Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accuracy of Self-Report of Sexual Activity among Adolescent Girls: Implications for Interpretation of Vaginal Flora Patterns

We read with interest the article by Hickey et al. (1), which enrolled 31 healthy, asymptomatic premenarcheal girls (primarily Tanner stages 2 or 3) aged 10 to 12 years (of whom 67% were African American) with no history of sexual contact whose vulvar and vaginal microbiota were monitored quarterly for up to 3 years. Lactobacillus species were dominant in the vaginal microbiota of most girls before the onset of menarche in the early-middle stages of puberty (as the production of estrogen during puberty causes a change in the vaginal flora to lactobacillus predominance) (2). However, Gardnerella vaginalis was detected in appreciable levels in approximately 1/3 of women. This is of significant interest given that G. vaginalis has been the bacterium most extensively studied in relationship to the pathogenesis of bacterial vaginosis (3–5). Several limitations of this study may have confounded the G. vaginalis results. This study, like others (6–9), has the …
An Axiom System for Functional Dependency Implication in Complete XML Documents I - Soundness

A gas bag for a vehicle has an substantially elongated shape and is convertable from a folded-up condition to an inflated condition. The vehicle has securing sites between which the bas bag is installed bow-shaped. The gas bag has an outer wall, two opposed longitudial ends and at least one element, the element constricting the gas bag in its inflated condition substantially transversely to the longitudinal direction of the gas bag so that the gas bag is shortened in the longitudinal direction and bridges the securing sites by the shortest way.
ECHOES AND NOISE WITH SEAMLESS ACOUSTIC MAN-MACHINE INTERFACES - THE CHALLENGE PERSISTS

Within a general framework for seamless acoustic man-machine interfaces, common problems for different classes of applications are identified. Removing loudspeaker echoes, noise, and reverberation of local sources from microphone signals, and conditioning loudspeaker signals to eliminate reverberation and noise at a listener’s ears constitute problems of system identification and signal separation. The corresponding signal processing techniques concentrate on adaptive filtering and signal separation methods based on temporal and spatial information. Major challenges are posed by the time-variance of the acoustic environment, the nonstationarity of the signals involved, and most of all by the blindness of signal processing with regard to the signals at the human’s mouth and ears. 1. ACOUSTIC MAN-MACHINE INTERFACES As a general framework for a broad class of acoustic manmachine interfaces, we consider the setup according to Fig.1. The interface consists of a digital signal processing unit for broadcasting and recording with multiple loudspeakers and microphones, respectively. Signal processing may include mixing, so that the number of input channels to the broadcasting and the number of output signals of the recording will in general not be equal to the number of transducers. A possible feedback path between the recording part and the broadcasting part closes a loop which is of concern for some important applications. Obviously, the scenario can be generalized to multiple desired sources/listeners and multiple noise sources in the local environment, as well as it includes important special cases of single-channel signals or singlesensor electroacoustic transduction. At a local listener’s ears, the sum of the reverberated loudspeaker signals and local noise signals will be heard instead of the original loudspeaker signals. On the other hand, the multi-microphone interface captures reverberated versions of the desired source signal and local noise sources as Noise
Predicting the effects of in-car interface use on driver performance: an integrated model approach

While researchers have made great strides in evaluating and comparing user interfaces using computational models and frameworks, their work has focused almost exclusively on interfaces that serve as the only or primary task for the user. This paper presents an approach of evaluating and comparing interfaces that users interact with as secondary tasks while executing a more critical primary task. The approach centers on the integration of two computational behavioral models, one for the primary task and another for the secondary task. The resulting integrated model can then execute both tasks together and generate a priori predictions about the effects of one task on the other. The paper focuses in particular on the domain of driving and the comparison of four dialing interfaces for in-car cellular phones. Using the ACT-R cognitive architecture (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) as a computational framework, behavioral models for each possible dialing interface were integrated with an existing model of driver behavior (Salvucci, Boer & Liu, in press). The integrated model predicted that two different manual-dialing interfaces would have significant effects on driver steering performance while two different voice-dialing interfaces would have no significant effect on performance. An empirical study conducted with human drivers in a driving simulator showed that while model and human performance differed with respect to overall magnitudes, the model correctly predicted the overall pattern of effects for human drivers. These results suggest that the integration of computational behavioral models provides a useful, practical method for predicting the effects of secondary-task interface use on primary-task performance.
Visual search has memory: Evidence from multiple target search

