Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Considering Eligibility for Studies of Deep Brain Stimulation for Treatment-Resistant Depression: Insights From a Clinical Trial in Unipolar and Bipolar Depression

Background While electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is the most effective treatment for major depression (major depressive disorder [MDD]), deep brain stimulation (DBS) has shown efficacy in patients who have not received benefit from ECT. Studies of DBS are small, and a better understanding of which eligibility criteria lead to exclusion may help achieve a more appropriate balance between scientific rigor and generalizability in future trials. We assessed the rate and reasons for exclusion from a study of DBS for treatment-resistant MDD and bipolar type II (BPII) depression. Methods One thousand ninety-eight adults were screened for a study of DBS for MDD or BPII. Reasons for exclusion were documented. Descriptive statistics were calculated for each reason for exclusion for the entire sample as well as the self-reported MDD and BPII subgroups. Results Ninety-eight percent (98%) of patients screened were excluded. Exclusion due to lack of interest or inability to relocate to the study site was high (41%). Following this, primary reasons for exclusion were lack of prior ECT and presence of psychiatric/general medical comorbidity. Patients with MDD were more likely to be excluded because of inadequate ECT, whereas patients with BPII depression were more likely to be excluded for comorbid psychiatric diagnoses and not meeting minimum severity criteria. Conclusions A surprisingly high number of potential participants were excluded because of lack of adequate ECT. This suggests that many patients self-identifying as “treatment resistant” have not truly exhausted available, evidence-based treatments. Overall exclusion rate was high, with key differences in exclusion reasons between the MDD and BPII subgroups. These findings can inform design of future clinical trials for treatment-resistant unipolar and bipolar depression. Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00367003
Prevalence and risk factors of workplace violence against health care workers in emergency department in Ismailia, Egypt

Introduction Emergency department is one of the high-risk areas, where violence against health care workers (HCWs) is a prevalent and serious problem. Violence has negative effects on HCWs, and therefore on the quality of care provided in emergency department. This study aimed to determine the prevalence, types, sources and risk factors of violence reported by HCWs in emergency department. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted using a standardized questionnaire developed by the WHO. One hundred thirty four questionnaires were included in this study (94.4% response rate). Results WPV was reported by 59.7% of HCWs. Verbal violence was the most reported (58.2%), compared to physical violence (15.7%). The most reported reasons for violence were waiting time and that patient and family expectations not being met. Only 29.5% of HCWs who experienced verbal violence and 23.8% of who experienced physical violence reported it to hospital authority. About 75% of HCW thought that work place violence could be prevented, and about 60% said that no action was taken against the attacker by hospital authority. Conclusion Violence against HCWs in emergency department is a significant issue that cannot be ignored. There are multiple reasons. The key point in dealing with the problem is to treat its specific causes.
A Grounded Typology of Consumer Coping Strategies Within the Context of Infertility Treatment

EXTENDED ABSTRACT In recent years, researchers in consumer behavior have increasingly recognized that people may encounter significant obstacles when attempting to achieve goals related to consumption. One research stream demonstrating the salience of this topic focuses on understanding the coping strategies consumers employ when they experience and attempt to manage negative or mixed emotions in a variety of consumer contexts. Coping has been defined as Aa multidimensional set of cognitions and behaviors called upon to help the person manage or tolerate the demands imposed by chronic or acute stressors. @ (Eckenrode, 1991, p.3).
Iterative Multiuser Detectors for Spatial–Frequency–Time-Domain Spread Multi-Carrier DS-CDMA Systems

