Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuropsychiatric perspectives on nodding syndrome in northern Uganda: a case series study and a review of the literature

Background: Nodding Syndrome (NS), previously called Nodding Disease, is a chronic and debilitating illness affecting thousands of children aged 3-18 years in post-conflict Northern Uganda and South Sudan. Characterised by malnutrition, stunted growth, mental retardation and seizures, some researchers have designated it as epilepsy. With reports appearing in Northern Uganda in1997, NS reached epidemic proportions around 2000-2003 when people were moved into Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camps. Investigations for infections (onchocerciasis) and toxins have been inconclusive as to cause, treatment or outcome. No study has addressed the possible relationship of NS to childhood war-trauma experiences. Objective: To explore a possible relationship of exposure to prolonged war-trauma and the emergence of epidemic NS in Northern Uganda. Method: This study was a case-series descriptive psychiatric naturalistic field observations of NS cases from homesteads in Northern Uganda and psychiatric investigations and treatment of NS cases referred to Mulago National Referral and Teaching Hospital. Results: Detailed Psychiatric clinical evaluations and field observations revealed that NS children had been exposed to severe war-related psychological and physical trauma as well as non-specific CNS insults including untreated CNS infections/ infestations and malnutrition possibly causing seizures. Many children suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Conclusion: NS could present as an association of childhood complex PTSD, (called Developmental Trauma Disorder), occurring in the chronically war-traumatised children of Northern Uganda, complicated by severe prolonged depression with its characteristic symptoms of psychomotor retardation, anxiety, anhedonia and anorexia. This, coupled with food shortages, resulted in malnutrition, wasting and stunted growth with severe avitaminoses. Many children had seizures. All this calls for multi-disciplinary treatment approaches.
Acute care of older patients in the emergency department: strategies to improve patient outcomes

Older patients in the emergency department (ED) are a vulnerable population who are at a higher risk of functional decline and hospital reattendance subsequent to an ED visit, and have a high mortality rate in the months following an ED attendance. The delivery of acute care in a busy environment to this population presents its own unique challenge. The purpose of this review is to detail the common geriatric syndromes encountered in the ED as well as the appropriate strategies and instruments, which can be utilized to support the clinical decision matrix and improve outcomes.
L'orientation entrepreneuriale des PME à internationalisation rapide et logiques d'identification des opportunités d'exportation : cas des PME agro-industrielles au Maroc

Hormis l'interet croissant que suscitent l'entrepreneuriat international et l'entrepreneuriat organisationnel comme nouvelles voies de reflexion, la recherche academique dans les deux champs ne semble pas suffisamment insister sur les processus et les dynamiques sous- jacentes de l'internationalisation rapide des PME et de la formation de leurs orientations entrepreneuriales (OE). La presente recherche se donne comme objectif de proposer une comprehension systemique des processus entrepreneuriaux de la PME a internationalisation rapide en placant la logique de identification des opportunites d'exportation au cœur de notre reflexion. Le travail s'achevera par une modelisation qualitative expliquant le phenomene en question.La premiere partie de cette these est consacree aux fondements theoriques de la recherche, abordant les concepts cles de notre cadre conceptuel. La deuxieme partie aborde empiriquement la problematique de la recherche. Apres une premiere analyse de contextualisation, sont presentes et analyses les resultats d'une etude de cas multiples, realisees au sein de six jeunes PME exportatrices marocaines du secteur agro-industriel.La recherche met en evidence des vecteurs internes (connaissances, experiences et capital social) et des contraintes externes (nature de l'activite et caracteristiques du marche local) comme determinants de l'internationalisation rapide des PME etudiees. Plus important encore, deux configurations differentes de l'OE sont decrites en relation avec deux logiques distinctes de identification des opportunites d'exportation (une logique de type causale et une autre de type effectuale).
Plasma Membrane Redox Enzyme Is Involved in the Synthesis of O2- and H2O2 by Phytophthora Elicitor-Stimulated Rose Cells

An elicitor prepared from the autoclaved cell walls of Phytophthora sp. induced O2- generation and H2O2 accumulation by cultured cells of Rosa damascena Mill. cv Gloire de Guilan. N,N-Diethyldithiocarbamate, a superoxide dismutase inhibitior, blocked H2O2 accumulation and caused a dramatic accumulation of O2- by elicitor-treated rose cells. In the absence of N,N-diethyldithiocarbamate no detectable O2- was accumulated. Diphenyleneiodonium, quinacrine, pyridine, and imidazole, inhibitors of the mammalian neutrophil NADPH oxidase responsible for the generation of O2- during phagocytosis, inhibited O2- generation by elicitor-treated rose cells. Diphenyleneiodonium also inhibited NADH-dependent O2- production by plasma membranes isolated from rose cells. None of the four compounds inhibited the peroxidase activity in the cell-suspension medium. These results demonstrate that elicitor-stimulated accumulation of H2O2 comes only from superoxide dismutase-catalyzed dismutation of O2-. The data are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the synthesis of O2- is catalyzed by extracellular peroxidase and suggest that the enzyme responsible for the synthesis of O2- by elicitor-treated rose cells might be similar to the mammalian neutrophil NADPH oxidase.
Positron tomography demonstrates frontal lobe hypometabolism in progressive supranuclear palsy

