Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Online Alcohol Interventions: A Systematic Review

Background There has been a significant increase in the availability of online programs for alcohol problems. A systematic review of the research evidence underpinning these programs is timely. Objectives Our objective was to review the efficacy of online interventions for alcohol misuse. Systematic searches of Medline, PsycINFO, Web of Science, and Scopus were conducted for English abstracts (excluding dissertations) published from 1998 onward. Search terms were: (1) Internet, Web*; (2) online, computer*; (3) alcohol*; and (4) E\effect*, trial*, random* (where * denotes a wildcard). Forward and backward searches from identified papers were also conducted. Articles were included if (1) the primary intervention was delivered and accessed via the Internet, (2) the intervention focused on moderating or stopping alcohol consumption, and (3) the study was a randomized controlled trial of an alcohol-related screen, assessment, or intervention. Results The literature search initially yielded 31 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), 17 of which met inclusion criteria. Of these 17 studies, 12 (70.6%) were conducted with university students, and 11 (64.7%) specifically focused on at-risk, heavy, or binge drinkers. Sample sizes ranged from 40 to 3216 (median 261), with 12 (70.6%) studies predominantly involving brief personalized feedback interventions. Using published data, effect sizes could be extracted from 8 of the 17 studies. In relation to alcohol units per week or month and based on 5 RCTs where a measure of alcohol units per week or month could be extracted, differential effect sizes to posttreatment ranged from 0.02 to 0.81 (mean 0.42, median 0.54). Pre-post effect sizes for brief personalized feedback interventions ranged from 0.02 to 0.81, and in 2 multi-session modularized interventions, a pre-post effect size of 0.56 was obtained in both. Pre-post differential effect sizes for peak blood alcohol concentrations (BAC) ranged from 0.22 to 0.88, with a mean effect size of 0.66. Conclusions The available evidence suggests that users can benefit from online alcohol interventions and that this approach could be particularly useful for groups less likely to access traditional alcohol-related services, such as women, young people, and at-risk users. However, caution should be exercised given the limited number of studies allowing extraction of effect sizes, the heterogeneity of outcome measures and follow-up periods, and the large proportion of student-based studies. More extensive RCTs in community samples are required to better understand the efficacy of specific online alcohol approaches, program dosage, the additive effect of telephone or face-to-face interventions, and effective strategies for their dissemination and marketing.
Diversity and Spatial Distribution of Hydrazine Oxidoreductase (hzo) Gene in the Oxygen Minimum Zone Off Costa Rica

Anaerobic ammonia oxidation (anammox) as an important nitrogen loss pathway has been reported in marine oxygen minimum zones (OMZs), but the community composition and spatial distribution of anammox bacteria in the eastern tropical North Pacific (ETNP) OMZ are poorly determined. In this study, anammox bacterial communities in the OMZ off Costa Rica (CRD-OMZ) were analyzed based on both hydrazine oxidoreductase (hzo) genes and their transcripts assigned to cluster 1 and 2. The anammox communities revealed by hzo genes and proteins in CRD-OMZ showed a low diversity. Gene quantification results showed that hzo gene abundances peaked in the upper OMZs, associated with the peaks of nitrite concentration. Nitrite and oxygen concentrations may therefore colimit the distribution of anammox bacteria in this area. Furthermore, transcriptional activity of anammox bacteria was confirmed by obtaining abundant hzo mRNA transcripts through qRT-PCR. A novel hzo cluster 2x clade was identified by the phylogenetic analysis and these novel sequences were abundant and widely distributed in this environment. Our study demonstrated that both cluster 1 and 2 anammox bacteria play an active role in the CRD-OMZ, and the cluster 1 abundance and transcriptional activity were higher than cluster 2 in both free-living and particle-attached fractions at both gene and transcriptional levels.
Thermal barrier coating system

The invention relates to a thermal barrier coating system for metallic components, in particular for components of a gas turbine such as an aircraft engine. The thermal barrier coating system (13) includes an inner contact layer (14) and an outer cover layer (15), wherein the inner contact layer (14) (12) with interposition of an adhesive layer to a surface (11) of a gas turbine component (10) is applied. According to the invention the inner contact layer (14) is formed of a partially stabilized with yttrium, zirconium oxide or yttrium oxide, the outer cover layer (15) is formed of lanthanum hexaaluminate.
Interplay of structure, elasticity, and dynamics in actin-based nematic materials