Recent studies have proposed two opposing models regarding the function of memory in inefficient visual search, a memory-driven model and a memory-free model. Horowitz and Wolfe (2001) examined the reaction time x n function in a multiple target search task: Participants were required to respond whether there were at least n targets present in the display or not. They demonstrate the positive and accelerated curve of the reaction time x n function, suggesting that no record is kept on the deployment of attention during inefficient search (i.e., the memory-free model). The conclusion in their study is based on the assumption that the n is irrelevant to search rate, although the mental load is heavier when participants look for a large number of targets. In the present study, I varied the total set size, and fitted the models separately for each n condition. The model fitting resulted that the memory-driven model is more appropriate than the memory-free model. The results indicate that the positive and accelerated curve of the reaction time x n function is the result of increasing search rate with increasing n and not due to an amnesic process.
Antioxidant status in patients with uncomplicated insulin‐dependent and non‐insulin‐dependent diabetes mellitus

Oxidative damage by free radicals has been implicated in the pathogenesis of vascular disease in diabetes. We compared the radical‐scavenging antioxidant activity of serum from 28 patients with insulin‐dependent diabetes mellitus and 24 patients with non‐insulin‐dependent diabetes mellitus uncomplicated by vascular disease with age‐matched non‐diabetic control subjects. Patients with insulin‐dependent diabetes had significantly reduced total antioxidant activity (320.2 ± 11.3 vs. 427.5 ± 19.2 μmol L−1; P < 0.001). This was attributable to lower urate (209.4 ± 10.4 vs. 297.1 ± 16.7 μmol L−1; P < 0.001) and vitamin C levels (63.6 ± 6.0 vs. 87.5 ± 4.9 μmol L−1; P < 0.01). Patients with non‐insulin‐dependent diabetes had lower total antioxidant activity than age‐matched control subjects (433.8 ± 25.4 vs. 473.9 ± 30.2 μmol L−1; NS), reflecting lower urate (299.5 ± 19.4 vs. 324.8 ± 21.4 μmol L−1; NS) and vitamin C levels (38.6 ± 5.7 vs. 58.5 ± 5.3 μmol L−1; P < 0.05). Multiple regression analysis showed that urate, vitamin C and vitamin E were the major contributors to serum total antioxidant activity. These results show that diabetic patients have significant defects of antioxidant protection, which may increase vulnerability to oxidative damage and the development of diabetic complications.
Primate milk: Proximate mechanisms and ultimate perspectives

To understand the evolutionary forces that have shaped primate lactation strategies, it is important to understand the proximate mechanisms of milk synthesis and their ecological and phylogenetic contexts. The lactation strategy of a species has four interrelated dimensions: the frequency and duration of nursing bouts, the period of lactation until weaning, the number and sex ratio of infants that a mother rears simultaneously, and the composition and yield of the milk that mothers synthesize. Milk synthesis, arguably the most physiologically costly component of rearing infants, remains the least studied. Energy transfer becomes energetically less efficient, transitioning from placental support to milk synthesis 1 , 2 just as the energy requirements for infant growth, development, and behavioral activity substantially increase. Here we review primate lactation biology and milk synthesis, integrating studies from anthropology, biology, nutrition, animal science, immunology, and biochemistry, to identify the derived and ancestral features of primate milks and enhance our understanding of primate life history.
Spot trading of shared resource in IIU federated cloud