A regional analysis of cerebral glucose metabolism was carried out in 9 patients with progressive supranuclear palsy by using positron emission tomography with fluorodeoxyglucose as the tracer. A consistent metabolic map of frontal hypometabolism was found in 7 patients. Brain metabolism was normal in 1 subject and diffusely decreased in another. In the 7 patients with selective hypofrontality, motor and premotor areas were severely hypometabolic, while heteromodal association cortex and paralimbic regions were comparatively less affected. Although this pattern of frontal alterations, probably due to disconnection, appeared consistent with the clinical features of the disease, it proved difficult to correlate the metabolic maps with neuropsychological disturbances.
Quantitative T2′-Mapping in Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose— Quantitative T2′-mapping detects regional changes in the relation of oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobine and might reflect areas with increased oxygen extraction. T2′-mapping in conjunction with an elaborate algorithm for motion correction was performed in patients with acute large-vessel stroke, and quantitative T2′-values were determined within the diffusion-weighted imaging lesion and perfusion-restricted tissue. Methods— Eleven patients (median age, 71 years) with acute middle cerebral or internal carotid artery occlusion underwent MRI before scheduled endovascular treatment. MR-examination included diffusion- and perfusion-weighted imaging and quantitative, motion-corrected mapping of T2′. Time-to-peak maps were thresholded for different degrees of perfusion delays (eg, ≥0 s, ≥ 2s) when compared with a reference time-to-peak value from healthy contralateral tissue. Mean T2′-values in areas with reduced apparent diffusion coefficient and in areas with impaired perfusion were compared with T2′-values in corresponding contralateral areas. Results— Median time between symptom onset and MRI was 238 minutes. T2′-values were significantly reduced within the apparent diffusion coefficient -lesion when compared with contralateral healthy tissue (83 ms [67, 97] versus 97 ms [91, 111]; P<0.003). In perfusion-restricted tissue, T2′-values were also significantly lower when compared with contralateral healthy tissue (ie, for time to peak, ≥0 s 93 ms [86, 102] versus 104 [90, 110]; P=0.008) but were significantly higher than within the apparent diffusion coefficient lesion. The severity of the perfusion impairment had no influence on median T2′-values. Conclusions— Motion-corrected T2′-mapping reveals significant and gradually declining values from healthy to perfusion-disturbed to apparent diffusion coefficient-restricted tissue. Current T2′-mapping can differentiate between the ischemic core and the perfusion-impaired areas but not on its own between penumbral and oligemic tissue.
Deterministic and Fuzzy Model for Temporal Association Rule Mining

paper explores the usage of deterministic and soft computing approaches in frequent item set mining in temporal data. In deterministic approach TPASCAL and PPCI algorithms are discussed in this paper. TPASCAL is based on counting inference method and PPCI combines progressive partition approach with counting inference method to discover association rules in temporal database. For effective knowledge discovery both Soft Computing and Data Mining can be merged. Soft Computing techniques such as fuzzy logic, rough sets aims to reveal the tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty for achieving tractability, robustness and low- cost solutions. Temporal fuzzy association rule on quantitative database and RSMAR and RSHAR which are used for mining of multidimensional association rules with rough set technology are discussed. It can be seen the algorithms is effective to settle with some problems. All the models developed here lead to superior performance and efficiency of mining temporal patterns as compared to existing algorithms.
De Novo Origination of a New Protein-Coding Gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Origination of new genes is an important mechanism generating genetic novelties during the evolution of an organism. Processes of creating new genes using preexisting genes as the raw materials are well characterized, such as exon shuffling, gene duplication, retroposition, gene fusion, and fission. However, the process of how a new gene is de novo created from noncoding sequence is largely unknown. On the basis of genome comparison among yeast species, we have identified a new de novo protein-coding gene, BSC4 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The BSC4 gene has an open reading frame (ORF) encoding a 132-amino-acid-long peptide, while there is no homologous ORF in all the sequenced genomes of other fungal species, including its closely related species such as S. paradoxus and S. mikatae. The functional protein-coding feature of the BSC4 gene in S. cerevisiae is supported by population genetics, expression, proteomics, and synthetic lethal data. The evidence suggests that BSC4 may be involved in the DNA repair pathway during the stationary phase of S. cerevisiae and contribute to the robustness of S. cerevisiae, when shifted to a nutrient-poor environment. Because the corresponding noncoding sequences in S. paradoxus, S. mikatae, and S. bayanus also transcribe, we propose that a new de novo protein-coding gene may have evolved from a previously expressed noncoding sequence.
Evidence-Based Information Extraction for High Accuracy Citation and Author Name Identification

