Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beliefs and attitutes about physical activity : an ethnographic study of older Caucasians and South Asians

Increasing levels of physical activity in older adults and fall prevention are key concerns of current UK health policy. Regular physical activity has many positive benefits for older adults, for example in fall prevention. However, sedentary behaviour among older adults is common. Forty per cent of over 50s in the UK report less physical activity than is considered necessary to maintain good health. Sedentary behaviour is even more common in South Asian older people in the UK. The aim of this research was to investigate the attitudes and beliefs that drive or hinder uptake and adherence of physical activity, in general and in relation to fall prevention, among 60-70 year old Caucasian and South Asian community dwellers. An ethnographic method was chosen as the research approach as it provided the framework for facilitating the incorporation of multiple voices. Two main geographical areas were chosen to conduct the study and included eight sites of study. Data collection used multiple methods (participant observation, focus groups and semi-structured interviews). In total 60 hours of participant observation, 15 focus group discussions (n = 87; mean age = 65.74 years) and 40 semi-structured interviews (mean age = 64.83 yrs) were conducted. Data analysis and classification followed a framework approach, comparing and contrasting themes within and across groups. Findings demonstrate that older people do not recognise falls as a risk and are not motivated to perform physical activity on a regular basis purely to help prevent falls. Social support and social benefits of physical activity appear to be key motivators to initiating and maintaining physical activity. Enjoyment, increased self-confidence and developing social networks seem to be important motivators in terms of adherence. Health, although a good motivator for the initiation of physical activity, appears to be a secondary motivator in terms of adherence. Barriers to physical activity include perceived and actual poor physical health, lack of social support, specificity of physical activity messages by health professionals as well as lack of motivation, low mood, fear of harm and domestic and carer issues.These findings suggest that older adults should be assessed individually, to address physical symptoms and possible low mood, and not according to age. The importance of exercise, even in the presence of physical illness needs to be explained. There is a need to promote confidence in older people? s ability to perform an activity, as this appears to be essential in continuing with exercise. Activities that take a ? one size fits all? approach, serve as a de-motivating force. Variety in exercise and physical activity is important to maintain motivation in the long-term.
Tactual illusions of movement

Investigated the role of the intensity of tactual stimuli, the distance between them and other variables, like exposure time of the stimuli. Two similar tactual stimuli were presented at different points of the skin, with control of the time relations, intensity of the stimuli, and the distance between them. Under certain conditions of time, distance, and intensity, an impression of movement from one point to the other in the direction of the actual temporal succession resulted from 2 punctuate tactual stimuli on the forearm, given for equal lengths of time, separated by a discrete time interval, and a few centimeters apart. It was noted that if the intensity of the second stimulus was greater than that of the first, the illusion movement was sometimes produced in the reverse direction. It has been suggested that the action theory could account for the movement illusion which occurred similarly in vision, audition and touch. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Proteins involved in more domain types tend to be more essential

Investigation of essential proteins is significantly valuable for understanding of cellular life, drug design and other practical purposes. In most of current studies, essential proteins are generally mined in protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks with diverse topology features. In this study, we investigate what kind of proteins is inclined to be essential from a new perspective. The investigation implies that protein essentiality is correlated with protein domains, which are functional, structural and evolutionary units of proteins. Proteins with a larger Number of Domain Types (NDT) tend to be essential. The analyses on 22 species show that essential proteins identified by NDT are much more than those identified by ten random identifications. The consideration of the structural feature makes us less dependent on network data and thus enables us to investigate protein essentiality of more species with incomplete and/or inconsistent network data.
Dimensionality Reduction Using Neural Networks

