Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Systematic Review of Hearing Loss Genes in the African American Population.

OBJECTIVE Literature review of the genetic etiology of hearing loss (HL) in the African American (AA) population. DATA SOURCES PubMed, EBSCO, and CINAHL were accessed from 1966 to 2018. REVIEW METHODS PRISMA guidelines were followed. Search terms included permutations of "hearing loss," "African American," "black," and "genetic"; "African American" was then cross-referenced against documented HL genes. AA subjects included in multiethnic cohorts of genetic HL testing were identified by searching the key terms "hearing loss" and "ethnic cohort" and "genetic. " The Q-Genie tool was used in the quality assessment of included studies. An allele frequency meta-analysis of pathogenic GJB2 variants in the AA population was performed and stratified by hearing status. RESULTS Four hundred seventeen articles were reviewed, and 26 met our inclusion criteria. Ten studies were included in the GJB2 meta-analysis. In the general AA population, pathogenic GJB2 variants are rare, including the 35delG allele, which displayed a carrier frequency of 0.05%. Pathogenic variants were discovered in seven nonsyndromic HL genes (GJB2, MYO3A, TECTA, STRC, OTOF, MYH14, TMC1), eight syndromic HL genes, and one mitochondrial HL gene. Recent comprehensive genetic testing using custom genetic HL testing platforms has yielded only a 26% molecular diagnosis rate for HL etiologies in the AA population. CONCLUSIONS Investigators should be encouraged to provide an ethnic breakdown of results. Sparse literature and poor diagnosis rates indicate that genes involved in HL in the AA population have yet to be identified. Future explorative investigations using next-generation sequencing technologies, such as whole-exome sequencing, into the AA population are warranted.
The Benefits of Parenteral Nutrition (PN) Versus Enteral Nutrition (EN) Among Adult Critically Ill Patients: What is the Evidence? A Literature Review

Malnutrition is frequently seen among patients in the intensive care unit. Evidence shows that optimal nutritional support can lead to better clinical outcomes. Recent clinical trials debate over the efficacy of enteral nutrition (EN) over parenteral nutrition (PN). Multiple trials have studied the impact of EN versus PN in terms of health-care cost and clinical outcomes (including functional status, cost, infectious complications, mortality risk, length of hospital and intensive care unit stay, and mechanical ventilation duration). The aim of this review is to address the question: In critically ill adult patients requiring nutrition support, does EN compared to PN favorably impact clinical outcomes and health-care costs?
Why is Postoperative Atrial Fibrillation Difficult to Prevent and Treat: Potential Roles of Unrecognized Magnesium Deficiency and Release of Ceramide and Platelet-Activating Factor

Post-operative atrial fibrillation (POAF) is the most prevalent complication after cardiac or lung surgery, occurring in about 20-50 percent of these patients [1-5]. This event often leads to increased morbidity, thromboembolisms, strokes and long-term mortality resulting in recurring hospitalizations and increased costs. Often the cause(s) of POAF is not known. Age, previous history of atrial fibrillation (AF), hypertension, diabetes, myocardial infarction, valvular heart disease, left ventricular hypertrophy, obesity, excessive drinking of alcohol and excessive smoking present great risk factors for development of POAF [15]. According to a number of reports, the incidence of cerebral infarction and heart failure can increase two-four fold after PAOF [1-5]. Added to this, are a number of growing autopsy studies which demonstrate that many of the PAOF patients, who have died, have considerable atherosclerotic plaques on the walls of the coronary vessels leading to the idea that inflammatory events probably play an important role in the PAOF syndrome [5]. POAF is usually managed by digoxin, calcium channel blockers, betablockers, quinidine, amiodarone, direct current cardioversion, catheter ablation inside the heart, or appropriate rate control techniques to restore rhythm to normal [1-5]. Although digoxin is often utilized, it can present direct risks for POAF patients and has been associated with increased hospitalizations and mortalities [6, 7]. Such data has raised serious concerns about use of digoxin, one of our oldest and most controversial drugs . Ever since 1935 [8], digoxin and cardiac glycosides have been known to deplete the human body and heart of magnesium (Mg) [for review, see [9]]. Several studies have suggested that use of intravenous magnesium sulfate may be better than either betablockers, calcium channel blockers, or amiodarone [1, 5, 10-12]. This concept is currently under investigation by several groups in the USA and Europe. Abstract
The Gaussian Graphical Model in Cross-Sectional and Time-Series Data

