Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of transdermal testosterone on bone and muscle in older men with low bioavailable testosterone levels.

BACKGROUND A large proportion of men over 65 years of age have bioavailable testosterone levels below the reference range of young adult men. The impact of this on musculoskeletal health and the potential for improvement in function in this group with testosterone supplementation require investigation. METHODS Sixty-seven men (mean age 76 +/- 4 years, range 65--87) with bioavailable testosterone levels below 4.44 nmol/l (lower limit for adult normal range) were randomized to receive transdermal testosterone (two 2.5-mg patches per day) or placebo patches for 1 year. All men received 500 mg supplemental calcium and 400 IU vitamin D. Outcome measures included sex hormones (testosterone, bioavailable testosterone, sex-hormone binding globulin [SHBG], estradiol, and estrone), bone mineral density (BMD; femoral neck, Ward's triangle, trochanter, lumbar spine, and total body), bone turnover markers, lower extremity muscle strength, percent body fat, lean body mass, hemoglobin, hematocrit, prostate symptoms, and prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels. RESULTS Twenty-three men (34%) withdrew from the study; 44 men completed the trial. In these men, bioavailable testosterone levels increased from 3.2 +/- 1.2 nmol/l (SD) to 5.6 +/- 3.5 nmol/l (p <.002) at 12 months in the testosterone group, whereas no change occurred in the control group. Although there was no change in estradiol levels in either group, estrone levels increased in the testosterone group (103 +/- 26 pmol/l to 117 +/- 33 pmol/l; p <.017). The testosterone group had a 0.3% gain in femoral neck BMD, whereas the control group lost 1.6% over 12 months (p =.015). No significant changes were seen in markers of bone turnover in either group. Improvements in muscle strength were seen in both groups at 12 months compared with baseline scores. Strength increased 38% (p =.017) in the testosterone group and 27% in the control group (p =.06), with no statistical difference between the groups. In the testosterone group, body fat decreased from 26.3 +/- 5.8% to 24.6 +/- 6.5% (p =.001), and lean body mass increased from 56.2 +/- 5.3 kg to 57.2 +/- 5.1 kg (p =.001), whereas body mass did not change. Men receiving testosterone had an increase in PSA from 2.0 +/- 1.4 microg/l to 2.6 +/- 1.8 microg/l (p =.04), whereas men receiving placebo had an increase in PSA from 1.9 +/- 1.0 microg/l to 2.2 +/- 1.5 microg/l (p =.09). No significant differences between groups were seen in hemoglobin, hematocrit, symptoms or signs of benign prostate hyperplasia, or PSA levels. CONCLUSIONS Transdermal testosterone (5 mg/d) prevented bone loss at the femoral neck, decreased body fat, and increased lean body mass in a group of healthy men over age 65 with low bioavailable testosterone levels. In addition, both testosterone and placebo groups demonstrated gains in lower extremity muscle strength, possibly due to the beneficial effects of vitamin D. Testosterone did result in a modest increase in PSA levels but resulted in no change in signs or symptoms of prostate hyperplasia.
A Cognitive and Social Psychological Analysis of Disclosure Laws and Call for Mortgage Counseling to Prevent Predatory Lending

The federal government’s primary method of protecting consumers from “predatory lending” has been to enact disclosure laws that were supposed to enable consumers to make informed decisions. This article contends that notwithstanding these disclosure laws, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and lenders have been able to take advantage of certain described cognitive and social psychological phenomena to induce borrowers to enter into predatory loans, and argues that disclosures alone - even the recently revised disclosure forms - are inadequate. To better empower consumers to make informed decisions on their home loans, this article proposes and details a mortgage counseling intervention that contains both “in-person” and interactive computer training as a necessary supplement to disclosure laws. Designed properly, such an intervention would more effectively address the cognitive and social psychological barriers to rational decision-making than disclosure alone. The article also examines the likely costs and benefits of the proposed mortgage counseling intervention in light of Illinois experience with mortgage counseling and urges policymakers to consider not only the costs of implementing mortgage counseling, but also the costs of not providing for this counseling.
Evaluation of bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing-aid regarding transmission of paralinguistic information: a comparison with cochlear implant simulator

