving the canopy otherwise intact. At other sites, many large branches and a few entire trees were broken off, thereby removing most of the overstory canopy. The canopy damage resulted in a large pulse of litter, ranging from 4 to 19 t ha' across our study sites. In the first six months following the hurricane, tree growth rates decreased in proportion to leaf area lost. Thereafter, growth rates increased, generally following the pattern of leaf area recovery. Survival of severely damaged koa trees (losing more than 75 percent of their crowns) ranged from zero to 80 percent, and was higher at wetter sites. Koa seedling densities were highest at mid-elevation sites as a result of both high emergence and high survival. Seedling densities were lower at sites with greater amounts of hurricaneinduced litter. The alien species guava (Psidium guajava) generally had higher survival than the native 'a'ali'i (Dodonea viscosa), both as adults and as seedlings, but there was relatively little invasion of alien species following the hurricane. At these sites, there was no drastic change in species composition following hurricane disturbance, and forest structure and productivity had recovered to a great degree within two years.
Search for overlapped communities by parallel genetic algorithms

— In the last decade the broad scope of complex networks has led to a rapid progress. In this area a particular interest has the study of community structures. The analysis of this type of structure requires the formalization of the intuitive concept of community and the definition of indices of goodness for the obtained results. A lot of algorithms has been presented to reach this goal. In particular, an interesting problem is the search of overlapped communities and it is field seems very interesting a solution based on the use of genetic algorithms. The approach discusses in this paper is based on a parallel implementation of a genetic algorithm and shows the performance benefits of this solution.
Perturbations on a moving D3-brane and mirage cosmology

We study the evolution of perturbations on a moving probe D3-brane coupled to a 4-form field in an AdS$_5$-Schwarzschild bulk. The unperturbed dynamics are parametrised by a conserved energy $E$ and lead to Friedmann-Robertson-Walker `mirage' cosmology on the brane with scale factor $a(\tau)$. The fluctuations about the unperturbed worldsheet are then described by a scalar field $\phi(\tau,\vec{x})$. We derive an equation of motion for $\phi$, and find that in certain regimes of $a$ the effective mass squared is negative. On an expanding BPS brane with E=0 superhorizon modes grow as $a^4$ whilst subhorizon modes are stable. When the brane contracts, all modes grow. We also briefly discuss the case when $E>0$, BPS anti-branes as well as non-BPS branes. Finally, the perturbed brane embedding gives rise to scalar perturbations in the FRW universe. We show that $\phi$ is proportional to the gauge invariant Bardeen potentials on the brane.
Single Tree Stem Profile Detection Using Terrestrial Laser Scanner Data, Flatness Saliency Features and Curvature Properties

A method for automatic stem detection and stem profile estimation based on terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) was validated. The root-mean-square error was approximately 1 cm for stem diameter estimations. The method contains a new way of extracting the flatness saliency feature using the centroid of a subset of a point cloud within a voxel cell that approximates the point by point calculations. The loss of accuracy is outweighed by a much higher computational speed, making it possible to cover large datasets. The algorithm introduces a new way to connect surface patches belonging to a stem and investigates if they belong to curved surfaces. Thereby, cylindrical objects, like stems, are found in the pre-filtering stage. The algorithm uses a new cylinder fitting method that estimates the axis direction by transforming the TLS points into a radial-angular coordinate system and evaluates the deviations by a moving window convex hull algorithm. Once the axis direction is found, the cylinder center is chosen as the position with the smallest radial deviations. The cylinder fitting method works on a point cloud in both the single-scan setup, as well as a multiple scan setup of a TLS system.
Security Issues and Challenges of Mobile Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is proving itself an emerging technology in IT world which provides a novel business model for organizations to utilize softwares, applications and hardware resources without any upfront investment. Few years later with the broad development in mobile applications and advancements in cloud computing, a new expansion is being expected in the form of mobile cloud computing (MCC). MCC provides a platform where mobile users make use of cloud services on mobile devices. The use of MCC minimizes the performance, compatibility, and lack of resources issues in mobile computing environment. Despite the astonishing advancement achieved by MCC, the users of MCC are still below expectations because of the associated risks in terms of security and privacy. These risks are playing important role by preventing the organizations to adopt MCC environment. Significant amount of research is in progress in order to reduce the security concerns but still a lot work has to be done to produce a security prone MCC environment. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of MCC and its security issues and challenges.
Early design phase power/performance modeling through statistical simulation

Microprocessor design time and effort are getting impractical due to the huge number of simulations that need to be done to evaluate various processor configurations for various workloads. An early design stage methodology could be useful to efficiently cull huge design spaces to identify regions of interest to be further explored using more accurate simulations. In such an early design stage methodology, power consumption should be considered besides performance, since power consumption is becoming a key design issue for midrange and high-end microprocessor designs. In this paper, we propose to use statistical simulation as an early design stage methodology that considers both performance and power. We evaluate the applicability and the accuracy of this methodology and we show that statistical simulation is indeed capable of identifying a region of energy-efficient architectures. In addition, we demonstrate that this methodology can be used to explore workload design spaces in terms of power/performance by varying program characteristics that are hard to vary using real programs.
Detection of Unique ALLÃ(cid:141) (MLL) Fusion Transcripts in Normal Human Bone Marrow and Blood: Distinct Origin of Normal versus Leukemic ALLÃ(cid:141) Fusion Transcripts1

