Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Correlations between Nutritional Screening Score and Anthropometric Parameters in Institutionalized Elderly

The aim of this study is to assess nutritional status in a group of institutionalized elderly and to establish correlations between nutritional screening score and anthropometric parameters. We analyzed a sample of 156 seniors, 62 (39.7%) men, 94 (60.3%) women, to whom we performed nutritional screening using Mini Nutritional Assessment - MNA and we evaluated anthropometric parameters (body mass index - BMI, waist circumference - WC, calf circumference - CC and midupper arm circumference - MUAC). In the group of elderly institutionalized to whom the MNA has been applied, 69.2% had optimal nutritional status, 24.4% had a score of screening indicating risk of malnutrition and 6.4% had a screening score corresponding to malnutrition. A significantly higher percentage of women had a screening score indicating malnutrition (9.6% vs. 1.6%) and a screening score showing risk of malnutrition (26.6% vs. 21%) (p=0.029). Analysis by gender showed strong correlation between BMI and WC value (r = 0.869) in men, and between MUAC and CC value (r = 0.838) in women (p 0.400, p<0.001), the strongest correlation being recorded with CC (r = 0.528). MNA short form (MNA-SF) represents a useful tool for rapid nutritional screening of elderly, enabling the identification of individuals at risk for malnutrition and those with a score indicating malnutrition. Calf circumference is a parameter which is positively correlated with nutritional screening score in institutionalized elderly population, and can be proposed as a starting point in nutritional assessment algorithm.
Perceptive Spaces for Performance and Entertainment Untethered Interaction Using Computer Vision and Audition

Bulky head-mounted displays, data gloves, and severely limited movement have become synonymous with virtual environments. This is unfortunate, since virtual environments have such great potential in applications such as entertainment, animation by example, design interface, information browsing, and even expressive performance. In this article, we describe an approach to unencumbered natural interfaces called Perceptive Spaces. The spaces are unencumbered because they utilize passive sensors that do not require special clothing and large format displays that do not isolate the users from their environment. The spaces are natural because the open environment facilitates active participation. Several applications illustrate the expressive power of this approach, as well as the challenges associated with designing these interfaces.
Bildung und Gerechtigkeit

Der Autor diskutiert das Spannungsfeld von Bildung und Gerechtigkeit in historischer Perspektive. So skizziert er im ersten Kapitel die Idee der Â„EinheitsschuleÂ“ in Deutschland und zeichnet vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute die Entwicklung des deutschen Schulsystems nach. Im zweiten Kapitel setzt er sich kritisch mit der Frage nach der Â„ChancengleichheitÂ“ auseinander. Wahrend er stattdessen Aspekte der Ungleichheit anhand der Thesen und Positionen verschiedener Theoretiker im Zusammenhang mit Bildung darlegt, fuhrt er in einem abschliesenden Kapitel die Gesamtschulsysteme von Japan und Finnland als Beispiele an, in denen er trotz formal gegebener Chancengleichheit Ungleichheiten aufdeckt. (DIPF/ ssch)
The role of optical coherence tomography in the detection of pituitary adenoma

Purpose: To analyse retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) thickness in eyes with compression of the optic chiasm by a pituitary adenoma. RNFL thickness was analysed with optical coherence tomography (OCT) and compared to visual field measurements using high‐pass resolution perimetry (HRP).
Efficiently extracting frequent subgraphs using MapReduce

Frequent subgraph extraction from a large number of small graphs is a primitive operation for many data mining applications. To extract frequent subgraphs, existing techniques need to enumerate a large number of subgraphs which is superlinear with the cardinality of the dataset. Given the rapid growing volume of graph data, it is difficult to perform the frequent subgraph extraction on a centralized machine efficiently. In this paper, we investigate how to efficiently perform this extraction over very large datasets using MapReduce. Parallelizing existing techniques directly using MapReduce does not yield good performance as it is difficult to balance the workload among the compute nodes. We therefore propose a framework that adopts the breadth first search strategy to iteratively extract frequent subgraphs, i.e., all frequent size-(i+1) subgraphs are generated based on frequent size-i subgraphs at the ith iteration using a single MapReduce job. To efficiently extract frequent subgraphs, we propose an isomorphism-testing-free approach by properly maintaining how frequent subgraphs are mapped within each graph. Extensive experiments conducted on our in-house clusters demonstrate the superiority of our proposed solution in comparison with the baseline approach.
Lemmatization of Polish Person Names

