Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in plasma free fatty acid concentrations in rheumatoid arthritis patients during fasting and their effects upon T-lymphocyte proliferation.

OBJECTIVE To measure whether changes in the concentrations of circulating free fatty acids (FFAs) after a 7 day fast in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients would inhibit in vitro T-lymphocyte proliferation. METHODS The concentration and composition of plasma FFAs were measured in nine RA patients at the conclusion of a 7 day fast. A FFA mixture was made up based on these findings (20% linoleic, 43% oleic, 10% stearic, 27% palmitic acid). Mitogen-induced lymphocyte proliferative responses were measured after co-culture of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from healthy individuals in the presence of increasing concentrations of this FFA mixture (from 0 to 2000 microM) and in the presence of FFA mixtures where the relative proportions of fatty acids varied. RESULTS Both the concentration of the FFA mixture and the ratio between the unsaturated and saturated fatty acids significantly influenced in vitro lymphocyte proliferation (P<0.0001). Unexpectedly, the highest concentrations of the FFA mixture increased lymphocyte proliferation. At equimolar concentrations (600 microM), manipulating the amounts of oleic and linoleic fatty acids relative to stearic and palmitic fatty acids had a potent inhibitory effect upon lymphocyte proliferation. CONCLUSION Fasting-associated increases in total plasma FFA concentrations do not inhibit, but rather enhance, in vitro lymphocyte proliferation. An inhibitory effect could only be achieved by manipulating the balance between the unsaturated and saturated fatty acids.
In search of objectivity in research performed in the field of social pedagogy

The following paper presents a second-order inquiry (an investigation of research procedures), the main purpose of which was to answer questions about a) the effectiveness of different approaches to qualitative research and b) participation in qualitative research conducted in the field of social pedagogy. The authors have taken four groups of researchers, which analysed the same text, to compare various methods of text analysis and different approaches to devising a well-founded theory (by employing three distinct qualitative methods). In addition to a reflection on the research procedures in question, the second part of this paper considers the participation within qualitative research and its effects on the construction of a plausible theory.
Statistically optimized minislot allocation for initial and collision resolution in hybrid fiber coaxial networks

In a two-way hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, the headend broadcasts in downstream channels, whereas all stations share the upstream channels. Hence, collision occurs when multiple stations send their bandwidth requests in a minislot. The headend determines how many minislots to allocate to manage collisions. This paper proposes a minislot allocation (SOMA) algorithm to optimize minislot throughput based on statistical estimation. A time proportional scheme is adopted to estimate the number of new requests in the initial resolution process. In addition, the number of retry requests in the collision resolution process is estimated by looking up a predetermined table of the most likely number of requests (MLR). In addition, SOMA is modified to reduce the request access delay by relaxing its allocation policy in a specific situation. We use a self-similar traffic model for simulation and analysis to compare SOMA with the optimal bound and the 3-ary tree algorithm.
Toward Crowdsourcing-Based Road Pavement Monitoring by Mobile Sensing Technologies

In crowdsourcing applications, the quality of the crowdsourced data is decisive to the success of subsequent system-level mining processes. We proposed a smartphone probe car (SPC) system to monitor road pavement. An SPC is essentially an ordinary vehicle with a mounted smartphone that runs sensing programs to objectively assess bumping caused by road anomalies such as potholes and bumps. The proposed system has several features. First, to allow dynamic forming of SPCs, we develop a signal processing heuristic for the extraction of the vertical acceleration components from the accelerometer readings (upon which bumping detection and road surface anomaly assessment rely). By these means, the proposed system provides a driver-friendly environment, requiring neither complicated installation nor driver-assisted training processes, and thus is possible to achieve hassle-free mass deployment such that drivers would be willing to participate in crowdsourcing. Second, based on the underdamped oscillation model, we propose a road anomaly indexing heuristic that is representable for road anomalies rather than vehicle conditions. This will later facilitate the system-level data mining processes in the servers. Third, a prototype SPC system was implemented and extensive field tests were undertaken to verify the performance of our system framework. Furthermore, we experimentally adopted a DENCLUE-like algorithm to mine road anomaly information from reported events to demonstrate any potential benefit from future investigation of data mining process at the system level. We believe the research works introduced in this paper consist the first step toward building an “ecosystem” of SPC-based crowdsourcing traffic and road monitoring applications.
“Deep” Sequencing Accuracy and Reproducibility Using Roche/454 Technology for Inferring Co-Receptor Usage in HIV-1