Human listeners can perceive speech signals in a voice-modulated ultrasonic carrier from a bone-conduction stimulator, even if the listeners are patients with sensorineural hearing loss. Considering this fact, we have been developing a bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing aid (BCUHA). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usability of BCUHA regarding transmission of paralinguistic information. For this purpose, two series of listening experiments were conducted. One is a speaker’s intention identiﬁcation experiment, the other is a speaker discrimination experiment. To compare performance of BCUHA to that of air-conduction (AC) and cochlear implant, both experiments were conducted under three conditions; BCUHA, AC, and cochlear implant simulator (CIsim). The results show that BCUHA can transmit intentions of speaker as well as CIsim. Also BCUHA can transmit speaker information better than CIsim.
Experience-Associated Structural Events, Subependymal Cellular Proliferative Activity, and Functional Recovery After Injury to the Central Nervous System

Considerable structural plasticity is possible in the damaged neocortex and connected brain areas, and the potential for significant functional recovery remains even during the chronic phases of the recovery process. In this article, the authors review the literature on use-dependent morphologic events, focusing on the direct interaction of behavioral experience and structural changes associated with plasticity and degeneration. Experience-associated neural changes have the potential to either hinder or enhance functional recovery; therefore, issues concerning the nature, timing, and intensity of behavior-based intervention strategies are addressed.
Alpha-Tocopherol prevents esophageal squamous cell carcinoma by modulating PPARγ-Akt signaling pathway at the early stage of carcinogenesis

The poor prognosis of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) emphasizes the urgent need to better understand the carcinogenesis and develop prevention strategies. Previous studies have highlighted the potential of using Vitamin E (tocopherols) for cancer chemoprevention, but the preventive activity of α-Tocopherol against ESCC remains to be elucidated. Our data showed that early-stage supplementation with α-Tocopherol significantly prevented esophageal carcinogenesis induced by N-nitrosomethylbenzylamine (NMBA) in ESCC rat model. In the Het-1A cell model, α-Tocopherol markedly suppressed cell proliferation, promoted cell cycle G2-phase arrest and increased apoptosis. Gene microarray and proteins array analysis indicated that Akt signaling was a potential target for α-Tocopherol. We further demonstrated that α-Tocopherol increased the expression of PPARγ and its downstream tumor suppressor PTEN. Knockdown of PPARγ activated Akt signaling transduction, whereas this process was attenuated by the presence of α-Tocopherol and PPARγ agonist Rosiglitazone. In contrast, the effect of α-Tocopherol on Akt inhibition was not observed in established tumors, neither in cancerous cell lines which constitutively expressed higher levels of PPARγ. These results were closely correlated with the ineffectiveness of α-Tocopherol in the late stage of ESCC carcinogenesis. Taken together, our study suggested that α-Tocopherol may serve as a PPARγ agonist for the chemoprevention of esophageal cancer.
Teaching through an ethics of belonging, care and obligation as a critical approach to transforming education

This paper considers the experiences of a New Zealand family and their ‘disabled’ daughter Clare’s ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ in her early childhood centre and the implications of these experiences for shifting from a discourse of ‘inclusion’ to ‘belonging’ based on ‘an ethics of care and obligation to others’. I argue that the meanings and understandings of ‘inclusion’ for disabled children in education are variable and that they often default to dominant deficit discourses whilst believing themselves to be ‘inclusive’. I also argue that we must consciously develop a critical awareness of how exclusionary power operates in society and in our own settings. In this paper, I present ideas drawn from a ‘pedagogy of listening’ and Te Whaariki – The New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum to critically reflect on some of the early childhood education experiences of Clare and her family. I suggest that teachers’ use of critical reflective ‘child’s questions’ can be used as tools for educational transformation towards the full and meaningful participation of disabled children in education.
SECloud: Binary Analyzing Using Symbolic Execution in the Cloud

SECloud is a automatic platform to deal with the resource-intensive and labor-intensive nature of high-quality software analysis. SECloud parallelizes symbolic execution in computing cloud to cope with path explosion. To our knowledge, SECloud is the first binary analyzing software that scales to large clusters of machines and can automatically test real-world softwares (e.g., Squirrel, Aeon, Socat, Aspell, Atphttpd) effectively. It utilizes the technology of loop elision and state merging to reduce the executing path state explosion. SECloud can also diagnose incomplete software patches by analyzing the difference pathes caused by patches. SECloud offers a flexible testing service according to the software testing task. It runs on computing clouds, like Amazon EC2, and takes advantage of the the flexible computing resource of cloud. Our experiment results show that SECloud can achive 3 to 4 orders of magnitude speedup comparing a state-of-the-art symbolic execution engine (e.g., S2E).
INST: An Adaptive Metric for Information Retrieval Evaluation

A large number of metrics have been proposed to measure the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Here we provide a detailed explanation of one recent proposal, INST, articulate the various properties that it embodies, and describe a number of pragmatic issues that need to be taken in to account when writing an implementation. The result is a specification for a program inst_eval for use in TREC-style IR experimentation.
The Growth of Private University Education in Kenya: The Promise and Challenge