Significance Thermotropic liquid crystals (LCs) are central to a wide range of commercial and emerging technologies. Lyotropic, aqueous-based LCs are common in nature, but applications have been scarce. The current understanding of their behavior is limited, and manipulating their mechanical and dynamic characteristics has been challenging. Here we show that the elasticity and temporal evolution of biopolymer-based nematic systems can be inferred from simple optical microscopy measurements, and that their mechanical properties can be manipulated by adjusting certain molecular characteristics, such as the product of length and concentration. It is also shown that the dynamic evolution of the resulting materials can be understood and predicted on the basis of a free energy functional originally developed for the study of thermotropic systems. Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can be manipulated over a relatively wide range of elastic moduli. Specifically, thin films of actin filaments are assembled at an oil–water interface. At sufficiently high concentrations, one observes the formation of a nematic phase riddled with ±1/2 topological defects, characteristic of a two-dimensional nematic system. As the average filament length increases, the defect morphology transitions from a U shape into a V shape, indicating the relative increase of the material’s bend over splay modulus. Furthermore, through the sparse addition of rigid microtubule filaments, one can gain additional control over the liquid crystal’s elasticity. We show how the material’s bend constant can be raised linearly as a function of microtubule filament density, and present a simple means to extract absolute values of the elastic moduli from purely optical observations. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict not only the static structure of the material, including its topological defects, but also the evolution of the system into dynamically arrested states. Despite the nonequilibrium nature of the system, our continuum model, which couples structure and hydrodynamics, is able to capture the annihilation and movement of defects over long time scales. Thus, we have experimentally realized a lyotropic liquid crystal system that can be truly engineered, with tunable mechanical properties, and a theoretical framework to capture its structure, mechanics, and dynamics.
First Empirical Evaluation of Outcomes for Mentalization-Based Group Therapy for Adolescents With BPD

Adolescent borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a devastating disorder, and it is essential to identify and treat the disorder in its early course. A total of 34 female Danish adolescents between 15 and 18 years old participated in 1 year of structured mentalization-based group therapy. Twenty-five adolescents completed the study, of which the majority (23) displayed improvement regarding borderline symptoms, depression, self-harm, peer-attachment, parent-attachment, mentalizing, and general psychopathology. Enhanced trust in peers and parents in combination with improved mentalizing capacity was associated with greater decline in borderline symptoms, thereby pointing to a candidate mechanism responsible for the efficacy of the treatment. The current study provides a promising rationale for the further development and evaluation of group-format mentalization-based treatment for adolescents with borderline traits.
Distributed implementation of the latent Dirichlet allocation on Spark

The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is one of the most used topic models to discover complex semantic structure. However, for massive corpora of text LDA can be very slow and can require days or even months. This problem created a particular interest in parallel solutions, like the Approximate Distributed LDA (AD-LDA), where clusters of computers are used to approximates the popular Gibbs sampling used by LDA. Nevertheless, this solution has two main issues : first, requiring local copies on each partition of the cluster (this can be inconvenient for large datasets). Second, it is common to have read/write memory conflicts. In this article, we propose a new implementation of the AD-LDA algorithm where we provide computation in memory and a good communication between the processors. The implementation was made possible with the syntax of Spark. We show empirically with a set of experimentations that our parallel implementation with Spark has the same predictive power as the sequential version and has a considerable speedup. We finally document an analysis of the scalability of our implementation and the super-linearity that we obtained. We provide an open source version of our Spark LDA.
A Motivation-Based Mechanism to Design Behaviors

In human-level simulations, like video games can be, the design of character's behaviors has an important impact on simulation realism. We propose to divide it into a reasoning part, dedicated to a planner, and an individuality part, assigned to an action selection mechanism. Applying the separation of declarative and procedural aspects, the principle is to provide every character with the same procedural mechanisms: the planner and the action selection mechanism. Declarative knowledge is then used at the agent level to individualize the behavior. The contribution of this paper consists in a motivation-based action selection mechanism that allows individualization in behavior. The modularity provided by the motivations enables a large variety of behaviors for which the designer has to choose parameters. If the simulation of characters are our first motivation, the principles involved in the proposed motivation-based action mechanism are general enough to be used in other contexts.
Finite Element Analysis on Single Abrasive Grinding Ti6Al4V Alloy

The paper presents the simulated 3D Finite Element Model (FEM) while grinding the Ti6Al4V alloy using a single abrasive wheel. Grinding simulation was carried out using a Lagrangian finite element based machining model to predict the tangential cutting force, temperature distribution at grinding zone and the effective stress and strain. All simulations were performed according to the cutting conditions designed, using the plane up-grinding. The work piece was considered as typical materials to machine difficulty. As the cutting speed is increased from 15 m/min to 33 m/min at higher feed rate, a maximum value of 750 MPa stress and higher temperature localization to an extent of 900°C at grinding zone were observed.
Estimating the Exposure–Response Relationships between Particulate Matter and Mortality within the APHEA Multicity Project

