Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mood changes after delivery: role of the serotonin transporter gene

Background Polymorphic variations in the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT) moderate the depressogenic effects of tryptophan depletion. After childbirth there is a sharp reduction in brain tryptophan availability, thus polymorphic variations in 5-HTT may play a similar role in the post-partum period. Aims To study the role of 5-HTT polymorphic variations in mood changes after delivery. Method One thousand, eight hundred and four depression-free Spanish women were studied post-partum. We evaluated depressive symptoms at 2–3 days, 8 weeks and 32 weeks post-partum. We used diagnostic interview to confirm major depression for all probable cases. Based on two polymorphisms of 5-HTT (5-HTTLPR and STin2 VNTR), three genotype combinations were created to reflect different levels of 5-HTT expression. Results One hundred and seventy-three women (12.7%) experienced major depression during the 32-week post-partum period. Depressive symptoms were associated with the high-expression 5-HTT genotypes in a dose–response fashion at 8 weeks post-partum, but not at 32 weeks. Conclusions High-expression 5-HTT genotypes may render women more vulnerable to depressive symptoms after childbirth.
Composable Unpaired Image to Image Translation

There has been remarkable recent work in unpaired image-to-image translation. However, they're restricted to translation on single pairs of distributions, with some exceptions. In this study, we extend one of these works to a scalable multidistribution translation mechanism. Our translation models not only converts from one distribution to another but can be stacked to create composite translation functions. We show that this composite property makes it possible to generate images with characteristics not seen in the training set. We also propose a decoupled training mechanism to train multiple distributions separately, which we show, generates better samples than isolated joint training. Further, we do a qualitative and quantitative analysis to assess the plausibility of the samples. The code is made available at this https URL
‘Deep’ Grammatical Relations for Semantic Interpretation

In this paper, we evaluate five distinct systems of labelled grammatical dependency against the kind of input we require for semantic interpretation, in particular for the deep semantic interpreter underlying a tutorial dialogue system. We focus on the following linguistic phenomena: passive, control and raising, noun modifiers, and meaningful vs. non-meaningful prepositions. We conclude that no one system provides all the features that we require, although each such feature is contained within at least one of the competing systems.
Fine-Grained Emotion Analysis of Arabic Tweets: A Multi-target Multi-label Approach

Emotion Analysis (EA) is the task of determining the emotion of a given piece of text. This is an important task with many applications especially when applied to tweets. However, existing work take a rather coarse-grained approach by assuming that each tweet has a single emotion and that this emotion has no intensity. In this work, we take a fine-grained approach by considering cases where a single tweet may have several emotions (multi-label) each with possibly different intensity (multi-target). Moreover, unlike existing work, which consider languages such as English and Chinese, we focus on the Arabic language, a severely under-studied language despite its importance. We build the first dataset (to the best of our knowledge) of Arabic tweets annotated for emotion analysis as a multi-label multi-target problem. Two human experts participated in the annotation process and Cohen's Kappa measure was used to determine their concordance.
Increased Expression of the dsRNA-Activated Protein Kinase PKR in Breast Cancer Promotes Sensitivity to Doxorubicin

It has been reported that the expression and activity of the interferon-inducible, dsRNA-dependent protein kinase, PKR, is increased in mammary carcinoma cell lines and primary tumor samples. To extend these findings and determine how PKR signaling may affect breast cancer cell sensitivity to chemotherapy, we measured PKR expression by immunohistochemical staining of 538 cases of primary breast cancer and normal tissues. Significantly, PKR expression was elevated in ductal, lobular and squamous cell carcinomas or lymph node metastases but not in either benign tumor specimens or cases of inflammation compared to normal tissues. Furthermore, PKR expression was increased in precancerous stages of mammary cell hyperplasia and dysplasia compared to normal tissues, indicating that PKR expression may be upregulated by the process of tumorigenesis. To test the function of PKR in breast cancer, we generated MCF7, T-47D and MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cell lines with significantly reduced PKR expression by siRNA knockdown. Importantly, while knockdown of PKR expression had no effect on cell proliferation under normal growth conditions, MCF7, T-47D or MDA-MB-231 cells with reduced PKR expression or treated with a small molecule PKR inhibitor were significantly less sensitive to doxorubicin or H2O2-induced toxicity compared to control cells. In addition, the rate of eIF2α phosphorylation following treatment with doxorubicin was delayed in breast cancer cell lines with decreased PKR expression. Significantly, treatment of breast cancer lines with reduced PKR expression with either interferon-α, which increases PKR expression, or salubrinal, which increases eIF2α phosphorylation, restored doxorubicin sensitivity to normal levels. Taken together these results indicate that increased PKR expression in primary breast cancer tissues may serve as a biomarker for response to doxorubicin-containing chemotherapy and that future therapeutic approaches to promote PKR expression/activation and eIF2α phosphorylation may be beneficial for the treatment of breast cancer.
Perforated gastrointestinal stromal tumor in Meckel's diverticulum treated laparoscopically

Gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) can represent a source of substantial gastrointestinal hemorrhage. Bleeding is described as a frequent cause of clinical presentation and commonly patients received surgical treatment on an urgent basis to drain the hematoma. However, a literature review has shown that perforation with peritonitis is very uncommon and rarely reported. These tumors are usually located in the stomach, and primary ileal and Meckel's localization is rare, occurring in less than 10% of cases in many series. In the English literature, we have found seven well‐reported cases of GIST in a Meckel's diverticulum that presented with perforation and peritonitis; these case were found through a MEDLINE search of the terms: “perforated” GISTs in “Meckel's” GISTs. Herein, we describe a rare case of a perforated GIST in Meckel's diverticulum that caused severe peritonitis and that was treated with minimally invasive surgery.
Similarity Retrieval of Trademark Images by Vector Graphics Based on Shape Characteristics of Components

This paper presents a similarity retrieval of trademark images represented by vector graphics. In the real inspection for new trademark images, similarity for essential objects which show products or services is evaluated to the registry. Although a similarity retrieval system which evaluates similarity between the essential objects has been already reported with trademark images represented by vector graphics, the existing system does not work well in some cases. The proposed method is an improvement version of the existing system. To enhance performance of the system, in the proposed method, the extraction of feature vectors for an object's contour shape is improved and the method of centroid distance is introduced into the feature extraction besides. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method could evaluate similarity of each essential object in trademarks better than the existing system.
Impact of a COPD comprehensive case management program on hospital length of stay and readmission rates

Background COPD accounts for the highest rate of hospital admissions among major chronic diseases. COPD hospitalizations are associated with impaired quality of life, high health care utilization, and poor prognosis and result in an economic and a social burden that is both substantial and increasing. Aim The aim of this study is to determine the efficacy of a comprehensive case management program (CCMP) in reducing length of stay (LOS) and risk of hospital admissions and readmissions in patients with COPD. Materials and methodology We retrospectively compared outcomes across five large hospitals in Vancouver, BC, Canada, following the implementation of a systems approach to the management of COPD patients who were identified in the hospital and followed up in the community for 90 days. We compared numbers, rates, and intervals of readmission and LOS during 2 years of active program delivery compared to 1 year prior to program implementation. Results A total of 1,564 patients with a clinical diagnosis of COPD were identified from 2,719 hospital admissions during the 3 years of study. The disease management program reduced COPD-related hospitalizations by 30% and hospitalizations for all causes by 13.6%. Similarly, the rate of readmission for all causes showed a significant decline, with hazard ratios (HRs) of 0.55 (year 1) and 0.51 (year 2) of intervention (P<0.001). In addition, patients’ mean LOS (days) for COPD-related admissions declined significantly from 10.8 to 6.8 (P<0.05). Conclusion A comprehensive disease management program for COPD patients, including education, case management, and follow-up, was associated with significant reduction in hospital admissions and LOS.
Immune imbalance of global gene expression, and cytokine, chemokine and selectin levels in the brains of offspring with social deficits via maternal immune activation

The murine maternal immune activation (MIA) offspring model enables longitudinal studies to explore aberrant social behaviors similar to those observed in humans. High levels of cytokines, chemokines and cell adhesion molecules (CAM) have been found in the plasma and/or brains of psychiatric patients. We hypothesized that upregulation of the systemic or brain immune response has an augmenting effect by potentially increasing the interplay between the neuronal and immune systems during the growth of the MIA offspring. In this study, a C57BL/6j MIA female offspring model exhibiting social deficits was established. The expression of fetal interferon (IFN)‐stimulated (gbp3, irgm1, ifi44), adolescent immunodevelopmental transcription factor (eg, r2, tfap2b), hormone (pomc, hcrt), adult selectin (sell, selp) and neuroligin (nlgn2) genes was altered. Systemic upregulation of endogenous IL‐10 occurred at the adult stage, while both IL‐1β and IL‐6 were increased and persisted in the sera throughout the growth of the MIA offspring. The cerebral IL‐6 levels were endogenously upregulated, but both MCP‐1 (macrophage inflammatory protein‐1) and L‐selectin levels were downregulated at the adolescent and/or adult stages. However, the MIA offspring were susceptible to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation. After reinjecting the MIA offspring with LPS in adulthood, a variety of sera and cerebral cytokines, chemokines and CAMs were increased. Particularly, both MCP‐1 and L‐selectin showed relatively high expression in the brain compared with the expression levels in phosphate‐buffered saline (PBS)‐treated offspring injected with LPS. Potentially, MCP‐1 was attracted to the L‐selectin‐mediated immune cells due to augmentation of the immune response following stimulation in MIA female offspring.
Bitcoin research across disciplines