The paper presents two techniques for lemmatization of Polish person names. First, we apply a rule-based approach which relies on linguistic information and heuristics. Then, we investigate an alternative knowledge-poor method which employs string distance measures. We provide an evaluation of the adopted techniques using a set of newspaper texts.
Variability in judgement of neonatal imitation

Reciprocity in interaction has been claimed to be an important aspect of neonatal imitation. In order to respond, an adult partner must be able to apprehend infant cues of imitation. The possibility of identifying neonatal imitation by inspecting infants' facial expressions alone was explored. The faces of 19 infants engaged in free face-to-face interaction with their mothers as well as watching their mothers display three types of gestures (tongue protrusion, mouth opening and the vocalization 'Ah') were videotaped. The video tapes were shown to eight observers who were asked to identify which gesture they believed the infant had been watching. The results showed that only sequences of free face-to-face interaction were correctly identified to a degree significantly exceeding chance. The percentage of correctly identified sequences varied considerably between the observers, and sequences for some gestures appeared to be easier to detect than others. The results indicate that signs of neonatal imitation are not easily detectable from the infant's behaviour alone. There are large individual variations in the extent to which imitative behaviour is distinguishable from spontaneous behaviour.
Neural networks based channel compensation for i-vector speaker verification

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and Gaussian probabilistic LDA (PLDA) have been shown to effectively suppress channel- and session-variability of i-vectors. But they suffer the following limitations: 1) In LDA, a single linear transformation may not be adequate to describe the nonlinear relationship of features and 2) Gaussian-PLDA assumes the speaker and channel factors follow a Gaussian distribution, but they are actually non-Gaussians. We consider neural networks (NN) as a way to overcome the limitations, that captures the nonlinear relationship of features and does not require prior assumptions. This paper investigates three NN based channel compensation methods: deep metric learning, NN classifier, and deep denoising autoencoder and compares their performance with LDA and PLDA. Experiments conducted on NIST 2010 speaker recognition evaluation suggest that NN-based channel compensation methods are superior to LDA and that the performance of NN classifier is better than that of PLDA under most of common evaluation conditions. Additionally, this paper also helps us understand the relationships among LDA, PLDA, and NN based methods.
Drinking water disinfection byproducts: review and approach to toxicity evaluation.

There is widespread potential for human exposure to disinfection byproducts (DBPs) in drinking water because everyone drinks, bathes, cooks, and cleans with water. The need for clean and safe water led the U.S. Congress to pass the Safe Drinking Water Act more than 20 years ago in 1974. In 1976, chloroform, a trihalomethane (THM) and a principal DBP, was shown to be carcinogenic in rodents. This prompted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) in 1979 to develop a drinking water rule that would provide guidance on the levels of THMs allowed in drinking water. Further concern was raised by epidemiology studies suggesting a weak association between the consumption of chlorinated drinking water and the occurrence of bladder, colon, and rectal cancer. In 1992 the U.S. EPA initiated a negotiated rulemaking to evaluate the need for additional controls for microbial pathogens and DBPs. The goal was to develop an approach that would reduce the level of exposure from disinfectants and DBPs without undermining the control of microbial pathogens. The product of these deliberations was a proposed stage 1 DBP rule. It was agreed that additional information was necessary on how to optimize the use of disinfectants while maintaining control of pathogens before further controls to reduce exposure beyond stage 1 were warranted. In response to this need, the U.S. EPA developed a 5-year research plan to support the development of the longer term rules to control microbial pathogens and DBPs. A considerable body of toxicologic data has been developed on DBPs that occur in the drinking water, but the main emphasis has been on THMs. Given the complexity of the problem and the need for additional data to support the drinking water DBP rules, the U.S. EPA, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the U.S. Army are working together to develop a comprehensive biologic and mechanistic DBP database. Selected DBPs will be tested using 2-year toxicity and carcinogenicity studies in standard rodent models; transgenic mouse models and small fish models; in vitro mechanistic and toxicokinetic studies; and reproductive, immunotoxicity, and developmental studies. The goal is to create a toxicity database that reflects a wide range of DBPs resulting from different disinfection practices. This paper describes the approach developed by these agencies to provide the information needed to make scientifically based regulatory decisions. ImagesFigure 3
Constraints on Homorganic Cluster Lengthening in Early English

