Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seeing, thinking, feeling : exploring free associations with (non)restorative pictures

Research has demonstrated that nature has a restorative effect on human beings. Viewing nature can increase mood, cognitive performance, and directed attention, while reducing stress levels and negative affect (e.g., Hartig, et al., 1991; Berman & Jonides, 2008). Yet both current theories explaining these effects (Ulrich et al., 1991; Kaplan, 1995) still leave quite a few questions on the underlying mechanisms unanswered. Efforts to investigate these mechanisms included methodologies such as continuous psychophysiological recordings (Hartig, et al., 1991), affective priming (Korpela, et al., 2002), or eye-tracking (Parsons & Olson, 1998). In the current study we investigated the free associations of viewers of natural vs. urban pictures as a first step on an avenue towards more insight in the restorative effects of nature. Very little research focused on the role of associations, yet learned positive associations with nature have been suggested in relation to restoration (Ulrich et al., 1991). Also, ART’s components fascination and being away (Kaplan, 1995) both suggest the mind is drawn away from current worries or tasks – but where to? Our study aimed to answer this question.
Obstacles to Brain Tumor Therapy: Key ABC Transporters

The delivery of cancer chemotherapy to treat brain tumors remains a challenge, in part, because of the inherent biological barrier, the blood–brain barrier. While its presence and role as a protector of the normal brain parenchyma has been acknowledged for decades, it is only recently that the important transporter components, expressed in the tightly knit capillary endothelial cells, have been deciphered. These transporters are ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters and, so far, the major clinically important ones that functionally contribute to the blood–brain barrier are ABCG2 and ABCB1. A further limitation to cancer therapy of brain tumors or brain metastases is the blood–tumor barrier, where tumors erect a barrier of transporters that further impede drug entry. The expression and regulation of these two transporters at these barriers, as well as tumor derived alteration in expression and/or mutation, are likely obstacles to effective therapy.
Partial face recognition by template matching

One of the major difficulties encountered by current face recognition systems deception in the problems of handling partial face recognition such as varying poses, illumination, light scattering, diffused faces i.e., recognition of faces in random in-depth rotations. The face image differences caused by rotations are often superior to the inter-person differences used in distinctive identities. Initially we have taken full face as training set, part of the images are make it as rotational, flip horizontal, flip vertical, scaled up, scaled down facial images which are considered as testing set (for both we use AR database) then convert the colored images in to gray level images. Secondly normalize the histogram of an image it represents the relative frequency of occurrence of the various gray levels in the image. Subsequently, Testing cases are divided in to four ratio cases like as 70:30, 60:40, 50:50, 80:20 using this bifurcation cases of images we will get different recognition results. Simultaneously we have computed histogram of the normalized images and we got features in the form of matrix or vector representation and then compare the values of different testing cases. Finally, matching the features using template matching. The proposed algorithm has been testing with AR dataset and results obtained are satisfactory.
An update on approaches to controlling coccidia in poultry using botanical extracts

Abstract 1. This paper reviews the use of botanical extracts in the control of coccidial infection in poultry. 2. Some plants and their respective volatile oils and extracts have the potential to alleviate coccidiosis and reduce its severity. 3. Most plant bioactives improve some, but not all, aspects of coccidiosis with variable effectiveness against different species of Eimeria. 4. Difficulties in comparing research findings have arisen from the use of different experimental models, different active components and infectious dose of Eimeria. 5. Current knowledge of their potential anti-coccidial effects may provide guidance for the use of botanical extracts in the control of the coccidiosis.
The Endemic Treponematoses

SUMMARY The agents of human treponematoses include four closely related members of the genus Treponema: three subspecies of Treponema pallidum plus Treponema carateum. T. pallidum subsp. pallidum causes venereal syphilis, while T. pallidum subsp. pertenue, T. pallidum subsp. endemicum, and T. carateum are the agents of the endemic treponematoses yaws, bejel (or endemic syphilis), and pinta, respectively. All human treponematoses share remarkable similarities in pathogenesis and clinical manifestations, consistent with the high genetic and antigenic relatedness of their etiological agents. Distinctive features have been identified in terms of age of acquisition, most common mode of transmission, and capacity for invasion of the central nervous system and fetus, although the accuracy of these purported differences is debated among investigators and no biological basis for these differences has been identified to date. In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially set a goal for yaws eradication by 2020. This challenging but potentially feasible endeavor is favored by the adoption of oral azithromycin for mass treatment and the currently focused distribution of yaws and endemic treponematoses and has revived global interest in these fascinating diseases and their causative agents.
A new locus for autosomal dominant congenital coronary cataract in a Chinese family maps to chromosome 3q