ABSTRACT Over the last few years, research on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has snowballed across many disciplines: technical fields, economics, law, public policy, finance, accounting, and others. As the uses of blockchain technology behind Bitcoin expand, more disciplines will be drawn to its study and the research will greatly expand. This paper provides an assessment of the current state of the literature. From a comprehensive search of the literature that resulted in an original sample of 13,507 results, a final sample of 1,206 papers on Bitcoin are categorised and mapped across six disciplines.
CWS-Transactions: An Approach for Composing Web Services

Many transaction models have been developed for modelling composed web services. In these models subtransactions (single web services) can commit and release their resources before the whole composed transaction commits. If the whole transaction aborts, then the (semantic) atomicity is ensured by executing compensating transactions which semantically undo the effects of the committed subtransactions. However, using compensating transactions in ensuring semantic atomicity is turned out to be problematic in many cases. In order to avoid these problems we have developed a new transaction model, called CWStransaction model, for composed web services. It deviates from other advanced transaction models in that it is not based on compensating transactions, but rather it divides the traditional business transaction into two successive transactions, called request transaction and decision transaction. The commitment of the request transaction ensures that the decision transaction will not fail, and so the atomicity of the CWS-transaction is ensured. In this paper we specify the components of the CWS-transaction model, their execution dependencies, the correctness criteria of the CWS-transactions and give an example of the implementation of the CWS-transaction model.
Research of QoE Policy Decision of Real-time Video Session Service Based on Multipath transmission

To meet and enhance user quality of experience (QoE) is the main goal of network media service transmission, which also is the main basis for the adjustment to optimize transmission control mechanism. In multipath transmission, quality of service (QoS) parameters coupled of multiple paths, paths payload distribution and transmission policy decision problems need to be solved. A kind of QoE policy decision of real-time video session service based on multipath transmission method is proposed which mainly discussed the rules of service QoE policy decision, the guidance scheme of payload distribution of media transmission control. The server gave each of schemes service score using service QoE score calculation mode, and policy decision inference process was introduced by evaluation decision conditions and service scores. Finally, the server side gave a suitable optimal transmission scheme of real-time video session service considered by service evaluation results, media transmission control scheme and policy decision guidance information. Experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and practicality of service policy decisions QoE evaluation method.
Comparative CYP-omic analysis between the DDT-susceptible and -resistant Drosophila melanogaster strains 91-C and 91-R.

BACKGROUND Cytochrome P450 monooxygenases (P450s) are involved in the biosynthesis of endogenous intracellular compounds and the metabolism of xenobiotics, including chemical insecticides. We investigated the structural and expression level variance across all P450 genes with respect to the evolution of insecticide resistance under multigenerational dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) selection. RESULTS RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) and reverse transcriptase-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) indicated that the transcript levels of seven P450 genes were significantly up-regulated and three P450 genes were down-regulated in the DDT-resistant strain 91-R, as compared to the control strain 91-C. The overexpression of Cyp6g1 was associated with the presence of an Accord and an HMS-Beagle element insertion in the 5' upstream region in conjunction with copy number variation in the 91-R strain, but not in the 91-C strain. A total of 122 (50.2%) fixed nonsynonymous (amino acid-changing) mutations were found between 91-C and 91-R, and 20 (8.2%) resulted in amino acid changes within functional domains. Three P450 proteins were truncated as a result of premature stop codons and fixed between strains. CONCLUSION Our results demonstrate that a combination of changes in P450 protein-coding regions and transcript levels are possibly associated with DDT resistance, and thereby suggest that selection for variant function may occur within this gene family in response to chronic DDT exposure. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry.
The Multifaceted Effects of Alpha1-Antitrypsin on Neutrophil Functions

Neutrophils are the predominant immune cells in human blood possessing heterogeneity, plasticity and functional diversity. The activation and recruitment of neutrophils into inflamed tissue in response to stimuli are tightly regulated processes. Alpha1-Antitrypsin (AAT), an acute phase protein, is one of the potent regulators of neutrophil activation via both -protease inhibitory and non-inhibitory functions. This review summarizes our current understanding of the effects of AAT on neutrophils, illustrating the interplay between AAT and the key effector functions of neutrophils.
Three views of two degrees