ABSTRACT We discuss the Gaussian graphical model (GGM; an undirected network of partial correlation coefficients) and detail its utility as an exploratory data analysis tool. The GGM shows which variables predict one-another, allows for sparse modeling of covariance structures, and may highlight potential causal relationships between observed variables. We describe the utility in three kinds of psychological data sets: data sets in which consecutive cases are assumed independent (e.g., cross-sectional data), temporally ordered data sets (e.g., n = 1 time series), and a mixture of the 2 (e.g., n > 1 time series). In time-series analysis, the GGM can be used to model the residual structure of a vector-autoregression analysis (VAR), also termed graphical VAR. Two network models can then be obtained: a temporal network and a contemporaneous network. When analyzing data from multiple subjects, a GGM can also be formed on the covariance structure of stationary means—the between-subjects network. We discuss the interpretation of these models and propose estimation methods to obtain these networks, which we implement in the R packages graphicalVAR and mlVAR. The methods are showcased in two empirical examples, and simulation studies on these methods are included in the supplementary materials.
Risk for Major Hemorrhages in Patients Receiving Clopidogrel and Aspirin Compared With Aspirin Alone After Transient Ischemic Attack or Minor Ischemic Stroke: A Secondary Analysis of the POINT Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance Results show the short-term risk of hemorrhage in treating patients with acute transient ischemic attack (TIA) or minor acute ischemic stroke (AIS) with clopidogrel plus aspirin or aspirin alone. Objective To characterize the frequency and kinds of major hemorrhages in the Platelet-Oriented Inhibition in New TIA and Minor Ischemic Stroke (POINT) trial. Design, Setting, and Participants This secondary analysis of the POINT randomized, double-blind clinical trial conducted in 10 countries in North America, Europe, and Australasia included patients with high-risk TIA or minor AIS who were randomized within 12 hours of symptom onset and followed up for 90 days. The total enrollment, which occurred from May 28, 2010, through December 17, 2017, was 4881 and constituted the intention-to-treat group; 4819 (98.7%) were included in the as-treated analysis group. The primary safety analyses were as-treated, classifying patients based on study drug actually received. Intention-to-treat analyses were performed as secondary analyses. Data were analyzed in April 2018. Interventions Patients were assigned to receive clopidogrel (600 mg loading dose on day 1 followed by 75 mg daily for days 2-90) or placebo; all patients also received open-label aspirin, 50 to 325 mg/d. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary safety outcome was all major hemorrhages. Other safety outcomes included minor hemorrhages. Results A total of 269 sites worldwide randomized 4881 patients (median age, 65.0 years [interquartile range, 55-74 years]; 2195 women [45.0%]); the primary results have been published previously. In the as-treated analyses, major hemorrhage occurred in 21 patients (0.9%) receiving clopidogrel plus aspirin and 6 (0.2%) in the aspirin alone group (hazard ratio, 3.57; 95% CI, 1.44-8.85; P = .003; number needed to harm, 159). There were 4 fatal hemorrhages (0.1%; 3 in the clopidogrel plus aspirin group and 1 in the aspirin alone group); 3 of the 4 were intracranial. There were 7 intracranial hemorrhages (0.1%); 5 were in the clopidogrel plus aspirin group and 2 in the aspirin plus placebo group. The most common location of major hemorrhages was in the gastrointestinal tract. Conclusions and Relevance The risk for major hemorrhages in patients receiving either clopidogrel plus aspirin or aspirin alone after TIA or minor AIS was low. Nevertheless, treatment with clopidogrel plus aspirin increased the risk of major hemorrhages over aspirin alone from 0.2% to 0.9%. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00991029.
Folate and cobalamin status in relation to diet in healthy 2-y-old children.