Purpose To identify the genetic defect in an autosomal dominant congenital coronary cataract family (ADCCC). Methods A Chinese family with ADCC was identified and characterized. All the members were genotyped with microsatellite markers at genes and loci that were considered to be associated with hereditary cataracts. Linkage analysis was performed after genotyping. Two-point Logarithm of odds (LOD) scores were calculated using MLINK software, from the LINKAGE program package. Multipoint parametric and non-parametric linkage were performed via the program MERLIN. Results Linkage analysis provided evidence for a genetic locus for the ADCC on chromosome 3q. The maximum Two-point LOD score was 3.01 (θ=0) for two close markers. Conclusions The mapping of the congenital cataracts in a Chinese family locus to chromosome 3q.
Distributed learning via Diffusion adaptation with application to ensemble learning

We examine the problem of learning a set of parameters from a distributed dataset. We assume the datasets are collected by agents over a distributed ad-hoc network, and that the communication of the actual raw data is prohibitive due to either privacy constraints or communication constraints. We propose a distributed algorithm for online learning that is proved to guarantee a bounded excess risk and the bound can be made arbitrary small for sufficiently small step-sizes. We apply our framework to the expert advice problem where nodes learn the weights for the trained experts distributively.
HIV‐1, ubiquitin and ubiquitin‐like proteins: the dialectic interactions of a virus with a sophisticated network of post‐translational modifications

The modification of intracellular proteins by ubiquitin (Ub) and ubiquitin‐like (UbL) proteins is a central mechanism for regulating and fine‐tuning all cellular processes. Indeed, these modifications are widely used to control the stability, activity and localisation of many key proteins and, therefore, they are instrumental in regulating cellular functions as diverse as protein degradation, cell signalling, vesicle trafficking and immune response. It is thus no surprise that pathogens in general, and viruses in particular, have developed multiple strategies to either counteract or exploit the complex mechanisms mediated by the Ub and UbL protein conjugation pathways. The aim of this review is to provide an overview on the intricate and conflicting relationships that intimately link HIV‐1 and these sophisticated systems of post‐translational modifications.
Assessment of bone grafts placed within an oral and maxillofacial training programme for implant rehabilitation.

BACKGROUND This study aimed to review the survival of bone grafting procedures, performed by surgical trainees and assess factors affecting survival of these bone grafts as an adjunct to implant rehabilitation. METHODS Data were collected from patients between 2003 and 2009 receiving bone grafting. Graft failure was defined as any complete or partial graft loss, graft which had to be removed or regrafted, or was unable to have an implant placed. Implant survival rates were not assessed in this study. RESULTS Seventy-five patients received 86 bone grafts over a period of 7 years. Overall graft survival was 87.3% with 7 complete graft failures (8.1%) and 3 partial graft failures (4.6%). All failed grafts were of the block graft type, predominately in the anterior maxilla. The main reason for failure was secondary infection. Other complications occurred in about 27% of patients. Factors significantly increasing the risk of graft failure included use of bone block augmentation (p = 0.001), mixed autogenous/bone substitute grafts (p = 0.007) and diabetes mellitus (p = 0.006). Smoking was not found to affect graft survival. CONCLUSIONS Good results were found in a series of patients treated in an oral and maxillofacial training programme. Care should be taken in regards to planning block grafts in diabetic patients.
XTMS: pathway design in an eXTended metabolic space

As metabolic engineering and synthetic biology progress toward reaching the goal of a more sustainable use of biological resources, the need of increasing the number of value-added chemicals that can be produced in industrial organisms becomes more imperative. Exploring, however, the vast possibility of pathways amenable to engineering through heterologous genes expression in a chassis organism is complex and unattainable manually. Here, we present XTMS, a web-based pathway analysis platform available at http://xtms.issb. genopole.fr, which provides full access to the set of pathways that can be imported into a chassis organism such as Escherichia coli through the application of an Extended Metabolic Space modeling framework. The XTMS approach consists on determining the set of biochemical transformations that can potentially be processed in vivo as modeled by molecular signatures, a specific coding system for derivation of reaction rules for metabolic reactions and enumeration of all the corresponding substrates and products. Most promising routes are described in terms of metabolite exchange, maximum allowable pathway yield, toxicity and enzyme efficiency. By answering such critical design points, XTMS not only paves the road toward the rationalization of metabolic engineering, but also opens new processing possibilities for non-natural metabolites and novel enzymatic transformations.
Actitudes y engagement en el trabajo como antecedentes del comportamiento altruista