Dimensionality reduction is a method of obtaining the information from a high dimensionalfeature space using fewer intrinsic dimensions. Reducing dimensionality of high dimensional datais good for better classiﬁcation, regression, presentation and visualization of data. By representingdata in the lower dimensional space, most of the time we don’t lose much information that mattersto the application.Recently Hinton et al. [5] used a deep autoencoder for dimensionality reduction of multipledatasets. The autoencoders used by them are multi-layer identity mapping neural networks repre-sented by a function f(x) = x, where x is a multidimensional input vector to the network. Theyargue that deep autoencoders could be easily trained using a gradient descent method providedthe initial weights are near good solutions. To choose the best set of initial weights they suggestedto use a pretraining method. In their formulation of a pretraining method they used a two layernetwork called Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) to initialize the weights prior to using aﬁne tuning gradient descent method. They trained two layers at a time and the output of theﬁrst RBM is used as an input to the next RBM. Layer by layer, training trickles down the wholenetwork. They claimed that by pretraining, they were able to obtain a good set of initial weights.Their second claim was that the ﬁne tuning which followed the pretraining approach was able toreduce the data dimensionality very eﬃciently. The results presented in their paper support theirarguments, however, there still remain some areas which require some additional studies.Firstly, they reported deep autoencoders showed signiﬁcant improvement when pretrained overthe ones without pretraining.
A rare cause of diuretic refractory ascites

Background and aim: There are limited evidence based data concerning the use of azathioprine in ulcerative colitis. We aimed to compare the efficacy of azathioprine and oral 5-aminosalicylic acid in inducing remission of steroid dependent ulcerative colitis. Methods: Seventy two patients with steroid dependent ulcerative colitis were admitted to this investigator-blind study. Steroid dependence was defined as a requirement for steroid therapy ⩾10 mg/day during the preceding six months, with at least two attempts to discontinue the medication. The disease had to be clinically and endoscopically active at study entry, and all patients were taking systemic prednisolone (40 mg/day). Patients were randomised to receive azathioprine 2 mg/kg/day or oral 5-aminosalicylic acid 3.2 g/day, for a six month follow up period. The outcome of the treatment was defined as (1) success, indicating induction of clinical and endoscopic remission and steroid discontinuation, or (2) failure, indicating the absence of clinical and endoscopic remission and therefore the need for at least one further cycle of systemic steroids to control symptoms, apart from the initial one, or colectomy. Results: Significantly more patients in the azathioprine than in the 5-aminosalicylic acid group had clinical and endoscopic remission, and discontinued steroid therapy, both in the intention to treat (azathioprine v 5-aminosalicylic acid: 19/36 patients (53%) v 7/36 (21%); odds ratio (OR) 4.78 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.57–14.5)) and per protocol (azathioprine v 5-aminosalicylic acid: 19/33 patients (58%) v 7/34 (21%); OR 5.26 (95% CI 1.59–18.1)) analysis. Conclusions: Azathioprine is significantly more effective than 5-aminosalicylic acid in inducing clinical and endoscopic remission and avoiding steroid requirement in the treatment of steroid dependent ulcerative colitis.
Fine scale spatialised prospective modelling - a methodological approach. Application to water management in Brittany

The main objective of this work is to elaborate a generic methodological approach to build prospective scenarios spatially explicit at a local scale. This approach is based on the scenario method used in prospective studies, and uses methodological techniques developed for the modelling of complex systems. The scenario-development process comprises four steps: construction of the basis, scenario building, giving a spatial dimension to the scenarios, and their evaluation. Applied in the framework of water planning in the Brittany region and more precisely of the application of the Water Planning and Management Schemes (WPMS) on the Blavet watershed, the approach is illustrated here by the example of one explanatory scenario and one normative scenario, both aiming at evaluating the potential impact of the 2006 Common Agricultural Policy and farms enlargement on futures land uses.
Predictors for persistent cytomegalovirus reactivation after T‐cell‐depleted allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation

Abstract: Cytomegalovirus (CMV) reactivation occurs in up to 60% of CMV‐seropositive recipients after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). The incidence of CMV disease among T‐cell‐depleted HSCT patients has been reported from 5–15%. The incidence of reactivation refractory to antivirals in this population is not well studied.
Effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy on survival among HIV‐infected men with Kaposi sarcoma or non‐Hodgkin lymphoma