According to the usage characteristics of shared resource in Internet Innovation Union (IIU) federated cloud, considering the randomness of the user demand, the supply remaining rate of resource is proposed to avoid failed purchasing caused by the short supply. The spot trading strategy is presented so that users can buy and utilize the idle resource in the market at the current time. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed pricing method and spot trading strategy of resource can reduce failed purchases effectively and improve the profit obtained by the resource providers as well as the resource application amount. The spot trading introduced into the market makes the resource trading more flexible. It is favorable for the federation members to share resource in a better way, and thus a good development of the federated market.
Application Buffer-Cache Management for Performance: Running the World's Largest MRTG

An operating system's readahead and buffer-cache behaviors can significantly impact application performance; most often these better performance, but occasionally they worsen it. To avoid unintended I/O latencies, many database systems sidestep these OS features by minimizing or eliminating application file I/O. However, network traffic measurement applications are commonly built instead atop a high-performance file-based database: the Round Robin Database (RRD) Tool. While RRD is successful, experience has led the network operations community to believe that its scalability is limited to tens of thousands of, or perhaps one hundred thousand, RRD files on a single system, keeping it from being used to measure the largest managed networks today. We identify the bottleneck responsible for that experience and present two approaches to overcome it. In this paper, we provide a method and tools to expose the readahead and buffer-cache behaviors that are otherwise hidden from the user. We apply our method to a very large network traffic measurement system that experiences scalability problems and determine the performance bottleneck to be unnecessary disk reads, and page faults, due to the default readahead behavior. We develop both a simulation and an analytical model of the performance-limiting page fault rate for RRD file updates. We develop and evaluate two approaches that alleviate this problem: application advice to disable readahead and application-level caching. We demonstrate their effectiveness by configuring and operating the world's largest Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG), with approximately 320,000 RRD files, and over half a million data points measured every five minutes. Conservatively, our techniques approximately triple the capacity of very large MRTG and other RRD-based measurement systems.
Receiver-Initiated Collision Avoidance in Multi-Hip Ad Hoc Networks

Previous analysis of collision avoidance in ad hoc networks with hidden terminals has focused on senderinitiated schemes, like the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordi nation function. This paper presents analytical modeling of receiver-initiated collision avoidance schemes in multihop ad hoc networks. Our analysis shows that receiver-initiate d schemes can offer substantial improvements over senderinitiated techniques, provided that nodes have a good estimate of the traffic offered by their neighbors.
Amygdala controls saccade and gaze physically, motivationally, and socially

The amygdala is uniquely sensitive to emotional events. However, it is not understood whether and how the amygdala uses such emotional signals to control behavior, especially eye movements. We therefore injected muscimol (GABAA agonist) into the central nucleus of amygdala (CeA) in monkeys. This unilateral temporary inactivation suppressed saccades to contralateral but not ipsilateral targets, resulting in longer latencies, hypometric amplitudes, and slower velocity. During free viewing of movies, gaze was distributed mostly in the ipsilateral hemifield. Moreover, CeA inactivation disrupted the tendency of gaze toward social interaction images, which were normally focused on continuously. Conversely, optogenetic stimulation of CeA facilitated saccades to the contralateral side. These findings suggest that CeA controls spatially selective gaze and attention in emotional contexts, and provide a new framework for understanding psychiatric disorders related to amygdala dysfunction. Highlights Central amygdala facilitates contralateral saccades selectively. Saccade facilitation is related to motivational goals and social interaction. The amygdala thus controls goal-directed behavior based on emotional contexts.
Mechanical Strain Influences Preosteoclasts Apoptosis through Mitochondrial Pathway