El reconocimiento de que el comportamiento altruista genera beneficios tanto para los em - pleados como para la organizacion hace necesario comprender los factores que pueden alentarlo. Por ello, este trabajo persigue dos objetivos: a) analizar las relaciones entre la satisfaccion general con el puesto y el compromiso afectivo con el comportamiento altruista y b) explorar si el engagement en el trabajo aumenta la varianza explicada en el altruismo por encima de tales actitudes. Para cum- plir estos objetivos se llevo a cabo una investigacion de diseno transversal en una muestra constitui- da por 472 empleados de 25 centros publicos espanoles de educacion superior. Las hipotesis plan- teadas fueron contrastadas mediante analisis de regresion jerarquica. Los resultados indican que un mayor nivel de compromiso afectivo, y particularmente de engagement en el trabajo, se asocia con un mayor comportamiento altruista. Especialmente relevante es la contribucion del engagement en el trabajo, al explicar varianza incremental en el comportamiento altruista, mas alla del compromiso. Para potenciar este tipo de comportamiento discrecional, la direccion deberia implantar intervencio - nes que alienten tanto una mayor conexion de los empleados con sus roles de trabajo como un mayor compromiso con la organizacion
Suicides in general hospitals in Hong Kong: retrospective study.

OBJECTIVE To describe the characteristics of suicidal patients and their suicidal acts occurring in general wards. DESIGN Retrospective study. SETTING All general public hospitals in Hong Kong. PATIENTS Survey data based on hospital records of patients who died of suicide or who attempted suicide in general wards between 2000 and 2002 were studied. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Demographic information, medical history, and circumstances of the suicidal acts. RESULTS Twenty-six hospitals reported a total of 166 suicidal acts, which included 34 completed suicides, corresponding to 9.46 attempted suicides and 1.93 completed suicides per 100 000 admissions. Most suicidal acts occurred in medical wards. Patients were, on average, in their mid-50s, predominantly male, and had been admitted because of physical problems. Fewer than 20% were admitted because of attempted suicide. A significant proportion of suicide attempters used potentially lethal suicide methods in the wards. Wide ranges of objects were used in the suicidal acts. Completed suicides tended to occur after midnight and in the ward toilet. Patients who went missing and then committed suicide acts did so in the first few hours of leaving the hospital. The timing of suicidal acts varied greatly with the reasons of admission. CONCLUSION Prevention efforts in general wards are unlikely to be effective if they simply focus on patients admitted for attempted suicide, or on the restriction of suicide means. For patients admitted to general wards because of attempted suicide, the risk is highest just after admission; hence, these patients have to be monitored closely. A high degree of alertness to the possibility of depression and suicidal risk among general ward patients is required.
The coalescence of closely spaced drops when they are at different electric potentials

To discuss the coalescence of two neighbouring drops at different electric potentials as a problem of stability it is necessary to assume that they are held on fixed supports, for otherwise there is no equilibrium state to become unstable. In this work these supports are two equal rings. Experiments at first using soap films instead of drops, are in agreement with the analysis when the geometry of the rings conforms to the requirements of the theory. When the distance between the drops is small compared with that between the supporting rings the critical potential difference does not depend on the size or position of the rings but only on the radius of the two drops and the distance between them. Under these circumstances a simple expression derived from computer solutions of the relevant equation has been found. This limiting formula is in agreement with some unpublished experiments with water drops carried out by J. Latham, and also with experiments in which instability was observed when neighbouring glycerine drops were subjected to potential differences as low as 9 8 V.
Natural Phonology or Natural Memory? the Interaction Between Phonological Processes and Recall Mechanisms

An analysis of the attempts by 90 children between the ages of four and nine to learn a number of new words revealed that their recall errors were remarkably similar to the phonological deformations found in the speech of young children in the early stages of language development. Two complementary explanations are put forward to account for the observed similarities: phonological processes noted in the speech of young children may reflect recall problems, and recall in all children may be related to perceptual salience, since perceptually salient features are likely to be those most strongly encoded in auditory memory. We point out that the role of memory, which has been virtually ignored by linguists, clearly needs to be taken into consideration.
Single-channel speech enhancement in a transient noise environment by exploiting speech harmonicity

This paper focuses on the problem of single-channel noise reduction in a transient noise environment for speech enhancement application. A typical speech enhancement algorithm requires an estimate of the noise statistics. However, the problem of noise estimation is challenging when the statistics of the noise vary significantly with time. By exploiting the fact that for speech signal most of the energy is concentrated on the harmonic bands in voiced frames, we propose an algorithm for the estimation of speech presence probability in the time-frequency domain. The estimated speech presence probability is then used for noise estimation for speech enhancement application. Evaluations are conducted to compare the speech enhancement performance between the proposed algorithm and the existing algorithm for various types of transient noise.
Active differential CMOS imaging device for human face recognition

This letter describes an original CMOS imaging system dedicated to human face recognition. The main interest of this work is to provide ambient light invariant images and facilitate segmentation of the face from the background. This system has been implemented in a specially designed CMOS smart image sensor with only one analog memory per pixel. This simple pixel design gives the possibility to incorporate this functionality into classic low-cost CMOS image sensors. One of its possible applications is face recognition, since the human face appearance is dramatically dependent on illumination conditions. A first indoor experience with different illumination conditions shows that a simple correlation-based verification algorithm on face images of 25 people of the INT database gives promising results.
Characterization of novel Staphylococcus aureus lytic phage and defining their combinatorial virulence using the OmniLog® system

