Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gamut Mapping with Enhanced Chromaticness

 The darker of a pair of highly chromatic colors of the same chroma appear to be more colorful  Deriving a model to factor in L* along with C* ab to describe the perceived colorfulness  Finding the relationship to gamut mapping in the CIELAB space  Mapping color of high C* ab to create the effect of a more colorful, more chromatic mapping 4 / 21
Propagation characteristics of micro-blog “Big V” users' public opinions in social breaking news as big data

With the development of Sina Weibo, the amount of user keeps increasing. Micro-blog “big V” users play an important role in the dissemination process of micro information. Social emergencies appeared constantly and spread on Sina Weibo, sometimes with rumors, so it is necessary to discover micro-blog “big V” users' public opinion propagation characteristics in order to set a health network environment. The paper gathered the data from Sina Weibo about “Beijing Heyi Hotel”. Through the micro-blogging visualization and social network analysis, we found that the small world phenomenon between Micro-blog “big V” users is more obvious; Betweenness centrality of weibo users is consistent with the “long-tail” theory; There exists a new style of “two-step” communication-Self-propagation behavior. This paper studied the spreading of public opinion of micro-blog “big V” users, thus can help the government strengthen the control and supervision of online public opinion.
Heart and soul : the therapeutic face of philosophy

Philosophy's traditional concerns with the nature of knowledge, good conduct and the self cannot be ignored by psychotherapists, while the growth of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have had a profound impact on philosophy. The essays in the books cover topics central to both psychotherapy and philosophy such as the nature of the self, motivation and subjectivity; the limits of certainty and objectivity in interpersonal situations; and the scope of narrative, dialogue and of therapy itself. Contributions draw on a wide range of different philosophical approaches and examine how they can deepen our understanding of the processes involved in different types of psychotherapy in a wide range of clinical settings.
Estradiol Induces Discordant Angiotensin and Blood Pressure Responses to Orthostasis in Healthy Postmenopausal Women

Postmenopausal estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) is reported to increase angiotensin II under resting conditions. To determine the implications of this increase for cardiovascular regulation during simulated orthostasis, blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), renin, angiotensinogen, angiotensin II, and aldosterone were measured at rest and during lower body negative pressure (LBNP; −10, −20, and −40 mm Hg). We studied 13 normotensive postmenopausal women (54±2 [mean±SE] years) before and after 1 month of oral estradiol 2 mg daily, and 14 premenopausal women. LBNP activated the renin-angiotensin system acutely in premenopausal but not postmenopausal women. Resting renin and aldosterone were unaffected by estradiol, whereas angiotensinogen (P<0.001) and angiotensin II (P<0.01) increased. Renin, aldosterone, and HR responses to LBNP (which tended to be less in postmenopausal women [P=0.06]) were not affected by estradiol. Importantly, angiotensin II was higher on estradiol during all stages of LBNP, and increased 70% above resting values at the end of this stimulus (P<0.05), yet BP was significantly lower, both at rest (P<0.05) and during LBNP (P<0.01). In summary, in normotensive postmenopausal women, estradiol increases angiotensin II, but not aldosterone, at rest and during orthostatic stress, yet lowers, rather than raises, BP under both conditions. Downregulation of vascular and adrenal responsiveness to angiotensin II may protect healthy women against this activation. Loss of such protection may elevate BP and have adverse implications for women with conditions that impair their capacity to counteract the pathological actions of angiotensin II. This may contribute to higher cardiovascular event rates reported in recent ERT trials.
Dahl Salt-Sensitive Rats Are Protected Against Vascular Defects Related to Diet-Induced Obesity

Obesity increases plasma renin activity and angiotensin II levels, leading to vascular damage, elevated blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, and renal damage. Because genetic deletion of crucial parts of the renin-angiotensin system protect against obesity-related cardiovascular defects, we hypothesized that Dahl salt-sensitive (SS) rats, a model of chronically low plasma renin activity and angiotensin II levels, would be protected against vascular defects during diet-induced obesity compared with SS.13BN consomic rats showing normal renin-angiotensin system regulation. We evaluated vascular function in middle cerebral arteries of SS or SS.13BN rats fed high-fat (45% kcal from fat) versus normal-fat diet for 15 to 20 weeks from weaning. Endothelium-dependent relaxation in response to acetylcholine (10−8 to 10−4 mol/L) was restored in middle cerebral arteries of high-fat SS rats versus normal-fat diet controls, whereas vasodilation to acetylcholine was dramatically reduced in high-fat SS 13BN rats versus normal-fat diet controls. These findings support the hypothesis that physiological levels of angiotensin II play an important role in maintaining normal vascular relaxation in cerebral arteries and suggest that the cerebral vasculature of the SS rat model is genetically protected against endothelial dysfunction in diet-induced obesity.
Evidence for Sigma Factor Competition in the Regulation of Alginate Production by Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Alginate overproduction, or mucoidy, plays an important role in the pathogenesis of P. aeruginosa lung infection in cystic fibrosis (CF). Mucoid strains with mucA mutations predominantly populate in chronically-infected patients. However, the mucoid strains can revert to nonmucoidy in vitro through suppressor mutations. We screened a mariner transposon library using CF149, a non-mucoid clinical isolate with a misssense mutation in algU (AlgUA61V). The wild type AlgU is a stress-related sigma factor that activates transcription of alginate biosynthesis. Three mucoid mutants were identified with transposon insertions that caused 1) an overexpression of AlgUA61V, 2) an overexpression of the stringent starvation protein A (SspA), and 3) a reduced expression of the major sigma factor RpoD (σ70). Induction of AlgUA61V in trans caused conversion to mucoidy in CF149 and PAO1DalgU, suggesting that AlgUA61V is functional in activating alginate production. Furthermore, the level of AlgUA61V was increased in all three mutants relative to CF149. However, compared to the wild type AlgU, AlgUA61V had a reduced activity in promoting alginate production in PAO1ΔalgU. SspA and three other anti-σ70 orthologues, P. aeruginosa AlgQ, E. coli Rsd, and T4 phage AsiA, all induced mucoidy, suggesting that reducing activity of RpoD is linked to mucoid conversion in CF149. Conversely, RpoD overexpression resulted in suppression of mucoidy in all mucoid strains tested, indicating that sigma factor competition can regulate mucoidy. Additionally, an RpoD-dependent promoter (PssrA) was more active in non-mucoid strains than in isogenic mucoid variants. Altogether, our results indicate that the anti-σ70 factors can induce conversion to mucoidy in P. aeruginosa CF149 with algU-suppressor mutation via modulation of RpoD.
Prospective evaluation of respiratory exacerbations in children with cystic fibrosis from newborn screening to 5 years of age

Background Newborn screening allows novel treatments for cystic fibrosis (CF) to be trialled in early childhood before irreversible lung injury occurs. As respiratory exacerbations are a potential trial outcome variable, we determined their rate, duration and clinical features in preschool children with CF; and whether they were associated with growth, lung structure and function at age 5 years. Methods Respiratory exacerbations were recorded prospectively in Australasian CF Bronchoalveolar Lavage trial subjects from enrolment after newborn screening to age 5 years, when all participants underwent clinical assessment, chest CT scans and spirometry. Results 168 children (88 boys) experienced 2080 exacerbations, at an average rate of 3.66 exacerbations per person-year; 80.1% were community managed and 19.9% required hospital admission. There was an average increase in exacerbation rate of 9% (95% CI 4% to 14%; p<0.001) per year of age. Exacerbation rate differed by site (p<0.001) and was 26% lower (95% CI 12% to 38%) in children receiving 12 months of prophylactic antibiotics. The rate of exacerbations in the first 2 years was associated with reduced forced expiratory volume in 1 s z scores. Ever having a hospital-managed exacerbation was associated with bronchiectasis (OR 2.67, 95% CI 1.13 to 6.31) in chest CT scans, and lower weight z scores at 5 years of age (coefficient −0.39, 95% CI −0.74 to −0.05). Conclusions Respiratory exacerbations in young children are markers for progressive CF lung disease and are potential trial outcome measures for novel treatments in this age group.
Object Representations of Sexually and Multiply Abused Females: A TAT Analysis

Object representations of sexually abused girls were compared to those of a clinical control group with no history of maltreatment. In addition, girls subjected to sexual abuse by itself were compared with girls who were sexually abused in conjunction with physical abuse and/or neglect (i.e., multiply abused). TAT stories were analyzed using the Object Relations and Social Cognition Scale which assesses four dimensions of object relations. It was hypothesized that sexually abused children would manifest more general and highly pathognomic impairment than controls along four dimensions of object relations. It was also hypothesized that multiple abuse would be associated with more general and highly pathognomic impairment in object relations than sexual abuse by itself.
Heat-induced superaggregation of amphotericin B reduces its in vitro toxicity: a new way to improve its therapeutic index

Superaggregation of amphotericin B (AmB) was previously shown to occur upon heating of solutions at 70 degrees C. In the present study, we demonstrate that heat pretreatment of Fungizone (deoxycholate salt of AmB [AmB-DOC]) solutions induces a drastic decrease in the in vitro toxicity of this antibiotic. Heated AmB-DOC colloidal solutions, which mainly contained superaggregated and monomeric forms of the antibiotic, were strongly less hemolytic than unheated solutions (aggregates and monomers). Thermal pretreatment of AmB-DOC solutions also reduced the toxicity to the cell line HT29, as deduced from two simultaneous cell viability assays (3-4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide and lactate dehydrogenase release). These heated colloidal solutions were only slightly less efficient than the unheated ones at inhibiting the growth of Candida albicans cells in vitro. Such results suggest that mild heat treatment of AmB-DOC solutions could provide a new and simple solution for improving the therapeutic index of this antifungal agent by reducing its toxicity to mammalian cells.
Acquiring Background Knowledge to Improve Moral Value Prediction