Limiting global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial global mean temperature has become a widely endorsed goal for climate policy. It has also been severely criticized. We show how the limit emerged out of a marginal remark in an early paper about climate policy and distinguish three possible views of it. The catastrophe view sees it as the threshold separating a domain of safety from a domain of catastrophe. The cost-benefit view sees it as a strategy to optimize the relation between the costs and benefits of climate policy. The focal point view sees it as a solution to a complex coordination problem. We argue that the focal point view is the most appropriate. It leads to an emphasis on implementing effective steps toward a near-zero emissions economy, without panicking in the face of a possible temporary overshooting. After several decades of practical experiences, the focal point may or may not be redefined on the basis of knowledge gathered thanks to these experiences.
Cross-Object Viewpoint Estimation via Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we study the problem of object viewpoint estimation from a single RGB image. Viewpoint estimation has relevance in a number of 2D-to-3D applications, such as robotics, autonomous driving, and scene understanding. Unfortunately, the importance of this problem is poorly represented by the small presence of available image data with corresponding viewpoint annotations, mostly because of the inherent difficulty to annotate 3D training data from a 2D image. Previous state-of-the-art methods [15, 16] rely on generating a massive amount of synthesized data for each individual object for training, but the resulting trained network is object class-dependant and can not generalize well to unseen object class. In this work, we propose a framework that learns an embedding which is invariant to both synthesized-or-real domains as well as object classes. The invariant embedding is realized by using a gradient reversal layer [5], which discourage the learned embedding to encode the domain or class information by reverse the gradient during back-propagation in training. We perform testing on the Pascal3D+[21] dataset and provide comparison and ablation study results.
The Length of SNCA Rep1 Microsatellite May Influence Cognitive Evolution in Parkinson’s Disease

Background Alpha-synuclein is a constituent of Lewy bodies and mutations of its gene cause familial Parkinson’s disease (PD). A previous study showed that a variant of the alpha-synuclein gene (SNCA), namely the 263 bp allele of Rep1 was associated with faster motor progression in PD. On the contrary, a recent report failed to detect a detrimental effect of Rep1 263 on both motor and cognitive outcomes in PD. Aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of the Rep1 variants on disease progression in PD patients. Methods We recruited and genotyped for SNCA Rep1 426 PD patients with age at onset ≥40 years and disease duration ≥4 years. We then analyzed frequency and time of occurrence of wearing-off, dyskinesia, freezing of gait, visual hallucinations, and dementia using a multivariate Cox’s proportional hazards regression model. Results SNCA Rep1 263 carriers showed significantly increased risk of both dementia (HR = 3.03) and visual hallucinations (HR = 2.69) compared to 263 non-carriers. Risk of motor complications did not differ in the two groups. Conclusion SNCA Rep1 263 allele is associated with a worse cognitive outcome in PD.
Chicken microchromosomes are hyperacetylated, early replicating, and gene rich.

The chicken karyotype consists of 39 chromosomes of which 33 are classed as microchromosomes (MICs). MICs contain about one third of genomic DNA. The majority of mapped chicken genes are assigned to macrochromosomes (MACs), but a recent study indicated that CpG islands (CGIs), which are associated with most vertebrate genes, map predominantly to MICs. The present work establishes that chicken genes are concentrated on MICs by several criteria. Acetylated (lysine 5) histone H4, which is strongly correlated with the presence of genes, is highly enriched on MICs by immunocytochemistry. In addition, detailed analysis of chicken cosmids shows that CGI-like fragments are approximately six times denser on MICs than on MACs. Published mapping of randomly chosen genes by fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) also shows a significant excess of microchromosomal assignments. Finally, the finding that MICs replicate during the first half of S phase is also compatible with the suggestion that MICs represent gene-rich DNA. We use the cosmid data to predict that approximately 75% of chicken genes are located on microchromosomes. [The sequence data described in this paper have been submitted to the GenBank data library under accession nos. AJ001643 and AJ001644. ]
Price Rigidities and the Granular Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations

We study the role of heterogeneity in nominal price rigidity for aggregate fluctuations in a model with sectoral productivity shocks. Theoretically, sectoral heterogeneity in the pricing friction has an ambiguous effect on GDP and aggregate price volatility. Quantitatively, (i) GDP volatility is amplified when the friction is heterogeneous rather than homogeneous; (ii) sectoral shocks can jointly rationalize the volatility of sectoral prices, aggregate prices, and GDP, unlike aggregate shocks; and (iii) shocks to the largest or most central sectors may not matter in the aggregate as heterogeneous pricing frictions may alter the identity of the most important sectors for aggregate fluctuations. (JEL E12, E23, E31, E32)