BACKGROUND Limited data exist on sources of folate and cobalamin in the toddler diet. OBJECTIVE We examined the influence of diet on folate and cobalamin status in healthy toddlers in an unfortified population. DESIGN Dietary intake was assessed in 178 children, aged 24 mo, by using 7-d food records and related to serum folate and cobalamin status in 155 children. RESULTS Median (25th-75th percentile) daily intakes of folate and cobalamin were 87 μg (74-104 μg) and 3.1 μg (2.4-3.8 μg), respectively. Thirty-five percent of subjects had a folate intake below the Norwegian recommendations (80 μg folate/d), but only 5.8% of subjects had low serum folate concentrations (<10 nmol/L). All children reached the recommended cobalamin intake (0.8 μg cobalamin/d). Median (25th-75th percentile) serum concentrations were as follows: folate, 19 nmol/L (14-24 nmol/L); cobalamin, 410 pmol/L (334-521 pmol/L); holotranscobalamin, 94 pmol/L (67-121 pmol/L); holohaptocorrin, 315 pmol/L (241-409 pmol/L); methylmalonic acid, 0.16 μmol/L (0.13-0.20 μmol/L); and total homocysteine, 5.0 μmol/L (4.2-5.7 μmol/L). Folate intake correlated with serum folate concentrations (ρ = 0.25, P < 0.01), and cobalamin intake correlated with serum holotranscobalamin concentrations (ρ = 0.21, P < 0.05). In multivariate models, serum folate concentrations were significantly positively associated with the consumption of fruit and berries and grain products; however, this was not the case with dairy products, which was the food group that contributed most to folate intake. Cobalamin status was associated with dairy products (cobalamin and holotranscobalamin), cobalamin supplements (cobalamin and holohaptocorrin), and liver pâté (holotranscobalamin). CONCLUSIONS In this unfortified toddler population, folate status was associated with intakes of fruit and berries and grain products. Cobalamin status was associated with intakes of dairy, liver pâté, and supplements. In the assessment of vitamin sources, vitamin availability must be considered.
“Colossal” Interstitial Supersaturation in Delta Ferrite in 17-7 PH Stainless Steels After Low-temperature Nitridation

A carbon-induced spinodal decomposition of delta ferrite to nanometer-scale Cr-rich and Fe-rich alpha ferrite phases was observed in the weak-contrast regions in high-resolution scanning TEM (STEM) [1]. In addition, an extremely high dislocation density was observed in the decomposed regions, which is consistent with the hypothesis that carbon segregation to dislocation cores effectively delays carbide precipitation and makes possible the “colossal” carbon supersaturation.
The landscape of assumptions

The problem of how the explicit and implicit assumptions made during agent and simulation development are formulated and handled (or not handled) has received comparatively little research. Effective cooperation between multiple artificial agents requires not only an explicit representation of terms, concepts and processes, but also alignment of meaning between developers, integrators, and users. Assumptions, especially implicit ones, have potentially tremendous impact on establishing unambiguous representation due to potentially unintended interpretations. This problem is important to agent directed simulation in several ways: agent mediated selection of simulation components requires methods for ensuring valid component interoperation; agents are a logical choice for automatically comparing sets of assumptions; and when potential conflicts are detected, agents have the potential to adjudicate and resolve them. This discussion will focus on the role of assumptions in modeling because it is fundamental to composing valid models and systems. This paper summarizes how assumptions are defined, characterized, used and misused by modelers. It examines how assumptions can be used to identify potential conflicts between domain views.
Guide and Retain Users: Interactive Recommender System