Background: Osteoclasts, the key differentiated cells mainly responsible for bone resorption, are sensitive to mechanical strain. However, the effect of mechanical strain on osteoclasts apoptosis is poorly understood. Objectives: To investigate the effects of mechanical strain on pre-osteoclast apoptosis in vitro. Methods: After treatment with osteoclast-inductive medium, the pre-osteoclastic RAW264.7 cells were subjected to mechanical strains of physiological 2500 micro strain (μs) and pathologic 5000 μs respectively. Then the apoptosis was detected with Annexin V-FITC/PI binding assay and colorimetric assay of caspase-3 activity, mitochondrial membrane potential (Δψm) was assayed with flow cytometry, and apoptotic proteins were detected with western blots. Results: The mechanical strain of 2500 μs decreased pre-osteoclast apoptosis ratio, caspase-3 activity, elevated Δψm and the level of Bcl-2, down-regulated the level of caspase-3 and cytochrome C in cytoplasm. The pre-osteoclasts subjected to 5000 μs strain showed no evident difference compared to unstrained group. Additionally, pretreatment with cyclosporine A, an inhibitor of mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP), elevated Δψm and lowered mechanical strain of 2500 μs reduced apoptosis ratio. Conclusion: Physiological mechanical strain of 2500 μs inhibited pre-osteoclast apoptosis, and the 5000 μs strain had no significant effects on apoptosis. The physiological strain influenced pre-osteoclast apoptosis through mPTP/ cytochrome C of the mitochondrial pathway.
Bullying Victimization and Perpetration and Their Correlates in Adolescents Clinically Diagnosed With ADHD

Objective: To examine the prevalence rates of bullying involvement and their correlates in adolescents diagnosed with ADHD in Taiwan. Method: Bullying involvement, family and ADHD characteristics, the levels of behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral approach system (BAS), and psychiatric comorbidity were assessed in 287 adolescents with ADHD. The multiple regression analysis was used to examine the correlate of bullying victimization and perpetration. Results: The prevalence rates of the pure victims, pure perpetrators, and victim-perpetrators were 14.6%, 8.4%, and 5.6%, respectively. Young age, a high BIS score, autism spectrum disorders, and low satisfaction with family relationships were associated with severe bullying victimization. A high score of fun seeking on the BAS and low satisfaction with family relationships were associated with severe bullying perpetration. Conclusion: A high proportion of adolescents with ADHD are involved in bullying. Multiple factors are associated with bullying involvement in adolescents with ADHD.
Regulation of Canonical Transient Receptor Potential (TRPC) Channel Function by Diacylglycerol and Protein Kinase C*

The mechanism of receptor-induced activation of the ubiquitously expressed family of mammalian canonical transient receptor potential (TRPC) channels has been the focus of intense study. Primarily responding to phospholipase C (PLC)-coupled receptors, the channels are reported to receive modulatory input from diacylglycerol, endoplasmic reticulum inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptors and Ca2+ stores. Analysis of TRPC5 channels transfected within DT40 B cells and deletion mutants thereof revealed efficient activation in response to PLC-β or PLC-γ activation, which was independent of inositol 1,4,5-trisphoshate receptors or the content of stores. In both HEK293 cells and DT40 cells, TRPC5 and TRPC3 channel responses to PLC activation were highly analogous, but only TRPC3 and not TRPC5 channels responded to the addition of the permeant diacylglycerol (DAG) analogue, 1-oleoyl-2-acetyl-sn-glycerol (OAG). However, OAG application or elevated endogenous DAG, resulting from either DAG lipase or DAG kinase inhibition, completely prevented TRPC5 or TRPC4 activation. This inhibitory action of DAG on TRPC5 and TRPC4 channels was clearly mediated by protein kinase C (PKC), in distinction to the stimulatory action of DAG on TRPC3, which is established to be PKC-independent. PKC activation totally blocked TRPC3 channel activation in response to OAG, and the activation was restored by PKC-blockade. PKC inhibition resulted in decreased TRPC3 channel deactivation. Store-operated Ca2+ entry in response to PLC-coupled receptor activation was substantially reduced by OAG or DAG-lipase inhibition in a PKC-dependent manner. However, store-operated Ca2+ entry in response to the pump blocker, thapsigargin, was unaffected by PKC. The results reveal that each TRPC subtype is strongly inhibited by DAG-induced PKC activation, reflecting a likely universal feedback control on TRPCs, and that DAG-mediated PKC-independent activation of TRPC channels is highly subtype-specific. The profound yet distinct control by PKC and DAG of the activation of TRPC channel subtypes is likely the basis of a spectrum of regulatory phenotypes of expressed TRPC channels.
High Q Micro-machined Cavity Resonator Filter in Low-Cost Silicon Technology