Homorganic Cluster Lengthening (HCL) has often been treated as exceptional or problematic in a holistic analysis of the quantitative changes of vowels in Middle English (ME). This paper aims to explore what constraints actively participate in HCL and to reconsider whether or not HCL is really incompatible with other quantitative changes of vowels, especially Pre-Cluster Shortening (PCS). This study starts with the assumption that the difference between HCL and PCS goes back to the different combination of the consonant clusters preceding a vowel. It is proposed that HCL is a consequence of the phonetic tendency that vowels and sonorants are longer before a voiced obstruent than before a voiceless one. The fact that only vowels are perceived as phonemically long in ME is captured by a conjoined constraint. Unlike previous analyses, it is shown that in an Optimality-theoretic analysis many causal factors are not mutually exclusive, but ranked with one another, and it is also demonstrated that HCL and the seemingly contradictory change, PCS, can be unified under the same hierarchy of constraint.
From Design Patterns to Parallel Architectural Skeletons

The concept of design patterns has been extensively studied and applied in the context of object-oriented software design. Similar ideas are being explored in other areas of computing as well. Over the past several years, researchers have been experimenting with the feasibility of employing design-patterns related concepts in the parallel computing domain. In the past, several pattern-based systems have been developed with the intention to facilitate faster parallel application development through the use of preimplemented and reusable components that are based on frequently used parallel computing design patterns. However, most of these systems face several serious limitations such as limited flexibility, zero extensibility, and the ad hoc nature of their components. Lack of flexibility in a parallel programming system limits a programmer to using only the high-level components provided by the system. Lack of extensibility here refers to the fact that most of the existing pattern-based parallel programming systems come with a set of prebuilt patterns integrated into the system. However, the system provides no obvious way of increasing the repertoire of patterns when need arises. Also, most of these systems do not offer any generic view of a parallel computing pattern, a fact which may be at the root of several of their shortcomings. This research proposes a generic (i.e., pattern- and application-independent) model for realizing and using parallel design patterns. The term “parallel architectural skeleton” is used to represent the set of generic attributes associated with a pattern. The Parallel Architectural Skeleton Model (PASM) is based on the message-passing paradigm, which makes it suitable for a LAN of workstations and PCs. The model is flexible as it allows the intermixing of high-level patterns with low-level message-passing primitives. An object-oriented and library-based implementation of the model has been completed using C++and MPI, without necessitating any language extension. The generic model and the library-based implementation allow new patterns to be defined and included into the system. The skeleton-library serves as a framework for the systematic, hierarchical development of network-oriented parallel applications.
Is Urban a Person or a Place? Characteristics of Urban Indian Country

Is urban a person or a place? Urban is a place, a setting in which many Indian people at some time in their lives visit, “establish an encampment,” or settle into. Urban doesn’t determine self-identity, yet the urban area and urban experiences are the context and some of the factors that contribute to defining identity. The intent of this article is to delineate some of the general structural characteristics of urban Indian communities in the United States, and to indicate the ways in which urban communities interplay with individual and group identity. While most of the focused research for this discussion has been carried out since 1978 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the principal examples given here are specific to this region, many of the comments also are applicable on a general level to other urban Indian communities such as those found in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The work, for example, of Garbarino and Straus on Chicago, 1 Liebow on Phoenix, 2 Shoemaker on Minneapolis, 3 Bramstedt and Weibel-Orlando on Los Angeles, 4 Danziger on Detroit, 5 and Guillemin on Boston 6 indicates parSusan Lobo, a cultural anthropologist, is a consultant emphasizing research, advocacy, and project design, working primarily for American Indian tribes and community organizations in the United States and Central and South America. She has been the coordinator of Intertribal Friendship House’s Community History Project since 1978, and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at Davis.
Predicting Phenotypic Diversity and the Underlying Quantitative Molecular Transitions