ABSTRACT Skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI) caused by methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are difficult to treat. Bacteriophage (phage) represent a potential alternate treatment for antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. In this study, 7 novel phage with broad lytic activity for S. aureus were isolated and identified. Screening of a diverse collection of 170 clinical isolates by efficiency of plating (EOP) assays shows that the novel phage are virulent and effectively prevent growth of 70–91% of MRSA and methicillin sensitive S. aureus (MSSA) isolates. Phage K, which was previously identified as having lytic activity on S. aureus was tested on the S. aureus collection and shown to prevent growth of 82% of the isolates. These novel phage group were examined by electron microscopy, the results of which indicate that the phage belong to the Myoviridae family of viruses. The novel phage group requires β-N-acetyl glucosamine (GlcNac) moieties on cell wall teichoic acids for infection. The phage were distinct from, but closely related to, phage K as characterized by restriction endonuclease analysis. Furthermore, growth rate analysis via OmniLog® microplate assay indicates that a combination of phage K, with phage SA0420ᶲ1, SA0456ᶲ1 or SA0482ᶲ1 have a synergistic phage-mediated lytic effect on MRSA and suppress formation of phage resistance. These results indicate that a broad spectrum lytic phage mixture can suppress the emergence of resistant bacterial populations and hence have great potential for combating S. aureus wound infections.
Individual Differences in Attentional Strategies in Multitasking Situations

This study compared attentional strategies in prioritized and unprioritized multitasking situations using individual differences in the Type A behavior pattern (TABP) as predictors. The study expanded previous studies by using a triple task situation that presented two visual tasks and one auditory task simultaneously. One hundred and eighteen undergraduate students were utilized. One group received instructions for all tasks and their relative importance to each other for achieving a full performance score. The other group received instructions for the visual tasks only, and no information about their relative importance was given, creating ambiguity about priorities among the tasks. Global TABP and its subcomponents (i.e., time urgency, achievement strivings, impatience or irritability, polychronicity) were utilized as predictors of task performance. Significant correlations were found between the TABP subcomponents and different performance indexes, but such a relation was not found between global TABP and performance. Applied implications of these findings and directions for the future research are discussed.
Periodontitis as a potential risk factor for peri-implantitis.

OBJECTIVES To review the literature regarding the possible association between a previous history of periodontitis and peri-implantitis. MATERIAL AND METHODS A search of MEDLINE as well as a manual search of articles were conducted. Publications and articles accepted for publication up to January 2008 were included. RESULTS Out of 951 papers retrieved, a total of three papers were selected for the review. Thus, the available evidence for an association between periodontitis and peri-implantitis is scarce. CONCLUSIONS Based on three studies with a limited number of patients and considerable variations in study design, different definitions of periodontitis, and confounding variables like smoking that not been accounted for, this systematic review indicates that subjects with a history of periodontitis may be at greater risk for peri-implant infections. It should, however, be stressed that the data to support this conclusion are not very robust.
The role of vacuolar processing enzymes in plant immunity

Proteases play important roles in plant innate immunity. In this mini-review, we describe the current view on the role of a plant protease, vacuolar processing enzyme (VPE), and the first identified plant caspase-1-like protein, in plant immunity. In the past several years, VPEs were determined to play important roles in various types of cell death in plants. Early studies demonstrated the identification of VPE as a vacuolar hydrolytic protein responsible for maturation of vacuolar proteins. Later, Nicotiana benthamiana VPE was reported to mediate virus-induced hypersensitive response by regulating membrane collapse. The ortholog of VPE in Arabidopsis is also suggested to be involved in both mycotoxin-induced cell death and developmental cell death. However, the role of VPE in elicitor-signaling is still unclear. Our recent studies demonstrated the involvement of VPE in elicitor signal transduction to induce stomatal closure and defense responses, including defense gene expression and hypersensitive cell death.
Network topology analysis: A new method for band selection

The hyperspectral bands are contiguous and highly correlated spectral bands. Band selection is often used to reduce the computational complexity for hyperspectral images. We proposed a new method for unsupervised band selection by using complex network to represent the spectral bands. The method completes the task with the objective of preserving the maximal information from original data in the selected bands. Both the divergences and connections between each hyperspectral band can be revealed from the topological characteristics of the generated network. We use the network topology as the criterion to identify the bands, and select the bands that can form the most approximate network comparing to the network of the original data. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with traditional methods, the proposed algorithm can obtain accurate results with clear physical meaning and simple process.