Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The mixing rate of the arterial blood pressure waveform Markov chain is correlated with shock index during hemorrhage in anesthetized swine

Identifying the need for interventions during hemorrhage is complicated due to physiological compensation mechanisms that can stabilize vital signs until a significant amount of blood loss. Physiological systems providing compensation during hemorrhage affect the arterial blood pressure waveform through changes in dynamics and waveform morphology. We investigated the use of Markov chain analysis of the arterial blood pressure waveform to monitor physiological systems changes during hemorrhage. Continuous arterial blood pressure recordings were made on anesthetized swine (N=7) during a 5 min baseline period and during a slow hemorrhage (10 ml/kg over 30 min). Markov chain analysis was applied to 20 sec arterial blood pressure waveform segments with a sliding window. 20 ranges of arterial blood pressure were defined as states and empirical transition probability matrices were determined for each 20 sec segment. The mixing rate (2nd largest eigenvalue of the transition probability matrix) was determined for all segments. A change in the mixing rate from baseline estimates was identified during hemorrhage for each animal (median time of 13 min, ~10% estimated blood volume, with minimum and maximum times of 2 and 33 min, respectively). The mixing rate was found to have an inverse correlation with shock index for all 7 animals (median correlation coefficient of -0.95 with minimum and maximum of -0.98 and -0.58, respectively). The Markov chain mixing rate of arterial blood pressure recordings is a novel potential biomarker for monitoring and understanding physiological systems during hemorrhage.
How important is each of the following to you in your life ? Trends in Preferences

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men. Betsey Stevenson The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania 1454 Steinberg Dietrich Hall 3620 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104 and NBER betseys@wharton.upenn. edu Justin Wolfers Business and Public Policy Department Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania 3620 Locust Walk Room 1456 Steinberg-Deitrich Hall Philadelphia, PA 19104-6372 and NBER jwolfers@wharton.upenn. edu
A Fuzzy Inference net approach to electricity price forecasting

In this paper, a new Fuzzy Inference Net (FIN)-based method is proposed for electricity price forecasting. FIN makes use of Fuzzy Self-organization Mapping (FSOM) to evaluate the attribute probability of unknown data for the predetermined clusters. This paper focuses on the predicted zone rather than the predicted value due to the difficulty of the price forecasting with high volatility. After the zone of the electricity price is sectionalized into several zones, this paper constructs FIN at each zone that evaluates the attribute probability of unknown input data to each zone. The proposed method is successfully applied to the one-day-ahead electricity price of real data.
Sustained potential shifts and paroxysmal discharges in hippocampal formation.

Paroxysmal firing was provoked by electric stimulation of afferent pathways in hippocampal formation of intact, urethan-anesthetized rats, of freely moving unanesthetized rats, and in hippocampal tissue slices in vitro. The electric responses of fascia dentata and CA3 zone of the hippocampus of urethan-anesthetized rats were recorded with extracellular microelectrodes. Paroxysmal discharges were provoked by stimulating the ipsilateral angular bundle. During repetitive stimulation, intercurrent paroxysmal discharges (IPaD) took the form of compound action potentials (population spikes) of large amplitude, provoked by but not locked in time to the stimulus pulses. IPaD was often but not always followed by paroxysmal after-discharge (PaAD), usually consisting of bursts of population spikes, sometimes superimposed on a slow wave. Stimulus pulses that were not strong enough to evoke population spikes when applied singly could provoke the paroxysmal firing of large amplitude spikes when applied repetitively. The liminal frequency to provoke paroxysmal firing, with 10-s train duration and with pulses evoking 60 to 80% of maximal amplitude focal postsynaptic potential (PSP) waves, varied between 6 and 15 Hz in urethan-anesthetized rats. The outbreak of IPaD was always accompanied by a marked sustained potential (SP) shift. The polarity of the paroxysmal SP shift was the opposite of the polarity of the PSP waves. We conclude that the extracellular paroxysmal SP shifts in fascia dentata are probably generated mainly by current flowing from the dendritic trees toward the cell somata of granule cells. The amplitude of the population spikes fired during paroxysmal discharges could reach 30-40 mV, indicating the precise coincidence of the impulses fired by many neurons. These spikes often arose without a detectable preceding synaptic potential. We conclude that the synchronization of the action potentials fired by granule and pyramidal cells during paroxysmal discharge is probably due to electric interaction among the neurons. In unanesthetized freely moving rats IPaD and PaAD consisting of bursts of population spikes were provoked. These were similar to those observed in urethan-anesthetized rats. Motor seizures provoked in kindled rats were associated with intense and prolonged spike bursts followed by spikeless positive waves recorded in the granule cell layer of fascia dentata. In hippocampal tissue slices maintained in vitro, paroxysmal firing could be provoked in CA1 zone by repetitive stimulation of Schaffer collaterals. IPaD and PaAD could be provoked in some slices exposed to normal (3.5 mM) [K+] and in all slices exposed to elevated (5.5 or 7.0 mM) [K+]. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Suppressive Effects of Edible Thai Plants on Superoxide and Nitric Oxide Generation.