This paper presents three low-complexity, yet effective, multiuser detectors (MUDs) for the uplink of spatial-frequency-time-domain (SFT-domain) spread multicarrier (MC) direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems. Each MUD first converts a received signal into the corresponding format. It then detects the transmitted symbols iteratively by using a one-domain (1D) minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) detector and a two-domain (2D) MMSE detector alternately. The weights of the 1D detector are updated to minimize the mean-square error (MSE) of the detection output by setting the weights of the 2D detector at the values determined in the previous iteration, and vice versa. Performance analyses of the bit-error-rate (BER) bound, the convergence, and the required computational complexity are conducted to assess the feasibility of the proposed MUDs. Finally, the results of computer simulations demonstrate that the performance of the proposed schemes is close to that of the joint SFT-domain MMSE MUD in most scenarios but with lower computational overheads.
FAST FACTORIZATIONS OF DISCRETE SINE TRANSFORMS OF TYPES VI AND

Discrete Sine Transforms of types VI and VII (DST-VI/VII) have recently received considerable interest in video coding. In particular, it was shown that DST-VII offers good approximation for KLT of residual signals produced by spatial (Intra) prediction process. In this paper, we offer an additional argument for use of such transforms by showing that they allow fast computation. Specifically, we establish a mapping between N -point DST-VI/VII and an 2N + 1-point Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), apply known factorization techniques for the DFT, and show how unused parts of the resulting flowgraph can be pruned, producing factorizations of DST-VI/VII.
Overflow Metabolism in Escherichia coli during Steady-State Growth: Transcriptional Regulation and Effect of the Redox Ratio

ABSTRACT Overflow metabolism in the form of aerobic acetate excretion by Escherichia coli is an important physiological characteristic of this common industrial microorganism. Although acetate formation occurs under conditions of high glucose consumption, the genetic mechanisms that trigger this phenomenon are not clearly understood. We report on the role of the NADH/NAD ratio (redox ratio) in overflow metabolism. We modulated the redox ratio in E. coli through the expression of Streptococcus pneumoniae (water-forming) NADH oxidase. Using steady-state chemostat cultures, we demonstrated a strong correlation between acetate formation and this redox ratio. We furthermore completed genome-wide transcription analyses of a control E. coli strain and an E. coli strain overexpressing NADH oxidase. The transcription results showed that in the control strain, several genes involved in the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle and respiration were repressed as the glucose consumption rate increased. Moreover, the relative repression of these genes was alleviated by expression of NADH oxidase and the resulting reduced redox ratio. Analysis of a promoter binding site upstream of the genes which correlated with redox ratio revealed a degenerate sequence with strong homology with the binding site for ArcA. Deletion of arcA resulted in acetate reduction and increased the biomass yield due to the increased capacities of the TCA cycle and respiration. Acetate formation was completely eliminated by reducing the redox ratio through expression of NADH oxidase in the arcA mutant, even at a very high glucose consumption rate. The results provide a basis for studying new regulatory mechanisms prevalent at reduced NADH/NAD ratios, as well as for designing more efficient bioprocesses.
Brief Image-Based Health Behavior Messages for Adolescents and Their Parents

ABSTRACT This study tested the efficacy of brief image-based print-mediated parent/caregiver and adolescent messages integrating physical activity with alcohol use avoidance. A total of 684 high school students were randomly assigned to either the parent postcard or adolescent flyer arm, with baseline and four-month postintervention data collections. A significant repeated measures interaction (group × time) was found (F(4,344) = 2.48, p = . 04), with univariate tests showing less alcohol use frequency and problems (ps < .05) among adolescents exposed to parent materials. Repeated measures factorial MANOVAs for group × time × prior current drug use were significant, with drug using adolescents receiving parent print messages showing less alcohol initiation and frequency and marijuana initiation and frequency (ps < .05). Very brief print materials sent to parents/caregivers may hold some promise for influencing substance use among adolescents, particularly those already using drugs.
On providing location privacy for mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