With the rise of the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, massive information is presented on the Internet and users often get lost. Recommender system severs as mining valuable information presented to the users in the vast amount of information in social networking, news, video and other major mainstream applications. The current recommendation system mainly performs offline calculation of some intermediate data of the recommendation system, such as the similarity between the items, and then recommends the items that the users are most interested in when the users log in the application. Since data sparsity and cold-start problems always exist, the improvement effect is not obvious only improving recommended algorithm currently. Also the user's interest may be not single in real-time recommendation, the current recommender system presents the recommended results via the offline calculations solely and does not guide the user to discover more interests in real time. Therefore it's necessary to study the continuous recommendation of recommendation system from the interaction for two purposes:(1)Recommender constantly gets users' preferences to solve data sparsity and cold-start problems so as to recommend items to users which is more close to users' preferences;(2)Recommender guide users to dig users' more interests to avoid the case that recommender systems always recommend items based on the user's historical interests. Firstly, this paper proposes that the recommender allows the users to explore items which are similar to the items filtered by the conditions that the users specified. Secondly, the recommender let users offer ratings to items to get user's more interest to improve accuracy of recommended result through conversational collaboration model when users can also explore the similar items and rate it. Thirdly, in order to increase the transparency of the recommended system, we show the explanation list to users, and in order to increase the controllability of the recommended system, we allow users to change the intermediate data, and in order to improve the intuitiveness of the recommendation system, we visualized the recommended results. Lastly, we combine the critique-based recommender system and collaborative filtering recommender system to constantly revise the recommended results and users can decide the weight of the two recommendation methods and the weight of each critique.
Development of the Cardiac Conduction System and the Possible Relation to Predilection Sites of Arrhythmogenesis

The cardiac conduction system (CCS) encompasses a complex system responsible for the coordinated contraction of the heart. In the developing heart, as well as in the adult heart, tissues of the (putative) CCS are characterized by different properties than the surrounding working myocardium, which can be observed on a histological level, as well as by the expression patterns of several immunohistological and molecular markers. In recent years, many markers have been studied that have helped to elucidate the processes involved in CCS development. It has become clear that multiple genes, cells and their interactions are involved in this complex process. In this article, an overview of the current knowledge of CCS development is supplied. Furthermore, several controversies regarding conduction system development are discussed, as well as the possible significance of embryologic development of the CCS for the development of arrhythmias later in life.
Characterization by TEM of Pt nanoparticles dispersed on TiO 2 Np , TiO 2 Nt and Al

The development of new catalysts for hydrogenation and dehydrogenation, isomerization, oxidation reactions using metals as active phase are reducing the metallic load at concentrations smaller than 1 wt. %. Therefore, information about the dispersion, size and chemical composition of the metallic phase is fundamental to understand the selectivity, reactivity and conversion results of the new catalytic formulation. Here, transmission electron microscopy plays an important role in the catalysis field [1]. This instrument gives information about the chemical composition, size and crystalline structure to a nanometric scale.
Enhanced Cross-Entropy Based Stopping Criteria at Low Signal-to-Noise Ratio Regions

This paper presents an enhancement of Cross-Entropy (CE)-based stopping criteria at a low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) region. The existing CE-based stopping criteria fail to stop the iteration and cause the maximum iteration at low SNRs. Intuitively, this work enhances the CE stopping criterion by combining with the Average-Entropy (AE) stopping criteria. The work also proposes a set of a stopping rule to distinguish the SNR between low and high region. These approaches are then thoroughly analyses in terms of the required average iteration number (AIN), as well as its bit-error-rate (BER) performance. The simulation results show that the enhanced CE able to reduce the AIN compared to existing CE-based stopping criteria while the BER is maintained. Hence, the enhanced CE-based stopping criterion make the decoder more efficient, in terms of reduction in the time delay while increasing turbo codes performance.
Synergistic Effect of Lipoprotein-Associated Phospholipase A2 with Classical Risk Factors on Coronary Heart Disease: A Multi-Ethnic Study in China

