Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intoxication due to alkylmercury-treated seed--1971-72 outbreak in Iraq: clinical aspects.

Sixty-six hospitalized patients suffering from chronic methylmercury poisoning were examined in Baghdad during 1972. The poisoning was attributed to consumption of home-made bread prepared from seed wheat treated with mercurial fungicide. The age incidence ranged between 4 and 70 years.Of the various clinical features encountered, neurological symptoms and signs were predominant and included muscular weakness, numbness, unsteady gait, paraesthesia, dysarthria, mental disturbances and, in severe cases, blindness, partial deafness, stupor, coma, and death. Involvement of the cardiovascular, urinary, gastrointestinal and haemopoietic systems, which was commonly encountered in ethylmercury poisoning in the 1960 outbreak in Iraq, was unusual.The severity of symptoms and signs was, broadly speaking, dose-dependent; high exposure led to severe clinical manifestations, but variations existed. Criteria, based on the clinical manifestations, were set for grading the severity of cases. The series included 2 asymptomatic cases, 20 mild, 20 moderate, 14 severe, and 10 very severe. In the latter group 5 patients died from failure of the central nervous system.The severely poisoned patients died irrespective of the medical treatment received. After 2 years of observation, most patients graded as mild or moderate cases lost their symptoms completely. Severe cases improved slowly, although ataxia, diminution of visual field and acuity and paraesthesia were still present. Thus, the previously accepted view that neurological signs were irreversible has been disproved.
Canada&Apos;S Pioneering Experience with a Flexible Exchange Rate in the 1950s:(Hard) Lessons Learned for Monetary Policy in a Small Open Economy

This paper revisits Canada's pioneering experience with floating exchange rate over the period 1950-1962. It examines whether the floating rate was the best option for Canada in the 1950s by developing and estimating a New Keynesian small open economy model of the Canadian economy. The model is then used to conduct a counterfactual analysis of the impact of different monetary policies and exchange rate regimes. The main finding indicates that the flexible exchange rate helped reduce the volatility of key macro-economic variables. The Canadian monetary authorities, however, clearly did not understand all of the implications of conducting monetary policy under a flexible exchange rate and a high degree of capital mobility. The paper confirms that monetary policy was more volatile in the post-1957 period and Canada's macroeconomic performance suffered as a result.
The Biomolecular Interaction Network Database and related tools 2005 update

The Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND) (http://bind.ca) archives biomolecular interaction, reaction, complex and pathway information. Our aim is to curate the details about molecular interactions that arise from published experimental research and to provide this information, as well as tools to enable data analysis, freely to researchers worldwide. BIND data are curated into a comprehensive machine-readable archive of computable information and provides users with methods to discover interactions and molecular mechanisms. BIND has worked to develop new methods for visualization that amplify the underlying annotation of genes and proteins to facilitate the study of molecular interaction networks. BIND has maintained an open database policy since its inception in 1999. Data growth has proceeded at a tremendous rate, approaching over 100 000 records. New services provided include a new BIND Query and Submission interface, a Standard Object Access Protocol service and the Small Molecule Interaction Database (http://smid.blueprint.org) that allows users to determine probable small molecule binding sites of new sequences and examine conserved binding residues.
Mediation of immunity to intracellular infection (Toxoplasma and Besnoitia) within somatic cells

Antigen-treated lymphocytes from immune hamsters specifically protected not only macrophages, but also cultured fibroblasts and kidney cells infected with Toxoplasma gondii or Besnoitia jellisoni. Macrophages were not necessary for the protection of fibroblasts and kidney cells. A mediator that inhibited the intracellular proliferation of these microbes was obtained from immune lymphocytes in contact with specific antigen. Again, macrophages were not necessary for the elaboration of this mediator or its activity in kidney cells or fibroblasts. The mediator was microbe and host specific, had a molecular weight between 4,000 and 5,000, was resistant to heating at 56 degrees C for 30 min, and was sensitive to chymotrypsin, but resistant to ribonuclease and deoxyribonuclease. A single injection of Besnoitia mediator afforded better protection to hamsters infected with Besnoitia than did antibody. Whereas antibody lysed extracellular organisms, the microbe-specific mediators conferred immunity not only on macrophages, but also on other cells of the body, apparently the first such demonstration.
A Markov Model of Machine Translation using Non-parametric Bayesian Inference