Next generation, “deep”, sequencing has increasing applications both clinically and in disparate fields of research. This study investigates the accuracy and reproducibility of “deep” sequencing as applied to co-receptor prediction using the V3 loop of Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1. Despite increasing use in HIV co-receptor prediction, the accuracy and reproducibility of deep sequencing technology, and the factors which can affect it, have received only a limited level of investigation. To accomplish this, repeated deep sequencing results were generated using the Roche GS-FLX (454) from a number of sources including a non-homogeneous clinical sample (N = 47 replicates over 18 deep sequencing runs), and a large clinical cohort from the MOTIVATE and A400129 studies (N = 1521). For repeated measurements of a non-homogeneous clinical sample, increasing input copy number both decreased variance in the measured proportion of non-R5 using virus (p<<0.001 and 0.02 for single replicates and triplicates respectively) and increased measured viral diversity (p<0.001; multiple measures). Detection of sequences with a mean abundance less than 1% abundance showed a 2 fold increase in median coefficient of variation (CV) in repeated measurements of a non-homogeneous clinical sample, and a 2.7 fold increase in CV in the MOTIVATE/A400129 dataset compared to sequences with ≥1% abundance. An unexpected source of error included read position, with low accuracy reads occurring more frequently towards the edge of sequencing regions (p<<0.001). Overall, the primary source of variability was sampling error caused by low input copy number/minority species prevalence, though other sources of error including sequence intrinsic, temporal, and read-position related errors were detected.
Early Pressure Dressing for the Prevention of Subdural Effusion Secondary to Decompressive Craniectomy in Patients With Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract This study was performed to investigate the effect of early pressure dressing on the prevention of postoperative subdural effusion secondary to decompressive craniectomy (DC) in patients with severe traumatic brain injury (STBI). Patients with STBI who had undergone DC for refractory increased intracranial pressure between January 2008 and December 2011 (n = 169) were randomly divided into early pressure dressing (n = 82) and control (n = 87) groups. Early pressure dressing with an elastic bandage or general wrapping (control treatment) was applied 7 to 10 days after DC. Patients’ age, sex, preoperative Glasgow Coma Scale score, incidence rate of subdural effusion, hospitalization time, and postoperative Glasgow Outcome Scale score were compared between groups. Intracranial pressure was measured immediately before and on the day after pressure dressing. No significant difference in age, sex, preoperative Glasgow Coma Scale score, or postoperative Glasgow Outcome Scale score was observed between groups (P > 0.05). Subdural effusion incidence rates were significantly lower in the early pressure dressing group than those in the control group (&khgr;2 = 5.449, P = 0.021), and a larger proportion of patients in the early pressure dressing group was hospitalized for 30 days or less (&khgr;2 = 5.245, P = 0.027). Early pressure dressing 7 to 10 days after DC, which is a noninvasive, simple procedure, reduced the incidence rate of subdural effusion and shortened hospitalization time after DC for STBI.
The Exploration of Deterministic and Efficient Dependency Parsing

In this paper, we propose a three-step multilingual dependency parser, which generalizes an efficient parsing algorithm at first phase, a root parser and post-processor at the second and third stages. The main focus of our work is to provide an efficient parser that is practical to use with combining only lexical and part-of-speech features toward language independent parsing. The experimental results show that our method outperforms Maltparser in 13 languages. We expect that such an efficient model is applicable for most languages.
Willpower and Conscious Percept: Volitional Switching in Binocular Rivalry