This paper demonstrates a two-pole filter based on high Q micro-machined cavity resonators for operation at 20 GHz. The filter implements a novel inter-resonator coupling cavity placed above the inter-cavity wall separating the resonators and etched out of silicon using the same KOH-etching process as the one used to realised the cavity resonators. The Q-factor of a single cavity resonator is measured as well as the response of the two-pole filter. The filter presented here constitutes the first development step toward a more sophisticated fixed as well as tunable four-pole filter aiming at the replacement of bulky waveguide filters mounted in a majority of satellite transceivers.
A Nontoxic Pseudomonas Exotoxin A Induces Active Immunity and Passive Protective Antibody against Pseudomonas Exotoxin A Intoxication

Pseudomonas exotoxin A (PE) is one of the most potent cytotoxic agents produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In this study, we examined the possibility of using PE with a deletion of 38 carboxyl-terminal amino acid residues, designated PE(Δ576–613), for active immunization against PE-mediated disease. We first examined the toxic effects of PE and PE(Δ576–613) on 5- and 9-week-old ICR mice. The results show that the subcutaneous administration of PE(Δ576–613) at a dose of 250 μg was still nontoxic to 5- and 9-week-old ICR mice, while native PE was lethal at a dose of 0.5 and 1 μg, respectively. PE(Δ576–613) was then used to immunize ICR mice. The minimum dose of PE(Δ576–613) that could effectively induce anti-PE antibodies in 5- and 9-week-old ICR mice was found to be 250 ng. However, immunization with 250 ng PE(Δ576–613) failed to protect the immunized mice from a lethal dose of PE. The effective immunization dose of PE(Δ576–613) that could protect mice against a 2 μg PE challenge was found to be 15 μg. In addition, sera obtained from PE(Δ576–613)-immunized ICR mice were able to neutralize PE intoxication and effectively protect mice from PE. Thus, PE(Δ576–613) may be used as an alternative route to new PE vaccine development.
Auditory Perceptual Learning in Adults with and without Age-Related Hearing Loss

Introduction : Speech recognition in adverse listening conditions becomes more difficult as we age, particularly for individuals with age-related hearing loss (ARHL). Whether these difficulties can be eased with training remains debated, because it is not clear whether the outcomes are sufficiently general to be of use outside of the training context. The aim of the current study was to compare training-induced learning and generalization between normal-hearing older adults and those with ARHL. Methods : Fifty-six listeners (60–72 y/o), 35 participants with ARHL, and 21 normal hearing adults participated in the study. The study design was a cross over design with three groups (immediate-training, delayed-training, and no-training group). Trained participants received 13 sessions of home-based auditory training over the course of 4 weeks. Three adverse listening conditions were targeted: (1) Speech-in-noise, (2) time compressed speech, and (3) competing speakers, and the outcomes of training were compared between normal and ARHL groups. Pre- and post-test sessions were completed by all participants. Outcome measures included tests on all of the trained conditions as well as on a series of untrained conditions designed to assess the transfer of learning to other speech and non-speech conditions. Results : Significant improvements on all trained conditions were observed in both ARHL and normal-hearing groups over the course of training. Normal hearing participants learned more than participants with ARHL in the speech-in-noise condition, but showed similar patterns of learning in the other conditions. Greater pre- to post-test changes were observed in trained than in untrained listeners on all trained conditions. In addition, the ability of trained listeners from the ARHL group to discriminate minimally different pseudowords in noise also improved with training. Conclusions : ARHL did not preclude auditory perceptual learning but there was little generalization to untrained conditions. We suggest that most training-related changes occurred at higher level task-specific cognitive processes in both groups. However, these were enhanced by high quality perceptual representations in the normal-hearing group. In contrast, some training-related changes have also occurred at the level of phonemic representations in the ARHL group, consistent with an interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes.