Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spectrum of Dental Phenotypes in Nonsyndromic Orofacial Clefting

Children with oral clefts show a wide range of dental anomalies, adding complexity to understanding the phenotypic spectrum of orofacial clefting. The evidence is mixed, however, on whether the prevalence of dental anomalies is elevated in unaffected relatives and is mostly based on small samples. In the largest international cohort to date of children with nonsyndromic clefts, their relatives, and controls, this study characterizes the spectrum of cleft-related dental anomalies and evaluates whether families with clefting have a significantly higher risk for such anomalies compared with the general population. A total of 3,811 individuals were included: 660 cases with clefts, 1,922 unaffected relatives, and 1,229 controls. Dental anomalies were identified from in-person dental exams or intraoral photographs, and case-control differences were tested using χ2 statistics. Cases had higher rates of dental anomalies in the maxillary arch than did controls for primary (21% vs. 4%, P = 3 × 10−8) and permanent dentitions (51% vs. 8%, P = 4 × 10−62) but not in the mandible. Dental anomalies were more prevalent in cleft lip with cleft palate than other cleft types. More anomalies were seen in the ipsilateral side of the cleft. Agenesis and tooth displacements were the most common dental anomalies found in case probands for primary and permanent dentitions. Compared with controls, unaffected siblings (10% vs. 2%, P = 0.003) and parents (13% vs. 7%, P = 0.001) showed a trend for increased anomalies of the maxillary permanent dentition. Yet, these differences were nonsignificant after multiple-testing correction, suggesting genetic heterogeneity in some families carrying susceptibility to both overt clefts and dental anomalies. Collectively, the findings suggest that most affected families do not have higher genetic risk for dental anomalies than the general population and that the higher prevalence of anomalies in cases is primarily a physical consequence of the cleft and surgical interventions.
Multiple Sclerosis related Fatigue and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis

Introduction: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a complex immune-mediated inflammatory and neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system (CNS). Recent studies were repeatedly able to demonstrate hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) hyperactivity in MS patients. MS related fatigue (MSF) is one of its most disabling symptoms. Postulated mechanisms for MSF development include neuroendocrine, neuroimmune and structural abnormalities of the central nervous system. Other diseases with fatigue (e.g. chronic fatigue syndrome, major depression) have been found to be associated with HPA axis deregulation. Objective: This study investigated, whether MSF severity correlates with the extent of HPA axis hyperactivity. Patients and methods: In a prospective, cross-sectional study, 31 clinically stable MS patients definitely fulfilling MS-diagnostic criteria were recruited from the database of the MS outpatient clinic of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital Eppendorf. Exclusion criteria were applied (incomplete address in the database, a missing fatigue screening score (see next paragraph), an incomplete medical record, current pregnancy, current MS relapse, relapse during the last three months, steroid treatment within the last three months, known endocrine abnormality or clinical evident psychiatric disease). 16 Patients with MSF and 15 patients without MSF were enrolled into the study, using empirical cut-offs for the scores determined by the fatigue severity scale (FSS). Fatigue severity was correlated with endocrine parameters (ACTH, Cortisol) won by the combined dexamethasone/corticotropin-releasing hormone test (Dex/CRH test). Clinical characteristics (sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, disability, cognitive impairment, depression, quality of life) of the participants were examined. Results: MSF severity and endocrine parameters were not significantly associated. MSF severity significantly correlated with disease disability, diminished sleep quality, excessive daytime sleepiness and reduced quality of life. No correlation was found between MSF severity and cognitive impairment. The degree of cognitive impairment significantly correlated with the extent of HPA axis hyperactivity. Discussion: MSF severity did not significantly correlate with HPA axis hyperactivity. MSF and HPA axis activity may be secondary phenomena to the body‘s reaction to MS, possibly having a prognostic value in early stages of MS. HPA axis hyperactivity in cognitively impaired MS patients might be the result of neural loss of inhibiting cortico-subcortical pathways. Future studies should involve larger and more homogeneous patient samples.
Considering RFM-values of frequent patterns in transactional databases

Market basket analysis is an important data mining application for finding correlations between purchasing items in transactional databases. Previous works show that considering constraints which users may concerned with into the mining process can effectively reduce the number of patterns and get more promising information. In this study, we extend the RFM analysis into the mining process to measure the importance of frequent patterns. In RFM analysis, a customer to be recognized as valuable if his/her purchasing records are recent, frequent, and having high amount of money. Follow the same concept of RFM analysis, we first define the RFM-patterns. The RFM-patterns we discovered are not only frequently occurred but also recently bought and having a higher percentage of revenue. After that, we propose a tree structure, named RFMP-tree, to compress and store entire transactional database, and a pattern growth-based algorithm, called RFMP-growth, is developed to discover all RFM-patterns from RFMP-tree. In experimental evaluation, the results show that the algorithm can both significantly reduce the number of discovered patterns and efficiently find the RFM-patterns.
Noise Smoothing for Structural Vibration Test Signals Using an Improved Wavelet Thresholding Technique

In structural vibration tests, one of the main factors which disturb the reliability and accuracy of the results are the noise signals encountered. To overcome this deficiency, this paper presents a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) approach to denoise the measured signals. The denoising performance of DWT is discussed by several processing parameters, including the type of wavelet, decomposition level, thresholding method, and threshold selection rules. To overcome the disadvantages of the traditional hard- and soft-thresholding methods, an improved thresholding technique called the sigmoid function-based thresholding scheme is presented. The procedure is validated by using four benchmarks signals with three degrees of degradation as well as a real measured signal obtained from a three-story reinforced concrete scale model shaking table experiment. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by computing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the root-mean-square error (RMSE) after denoising. Results reveal that the proposed method offers superior performance than the traditional methods no matter whether the signals have heavy or light noises embedded.
Applications of the Four Color Problem

In this paper are followed the necessary steps for the realisation of the map's coloring, matter that stoud in the attention of many mathematicians for a long time. It is debated the matter of the four colors, but also the way of solving by implementing of an algorithm in the MAP-MAN application. Also, it is tackled the maps drawing in real time within GPS system satellites, using more colors depending on the covered route and the landforms met. Keywords—The issue of the fourth colors, The MAP- MAN application, Software for GPS.
A clonal selection algorithm to minimize reshuffling in container stacking operations

A container is a widely used solution for the cargo storage to be transported between ports, playing a central role in international trade. Consequently, ships grew in size in order to maximize their container transportation capacity in each trip. Due to increasing demand, container terminals face the challenges of increasing their service capacity and optimizing the loading and unloading time of ships. This paper presents the proposal of a novel meta-heuristic based on the Clonal Selection Algorithm, named MRCLONALG, to minimize the number of reshuffles in operations involving piles of containers. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated through simulations and results compared with those obtained by algorithms from the literature under the same test conditions. The results show that MRCLONALG is competitive in terms of minimizing the need of reshuffles, besides presenting a reduced processing time compared with models of similar performance.
Nonlinear manifold learning for visual speech recognition

A technique for representing and learning smooth nonlinear manifolds is presented and applied to several lip reading tasks. Given a set of points drawn from a smooth manifold in an abstract feature space, the technique is capable of determining the structure of the surface and of finding the closest manifold point to a given query point. We use this technique to learn the "space of lips" in a visual speech recognition task. The learned manifold is used for tracking and extracting the lips, for interpolating between frames in an image sequence and for providing features for recognition. We describe a system based on hidden Markov models and this learned lip manifold that significantly improves the performance of acoustic speech recognizers in degraded environments. We also present preliminary results on a purely visual lip reader. <<ETX>>
Serum concentrations of 25-hydroxyvitamin D and its association with bone mineral density and serum parathyroid hormone levels during winter in urban males from Guiyang, Southwest China

Abstract Serum vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD)) may influence serum parathyroid hormone (PTH) levels and bone mineral density (BMD). In the present study, we assessed serum 25OHD concentration and its association with PTH and BMD in urban males from Guiyang (N26.57°), the capital city of Guizhou province, Southwest China. We recruited 634 males aged >20 years from the Guiyang Health Measures Survey, and stratified them into three groups according to age: young (20–39 years), middle aged (40–59 years) and older (60–79 years). We measured serum concentrations of 25OHD, PTH levels and BMD of the lumbar spine (L1–L4), femoral neck and total hip. In addition, we also explored the relationship between 25OHD and lifestyle, socio-economic characteristics and medical history by applying covariance analysis and locally weighted regression plots. The results showed that serum 25OHD was <50 nmol/l in 59·3 % of the subjects and >75 nmol/l in 12·6 % of the subjects. Higher level of serum PTH was detected in relation to lower concentrations of serum 25OHD up to 50 nmol/l. A negative correlation between serum 25OHD and PTH concentrations was observed (r −0·207, P=0·003). Mean concentration of serum PTH increased gradually and plateaued while concentrations of serum 25OHD decreased to 50 nmol/l. Gradual increase in serum PTH was observed as 25OHD concentration was <25 nmol/l (P=0·004). BMD values at all sites were greater in the higher serum 25OHD concentration group. This study shows that low concentrations of serum 25OHD were common in males, and bone health was likely to be improved when serum 25OHD values were between 30 and 50 nmol/l.
An app demodulator for iterative decoding of turbo coded differential space-time modulation with unitary group codes

A modified technique for joint iterative decoding of serial concatenation of turbo code and unitary space-time group code is proposed and evaluated under temporally correlated fading channels. This approach further takes advantage of the system by exploiting the unitary space-time group code which possesses trellis structure of differential modulation. The extrinsic information of modulation symbols is calculated from this trellis structure by using a detector called an a posteriori probability (APP) demodulator. The simulation results show that our modified method is superior to the conventional one at the expense of more complexity.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICS ESSAY TEST FOR HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

This research has been done to develop an instrument for measuring junior high school students’ physics higher order thinking skills (PhysETHOTSS) and to obtain the characteristics of the PhysETHOTS. The instrument blue print has been developed based on the aspects and sub-aspects of higher order thinking skills, then it was used to develop the items. The instrument consisting of 24 items were validated by physics educational measurement experts. The validated instrument was tried out on students of junior high school (SMPN 1 Sewon). The polytomous data were analyzed according to the partial credit model (PCM). The results show that the 24 items of PhysETHOTS were fit to the PCM, the reliability of the test was 0.75, the items’ difficulty indexes ranged from -1.22 to 0.34. Therefore, the PhysETHOTS is qualified for the measurement of junior high school students’ physics higher order thinking skills.
Motivation to move : physical activity affordances in preschool play areas

Motivation to Move: Physical Activity Affordances in Preschool Play Areas The goal of this study is to investigate the association between different types of play area design and level of physical activity of 3-5 year old children. Rationale 1. The majority of USA children are in some type of childcare provision. 2. The childcare centre is the highest predictor of preschool physical activity. 3. Being outdoors is the strongest correlate of physical activity. Three childcare centres in North Carolina, USA, were selected to carry out the study (n=90). A variety of methods were used to establish sample comparability: Early Childhood Attention Deficit Disorder Scale EC-ADDES, body mass index (BMI), the Test of Gross Motor Development TGMD-2 and children demographic information. Accelerometry was used to measure children’s activity. To link the amount of physical activity to play settings and environmental features two methods were used: 1. Behaviour mapping (processed with GIS), and 2. Video tracking of selected children (analysed using The Observer, Noldus). Setting diversity was measured using a 1-4 point scale developed by the researcher. Findings The study strongly suggests that: • The amount of physical activity afforded by preschool play areas can be intentionally improved by design. • Diverse play areas containing pathways and natural elements, and combining a range of setting sizes are expected to be the most active. • The most effective setting for motivating physical activity in this study is predicted to be a wide, curvy, wheeled toy pathway. • Compact play areas, where greater numbers of children play together, are likely to support more physical activity. • Educational programs that foster outdoor learning are likely to secure greater amounts of sustained physical activity. As a research contribution to the emerging field of design for active living, a key purpose of the study is to influence childcare policy and accreditation. Appropriate design and childcare licensing policies are viable vehicles to produce environmental and behaviour change in early childhood institutions.
Effects of botulinum toxin type A on intracortical inhibition in patients with dystonia

To find out whether botulinum toxin alters the excitability of cortical motor areas, we studied intracortical inhibition with transcranial magnetic stimulation in patients with upper limb dystonia before, 1 month after, and 3 months after the injection of botulinum toxin type A in the affected muscles. Eleven normal subjects and 12 patients with dystonia involving the upper limbs (7 with generalized dystonia, 2 with segmental dystonia, and 3 with focal dystonia) were studied. Patients were assessed clinically with the Dystonia Movement Scale. Paired magnetic stimuli were delivered by two Magstim 200 magnetic stimulators connected through a Bistim module to a figure‐of‐eight coil placed over the motor area of the forearm muscles. Paired stimulation was given at rest. A subthreshold (80% of motor threshold) conditioning stimulus was delivered 3 and 5 msec before the suprathreshold (120% of motor threshold) test stimulus. Electromyographic signals were recorded over the flexor or extensor muscles of the forearm on the affected side. We measured the amplitude of the test motor evoked potential (expressed as a percentage of the unconditioned motor evoked potential). All results were compared using ANOVA. In all patients, a botulinum toxin type A injection (50–100 mouse units) reduced dystonic movements in the arm. In normal subjects, electromyographic recordings showed significant inhibition of the test response. Before botulinum toxin injection, patients had less test response inhibition than normal subjects. One month after injection, patients had test response inhibition similar to that of normal subjects. At 3 months after injection, they again had less inhibition than normal subjects or patients at 1 month after injection. In conclusion, our data suggest that botulinum toxin can transiently alter the excitability of the cortical motor areas by reorganizing the inhibitory and excitatory intracortical circuits. The cortical changes probably originate through peripheral mechanisms. Ann Neurol 2000;48:20–26
Collective construction changes organizational reality

Presents an analytic case study of a reorganization project in the Swiss federal patent and copyright bureau (BAGE) on an action and a reflection level. The consultants in the BAGE case were acting as systemic catalysts to the self‐organizing processes in the BAGE. Based on a brief introduction to self‐organization theory and to the socio‐technical systems approach, discusses the main aspects of systemic consulting. The case study then illustrates the relative influence of the consultants as mirrors and a source of disturbance to organizational routines and discourse, and of the organization as a self‐organizing system that bears the potential to redesign itself.
Estudo sobre um parâmetro de tarefa e um parâmetro amostral para experimentos com julgamentos de aceitabilidade temporalizados

Resumo : A tarefa de julgamento de aceitabilidade de sentencas temporalizadas e uma das tecnicas de eliciacao de julgamentos na qual se impoem restricoes temporais aos juizes. Propoe-se que essa tecnica proporciona observacoes mais fidedignas de conhecimento implicito e processos automatizados. Este estudo explora a definicao de tetos temporais minimos para a execucao dessa tarefa por falantes nativos das linguas dos estimulos, assim como avalia o impacto do recrutamento de amostras de conveniencia, formadas por participantes com treinamento em estudos de linguagem, sobre esse tipo de experimento. Os resultados indicam nao haver impacto critico dessa forma de amostragem de conveniencia, e que efeitos de gramaticalidade sao detectaveis com janelas temporais de 4 segundos para cada sentenca. Palavras-chave : Aceitabilidade; Gramaticalidade; Julgamentos temporalizados; Amostragem de conveniencia. Abstract : The speeded sentence acceptability judgment task is a technique for the elicitation of judgments in which temporal constraints are imposed on judges. It is suggested that such technique provides more reliable observations of implicit knowledge and automatic processes. This study explored the setting of minimal temporal ceilings for performance in the speeded acceptability judgment task by native speakers of the stimuli languages, and it also assessed the impact of convenience sampling where participants with language studies backgrounds are recruited. The results show that there is no critical impact of this kind of convenience sampling, and they also show that grammaticality effects are detectable within a time window of 4 seconds per sentence. Keywords : Acceptability; Grammaticality; Speeded Judgments; Convenience Sampling.
Interictal EEG and the Diagnosis of Epilepsy

Summary: The interictal EEG provides information that aids in diagnosis and management of epilepsy. One must remember that the EEG is merely a tool, and its usefulness depends largely upon the skill of the individual who wields it. Like all diagnostic tests, it has significant limitations and cannot substitute for a careful history and exercise of good judgment. Nonetheless, in skilled hands, it provides unique and vital information in many patients, and enhances our understanding of their condition.
Hidden Markov model-unscented Kalman filter contour tracking: A multi-cue and multi-resolution approach

This paper present a novel attempt to introduce an HMM-based multi-resolution and multi-cue segmentation in combination with the unscented Kalman filter tracking method. It combines multiple features distribution and multiple resolutions to facilitate 2D video tracking. The advantages of this method lie in its speed and its robustness. Speed is dramatically improved by taking into account multiple resolutions which reduce number of measurement points (number of HMM states) while keeping its quality. Robustness is achieved by using multiple cues. We propose an algorithm to find an optimal operating point for a tracker in terms of the image scale. Furthermore, we propose a faster multi-scale (spatial) tracker based on a minimum acceptable performance limit. The proposed method is demonstrated on human head tracking with a non-stationary camera. Visual tests indicate that the optimized algorithms produce qualitatively better results. Results show that we are able to maintain real-time processing on quite generous video resolutions. Therefore it will be shown that our approach is faster and more efficient than conventional UKF and UKF with multi-cue.
Transient accumulations of cyanophycin in Anabaena cylindrica and Synechocystis 6308

Summary: Cyanophycin, the nitrogen reserve compound in cyanobacteria, has a dynamic metabolism during transitions between the metabolic states of nitrogen deficiency and nitrogen repletion and vice versa. Cyanophycin was transiently synthesized when ammonia-grown Anabaena cylindrica or Synechocystis 6308 consumed a limited amount of ammonia. It was synthesized during the phase of declining ammonia concentration, and its degradation was complete by the time the external ammonia had been completely consumed. When nitrogen-starved cells of A. cylindrica or Synechocystis 6308 were given a usable source of fixed nitrogen, cyanophycin again accumulated transiently. This synthesis of cyanophycin was triggered by the suddenly renewed availability of fixed nitrogen, and not by the subsequent decline in the external concentration of fixed nitrogen. The cyanophycin was degraded when balanced exponential growth was again possible. Transient accumulations of cyanophycin with similar kinetics were also observed when ammonia was added to nitrogen-fixing A. cylindrica. It is suggested that cyanophycin serves as a dynamic reservoir which separates the environmental supply of fixed nitrogen from the metabolic demands of the cells, and that this provides a mechanism which enables cyanobacteria to maximize their share of any available fixed nitrogen. This would give cyanobacteria a competitive advantage over other organisms.