Aims: We evaluated the synergistic effect of lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2) in association with classical risk factors in predicting coronary heart disease (CHD) and demonstrated the diagnostic value of Lp-PLA2 for predicting coronary stenotic lesions in subjects with CHD. Methods: Blood samples were acquired from 911 consecutive adult subjects (662 males and 249 females) from 11 ethnic groups. Lp-PLA2 plasma levels were detected using a commercially available turbidimetric immunoassay (TIA). CHD in patients was confirmed using coronary angiography, and the severity of coronary atherosclerosis was assessed using the Gensini scoring system. Results: A binary logistic regression was performed to analyse the relationships between Lp-PLA2 and other risk factors. A multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that Lp-PLA2 levels were significantly associated with CHD (OR, 1.882; 95% CI, 1.369-2.587, p=0.000). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for Lp-PLA2 was 0.589 (95%CI, 0.549-0.629, p=0.000). The synergism between Lp-PLA2 and other risk factors was also investigated. The proportion of CHD attributable to the interaction between Lp-PLA2 and age was as high as 64%. Conclusions: Lp-PLA2 levels in human plasma were positively associated with the severity of CHD, and there was a clear positive interaction between Lp-PLA2 and classical risk factors in predicting CHD.
The Politician and the Judge: Accountability in Government

We build a simple model to capture the major virtues and drawbacks of making public officials accountable (i.e., subjecting them to reelection): On the one hand, accountablity allows the public to screen and discipline their officials; on the other, it may induce those officials to pander to public opinion and put too little weight on minority welfare. We study when decision-making powers should be allocated to the public directly (direct democracy), to accountable officials (called “politicians”), or to nonaccountable officials (called “judges”).
Unforeseen Contingencies and Incomplete Contracts

We scrutinize the conceptual framework commonly used in the incomplete contract literature. This literature usually assumes that contractual incompleteness is due to the transaction costs of describing—or of even foreseeing—the possible states of nature in advance. We argue, however, that such transaction costs need not interfere with optimal contracting (i.e. transaction costs need not be relevant), provided that agents can probabilistically forecast their possible future payoffs (even if other aspects of the state of the nature cannot be forecast). In other words, all that is required for optimality is that agents be able to perform dynamic programming, an assumption always invoked by the incomplete contract literature. The foregoing optimality result holds very generally provided that parties can commit themselves not to renegotiate. Moreover, we point out that renegotiation may be hard to reconcile with a framework that otherwise presumes perfect rationality. However, even if renegotiation is allowed, the result still remains valid provided that parties are risk averse.
Generation of a Tactile-based Pouring Motion Using Fingertip Force Sensors

To pour various contents from a container, a robot needs to be able to generate a trajectory of its arm, to grasp containers, and to estimate the amount poured. We propose a method only based on tactile sensing to generate the overall pouring motion including all the required abilities. Using a robot arm, we generated a human-like tipping motion and developed a grasping strategy to prevent slippage of the robot’s fingertips for objects whose center of gravity changes while pouring. With this method, the robot uses the fingertip forces to estimate the amount poured independently of the material being poured and the working environment of the robot. By using a tactile-based pouring motion rather than a vision-based pouring motion, we expect the robot to achieve a general-purpose, robust, and highly accurate pouring motion. We evaluated the usefulness of the proposed tactile-based pouring motion through pouring experiments where the robot poured the contents from a plastic bottle into a cup. The robot pours the three types of materials with different particle sizes from a plastic bottle into a cup. The results showed that the proposed method enabled the robot to pour the contents into the cup while estimating the mass of the poured material with an error less than 17 grams.
Array of Accelerometers as a Dynamic Vibro-Tactile Sensing for Assessing the Slipping Noise

Through vibrations people can assess both slippage of the directly grasped object and sliding of an external agent over the surface of the grasped immovable object. In robotic hands, with less advanced tactile sensing, the slippage and sliding events can be hard to distinguish. This paper shows how vibro-tactile sensing array can help to distinguish object/world sliding and sensor/object slippage events based on cross-correlation, which computes similarity in sensor readings of tactile array cells. The proposed vibro-tactile system consists of two accelerometers. Experiments with different surfaces are conducted to test the system and the proposed algorithm.