When dissimilar images are presented to the left and right eyes, awareness switches spontaneously between the two images, such that one of the images is suppressed from awareness while the other is perceptually dominant. For over 170 years, it has been accepted that even though the periods of dominance are subject to attentional processes, we have no inherent control over perceptual switching. Here, we revisit this issue in response to evidence that top-down attention can target perceptually suppressed ‘vision for action’ representations in the dorsal stream. We investigated volitional control over rivalry between apparent motion (AM), drifting (DM) and stationary (ST) grating pairs. Observers demonstrated a remarkable ability to generate intentional switches in the AM and D conditions, but not in the ST condition. Corresponding switches in the pursuit direction of optokinetic nystagmus verified this finding objectively. We showed it is unlikely that intentional perceptual switches were triggered by saccadic eye movements, because their frequency was reduced substantially in the volitional condition and did not change around the time of perceptual switches. Hence, we propose that synergy between dorsal and ventral stream representations provides the missing link in establishing volitional control over rivalrous conscious percepts.
Epidemiology of insomnia, depression, and anxiety.

STUDY OBJECTIVES This study used empirically validated insomnia diagnostic criteria to compare depression and anxiety in people with insomnia and people not having insomnia. We also explored which specific sleep variables were significantly related to depression and anxiety. Finally, we compared depression and anxiety in (1) different insomnia types, (2) Caucasians and African Americans, and (3) genders. All analyses controlled for health variables, demographics, organic sleep disorders, and symptoms of organic sleep disorders. DESIGN Cross-sectional and retrospective. PARTICIPANTS Community-based sample (N=772) of at least 50 men and 50 women in each 10-year age bracket from 20 to more than 89 years old. MEASUREMENTS Self-report measures of health, sleep, depression, and anxiety. RESULTS People with insomnia had greater depression and anxiety levels than people not having insomnia and were 9.82 and 17.35 times as likely to have clinically significant depression and anxiety, respectively. Increased insomnia frequency was related to increased depression and anxiety, and increased number of awakenings was also related to increased depression. These were the only 2 sleep variables significantly related to depression and anxiety. People with combined insomnia (ie, both onset and maintenance insomnia) had greater depression than did people with onset, maintenance, or mixed insomnia. There were no differences between other insomnia types. African Americans were 3.43 and 4.8 times more likely to have clinically significant depression and anxiety than Caucasians, respectively. Women had higher levels of depression than men. CONCLUSION These results reaffirm the close relationship of insomnia, depression, and anxiety, after rigorously controlling for other potential explanations for the relationship.
Circulating 2-Hydroxy- and 16α-Hydroxy Estrone Levels and Risk of Breast Cancer among Postmenopausal Women

Circulating estrogens are associated with breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women. Given that estrogen metabolites are potentially both mitogenic and genotoxic, it is possible that plasma levels of estrogen metabolites are related to breast cancer risk. We conducted a prospective, nested case-control study within the Nurses' Health Study. Blood samples, collected in 1989 to 1990, were assayed for 2-OH and 16α-OH estrone among 340 cases and 677 matched controls not taking postmenopausal hormones. Multivariate relative risks (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were calculated by conditional logistic regression, adjusting for breast cancer risk factors. Neither 2-OH nor 16α-OH estrone concentrations were significantly associated with breast cancer risk overall (top versus bottom quartile: RR, 1.19; 95% CI, 0.80-1.79; Ptrend = 0.40 for 2-OH estrone and RR, 1.04; 95% CI, 0.71-1.53; Ptrend = 0.81 for 16α-OH estrone). The ratio between the two metabolites (2-OH:16α-OH estrone) was similarly unrelated to risk overall (1.30; 95% CI, 0.87-1.95; Ptrend = 0.35). Although no associations were detected among women with estrogen receptor (ER)–positive/progesterone receptor (PR)–positive tumors, significant positive associations were observed for 2-OH estrone and the 2-OH:16α-OH estrone ratio among women with ER-negative/PR-negative tumors (RR, 3.65; 95% CI, 1.23-10.81; Ptrend = 0.01; Pheterogeneity = 0.02 for 2-OH estrone; RR, 3.70; 95% CI, 1.24-11.09; Ptrend = 0.004; Pheterogeneity = 0.005 for 2-OH:16α-OH estrone). These data do not support the hypothesized inverse associations with 2-OH estrone and the 2-OH:16α-OH estrone ratio or the hypothesized positive association with 16α-OH estrone. The significant positive associations with 2-OH estrone and the 2-OH:16-OH estrone ratio among women with ER-negative/PR-negative tumors needs to be replicated in future studies. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(8):2029–35)
A comprehensive benchmarking framework (CoBeFra) for conformance analysis between procedural process models and event logs in ProM