A common practice in sensor networks is to collect sensing data and report them to the sinks or to some pre-defined data rendezvous points via multi-hop communications. Attackers may locate the sink easily by reading the destination field in the packet header or predicting the arrival of the sink at the rendezvous points, which opens up vulnerabilities to location privacy of the sinks. In this paper, we propose a random data collection scheme to protect the location privacy of mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks. Data are forwarded along random paths and stored at the intermediate nodes probabilistically in the network. The sinks will move around randomly to collect data from the local nodes occasionally, which prevents the attackers from predicting their locations and movements. We analyze different kind of attacks threatening the location privacy of the sinks in sensor networks. We also evaluate the delivery rate, data collection delay and protection strength of our scheme by both analysis and simulations. Both analytical and simulation results show that our scheme can protect location privacy of mobile sinks effectively, while providing satisfactory data collection services.
Event-Selected Vector Field Discontinuities Yield Piecewise-Differentiable Flows

We study a class of discontinuous vector fields brought to our attention by multilegged animal locomotion. Such vector fields arise not only in biomechanics, but also in robotics, neuroscience, and electrical engineering, to name a few domains of application. Under the conditions that (i) the vector field's discontinuities are locally confined to a finite number of smooth submanifolds and (ii) the vector field is transverse to these surfaces in an appropriate sense, it is known that the vector field yields a well--defined flow that is Lipschitz continuous. We extend these results by showing this flow is piecewise--differentiable, so that it admits a first--order approximation (known as a Bouligand derivative) that is piecewise--linear and continuous at every point. We exploit this first--order approximation to infer existence of piecewise--differentiable impact maps (including Poincare maps for periodic orbits), show that the flow is locally conjugate (via a piecewise--differentiable homeomorphism) to a f.
Improved 4H-SiC N-MOSFET Interface Passivation by Combining N2O Oxidation with Boron Diffusion

A new oxide configuration for the development of high mobility 4H-SiC lateral MOSFETs is proposed in this work. The oxide is composed by a rapid thermal oxidation (RTO) in N2O environment, a Boron diffusion into the SiO2 and a PECVD TEOS deposited oxide, in order to improve the interface quality. The obtained MOSFETs show very high peak field effect mobilities ranging from 80 up to more than 170 cm2V-1s-1 in MOSFETs with higher channel length than the tested transistors. The physical (SIMS) and electrical analysis of the oxide and SiC surface reveals that the Boron has not diffused into the SiC. This is most probably due to the high concentration of Nitrogen at the interface generated during the N2O oxidation.
Towards automatic classification of private households using electricity consumption data

The ongoing liberalization of the energy market makes energy providers increasingly look at premium services -- like personalized energy consulting -- as preferred methods to bind existing customers and attract new ones. Providing such services, however, requires knowledge of specific properties of the customer's household -- like its size and the number of persons living in it. In this paper, we investigate how such properties can be inferred from the fine-grained electricity consumption data provided by digital electricity meters. In particular, we focus on exploring which properties are both interesting and likely to be identified using well-known classification methods. To this end, we first elicit a set of interesting properties by performing in-depth interviews with employees of three different energy providers. We then explore a large set of electricity consumption traces using a self-organizing map. This analysis allows to identify a set of household properties that are likely to be inferable from electricity consumption data using standard classification methods. For instance, our results show that the size of a household and the income of its occupants are properties that are both highly useful to energy providers as well as likely to be detectable using an automatic classification system.
Ruled Surfaces for Rationalization and Design in Architecture

In this work, we address the challenges in the realization of free-form architecture and complex shapes in general with the technical advantages of ruled surfaces. We propose a geometry processing framework to approximate (rationalize) a given shape by one or multiple strips of ruled surfaces. We discuss techniques to achieve an overall smooth surface and develop a parametric model for the generation of curvature continuous surfaces composed of ruled surface strips. We illustrate the usability of the proposed process at hand of several projects, where the pipeline has been applied to compute NC data for mould production and to rationalize large parts of free-form facades.
Ontology-Based Fuzzy Semantic Clustering