During development, signaling networks control the formation of multicellular patterns. To what extent quantitative fluctuations in these complex networks may affect multicellular phenotype remains unclear. Here, we describe a computational approach to predict and analyze the phenotypic diversity that is accessible to a developmental signaling network. Applying this framework to vulval development in C. elegans, we demonstrate that quantitative changes in the regulatory network can render ∼500 multicellular phenotypes. This phenotypic capacity is an order-of-magnitude below the theoretical upper limit for this system but yet is large enough to demonstrate that the system is not restricted to a select few outcomes. Using metrics to gauge the robustness of these phenotypes to parameter perturbations, we identify a select subset of novel phenotypes that are the most promising for experimental validation. In addition, our model calculations provide a layout of these phenotypes in network parameter space. Analyzing this landscape of multicellular phenotypes yielded two significant insights. First, we show that experimentally well-established mutant phenotypes may be rendered using non-canonical network perturbations. Second, we show that the predicted multicellular patterns include not only those observed in C. elegans, but also those occurring exclusively in other species of the Caenorhabditis genus. This result demonstrates that quantitative diversification of a common regulatory network is indeed demonstrably sufficient to generate the phenotypic differences observed across three major species within the Caenorhabditis genus. Using our computational framework, we systematically identify the quantitative changes that may have occurred in the regulatory network during the evolution of these species. Our model predictions show that significant phenotypic diversity may be sampled through quantitative variations in the regulatory network without overhauling the core network architecture. Furthermore, by comparing the predicted landscape of phenotypes to multicellular patterns that have been experimentally observed across multiple species, we systematically trace the quantitative regulatory changes that may have occurred during the evolution of the Caenorhabditis genus.
Large-eddy simulation and multiscale modelling of a Richtmyer–Meshkov instability with reshock

Large-eddy simulations of the Richtmyer–Meshkov instability with reshock are pre- sented and the results are compared with experiments. Several configurations of shocks initially travelling from light (air) to heavy (sulfur hexafluoride, SF6) have been simulated to match previous experiments and good agreement is found in the growth rates of the turbulent mixing zone (TMZ). The stretched-vortex subgrid model used in this study allows for subgrid continuation modelling, where statistics of the unresolved scales of the flow are estimated. In particular, this multiscale modelling allows the anisotropy of the flow to be extended to the dissipation scale, $\eta$, and estimates to be formed for the subgrid probability density function of the mixture fraction of air/SF6 based on the subgrid variance, including the effect of Schmidt number.
High-Level Expression of the Retinoic Acid Receptor fi Gene in Normal Cells of the Uterine Cervix Is Regulated by the Retinoic Acid Receptor a and Is Abnormally Down-Regulated in Cervical Carcinoma Cells'