Most modern machine translation systems use phrase pairs as translation units, allowing for accurate modelling of phraseinternal translation and reordering. However phrase-based approaches are much less able to model sentence level effects between different phrase-pairs. We propose a new model to address this imbalance, based on a word-based Markov model of translation which generates target translations left-to-right. Our model encodes word and phrase level phenomena by conditioning translation decisions on previous decisions and uses a hierarchical Pitman-Yor Process prior to provide dynamic adaptive smoothing. This mechanism implicitly supports not only traditional phrase pairs, but also gapping phrases which are non-consecutive in the source. Our experiments on Chinese to English and Arabic to English translation show consistent improvements over competitive baselines, of up to +3.4 BLEU.
Copyright protection of remote sensing imagery by means of digital watermarking

The demand for remote sensing data has increased dramatically mainly due to the large number of possible applications capable to exploit remotely sensed data and images. As in many other fields, along with the increase of market potential and product diffusion, the need arises for some sort of protection of the image products from unauthorized use. Such a need is a very crucial one even because the Internet and other public/private networks have become preferred and effective means of data exchange. An important issue arising when dealing with digital image distribution is copyright protection. Such a problem has been largely addressed by resorting to watermarking technology. Before applying watermarking techniques developed for multimedia applications to remote sensing applications, it is important that the requirements imposed by remote sensing imagery are carefully analyzed to investigate whether they are compatible with existing watermarking techniques. On the basis of these motivations, the contribution of this work is twofold: (1) assessment of the requirements imposed by the characteristics of remotely sensed images on watermark-based copyright protection; (2) discussion of a case study where the performance of two popular, state-of-the-art watermarking techniques are evaluated by the light of the requirements at the previous point.
Charge-associated effects of fullerene derivatives on microbial structural integrity and central metabolism.

The effects of four types of fullerene compounds (C60, C60-OH, C60-COOH, C60-NH2) were examined on two model microorganisms (Escherichia coli W3110 and Shewanella oneidensis MR-1). Positively charged C60-NH2 at concentrations as low as 10 mg/L inhibited growth and reduced substrate uptake for both microorganisms. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed damage to cellular structures. Neutrally charged C60 and C60-OH had mild negative effects on S. oneidensis MR-1, whereas the negatively charged C60-COOH did not affect either microorganism's growth. The effect of fullerene compounds on global metabolism was further investigated using [3-13C]L-lactate isotopic labeling, which tracks perturbations to metabolic reaction rates in bacteria by examining the change in the isotopic labeling pattern in the resulting metabolites (often amino acids). 1-3 The 13C isotopomer analysis from all fullerene-exposed cultures revealed no significant differences in isotopomer distributions from unstressed cells. This result indicates that microbial central metabolism is robust to environmental stress inflicted by fullerene nanoparticles. In addition, although C60-NH2 compounds caused mechanical stress on the cell wall or membrane, both S. oneidensis MR-1 and E. coli W3110 can efficiently alleviate such stress by cell aggregation and precipitation of the toxic nanoparticles. The results presented here favor the hypothesis that fullerenes cause more membrane stress 4-6 than perturbation to energy metabolism.7.
Fast regularization technique for expectation maximization algorithm for optical sectioning microscopy