We screened ethanol extracts from a total of 134 species of edible Thai plants for their suppressive effects on superoxide (O2(-)) generation using a xanthine (XA)-xanthine oxidase (XOD) assay system. When the extracts were tested at a concentration of 500 &mgr;/g/ml, 28.4% significantly suppressed O2(-) generation. Of these active extracts, it was found that in 17.9% of cases the action was due to XOD inhibition, in 1.5% due to O2(-) scavenging activity, and in 9% due to both XOD inhibition and O2(-) scavenging. In addition, some plant extracts (25 species) which had been known to possibly possess anti-tumor promoting activity were tested for O2(-) and NO generation in cellular systems. In this test, 13 species exhibited strong inhibitory activity toward both O2(-) and NO generation. From the fruit pods of Oroxylum indicum (Bignoniaceae), a traditional vegetable in Thailand, two flavones, oroxylin A and chrysin, and a triterpene carboxylic acid, ursolic acid (UA), were identified as inhibitors of O2(-) generation in XA/XOD system. These compounds also showed marked inhibitory effects on the tumor promoter 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA)-induced O2(-) generation in dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO)-differentiated HL-60 cells. Our results suggest that, as we have reported earlier, edible Thai plants are promising sources of antioxidants with chemopreventive potential.
Harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington State, USA, reveal a combination of local and global polychlorinated biphenyl, dioxin, and furan signals

The harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) can serve as a useful indicator of food web contamination by persistent organic pollutants (POPs) because of its high trophic level, wide distribution in temperate coastal waters of the Northern Hemisphere, and relative ease of capture. In 1996 through 1997, we live‐captured 60 harbor seal pups from three regions, spanning remote (Queen Charlotte Strait, BC, Canada), moderately industrialized (Strait of Georgia, BC, Canada), and heavily industrialized (Puget Sound, WA, USA) marine basins straddling the Canada‐United States border. Biopsy samples of blubber were taken and analyzed for congener‐specific polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polychlorinated dibenzo‐p‐dioxins (PCDDs), and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) by using high‐resolution gas chromatography‐high‐resolution mass spectrometry. Harbor seals in Puget Sound were heavily contaminated with PCBs, whereas seals from the Strait of Georgia had relatively high concentrations of PCDDs and PCDFs. Pattern evaluation and principal components analysis suggested that proximity to sources influenced the mixture to which seals were exposed, with those inhabiting more remote areas being exposed to lighter PCB congeners (those with lower Henry's law constant and KOW) that disperse more readily through atmospheric and other processes. Total toxic equivalents to 2,3,7,8‐tetrachlorodibenzo‐p‐dioxin for the PCBs, PCDDs, and PCDFs suggest that Puget Sound seals are at greatest risk for adverse health effects, and that PCBs represent the class of dioxinlike contaminants of greatest concern at all sites.
Human Intestinal Dendritic Cells Decrease Cytokine Release against Salmonella Infection in the Presence of Lactobacillus paracasei upon TLR Activation

Probiotic bacteria have been shown to modulate immune responses and could have therapeutic effects in allergic and inflammatory disorders. However, little is known about the signalling pathways that are engaged by probiotics. Dendritic cells (DCs) are antigen-presenting cells that are involved in immunity and tolerance. Monocyte-derived dendritic cells (MoDCs) and murine DCs are different from human gut DCs; therefore, in this study, we used human DCs generated from CD34+ progenitor cells (hematopoietic stem cells) harvested from umbilical cord blood; those DCs exhibited surface antigens of dendritic Langerhans cells, similar to the lamina propria DCs in the gut. We report that both a novel probiotic strain isolated from faeces of exclusively breast-fed newborn infants, Lactobacillus paracasei CNCM I-4034, and its cell-free culture supernatant (CFS) decreased pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines in human intestinal DCs challenged with Salmonella. Interestingly, the supernatant was as effective as the bacteria in reducing pro-inflammatory cytokine expression. In contrast, the bacterium was a potent inducer of TGF-β2 secretion, whereas the supernatant increased the secretion of TGF-β1 in response to Salmonella. We also showed that both the bacteria and its supernatant enhanced innate immunity through the activation of Toll-like receptor (TLR) signalling. These treatments strongly induced the transcription of the TLR9 gene. In addition, upregulation of the CASP8 and TOLLIP genes was observed. This work demonstrates that L. paracasei CNCM I-4034 enhanced innate immune responses, as evidenced by the activation of TLR signalling and the downregulation of a broad array of pro-inflammatory cytokines. The use of supernatants like the one described in this paper could be an effective and safe alternative to using live bacteria in functional foods.
Molecular evolution of the human immunoglobulin E response: high incidence of shared mutations and clonal relatedness among epsilon VH5 transcripts from three unrelated patients with atopic dermatitis