The partial tandem duplication (PTD) of ALLÃ(cid:141) (MLL) is one of the more common molecular abnormalities in adult de novo acute myeloid leukemia (AMD and carries a poor prognosis. The PTD of ALL! is identified in leukemic blasts at the genomic level by ALLÃ(cid:141) rearrangement upon Southern analysis and by genomic fusion following DNA PCR. The genomic defect encodes for a unique fusion transcript that is readily detected by reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR). To determine if the ALLÃ(cid:141) fusion transcript is specific for leukemic blasts or instead can be found with any frequency in normal cells, we analyzed 52 bone marrow and 8 peripheral blood samples from 60 normal donors by nested RT-PCR. Ten of 60 samples (16%; 7 bone marrow and 3 peripheral blood) contained a unique transcript showing a fusion of two . M.I. I exons that was consistent with the PTD of ALLÃ(cid:141). However, a corresponding genomic rearrangement or a unique genomic fusion of ALL! could not be demon strated by Southern analysis or DNA PCR, respectively. Marked differ ences were observed in the size and sequence of the ALL! fusion tran scripts detected in normal donors, compared to those detected in leukemic patients with a PTD of ALL! Moreover, although the M.I. I fusion tran scripts seen in \MI. always maintain the open reading frame, the open reading frame was preserved in only 5 of 10 fusion transcripts from normal donors. Finally, in contrast to leukemic blasts with the PTD of ALLÃ(cid:141), the fusion transcripts in normal cells could not be detected in the ! Â»>]>(\l ' RNA fraction by RT-PCR. In summary, the origin and the composition of the ALLÃ(cid:141) fusion transcripts found in normal cells appear to be distinct from those found in the leukemic cells. The data accumu lated thus far suggest that the ALLÃ(cid:141) fusion product detected in normal tissue results from the process of differential niKN Vsplicing rather than true ALLÃ(cid:141) gene rearrangement. These findings also suggest caution in the use of RT-PCR for detection of minimal residual disease in AML patients with the PTD of ALLÃ(cid:141).
Increased Prevalence of Esophageal Cancer in Areas with High Levels of Nickel in Farm Soils

Background: Heavy metal pollution in farm soils is a grave concern in Taiwan. Previously, we found the incidence of oral cancer (OC) correlated positively with levels of nickel and arsenic in farm soils. Many OC patients have a second malignancy, among which esophageal cancer (EC) is the most common one in Taiwan. Objectives: We aimed to investigate whether these two cancers share some common risk factors. Methods: Taiwan began a compulsory national health insurance program in 1995. We used a database from this program to calculate the prevalence of EC and OC in Taiwan. We compared the prevalence of EC with prevalence of betel nut chewers in adults and the information of heavy metal in farm soils to look for any association. Results: The prevalence of OC and prevalence of EC were strongly correlated. The prevalence of betel nut chewing correlated with OC prevalence, but not with EC prevalence. An increased prevalence (1.9 fold) of EC was found where the farm soils contained high levels of nickel. Meanwhile, among the eight heavy metals studied, only the levels of nickel in the farm soils correlated statistically with the prevalence of EC. Conclusion: Nickel is probably a common environmental risk factor for esophageal cancer and oral cancer.
A Challenge for the UNPBA Working Paper The Future of the Peacebuilding Architecture Project

At the 2005 World Summit in New York City, member states of the United Nations agreed to create " a dedicated institutional mechanism to address the special needs of countries emerging from conflict towards recovery, reintegration and reconstruction and to assist them in laying the foundation for sustainable development ". That new mechanism was the UN Peacebuilding Commission and two associated bodies: a Peacebuilding Support Office and a Peacebuilding Fund. Together , these new entities have been characterized as the UN's new peacebuilding architecture, or PBA. This Working Paper is one of nine essays that examine the possible future role of the UN's peacebuilding architecture. They were written as part of a project co-organized by the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. All of the contributors to the project were asked to identify realistic but ambitious " stretch targets " for the Peacebuild-ing Commission and its associated bodies over the next five to ten years. The resulting Working Papers, including this one, seek to stimulate fresh thinking about the UN's role in peacebuilding. The moment is ripe for such rethinking: During 2010, the UN will review the performance of the PBA to date, including the question of whether it has achieved its mandated objectives. Most of the contributors to this project believe that the PBA should pursue a more ambitious agenda over the next five years. While the PBC and its associated bodies have succeeded in carving out a niche for themselves, that niche remains a small one. Yet the need for more focused international attention, expertise, and coordinated and sustained assistance towards war-torn countries is undiminished. It remains to be seen whether UN officials and the organization's member states will rise to the challenge of delivering on the PBA's initial promise over the next five years and beyond, but doing so will at least require a vision of what the PBA can potentially accomplish in this period. The Working Papers produced in this project are intended to provide grist for this visioning effort. Summary 1 The private sector has become the darling of international and domestic organizations seeking strategic partners in building sustainable peace, including processes of demobilization of combatants, addressing victims' needs, and rebuilding wrecked economies. Arguments to attract the private sector combine economic (companies' economic performance suffers in violent contexts and is likely to improve in …