Maximum likelihood image restoration is a powerful method for 3D computational optical sectioning microscopy of extended objects. With punctate specimens, however, this method produces a few very bright isolated spots and dim detail around them is lost. The commonly used regularization methods (sieves and roughness penalty) decrease the amplitude of the bright spots, but do not avoid loosing dim detail. We derived an intensity regularization that decreases the amplitude of bright spots without loosing dim detail. In contrast with other regularization methods, this method does not increase significantly the computational complexity of the estimation algorithm.
Logic, physics, physiology, and topology of color

This commentary starts with a simplified Cartesian vector space of the tristimulus theory of color. This vector space is then further simplified so that bitstrings are used to represent the vector space. The Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage (CIE) diagram is shown to follow directly and simply from this vector space. The Berlin & Kay results are shown to agree quite well with the vector space and the two-dimensional version of it, especially if the dimensions are normalized to take into account the sensitivity of the eye to the different wavelengths comprising color. There is asymmetry with respect to the colors and a similar asymmetry in vocalic phonemes; these effects can be explained in terms of physiology. The (in)famous problem of the color channels is given a unified treatment at various levels. An eight-valued color algebra is created, with addition and multiplication corresponding to additive and subtractive blending of colors. Finally, it is shown that the discrete Hamming metric for colors has a natural toroidal topology.
Cancer incidence and staging among American Indians in Oklahoma.

BACKGROUND This study describes overall and site specific cancer incidence among AI/ANs compared to whites in Oklahoma and differences in cancer staging. METHODS Age-adjusted incidence rates obtained from the Oklahoma Central Cancer Registry are presented for all cancer sites combined and for the most common cancer sites among AI/ANs with comparisons to whites. Percentages of late stage cancers for breast, colorectal, and melanoma cancers are also presented. RESULTS AI/ANs had a significantly higher overall cancer incidence rate compared to whites (629.8/100,000 vs. 503.3/100,000), with a rate ratio of 1.25 (95% CI: 1.22, 1.28). There was a significant disparity in the percentage of late stage melanoma cancers between 2005 and 2009, with 14.0% late stage melanoma for whites and 20.0% for AI/ANs (p-value:0.03). CONCLUSIONS Overall, there were cancer disparities between AI/ANs and whites in Oklahoma. Incidence rates were higher among AI/ANs for all cancers and many site specific cancers.
Inventory Mistakes and the Great Moderation

Why did the volatility of U.S. real GDP decline by more than the volatility of final sales with the Great Moderation in the mid-1980s? One possible explanation is that firms shifted their inventory behaviour towards a greater emphasis on production smoothing. We investigate the role of inventories in the Great Moderation by estimating an unobserved components model that identifies inventory and sales shocks and their propagation in the aggregate data. Our findings suggest little evidence of increased production smoothing. Instead, a reduction in inventory mistakes explains the excess volatility reduction in output relative to sales. The inventory mistakes are informational errors related to production that must be set in advance and their reduction also helps to explain the changed forecasting role of inventories since the mid-1980s. Our findings provide an optimistic prognosis for the continuation of the Great Moderation despite the dramatic movements in output during the recent economic crisis.
( Preprint ) AAS XXXXX STATE-SPACE MODELING OF LARGE DOMAIN WAVE PROPAGATION SYSTEMS BY CY-PARTITIONED MATRICES

The Cy-partitioned method to produce a reduced-order, discrete-time, state-space model for large domain wave propagation is described. The method is suitable when the output dimension is orders of magnitude higher than the number of discrete-time samples specifying the time duration of interest. The model is characterized by a relatively small dynamic component relating the inputs to a relatively small number of anchored outputs, and a large static component relating these anchored outputs to all remaining outputs. The dynamic-static partition permits identification of these models in the time domain which is not possible otherwise due to the extremely large computational power and memory requirements.
The Experience of Loneliness: A Tri-Level Model