Document clustering plays an important role in providing intuitive navigation and browsing mechanisms by organizing large amounts of documents into a small number of meaningful clusters. Most of the documents clustering methods were grounded in the bag of words representation to measure similarity, ignoring the semantic relationships between words that do not co-occur literally. A novel fuzzy semantic method that integrates ontology as background knowledge into the process of computing similarity between documents is proposed so as to improve the performance of documents clustering in terms of quality and efficiency. Ontology is represented as a graph-based model that reflects semantic relationship between concepts, with which a semantic similarity matrix of concepts that exploits semantic relation of the ontology is defined. Based on conceptual matrix a document can be represented to a semantic fuzzy set. Then similarity between documents is computed with fuzzy matching measure. The result of this process may make documents not similar with vector representation become similar. Maximal fuzzy spanning tree algorithm is used as a document-clustering algorithm. Finally the efficacy of our approach is demonstrated through relevant experiments.
Toward improving the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

Figure 1. Evolution of Alzheimer’s disease. AD is characterized by progressive cognitive deficit which clearly separates AD patients from the mild decline in cognitive functions associated with normal aging. Mild cognitive impairment is a clinical state, sometimes prodromal to fully symptomatic AD, where cognitive deficit can be delineated by psychometric testing. AD pathogenesis is associated with progressive accumulation of a toxic and hydrophobic As peptide in the brain, which starts a number of years prior to the onset of clinical symptoms (yellow dotted line). This preclinical stage of the disease is dubbed the “brain AD stage”. Progressive accumulation of As in the brain results in a number of secondary pathological processes including neurofibrillary degeneration, inflammation, synaptic loss, and neuronal dropout, whose severity correlates with clinical symptoms of the disease (magenta dashed line).
Remediation of Nickel ion from wastewater by applying various techniques: a review

Abstract The remediation of organic and inorganic pollutants from the aqueous environment has touched a certain level with the development of research. Environmental pollution is increasing day by day due to industrial activities which cause a negative effect on human health and the ecosystem. Nowadays, heavy metals have a special concern due to its toxicity, persistence and bioaccumulation in nature. Toxic metals like chromium, nickel, arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium are the main contaminants of water because they are non-biodegradable in nature. Nickel is also a toxic metal, mostly used in industries because of its anticorrosion behaviour. As a consequence nickel is present in the wastage of electroplating, tableware, metal finishing, plastics manufacturing, nickel-cadmium batteries, fertilizers and mining industries and these waste have dangerous impact on the human health and environment and causes the diseases i.e. diarrhea, anemia, hepatitis, kidney damage, gastrointestinal distress, skin dermatitis, and central nervous system dysfunction. In the present review article, several techniques are discussed for the treatment of nickel from the industrial environment. The elimination of nickel from wastewater is not important only for economic purposes but also for environmental safety.
A new era in human computer interaction: the challenges of technology as a social proxy

As computer technologies become more pervasive new challengers will emerge, requiring approaches that reach out beyond a single mind interacting with an isolated technology in a social, cultural, and historical vacuum. This paper briefly presents new tendencies in HCI to studying the human interactions mediated by technologies in the context of their social practices, and a prominent framework, distributed cognition, as a new theoretical underpinning for HCI. To illustrate the challenges of this new context, findings from a three-year-long effort are discussed. Final remarks and considerations are then highlighted.
Revisiting Fisher: range size drives the correlation between variability and abundance of British bird eggs

We evaluate the correlation between intraspecific variation in egg size and population size in breeding British birds. Using information on abundance, range occupancy, migration status and phylogenetic relationships among species, we show that a wider geographical distribution rather than larger population size per se best predicts egg size variability. A similar result applies to wing length variability. Results from a phylogenetic path analysis suggest that geographical variation is the most parsimonious causal explanation for high intraspecific variation in common species.
The Basic Helix‐Loop‐Helix/Leucine Zipper Transcription Factor USF2 Integrates Serum‐Induced PAI‐1 Expression and Keratinocyte Growth