Citations play an essential role in navigating academic literature and following chains of evidence in research. With the growing availability of large digital archives of scientific papers, the automated extraction and analysis of citations is becoming increasingly relevant. However, existing approaches to citation extraction still fall short of the high accuracy required to build more sophisticated and reliable tools for citation analysis and corpus navigation. In this paper, we present techniques for high accuracy extraction of citations and references from academic papers. By collecting multiple sources of evidence about entities from documents, and integrating citation extraction, reference segmentation, and citation-reference matching, we are able to significantly improve performance in subtasks including citation identification, author named entity recognition, and citation-reference matching. Applying our algorithm to previously-unseen documents, we demonstrate high F-measure performance of 0.980 for citation extraction, 0.983 for author named entity recognition, and 0.948 for citation-reference matching.
Stitch-n-Sync: Discreetly disclosing topology information using logically centralized controllers

Competitive Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are typically long-known for their shrewdness to conceal their underlying network topology information. Having said this, in this article, we propose a quasi-distributed topology information sharing framework for network operators based on logically centralized controllers. Through our approach, we present a topology information sharing scheme in which two or more MNOs can cooperatively and more importantly, discreetly reveal their topology information for the sake of utilizing the unused available resources of each other, at times of network failure situations. Our approach has been formulated and developed based on a novel key metric to `tune' the amount of information sharing. Based on extensive simulations, we then investigate the impacts of network topology information sharing on the network capacity. The overall feasibility is illustrated through significant numerical results.
Genome duplication and mutations in ACE2 cause multicellular, fast-sedimenting phenotypes in evolved Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Significance The shift from unicellular to multicellular life forms represents a key innovation step in the evolution of life on Earth. However, knowledge on the evolutionary pressures resulting in the selection of multicellular life forms and the underlying molecular mechanisms is far from complete. Our study provides a complete identification of the specific genetic changes by which the unicellular eukaryote S. cerevisiae can acquire a multicellular, fast-sedimenting phenotype. We demonstrated that a minimal evolutionary mechanism encompassed a deregulation of the late step of the cell cycle through mutation in ACE2 followed by whole genome duplication. Laboratory evolution of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in bioreactor batch cultures yielded variants that grow as multicellular, fast-sedimenting clusters. Knowledge of the molecular basis of this phenomenon may contribute to the understanding of natural evolution of multicellularity and to manipulating cell sedimentation in laboratory and industrial applications of S. cerevisiae. Multicellular, fast-sedimenting lineages obtained from a haploid S. cerevisiae strain in two independent evolution experiments were analyzed by whole genome resequencing. The two evolved cell lines showed different frameshift mutations in a stretch of eight adenosines in ACE2, which encodes a transcriptional regulator involved in cell cycle control and mother-daughter cell separation. Introduction of the two ace2 mutant alleles into the haploid parental strain led to slow-sedimenting cell clusters that consisted of just a few cells, thus representing only a partial reconstruction of the evolved phenotype. In addition to single-nucleotide mutations, a whole-genome duplication event had occurred in both evolved multicellular strains. Construction of a diploid reference strain with two mutant ace2 alleles led to complete reconstruction of the multicellular-fast sedimenting phenotype. This study shows that whole-genome duplication and a frameshift mutation in ACE2 are sufficient to generate a fast-sedimenting, multicellular phenotype in S. cerevisiae. The nature of the ace2 mutations and their occurrence in two independent evolution experiments encompassing fewer than 500 generations of selective growth suggest that switching between unicellular and multicellular phenotypes may be relevant for competitiveness of S. cerevisiae in natural environments.
Dynamics and self-organization of locally coupled neural networks

These Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne EPFL, n° 1536 (1996) Prix EPFL de doctorats - EPFL doctorate award, 1996 Reference doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-1536Print copy in library catalog Award: http://vpaa.epfl. ch/page14975-fr.html Record created on 2005-03-16, modified on 2016-08-08
Bi-criteria strategies for business processes scheduling in cloud environments with fairness metrics