Several studies have reported significant health effects of air pollution even at low levels of air pollutants, but in most of theses studies linear nonthreshold relations were assumed. We investigated the exposure–response association between ambient particles and mortality in the 22 European cities participating in the APHEA (Air Pollution and Health—A European Approach) project, which is the largest available European database. We estimated the exposure–response curves using regression spline models with two knots and then combined the individual city estimates of the spline to get an overall exposure–response relationship. To further explore the heterogeneity in the observed city-specific exposure–response associations, we investigated several city descriptive variables as potential effect modifiers that could alter the shape of the curve. We conclude that the association between ambient particles and mortality in the cities included in the present analysis, and in the range of the pollutant common in all analyzed cities, could be adequately estimated using the linear model. Our results confirm those previously reported in Europe and the United States. The heterogeneity found in the different city-specific relations reflects real effect modification, which can be explained partly by factors characterizing the air pollution mix, climate, and the health of the population.
The Effect of Contrived Success in Calculation Tasks on the Self-efficacy of Junior High School Students

This study examines whether contrived success on a task closely related to school subjects would promote students’ self-efficacy. In our previous study, junior high school students who experienced contrived success on anagram tasks raised their sense of self-efficacy and kept it high for a year. We tried to replicate that study, substituting calculation tasks for the anagrams. One hundred eighteen junior high school students participated in this study, 18 of whom were surreptitiously given easier tasks than their classmates. Those students with easier tasks outperformed their peers and thereby raised their sense of self-efficacy. However, elevated self-efficacy did not persist, falling to the starting level after only three months. Keywords—self-efficacy, contrived success, junior high school students, calculation tasks
The risks of risk adjustment.

CONTEXT Risk adjustment is essential before comparing patient outcomes across hospitals. Hospital report cards around the country use different risk adjustment methods. OBJECTIVES To examine the history and current practices of risk adjusting hospital death rates and consider the implications for using risk-adjusted mortality comparisons to assess quality. DATA SOURCES AND STUDY SELECTION This article examines severity measures used in states and regions to produce comparisons of risk-adjusted hospital death rates. Detailed results are presented from a study comparing current commercial severity measures using a single database. It included adults admitted for acute myocardial infarction (n=11880), coronary artery bypass graft surgery (n=7765), pneumonia (n=18016), and stroke (n=9407). Logistic regressions within each condition predicted in-hospital death using severity scores. Odds ratios for in-hospital death were compared across pairs of severity measures. For each hospital, z scores compared actual and expected death rates. RESULTS The severity measure called Disease Staging had the highest c statistic (which measures how well a severity measure discriminates between patients who lived and those who died) for acute myocardial infarction, 0.86; the measure called All Patient Refined Diagnosis Related Groups had the highest for coronary artery bypass graft surgery, 0.83; and the measure, MedisGroups, had the highest for pneumonia, 0.85 and stroke, 0.87. Different severity measures predicted different probabilities of death for many patients. Severity measures frequently disagreed about which hospitals had particularly low or high z scores. Agreement in identifying low- and high-mortality hospitals between severity-adjusted and unadjusted death rates was often better than agreement between severity measures. CONCLUSIONS Severity does not explain differences in death rates across hospitals. Different severity measures frequently produce different impressions about relative hospital performance. Severity-adjusted mortality rates alone are unlikely to isolate quality differences across hospitals.
Function and Regulation of MicroRNAs and Their Potential as Biomarkers in Paediatric Liver Disease

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs involved in biological and pathological processes of every cell type, including liver cells. Transcribed from specific genes, miRNA precursors are processed in the cytoplasm into mature miRNAs and as part of the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) complex binds to messenger RNA (mRNA) by imperfect complementarity. This leads to the regulation of gene expression at a post-transcriptional level. The function of a number of different miRNAs in fibrogenesis associated with the progression of chronic liver disease has recently been elucidated. Furthermore, miRNAs have been shown to be both disease-and tissue-specific and are stable in the circulation, which has led to increasing investigation on their utility as biomarkers for the diagnosis of chronic liver diseases, including those in children. Here, we review the current knowledge on the biogenesis of microRNA, the mechanisms of translational repression and the use of miRNA as circulatory biomarkers in chronic paediatric liver diseases including cystic fibrosis associated liver disease, biliary atresia and viral hepatitis B.
Autoepistemic Logics of Closed Beliefs and Logic Programming