We have analyzed the nucleotide sequences of 19 epsilon VH5 transcripts derived from in vivo isotype switched peripheral blood B cells of three patients with atopic dermatitis. Comparison with the patients' own germline VH5 gene segments revealed that the epsilon transcripts were derived from both functional members of the human VH5 gene family and harbored numerous somatic mutations (range 5-36 per VH5 gene). In two patients, we detected clonally related but diverged transcripts, permitting the construction of a genealogical tree in one patient. We observed a high proportion of shared silent (S) and replacement (R) mutations among epsilon VH5 sequences derived from all three individuals, even among transcripts descending from the two different germline VH5 gene segments. A remarkably high number of these mutations is shared with previously reported VH5 genes encoding antibodies with defined specificities. The shared S mutations, and likely a fraction of the R mutations, appear to mark preferential sites ("hot spots") of somatic hypermutations in human VH5 genes. The distribution of R and S mutations over complementarity determining region and framework regions in the majority of VH regions deviated from that characteristic of antigen-driven immune response. We hypothesize that the V regions of immunoglobulin E-bearing B cells have accumulated "selectively neutral" mutations over extended periods of clonal expansion, resulting in unusual R/S ratios. We propose that the molecular characteristics of the epsilon VH regions in atopic dermatitis may be representative of antigens that recurrently or chronically stimulate the immune system.
Effects of Morpheme Boundaries on Intergestural Timing: Evidence from Korean

Abstract This paper examines the effects of morpheme boundaries on intergestural timing, and demonstrates that low-level phonetic realization is influenced by morphological structure, i.e. compounding and affixation. It reports two experiments, one using electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMA) and one electropalatography (EPG), examining Korean data. The results of the EMA study show that intergestural timing is less variable for adjacent gestures across the word boundary inside a lexicalized compound than inside a nonlexicalized compound, and inside a monomorphemic word than across a morpheme boundary. The EPG study (which examined the timing in palatalization of a coronal) shows that both [ti] and [ni] have more variability in gestural timing when heteromorphemic than when tautomorphemic. Furthermore, the phonetic details of gestural overlap shed light on the asymmetry on palatalization between tautomorphemic and heteromorphemic gestural sequences (e.g. ni vs. n-i), presumably driven by paradigmatic contrast and preference of overlap. In short, what emerges from two experiments is that gestures are coordinated more stably within a single lexical item (a morpheme or a lexicalized compound) than across a boundary between lexical items. In accounting for the stability of intergestural timing within a lexical entry, several hypotheses were discussed including the Phase Window, Bonding Strength, Phonological Timing and Extended Phase Window model newly proposed here. The implication is that the morphological structure may be encoded in the phonetic realization, as is the case with other linguistic structure (e.g. prosodic structure).
Comparison of effects of acoustic and language knowledge on spontaneous speech perception/recognition between human and automatic speech recognizer

An automatic speech recognizer uses acoustic knowledge and linguistic knowledge. In large vocabulary speech recognition, acoustic knowledge is modeled by hidden Markov models (HMM), linguistic knowledge is modeled by N-gram (typically bi-gram or trigram), and these models are stochastically integrated. It is thought that humans also integrate acoustic and linguistic knowledge of speech when perceiving continuous speech. Automatic speech recognition with HMM and N-gram is thought to roughly model the process of human perception. Although these models have drastically improved the performance of automatic speech recognition of well-formed read speech so far, they cannot deliver sufﬁcient performance on spontaneous speech recognition tasks because of various particular phenomena of spontaneous speech. In this paper, we conducted simulation experiments of N-gram language models by combining human acoustic knowledge and instruction of local context and assured that using two words neighboring the target word was enough to improve the performance of recognition when we could use only local information as linguistic knowledge. We also assured that coarticulation affected the perception of short words. We then compared some language models on speech recognizer. We calculated acoustic scores with HMM and then linguistic scores calculated from a language model were added. We obtained 37.5% recognition rate only with acoustic model, whereas we obtained 51.0% with both acoustic and language models, thus the relative performance improvement was 36%. On the other hand, we obtained a 16.5% recognition rate only with the language model, so the acoustic model improved the performance relatively 209%. The performance of the language model on spontaneous speech is almost equal to that on read speech and thus, the improvements of the acoustic models is more effective than that of the language model.
WAIS-IV Administration Errors: Effects of Altered Response Requirements on Symbol Search and Violation of Standard Surface-Variety Patterns on Block Design