The first step toward the introduction and development of university education in Kenya was taken in 1961, when the then Royal College, Nairobi, was elevated to university college status under a special arrangement with the University of London. However, it was not until 1970 that the University College of Nairobi attained university status. Although comparatively young, state universities in Kenya have accomplished a lot. They accomplished their initial mission of producing adequate human resources for the civil service, national corporations, and the private sector; graduated thousands of students; and helped foster an intellectual community in the country. In just 30 years, public higher education has expanded from a single university (the University of Nairobi) to the current 6 public universities: Nairobi, Moi, Kenyatta, Egerton, Jomo Kenyatta, and Maseno. In spite of this growth, public universities in Kenya have faced enrollments beyond their capacity to plan and finance, fiscal challenges beyond their control, a decline in quality beyond their anticipation, and weak management practices beyond their level of training. To help solve some of these problems, private universities have increasingly emerged and gained ground in the country as an alternative route to higher education provision. This article seeks to examine some of the trends, prospects, and challenges to the emergence and development of private university education in Kenya.
Fit for Virtual Social Work Practice?

ABSTRACT The paper considers the levels of coherence and dissonance between the education and training needs of social work practitioners working in a virtual environment and the focus of the requirements and learning and teaching approaches currently in use on social work programmes within education settings in England. The paper argues a gap exists in the way information and communication skills are currently conceptualised to support the education and training of social workers. It appears that e-learning is often considered in relation to its functional advantages and that similarly ICT skills are considered in terms of computer program literacy. The much wider question of the development of competence for virtual practice and how e-learning may support this development require much greater consideration and application.
The Significance of Risk Definition on Portfolio Selection

Des portefeuilles sont definis a partir d'un ensemble de 30 projets fictifs mais realistes, du secteur petrolier. Pour chaque projet, des profils de risques sont definis bases sur differentes mesures de la valeur utilisant les simulations de Monte Carlo. L'impact de la definition du risque sur la selection optimale d'un portefeuille est defini.
Visualizing program similarity in the Ac plagiarism detection system

Programming assignments are easy to plagiarize in such a way as to foil casual reading by graders. Graders can resort to automatic plagiarism detection systems, which can generate a "distance" matrix that covers all possible pairings. Most plagiarism detection programs then present this information as a simple ranked list, losing valuable information in the process. The Ac system uses the whole distance matrix to provide graders with multiple linked visualizations. The graph representation can be used to explore clusters of highly related submissions at different filtering levels. The histogram representation presents compact "individual" histograms for each submission, complementing the graph representation in aiding graders during analysis. Although Ac's visualizations were developed with plagiarism detection in mind, they should also prove effective to visualize distance matrices from other domains, as demonstrated by preliminary experiments.
Fuzzy Integrating Multiple SVM Classifiers and its Application in Credit Scoring

This paper presents a method of combining support vector machine (SVM) based on fuzzy integral. The classification has two steps: first map individual SVM classifiers' decision values, which are good representatives of confidence, to memberships, second aggregate these memberships by fuzzy integral to obtain the final decision. Experimental results on two public datasets indicate that the performance of the proposed method outperforms the three conventional combining methods: single best, majority-rule ensemble and weighted-majority-rule ensemble. It clearly shows that the method has a great potential to find successful application in credit scoring area
A Novel Interface for Hybrid Mock Circulations to Evaluate Ventricular Assist Devices

This paper presents a novel mock circulation for the evaluation of ventricular assist devices (VADs), which is based on a hardware-in-the-loop concept. A numerical model of the human blood circulation runs in real time and computes instantaneous pressure, volume, and flow rate values. The VAD to be tested is connected to a numerical-hydraulic interface, which allows the interaction between the VAD and the numerical model of the circulation. The numerical-hydraulic interface consists of two pressure-controlled reservoirs, which apply the computed pressure values from the model to the VAD, and a flow probe to feed the resulting VAD flow rate back to the model. Experimental results are provided to show the proper interaction between a numerical model of the circulation and a mixed-flow blood pump.
Accelerating HAC estimation for multivariate time series

Heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) covariance matrix estimation, or HAC estimation in short, is one of the most important techniques in time series analysis and forecasting. It serves as a powerful analytical tool for hypothesis testing and model verification. However, HAC estimation for long and high-dimensional time series is computationally expensive. This paper describes a novel pipeline-friendly HAC estimation algorithm derived from a mathematical specification, by applying transformations to eliminate conditionals, to parallelize arithmetic, and to promote data reuse in computation. We then develop a fully-pipelined hardware architecture based on the proposed algorithm. This architecture is shown to be efficient and scalable from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Experimental results show that an FPGA-based implementation of the proposed architecture is up to 111 times faster than an optimised CPU implementation with one core, and 14 times faster than a CPU with eight cores.
A fast iterative Bayesian inference algorithm for sparse channel estimation