Process mining encompasses the research area which is concerned with knowledge discovery from information system event logs. Within the process mining research area, two prominent tasks can be discerned. First of all, process discovery deals with the automatic construction of a process model out of an event log. Secondly, conformance checking focuses on the assessment of the quality of a discovered or designed process model in respect to the actual behavior as captured in event logs. Hereto, multiple techniques and metrics have been developed and described in the literature. However, the process mining domain still lacks a comprehensive framework for assessing the goodness of a process model from a quantitative perspective. In this study, we describe the architecture of an extensible framework within ProM, allowing for the consistent, comparative and repeatable calculation of conformance metrics. For the development and assessment of both process discovery as well as conformance techniques, such a framework is considered greatly valuable.
A hybrid approach to pedestrian clothing color attribute extraction

Clothing attributes, of which color plays an important role, are receiving more and more interests in machine vision researches and applications because of their uses and effectiveness in tasks like pedestrian analysis. However, color description is a challenging problem due to complex environments such as illumination variations. Most prior works describe color attributes using only low-level features or mid-level descriptors, which results in a marked drop of the discriminative power or photometric invariance. In this paper we introduce a new efficient joint representation that aims to overcome the shortcomings of using low-level features or mid-level descriptors alone and present a novel hybrid approach to pedestrian clothing color attribute extraction. As a necessary preprocessing step, a novel processing pipeline is also proposed. We evaluate our approach on the task of color classification on both the public dataset VIPeR and our own newly-built pedestrian dataset. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach and have shown its great potential for further researches and applications.
Shared Neural Correlates for Speech and Gesture

Humans are inherently social creatures: we spend a remarkable portion of our waking hours communicating with one another. We share our thoughts, goals, and desires, tell stories about what happened at lunch and make plans for the weekend. Although messages can be written, signed, or typed, the majority of this communication occurs through spoken language and face-to-face dialogue. These interactions demand that message recipients attend not only to words and sentences, but also to numerous nonverbal cues that include body language, facial expressions, and gestures, among others.
Predicting how populations decline to extinction

Global species extinction typically represents the endpoint in a long sequence of population declines and local extinctions. In comparative studies of extinction risk of contemporary mammalian species, there appear to be some universal traits that may predispose taxa to an elevated risk of extinction. In local population-level studies, there are limited insights into the process of population decline and extinction. Moreover, there is still little appreciation of how local processes scale up to global patterns. Advancing the understanding of factors which predispose populations to rapid declines will benefit proactive conservation and may allow us to target at-risk populations as well as at-risk species. Here, we take mammalian population trend data from the largest repository of population abundance trends, and combine it with the PanTHERIA database on mammal traits to answer the question: what factors can be used to predict decline in mammalian abundance? We find in general that environmental variables are better determinants of cross-species population-level decline than intrinsic biological traits. For effective conservation, we must not only describe which species are at risk and why, but also prescribe ways to counteract this.
Pregnancy in acromegaly: a one-center experience.