Moore's autoepistemic logic AEL proved to be a very successful approach to formalizing non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming. However, AEL also has some important drawbacks, e.g., quite \reasonable" theories are often inconsistent in AEL, it does not always lead to the expected, intended semantics and it cannot be eeectively computed even for very simple classes of theories. In this paper we propose a more general approach to autoepistemic reasoning by introducing Autoepistemic Logics of Closed Beliefs AEL cl , where j = cl denotes a speciic negative introspection inference operator (\closed world assumption") on which negative introspection in this logic is based. Negative introspection determines which formulae in autoepistemic logic are disbelieved, or, putting it diierently, negation of which for-mulae can be assumed by default. It determines therefore the set of closed world beliefs derivable in a given autoepistemic logic. Moore's autoepistemic logic AEL is a special case of AEL cl obtained when the negative introspection operator j = cwa , based on CWA, is used as j = cl , i.e., AEL AEL cwa. The proposed logics provide a natural and mathematically elegant framework where by choosing diierent negative introspection operators j = cl we obtain diierent au-toepistemic logics AEL cl whose properties reeect the properties of the operator j = cl. We substantiate this claim by investigating in the class of logic programs the Autoepis-temic Logic of Closed Beliefs AEL circ , in which the negative introspection operator j = circ is based on McCarthy's circumscription CIRC, and comparing it to the original Moore's autoepistemic logic AEL = AEL cwa , in which the negative introspection operator j = cwa is based on Reiter's CWA. Our results show that AEL circ represents a new and attractive autoepistemic logic which eliminates the drawbacks of the original Moore's AEL mentioned above. Moreover, in the class of logic programs, AEL circ naturally deenes the well-founded semantics thus showing that the well-founded semantics can also be viewed as being based on autoepistemic logic.
Aplicación del patrón de transformación de síntesis para la comparación de los lenguajes ATL vs. QVT

Resumen. La ingenieria dirigida por modelos (MDE) se caracteriza por asignar a los modelos el papel principal durante todas las etapas de desarrollo de software, aumentar la automatizacion en el proceso de desarrollo separando los aspectos de tecnologia y promoviendo la productividad y mejora de calidad de los sistemas. El enfoque MDE ha surgido como un nuevo paso en el camino hacia una verdadera industrializacion de la produccion de software. Tras el exito del paradigma orientado a objetos, el uso sistematico de modelos se presenta ahora como la forma apropiada para conseguir programar con un nivel mas alto de abstraccion y de aumentar el nivel de automatizacion. Se presenta un analisis de los lenguajes de transformacion de modelos ATL y QVT donde se mencionan las caracteristicas mas relevantes de cada uno de los lenguajes y un caso de estudio.
Marker for type VI secretion system effectors

Significance The recently discovered type VI secretion system (T6SS) is used by Gram-negative bacteria to deliver effector proteins into both eukaryotic and prokaryotic neighboring cells to mediate virulence and competition, respectively. Even though several T6SS effector families have been described, many T6SSs are not associated with known effectors. In this work, we report the discovery of a conserved motif named MIX (marker for type six effectors) that is often located near the T6SS genome neighborhood and is found in numerous proteins from diverse Proteobacteria, among them several T6SS effectors. We show that the MIX motif can be used as a marker to identify new T6SS effectors, thereby significantly enlarging the list of known T6SS effector families. Bacteria use diverse mechanisms to kill, manipulate, and compete with other cells. The recently discovered type VI secretion system (T6SS) is widespread in bacterial pathogens and used to deliver virulence effector proteins into target cells. Using comparative proteomics, we identified two previously unidentified T6SS effectors that contained a conserved motif. Bioinformatic analyses revealed that this N-terminal motif, named MIX (marker for type six effectors), is found in numerous polymorphic bacterial proteins that are primarily located in the T6SS genome neighborhood. We demonstrate that several MIX-containing proteins are T6SS effectors and that they are not required for T6SS activity. Thus, we propose that MIX-containing proteins are T6SS effectors. Our findings allow for the identification of numerous uncharacterized T6SS effectors that will undoubtedly lead to the discovery of new biological mechanisms.
Improving the Precision and Accuracy for Estimating Energy Expenditure Using the Heart Rate Method

The “heart rate technique” is commonly used to estimate the rate of oxygen consumption (a proxy for energy expenditure) of free‐ranging animals. However, a major limitation of this technique is that interindividual variability in the relationship between heart rate (fH) and rate of oxygen consumption (V̇o2) generates large errors of estimation when the technique is applied to individual free‐ranging animals. In this study, we present a new analysis technique that takes advantage of the observation that the fH/V̇o2 relationships between individuals are frequently parallel and differ only in elevation. This technique offers superior accuracy and precision of V̇o2 estimates, reducing the coefficient of variability from 18% to 9% for individual animals in an example application in macaroni penguins. This approach enables application of the heart rate technique to deduce the energetic strategies of individual animals.