We address the problem of detecting expressions of moral values in tweets using content analysis. This is a particularly challenging problem because moral values are often only implicitly signaled in language, and tweets contain little contextual information due to length constraints. To address these obstacles, we present a novel approach to automatically acquire background knowledge from an external knowledge base to enrich input texts and thus improve moral value prediction. By combining basic textual features with background knowledge, our overall context-aware framework achieves performance comparable to a single human annotator. Our approach obtains 13.3% absolute F -score gains compared to our baseline model that only uses textual features. 11Our code is available at https://github.com/limteng-rpi/mvp
Traffic estimation in road networks via compressive sensing

The recent advances of compressive sensing (CS) have witnessed a great potential of traffic condition estimation in road networks. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation approach that applies compressive sensing technique to achieve a city-scale traffic estimation with only a small number of vehicle probes. In particular, we construct a new type of random matrix for CS which can significantly reduce the number of vehicle probes for traffic estimation. Furthermore, we also propose a novel representation matrix to better exploit the correlations of road network to improve the accuracy of traffic estimation. We analyze the incoherence between random measurement matrix and sparsity representation basis. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through extensive simulations by real-world dataset.
Reversal Learning Based on Somatic Markers

One of the main aspects in the field of Artificial Intelligence is the creation of agents with the ability to learn like human beings do. Based on made experiences humans are able to adapt their behaviour in order to solve tasks. Another important aspect of human decision making is the ability to discard learned behaviour when the usual decisions, concerning a stimulus, lead to a bad outcome. For robots intended to be embedded in a social environment, the adaptability of behaviour is an important factor. Research of human decision behaviour shows, that emotions play a decisive role, even for learning and reversal learning. In this paper, improvements and further results of a previously presented framework for decision making based on an emotional memory are presented. The improvements include the reduction of the amount of previous knowledge that has to be implemented and an evaluation concerning reversal learning. For evaluation purposes, a typical reversal learning task, performed by real subjects, has been used. The results show that this framework allows the adaption of behaviour comparable to human subjects and offers decisive improvements, which lead to better results in reversal learning tasks without the need to directly declare a task as such one.
Inferring audience partisanship for YouTube videos

Political campaigning and the corresponding advertisement money are increasingly moving online. Some analysts claim that the U.S.~elections were partly won through a smart use of (i) targeted advertising and (ii) social media. But what type of information do politicized users consume online? And, the other way around, for a given content, e.g. a YouTube video, is it possible to predict its political audience? To address this latter question, we present a large scale study of anonymous YouTube video consumption of politicized users, where political orientation is derived from visits to "beacon pages", namely, political partisan blogs. Though our techniques are relevant for targeted political advertising, we believe that our findings are also of a wider interest.
VALUE BASED INTELLIGENT REQUIREMENT PRIORITIZATION ( VIRP ) : EXPERT DRIVEN FUZZY LOGIC BASED PRIORITIZATION TECHNIQUE

Requirement Prioritization is a very critical but often neglected area of requirement engineering. Experience has shown that without proper prioritization of requirements presented by various stakeholders, the end product usually fails to meet its objectives optimally. In fact in many instances, the product is considered a failure because it fails to meet its core objectives. Several requirement prioritization techniques have been presented by various researchers over the past years. Working with these techniques has exposed several limitations when applied in software projects. In this paper, we have presented a novel multi-level value based intelligent requirement prioritization technique using fuzzy logic. We have introduced and applied the concept of requirement value to prioritize requirements. We have performed extensive experimentation using our proposed technique along with existing techniques. Results have shown that our technique has achieved superior prioritization results and consistency. The experiments have also shown that proposed technique is capable of delivering impressive prioritization under various circumstances.
Comparison of designs towards a subject-independent brain-computer interface based on motor imagery

A major limitation of current Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) based on Motor Imagery (MI) is that they are subject-specific BCI, which require data recording and system training for each new user. This process is time consuming and inconvenient, especially for casual users or portable BCI with limited computational resources. In this paper, we explore the design of a Subject-Independent (SI) MI-based BCI, i.e., a BCI that can be used immediately by any new user without training the BCI with the user’s data. This is achieved by training the BCI on data acquired from several other subjects. In order to assess the possibility to build such a BCI, we compared several designs based on different features and classifiers, on data from 9 subjects. Our results suggested that linear classifiers were the most appropriate for the design of MI-based SI-BCI. We also proposed a filter bank common spatial patterns feature extraction method based on a multi-resolution frequency decomposition which achieved the highest accuracy.
Predictive isotope model connects microbes in culture and nature

In PNAS, Wing and Halevy (1) present a new model that quantitatively describes the magnitude of sulfur isotope fractionation produced by dissimilatory microbial sulfate reduction (MSR). MSR is a major player in the global biogeochemical cycles and is responsible for the respiration of up to 30% of organic matter in marine sediments (2). This metabolism produces large isotope effects, in which the product, sulfide, is depleted in the heavy isotopes (33S, 34S, and 36S) relative to the most abundant isotope 32S (3), enriching modern seawater sulfate in 34S by about 21‰ (parts per thousand) compared with mantle sulfur. Sedimentary sulfur minerals preserve a record of this effect and are used to track changes in the sulfur isotope composition of seawater and the biogeochemical sulfur, carbon, and oxygen cycles through geologic time (4). Such reconstructions require an understanding of factors that control the magnitude of sulfur isotope effects and dictate the fractionation of sulfur isotopes by sulfate reducers under a range of growth conditions.
Identification and Analysis of Amino Acid Mutations in Porin IB That Mediate Intermediate-Level Resistance to Penicillin and Tetracycline in Neisseria gonorrhoeae

ABSTRACT PenB is the third resistance determinant in the stepwise acquisition of multiple resistance genes in chromosomally mediated resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae (CMRNG). Alterations in porIB, one of two alleles at the por locus that encodes the outer membrane protein porin IB (PIB), were recently reported to be responsible for the increased resistance to penicillin and tetracycline conferred by penB, but the specific mutations conferring antibiotic resistance were not identified experimentally. To determine which amino acids in PIB confer increased resistance, we transformed a recipient strain with chimeras of the porIB genes from strains FA1090 and FA140 (penB2). These studies revealed that two amino acid changes, G120D and A121D, were both necessary and sufficient to confer increased resistance to penicillin and tetracycline. Site-saturation and site-directed mutagenesis of Gly-120 and Ala-121 revealed that both a single mutation, G120K, and the double mutations G120R A121H and G120P A121P also conferred antibiotic resistance to the recipient strain. The identical mutations in PIA increased penicillin and tetracycline resistance either moderately or not at all. Analysis of porIB genes present in the GenBank database from 51 clinical isolates demonstrated that lysine and aspartate mutations at positions 120 and/or 121 also occur in nature. These studies demonstrate that charged amino acids at positions 120 and 121 in PIB are highly preferential for conferring resistance to penicillin and tetracycline in N. gonorrhoeae.
Parenteral metoclopramide for acute migraine: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Abstract Objective To assess the evidence from controlled trials on the efficacy and tolerability of parenteral metoclopramide for acute migraine in adults. Data sources Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Medline, Embase, LILACS, CINAHL, conference proceedings, clinical practice guidelines, and other sources. Selection criteria Randomised controlled trials of parenteral metoclopramide for acute migraine in adults. Results We reviewed 596 potentially relevant abstracts and found 13 eligible trials totalling 655 adults. In studies comparing metoclopramide with placebo, metoclopramide was more likely to provide significant reduction in migraine pain (odds ratio 2.84, 95% confidence interval 1.05 to 7.68). Used as the only agent, metoclopramide showed mixed effectiveness when compared with other single agents. Heterogeneity of studies for combination treatment prevented statistical pooling. Treatments that did include metoclopramide were as, or more, effective than comparison treatments for pain, nausea, and relapse outcomes reported in all studies. Conclusions Metoclopramide is an effective treatment for migraine headache and may be effective when combined with other treatments. Given its non-narcotic and antiemetic properties, metoclopramide should be considered a primary agent in the treatment of acute migraines in emergency departments.
Using The NIH Stroke Scale to Assess Stroke Patients

&NA; The stroke patient is acutely ill within minutes of symptom onset. Typically, he or she is awake and thus requires a focal neurologic exam to evaluate vision, movement, sensation and language. With the advent of acute stroke treatments that need to be rapidly implemented, it is critical that the nurse he able to assess patients and relay the information accurately and efficiently to other members of the health care team. Performing and documenting the awake stroke exam in the most efficient and useful manner is key to the nursing care of the stroke patient. The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) is a systematic assessment tool designed to measure the neurologic deficits most often seen with acute stroke patients. Originally designed as a research tool, it is a nonlinear ordinal scale, with possible scores ranging from 0 ‐ 42. Exam performance has been timed to take 5–8 minutes. Use of the NIHSS includes documentation of neurologic status and outcome, data collection for planning safe nursing care and standardization of information exchanges between nurse caregivers and other health care professionals.