OBJECTIVE AND DESIGN The aim of the study was the retrospective evaluation of pregnancy in acromegalic women attending our center. PATIENTS AND METHODS Six active acromegalic women (30-35-years old, disease duration 5-17 years) underwent seven pregnancies. Four patients had macroadenoma and two microadenoma; four had surgery; and two had been treated primarily with drugs. Before conception, GH and IGF-I were 5.4+/-0.8 and 430+/-58 microg/l respectively. GH (by an assay unable to distinguish pituitary hormone from placental variant), IGF-I, and prolactin (PRL) levels were assessed before conception, every 3 months, and after delivery; visual field and magnetic resonance imaging were performed before delivery in the only patient with macroadenoma not previously operated on and after delivery in all. RESULTS All the women conceived normally, after discontinuation of medications in five cases and, while on treatment with depot somatostatin analogs in two (discontinued after confirmation of pregnancy). All patients remained off-treatment throughout pregnancy, had uneventful pregnancies, and term delivery. The babies were healthy and normal in length and weight. Breast-feeding was allowed in four cases. During pregnancy, GH levels showed variable changes; IGF-I, notwithstanding the withdrawal of any GH hypersecretion-suppressive treatment, remained close to normal limits in all subjects and returned to pathological levels after delivery; PRL increased physiologically, returning to baseline level after delivery. In one of the two patients primarily treated with drugs, GH levels increased and the tumor regrew throughout pregnancy, although without visual impairment. CONCLUSIONS Pregnancy in acromegalic women has a normal course leading to a normal delivery, and produces normal babies. GH levels show variable changes, but decrease in most patients. IGF-I levels remain normal without medical treatment.
Implications of Monitoring Mechanisms on Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Adoption

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies permit employees to use personal devices to access organizational information. Users gain convenience from the ability to work in geographically diverse locations, while organizations gain the benefit of increased productivity and reduced information technology expense. However, these symbiotic benefits come at a cost. Organizations’ security boundaries are now extended to include personal devices, which must be controlled to mitigate data exfiltration. This control comes in the form of monitoring employees’ personal d evices, which infringe on their privacy. The monitoring mechanisms employed by organizations play a critical role in employee participation in a BYOD program. This study investigates the impact of monitoring mechanisms, privacy concerns, and job performance when evaluating whether to participate in a BYOD program. A factorial survey design was developed to test the hypotheses. Initial testing was performed and was used to modify the instrument for the main study currently in progress.
On an eigenflow equation and its structure preserving properties

The present work deals with a dynamical system of the form Ã = [[N,A<sup>T</sup>+A],A]+ν[[A<sup>T</sup> ,A],A],, where A is an n×n real matrix, N is constant n×n real matrix, [A,B] = AB−BA, and ν is a positive constant. In particular, the purpose of this work is to establish structure preserving properties of this dynamical system for tridiagonal, Hessenberg, and Hamiltonian matrices in combination with potential applications.
Multi-Wire Tri-Gate Silicon Nanowires Reaching Milli-pH Unit Resolution in One Micron Square Footprint

The signal-to-noise ratio of planar ISFET pH sensors deteriorates when reducing the area occupied by the device, thus hampering the scalability of on-chip analytical systems which detect the DNA polymerase through pH measurements. Top-down nano-sized tri-gate transistors, such as silicon nanowires, are designed for high performance solid-state circuits thanks to their superior properties of voltage-to-current transduction, which can be advantageously exploited for pH sensing. A systematic study is carried out on rectangular-shaped nanowires developed in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible technology, showing that reducing the width of the devices below a few hundreds of nanometers leads to higher charge sensitivity. Moreover, devices composed of several wires in parallel further increase the exposed surface per unit footprint area, thus maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio. This technology allows a sub milli-pH unit resolution with a sensor footprint of about 1 µm2, exceeding the performance of previously reported studies on silicon nanowires by two orders of magnitude.