The Cloud computing paradigm is adopted for its several advantages like reduction of cost incurred when using a set of resources. Despite the many proven benefits of using a Cloud infrastructure to run business processes, it is still faced with a major problem that can compromise its success: the lack of guidance for choosing between multiple offerings. To ensure this, we propose a set of algorithms for business process scheduling in Cloud computing environments. More precisely, we propose an extension of our previous approaches taking into account the fact that several instances of the same process can run simultaneously, and they may have to share the same resources. The proposed approaches take into account the Cloud elasticity feature on the one hand, and on the other hand, they consider the two most important quality of service criteria when running business process in Clouds environment, namely (i) the overall execution time and (ii) the cost incurred using a set of resources. In addition they allow to ensure fairness between the different concurrent business process instances.
The High Prevalence of Thermolabile 5-10 Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase (MTHFR) in Italians Is not Associated to an Increased Risk for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD)

Summary Mild hyperhomocysteinemia was found to be related to venous thrombosis, cerebrovascular and coronary artery disease (CAD). Some recent studies suggested that a mutation in the gene encoding for 5-10 methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR), due to a transition C→ at nucleotide 677, is a genetic risk factor for vascular disease. However, several further studies could not confirm this association. We investigated 84 patients with CAD who underwent percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) and 106 healthy subjects. The prevalence of the mutated homozygous genotype was much higher than in other Italian populations, Europeans or other major human groups, but no excess of the Val/Val homozygotes was found in patients (28.5%) with respect to healthy subjects (30.2%). Mutated homozygous MTHFR genotype (+/+) was not found to be related to the clinical manifestations of CAD, to the prevalence of the common risk factors and to the rate of restenosis. In conclusion, thermolabile MTHFR does not appear to be associated “per se” with the risk for CAD or for restenosis after PTCA. The high frequency of the +/+ genotype in our Italian population (from Tuscany) confirms a wide macroheterogeneity and suggests a microheterogeneity in the genotype frequencies of the different ethnic populations. Preliminary data of this paper were selected for an Oral Communication at the XVIth ISTH Congress.
Discovering frequent probability pattern in uncertain biological networks by circuit simulation method

In the field of bioinformatics, many types of data can be represented as the topological graph, such as protein-protein interaction network. Milo proposed the concept of biological motif 0 on Science, which is referred as a substructure that appears in different parts of a network, and appears significantly more frequently than in a random network. Research shows that the motif recognition is important for many biological studies. As the life process itself is a dynamic process, the motif of the same function may be made up of the subgraphs which may slightly differ in topology, so Berg etc. [2] proposed probability motif mining algorithms in the biological network. And science graph data are obtained with the inevitable experimental error or noise data, and some biological network data carries probability information. Since biological evolution itself is a mutant selection process, the input of biological networks should also be a probabilistic network. Therefore, it is more intuitively and practically significantly to mine probability motif in the probability biological network.
Spontaneous Intracranial Hypotension‐Hypovolemia Associated With Tacrolimus

There is little precedent for a medication‐induced spontaneous intracranial hypotension/cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) hypovolemia (SIH). This case history of a woman with low CSF pressure, orthostatic headache, and radiographic findings consistent with SIH but without a detectable leak was notable for its association, both onset and resolution, with the use of the calcineurin inhibitor tacrolimus (FK506). A literature review for potential causes of a tacrolimus‐induced CSF hypotension suggests many potential mechanisms of action, including effects on blood brain barrier and dural compliance, and supports further vigilance for this condition in the medically complex setting of tacrolimus use.
Efficiently learning high-dimensional observation models for Monte-Carlo localization using Gaussian mixtures

Whereas probabilistic approaches are a powerful tool for mobile robot localization, they heavily rely on the proper definition of the so-called observation model which defines the likelihood of an observation given the position and orientation of the robot and the map of the environment. Most of the sensor models for range sensors proposed in the past either consider the individual beam measurements independently or apply uni-modal models to represent the likelihood function. In this paper, we present an approach that learns place-dependent sensor models for entire range scans using Gaussian mixture models. To deal with the high dimensionality of the measurement space, we utilize principle component analysis for dimensionality reduction. In practical experiments carried out with data obtained from a real robot, we demonstrate that our model substantially outperforms existing and popular sensor models.
A Product of Their Culture

Past approaches adopted by scholars in comparing international news have tended to concentrate on political and economic perspectives, while the role that culture plays in determining news has been somewhat neglected until recently. This article examines the role of culture in the development of journalistic practices and how a value systems approach can be applied to understanding journalism practices across cultures. Specifically, the article compares German and Anglo-American journalism practices with a view to locating differences between these traditions. The study demonstrates that using value systems as developed by Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede can be immensely useful in comparing the differences between the two traditions, as well as in understanding how journalists in these traditions report about the world.