This study utilized a sample of 50 college students to assess the possibility that responding to the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) Symbol Search subtest items with an “x” instead of a “single slash mark” would affect performance. A second sample of 50 college students was used to assess the impact on WAIS-IV Block Design performance of presenting all the items with only red surfaces facing up. The modified Symbol Search and Block Design administrations yielded mean scaled scores and raw scores that did not differ significantly from mean scores obtained with standard administrations. Findings should not be generalized beyond healthy, well-educated young adults.
Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior

Part 1 How nature handles complexity: what is a pattern? kinds of patterns principles of dynamic pattern formation the messages of self-organized patterns new laws to be expected in the organism matters of mind and matter the mind revealed? or, what this book's about. Part 2 Self-organization of behaviour - the basic picture: some historical remarks about the science of psychology are actions self-organized? if so, how? from synergies to synergetics requirements of a theory of self-organized behaviour. Part 3 Self-organization of behaviour - first steps of generalization: Hubris tempered? on Harvard horses and Russian cats coordination between components of an organism coordination between organisms on coupling. Part 4 Extending the basic picture - breaking away: relative coordination relative coordination explained absolute and relative coordination unified related models - fireflies, lampreys, and lasers instability and the nature of life - the intermittency mechanism exposed postscript. Part 5 Intentional dynamics: goal-directness in biology the second cornerstone of biological self-organization - informational specificity intentional behaviourial change related views - termites, predator-prey cycles, and quantum mechanics summing up. Part 6 Learning dynamics: issues in learning the main concepts the 'seagull effect' - competition and cooperation questions of learning transfer and generalization - symmetry again behaviourial development evolution and morphogenesis summary and conclusions. Part 7 perceptual dynamics: the barrier of meaning - perceptual dynamics I the barrier of meaning - perceptual dynamics II metastability of mind principles of perceiving - calculating, settling, resonating, and twinkling. Part 8 Self-organizing dynamics of the nervous system: microscale events mesoscale events macroscale events extending the basic picture.again postscript on etymology. Part 9 Self-organization of the human brain: prolegomenon obstacles to understanding the brain is not a static machine the 'brain dynamics' approach - fractural dimension spatiotemporal patterns of the brain models of brain behaviour - coupled modes and Sil'nikov chaos summary and conclusions - brain behaviour.
Diseases of the peripheral nerves, neuromuscular junction, or uncertain sites: relevant examination techniques and illustrative video segments.

Mechanical injuries to peripheral nerves occur because of compression, entrapment, transection, laceration, ischemia, crushing, stretching, or chemical or burn damage. Neurapractic lesions are characterized by a failure of conduction of the action potential across the injured axonal segment. Axonotmesis is axonal interruption caused by axon and myelin sheath injury, whereas neurotmesis reflects complete disruption of endoneurium, perineurium, and/or epineurium. Recovery by axonal regrowth is unlikely after neurotmesis. After axonotmesis of motor nerves, muscle reinnervation is to be expected and occurs by 2 separate mechanisms: collateral sprouting and axonal regrowth. If there is incomplete loss of axons, reinnervation of muscle units by sprouting occurs in days to weeks. Reinnervation by axonal regrowth occurs at a rate of 1 millimeter per day (approximately 1 inch per month). Skeletal muscle cells deprived of nerve supply ultimately undergo fibroblastic transformation; thus, reinnervation may not be possible after more than 12 months, although this remains a controversial issue. Peripheral nerve injuries are characterized by weakness of the innervated muscle accompanied within 2 to 4 weeks by appreciable atrophy. When the injured nerve supplies important extensor muscles of the limbs (e.g., as is the case for radial, femoral, sciatic, and peroneal nerves), there is obvious alteration of gait. Areas of cutaneous anesthesia occasionally accompany peripheral nerve injuries. Over the neck and trunk, cutaneous sensory innervation occurs in defined bands associated with segmental dermatomes. Damage to a peripheral spinal nerve or dorsal nerve root results in cutaneous anesthesia/hypalgesia over the supplied dermatome. With damage to the pudendal nerve or its sacral nerve roots, there is anesthesia/hypalgesia of the perineal area. In contrast, relatively small autonomous zones have been defined for sensory components of the ulnar, musculocutaneous, median, femoral, tibial, and peroneal nerves. Sympathetic fibers are distributed with peripheral nerves, so denervated skin also may be evident as circumscribed spontaneous sweating. The most common and important syndromes of me-
Quantitative X-ray pair distribution function analysis of nanocrystalline calcium silicate hydrates: a contribution to the understanding of cement chemistry

Quantitative analysis of the X-ray pair distribution function collected on calcium silicate hydrates having Ca/Si ratios ranging between 0.57 and 1.47 was applied. With increasing Ca/Si ratio, Si bridging tetrahedra are omitted and Ca(OH)2 is detected at the highest ratios.