Abstract Based on the content analysis of verbatim reports of loneliness accounts provided by 526 subjects, I developed a three-level model of the experience of loneliness. Ten factors are subsumed under four major elements and are differentiated into 23 components. In addition to demonstrating the complexity of loneliness, the present study also highlights the sources of the subjective experience and the varied accounts reported by so many writers. This model may be useful in designing therapeutic intervention procedures according to individual needs of the lonely and in examining the various conditions that give rise to the different experiences of loneliness that people report.
Modeling Oscillator Injection Locking Using the Phase Domain Response

This paper presents a simulation-based model for the behavior of injection-locked oscillators (ILOs) that can be applied to any oscillator topology under any strength of injected signal. By using the phase domain response (PDR) of an oscillator, the proposed model is shown to accurately predict the behavior of ILOs with asymmetric lock ranges or those using injection into multiple locations. It can also model subharmonic injection locking behavior. The model is validated through comparison with SPICE simulations as well as measured results of a multiplying ILO fabricated in 65-nm CMOS.
The Genomics of Speciation in Drosophila: Diversity, Divergence, and Introgression Estimated Using Low-Coverage Genome Sequencing

In nature, closely related species may hybridize while still retaining their distinctive identities. Chromosomal regions that experience reduced recombination in hybrids, such as within inversions, have been hypothesized to contribute to the maintenance of species integrity. Here, we examine genomic sequences from closely related fruit fly taxa of the Drosophila pseudoobscura subgroup to reconstruct their evolutionary histories and past patterns of genic exchange. Partial genomic assemblies were generated from two subspecies of Drosophila pseudoobscura (D. ps.) and an outgroup species, D. miranda. These new assemblies were compared to available assemblies of D. ps. pseudoobscura and D. persimilis, two species with overlapping ranges in western North America. Within inverted regions, nucleotide divergence among each pair of the three species is comparable, whereas divergence between D. ps. pseudoobscura and D. persimilis in non-inverted regions is much lower and closer to levels of intraspecific variation. Using molecular markers flanking each of the major chromosomal inversions, we identify strong crossover suppression in F1 hybrids extending over 2 megabase pairs (Mbp) beyond the inversion breakpoints. These regions of crossover suppression also exhibit the high nucleotide divergence associated with inverted regions. Finally, by comparison to a geographically isolated subspecies, D. ps. bogotana, our results suggest that autosomal gene exchange between the North American species, D. ps. pseudoobscura and D. persimilis, occurred since the split of the subspecies, likely within the last 200,000 years. We conclude that chromosomal rearrangements have been vital to the ongoing persistence of these species despite recent hybridization. Our study serves as a proof-of-principle on how whole genome sequencing can be applied to formulate and test hypotheses about species formation in lesser-known non-model systems.
Noise analysis of ECG signal using fast ICA

ECG(Electrocardiogram) signals get corrupted due to different noises and artifacts such as power line interference, baseline wander, motion artifacts, contact noise that hide lot of required information. This information is required for detecting various cardiac diseases. Hence before processing ECG signal denoising plays important role to obtain significant features of ECG signal. For denoising, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is applied on contaminated ECG signal. ICA is a blind source separation technique used to find the independent source signal from non-gaussian noisy signal. The ICA technique deals with maximization of non-gaussian source signal using higher order parameters such as kurtosis and Negentropy. The process of maximization is based on the central limit theorem. ICA can be used for ECG denoising only because ECG signal has super Gaussian shape. This technique is capable to remove noise and artifacts even though they have same frequency as original signal. The FastICA with different granularity functions like tanh, power3 isolates noise and original signal using kurtosis values of separated signal. Analysis of FastICA shows tanh granularity has faster convergence as compared to power3 granularity and SNR ratio is of 7db.
Specificity in Legume-Rhizobia Symbioses