Plasminogen activator inhibitor type‐1 (PAI‐1), a major regulator of the plasmin‐dependent pericellular proteolytic cascade, is prominently expressed during the tissue response to injury although the factors that impact PAI‐1 induction and their role in the repair process are unclear. Kinetic modeling using established biomarkers of cell cycle transit (c‐MYC; cyclin D1; cyclin A) in synchronized human (HaCaT) keratinocytes, and previous cytometric assessments, indicated that PAI‐1 transcription occurred early after serum‐stimulation of quiescent (G0) cells and prior to G1 entry. It was established previously that differential residence of USF family members (USF1→USF2 switch) at the PE2 region E box (CACGTG) characterized the G0 → G1 transition period and the transcriptional status of the PAI‐1 gene. A consensus PE2 E box motif (5′‐CACGTG‐3′) at nucleotides −566 to −561 was required for USF/E box interactions and serum‐dependent PAI‐1 transcription. Site‐directed CG → AT substitution at the two central nucleotides inhibited formation of USF/probe complexes and PAI‐1 promoter‐driven reporter expression. A dominant‐negative USF (A‐USF) construct or double‐stranded PE2 “decoy” attenuated serum‐ and TGF‐β1‐stimulated PAI‐1 synthesis. Tet‐Off induction of an A‐USF insert reduced both PAI‐1 and PAI‐2 transcripts while increasing the fraction of Ki‐67+ cells. Conversely, overexpression of USF2 or adenoviral‐delivery of a PAI‐1 vector inhibited HaCaT colony expansion indicating that the USF1 → USF2 transition and subsequent PAI‐1 transcription are critical events in the epithelial go‐or‐grow response. Collectively, these data suggest that USF2, and its target gene PAI‐1, regulate serum‐stimulated keratinocyte growth, and likely the cadence of cell cycle progression in replicatively competent cells as part of the injury repair program. J. Cell. Biochem. 115: 1840–1847, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Effect of Intra-Articular Hyaluronic Injection on Postural Stability and Risk of Fall in Patients with Bilateral Knee Osteoarthritis

Knee osteoarthritis is a common cause of disability which influences the quality of life. It is associated with impaired knee joint proprioception, which affects postural stability. Postural stability is critical for mobility and physical activities. Different types of treatment including nonsurgical and surgical are used for knee osteoarthritis. Hyaluronic acid injection is a nonsurgical popular treatment used worldwide. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the effect of hyaluronic acid injections on postural stability in individuals with bilateral knee osteoarthritis. Fifty patients aged between 50 and 70 years with mild and moderate bilateral knee osteoarthritis participated in our study. They were categorized into treatment (n = 25) and control (n = 25) groups. The treatment group received five weekly hyaluronic acid injections for both knees, whereas the control group did not receive any treatment. Postural stability and fall risk were assessed using the Biodex Stability System and clinical “Timed Up and Go” test. All the participants completed the study. The treatment group showed significant decrease in postural stability and fall risk scores after five hyaluronic acid injections. In contrast, the control group showed significant increase. This study illustrated that five intra-articular hyaluronic acid injections could significantly improve postural stability and fall risk in bilateral knee osteoarthritis patients. This trial is registered with: NCT02063373.
Características del emprendedor influyentes en el proceso de creación empresarial y en el éxito esperado

The article aims to know the effects of individual factors on entrepreneurship and success expectancy. The empirical analysis was carried out on a sample of 19.384 people in Spain and consisted of two parts. Firstly, in- dividual differences between entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs were calculated. Besides, entrepreneurs were analysed according to the time they had been running their business. Secondly, Heckmans two-stage method (1979) was used to estimate the effect of individual factors on the tendency to start a new business and the success expectancy. This analysis was repeated taking into account the stage of the entrepreneurship process. The results of the analysis could be useful not only for the design of public policies promoting entrepreneurship but for busi- nessmen, workers, financial institutions and the general public.