In this paper, we present a Bayesian channel estimation algorithm for multicarrier receivers based on pilot symbol observations. The inherent sparse nature of wireless multipath channels is exploited by modeling the prior distribution of multipath components' gains with a hierarchical representation of the Bessel K probability density function; a highly efficient, fast iterative Bayesian inference method is then applied to the proposed model. The resulting estimator outperforms other state-of-the-art Bayesian and non-Bayesian estimators, either by yielding lower mean squared estimation error or by attaining the same accuracy with improved convergence rate, as shown in our numerical evaluation.
Neurofascin induces neurites by heterophilic interactions with axonal NrCAM while NrCAM requires F11 on the axonal surface to extend neurites

Neurofascin and NrCAM are two axon-associated transmembrane glycoproteins belonging to the L1 subgroup of the Ig superfamily. In this study, we have analyzed the interaction of both proteins using neurite outgrowth and binding assays. A neurofascin-Fc chimera was found to stimulate the outgrowth of tectal cells when immobilized on an inert surface but not as a soluble form using polylysine as substrate. Antibody blocking experiments demonstrate that neurite extension on immobilized neurofascin is mediated by NrCAM on the axonal surface. Under the reverse experimental conditions where NrCAM induces neurite extension, F11, and not neurofascin, serves as axonal receptor. Binding studies using transfected COS7 cells and immunoprecipitations reveal a direct interaction between neurofascin and NrCAM. This binding activity was mapped to the Ig domains within neurofascin. The neurofascin-NrCAM binding can be modulated by alternative splicing of specific stretches within neurofascin. These studies indicate that heterophilic interactions between Ig-like proteins implicated in axonal extension underlie a regulation by the neuron.
Trajectories and attractors as specification for the evolution of behaviour in cellular automata

In this paper evolvability of uniform and nonuniform cellular automata is investigated in relation to the level of detail in the behavioural description. An experimental approach was taken to test how increased information, from only initial and final state to an approach including intervals of interest in the state space, influenced the evolutionary process. The results are promising as it seems that a more detailed specification of the behaviour, i.e. trajectory, was not annihilating regarding evolvability. The presented work is part of a larger goal of applying artificial evolution and development to achieve the goal of designing cellular machines that can be applied to complex computation and modelling. The specification of the sought problems for such machines is often of a nature that includes incomplete knowledge of the behaviour.
The structure of programming languages

In this paper the major components of every programming language are identified as: (1) the elementary program statement, (2) mechanisms for linking elementary statements together, (3) the means by which a program can obtain data inputs. Several alternative forms of each of these components are also described, compared and evaluated. Many examples, frequently from list processing languages, illustrate the forms described. The advantages, disadvantages and factors influencing the choice of a form of component for a language are discussed, and the paper concludes with the suggestion that programming languages evolve toward one which will permit all the most convenient ways of structuring programs, organizing systems and referencing data.
The Stanford Binet Profiles of Young Children with Autism

Twenty-four young children with autism were assessed with the Fourth Edition of the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale as part of the routine assessment procedure at the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center. Inspection of the pattern of their responses yielded an distinctive profile with the subscale of Absurdities being consistently the lowest and Pattern Analysis the highest subtest. Comparisons of the profiles for the subjects with the highest and lowest overall IQs showed essentially the same profile patterns. These data are consistent with what we know about autism as a disorder and provide support for the notion that traditional psychometric assessment can be useful in evaluating children with autism.
A brain basis for musical hallucinations 5

The physiological basis for musical hallucinations (MH) is not understood. One obstacle to understanding has been the lack of a method to manipulate the intensity of hallucination during the course of experiment. Residual inhibition, transient suppression of a phantom percept after the offset of a masking stimulus, has been used in the study of tinnitus. We report here a human subject whose MHwere residually inhibited by short periods of music. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) allowed us to examine variation in the underlying oscillatory brain activity in different states. Source-space analysis capable of single-subject inference defined left-lateralised power increases, associated with stronger hallucinations, in the gamma band in left anterior superior temporal gyrus, and in the beta band in motor cortex and posteromedial cortex. The data indicate that these areas form a crucial network in the generation of MH, and are consistent with a model in which MH are generated by persistent reciprocal communication in a predictive coding hierarchy. a 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.