Retinoic acid (RA) is essential for regulation of epithelial cell differen tiation. The intracellular effects of RA are mediated by RA-binding nuclear receptors, including the RA receptors (RARs) a, @3,and â€˜y.The ligand-activated receptors induce the transcription of target genes by binding to RA-responsive elements in the promoter regions. One target gene is the R4Rfi gene, which encodes a potential tumor suppressor. Loss of RA inducibility of RARIJgene expression is assumed to play a role in the development of several types of human carcinomas, including carci nomas of the uterine cervix. We have analyzed R4R13gene expression in normal cervical cells and in cervical carcinoma cell lines The results show that the RARfJmRNA levels are high and RA inducible in the primary keratinocytes, whereas they are low slightly inducible by PA in all of the cervical carcinoma cell lines analyzed The basal and the RA-induced RARfi mRNA levels tend to increase with senescence of the normal cells. Fusion of primary ectocervical keratino cytes with HeLa cervical carcinoma cells revealed that the characteristics ofRAR@3gene expression of the normal cells are dominant over that of the tumor cells. Using synthetic retinoids with receptor-preferential agonist activities and a RARa-specific antagonist, we show that RARa is the major endogenous RAR subtype for induction of RA-dependent RAR@ gene expression. Taken together, our resultsindicatethat abnormaldown regulation of RARg@Jgene expression may be an important step in the multifactorial process of cervical carcinogenesis, between HeLa cervical carcinoma cells and normal human cells. It has been shown previously that RA treatment strongly induces R4R@3 gene expression in the nontumorigenic HeLa X normal cell hybrids, but not in the parental HeLa cells or in tumorigenic hybrid segregants (30, 31). In the present study, we have examined whether RARf3 gene cx pression is generally altered in cervical carcinoma cell lines compared with the normal human cervical epithelium. RAR@ mRNA levels were determined in RA-treated and untreated primary cervical cells and in a variety of cervical carcinoma cell lines. Furthermore, we analyzed RARI3 expression levels in senescing human cervical kera tinocytes and in freshly generated hybrids between HeLa and normal ectocervical epithelial cells. By using synthetic retinoids with recep tor-preferential agonist and antagonist activity, we have analyzed which of the endogenous RAR subtypes are involved in the
Visual discrimination of fractal borders

The ideas of fractals and fractal dimension are here translated into the realm of visual psychophysics. Borders between two fields of different luminance were used. Because of the finite grain of the visual system, fractal dimension need be defined only within a certain size range. For a fractal dimension of 1.15, the just-detectable difference in fractal dimension was found to be about 0.0085, rising to about 0.015 for a fractal dimension of 1.25. Reducing exposure duration from 1 s to 0.33 s decreases sensitivity to differences in fractal dimension, but there was no gain in increasing the exposure duration. Good visual observers who are naive to the task require some training before reaching optimal performance. The ability to discriminate fractal dimension differs between fractal edges of the same fractal dimension that were generated with differing statistical programs. Even after considerable training, an observer makes 29 % errors when asked to distinguish a fractal edge generated with a Gaussian random walk from one with a rectangular random walk. Gaussian random walk fractals can be more easily distinguished from Poissonian and Cauchy ones.
Thioredoxin-dependent Redox Regulation of p53-mediated p21 Activation*

Thioredoxin (TRX) is a dithiol-reducing enzyme that is induced by various oxidative stresses. TRX regulates the activity of DNA-binding proteins, including Jun/Fos and nuclear factor-κB. TRX also interacts with an intranuclear reducing molecule redox factor 1 (Ref-1), which enhances the activity of Jun/Fos. Here, we have investigated the role of TRX in the regulation of p53 activity. Electrophoretic mobility shift assay showed that TRX augmented the DNA binding activity of p53 and also further potentiated Ref-1-enhanced p53 activity. Luciferase assay revealed that transfection of TRX enhanced p53-dependent expression of p21 and further intensified Ref-1-mediated p53 activation. Furthermore, Western blot analysis revealed that p53-dependent induction of p21 protein was also facilitated by transfection with TRX. Overexpression of transdominant negative mutant TRX (mTRX) suppressed the effects of TRX or Ref-1, showing a functional interaction between TRX and Ref-1.cis-Diamminedichloroplatinum (II) (CDDP) induced p53 activation and p21 transactivation. The p53-dependent p21 transactivation induced by CDDP was inhibited by mTRX overexpression, suggesting that TRX-dependent redox regulation is physiologically involved in p53 regulation. CDDP also stimulated translocation of TRX from the cytosol into the nucleus. Hence, TRX-dependent redox regulation of p53 activity indicates coupling of the oxidative stress response and p53-dependent repair mechanism.