Most species in the Leguminosae (legume family) can fix atmospheric nitrogen (N2) via symbiotic bacteria (rhizobia) in root nodules. Here, the literature on legume-rhizobia symbioses in field soils was reviewed and genotypically characterised rhizobia related to the taxonomy of the legumes from which they were isolated. The Leguminosae was divided into three sub-families, the Caesalpinioideae, Mimosoideae and Papilionoideae. Bradyrhizobium spp. were the exclusive rhizobial symbionts of species in the Caesalpinioideae, but data are limited. Generally, a range of rhizobia genera nodulated legume species across the two Mimosoideae tribes Ingeae and Mimoseae, but Mimosa spp. show specificity towards Burkholderia in central and southern Brazil, Rhizobium/Ensifer in central Mexico and Cupriavidus in southern Uruguay. These specific symbioses are likely to be at least in part related to the relative occurrence of the potential symbionts in soils of the different regions. Generally, Papilionoideae species were promiscuous in relation to rhizobial symbionts, but specificity for rhizobial genus appears to hold at the tribe level for the Fabeae (Rhizobium), the genus level for Cytisus (Bradyrhizobium), Lupinus (Bradyrhizobium) and the New Zealand native Sophora spp. (Mesorhizobium) and species level for Cicer arietinum (Mesorhizobium), Listia bainesii (Methylobacterium) and Listia angolensis (Microvirga). Specificity for rhizobial species/symbiovar appears to hold for Galega officinalis (Neorhizobium galegeae sv. officinalis), Galega orientalis (Neorhizobium galegeae sv. orientalis), Hedysarum coronarium (Rhizobium sullae), Medicago laciniata (Ensifer meliloti sv. medicaginis), Medicago rigiduloides (Ensifer meliloti sv. rigiduloides) and Trifolium ambiguum (Rhizobium leguminosarum sv. trifolii). Lateral gene transfer of specific symbiosis genes within rhizobial genera is an important mechanism allowing legumes to form symbioses with rhizobia adapted to particular soils. Strain-specific legume rhizobia symbioses can develop in particular habitats.
In Vitro Model Simulating the Form of Exposure of Bacteria to Antimicrobial Drugs Encountered in Infection

A new model, which is designed to investigate the in vitro activity of antibiotics as a function of different concentration-time curves, is described. The antibiotic is allowed to diffuse through a membrane into a bacterial culture until a peak level is reached; the antibiotic is then removed by flow-assisted back diffusion. With this arrangement it is possible to expose bacteria to a changing concentration of drug while maintaining a constant volume of bacterial culture. Preliminary studies were carried out to investigate the response of a strain of Escherichia coli to gentamicin. The results indicate that bacteria surviving exposure to concentrations of gentamicin similar to those obtained during therapy may exhibit an increase in resistance to the antibiotic.
Effects of Temporal Sequencing and Auditory Discrimination on Children's Memory Patterns for Tones, Numbers, and Nonsense Words

The purpose of this study was to determine whether children's recall of tones, numbers, and words was supported by a common temporal sequencing mechanism; whether children's patterns of memory for tones, numbers, and nonsense words were the same despite differences in symbol systems; and whether children's recall of tones, numbers, and nonsense words was related to their aural discrimination ability. Participants ( N = 74) were children enrolled in grades 1 through 3, drawn from an urban magnet school. On the basis of U-shaped performance profiles, the authors concluded that a common temporal sequencing mechanism may undergird children's recall of tones and nonsense words; thus, these domains may be linked at some basic level. Based on intraclass correlations that compared children's patterns of memory for tones, numbers, and nonsense words, the authors found that children's memory for information varied by symbol system and according to the characteristics of patterns within each symbol system. Finally, they found that aural discrimination skill contributed to children's recall despite differences in symbol systems.
Nephrolithiasis: what surgeons need to know.

OBJECTIVE In this article, we review the standard of care for imaging of nephrolithiasis as well as new technology and radiation concerns from the perspective of the urologic surgeon. CONCLUSION Nephrolithiasis is a common cause of morbidity with a lifetime prevalence of 5-10% worldwide. Increasingly, diagnostic evaluation and planning for medical or surgical intervention have become reliant on imaging.