The effect of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) on survival in HIV‐infected patients with Kaposi sarcoma (KS) or non‐Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is unknown. Our study examines survival after HAART for these 2 malignancies. Analyses were performed using data from 387 HIV‐infected men in the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) after a diagnosis of either KS or NHL in 1990–99. Potential prognostic factors, including HAART, were evaluated in univariate analyses using Kaplan‐Meier survival curves and log‐rank tests. Multivariate survival analyses were conducted using Cox's time‐dependent proportional hazards models, adjusting for CD4+ cell levels at the time of cancer diagnosis and other covariates. Forty‐three of 287 KS patients (15%) and 13 of 100 NHL patients (13%) had been treated with HAART. HAART treatment was associated with improved survival for KS and NHL patients (log‐rank p = 0.0001 for each group). In multivariate analyses, HAART was associated with an 81% reduced risk of death among KS patients [relative hazard (RH) 0.19, 95% confidence limits (CL) (0.08, 0.45)], compared to those not exposed to HAART and an 84% reduced risk [RH 0.16, 95% CL (0.04, 0.64)] among NHL patients. Relative hazards estimates were similar for those with HAART initiation before and after NHL diagnosis. The use of HAART prolongs overall survival among HIV‐positive men diagnosed with KS and NHL. HAART appears to be effective in improving survival even when initiated after the diagnosis of NHL and KS. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Long-Term Transmit Beamforming for Wireless Multicasting

This paper presents a low-complexity iterative algorithm for long-term transmit beamforming in multicast channels. Since it relies only on antenna correlations at the base station, the algorithm requires only infrequent feedback from the users. Multiantenna receivers are not required, but they are transparently accommodated. Simulation results within the context of the UMTS long-term evolution system indicate that, with half-wavelength antenna spacings and a typical power azimuth spectrum, the performance is close to optimal. The specific gains (in average SINR) then depend on the number of transmit antennas and the number of active users.
Accelerated join evaluation in Semantic Web databases by using FPGAs

While the amount of information steadily increases, the requirements on the response time to query these information become more strict. Under those conditions, conventional database systems reach their limits and cannot meet these performance requirements anymore. In recent years, systems with many processing cores are considered to satisfy these demands. Furthermore, these systems include more and more heterogeneous cores tailor‐made to solve one specific task in an efficient manner. However, dedicated hardware accelerators are inflexible and cannot be adapted to the requirements of a dedicated query. Thus, the challenge is orchestrating the diversity of the functionality of all the cores to be optimized for performance/energy efficiency. In this paper, a concept is introduced on how to develop a flexible Field‐Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)‐based hardware accelerator to improve the performance of query evaluation in a Semantic Web database. As a first step to the hardware/software system, several joint algorithms are implemented on an FPGA and evaluated against a well‐developed software solution (implemented in C). The comparison shows a significant speedup of up to 10 times. Because of the complexity of the join operator, it is promising that the overall performance of query evaluation can be further enhanced by processing whole queries on an FPGA. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Effect of Oral and Written Language Input on Children′s Phonological Awareness: A Cross-Linguistic Study

Abstract The aim of this study was to examine the effect of oral and written language input on the development of phonological awareness (PA) in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children. The abilities of Czech and English speakers were contrasted because these two languages differ considerably both with respect to syllable structure (oral language) and in orthographic depth (written language). Czech contains a greater variety and frequency of complex syllabic onsets than English. Also, the Czech orthography is transparent whereas English orthography is opaque. It was hypothesized that if language input affects children′s PA development, Czech children should show higher levels of awareness for complex onsets prior to formal schooling. The Czech first graders should show greater improvement in PA skills than their Anglophone peers as well as better spelling skills after formal exposure to literacy. The results revealed that Czech children do possess higher levels of awareness of complex onsets than English-Canadian children and that they have more advanced spelling skills by the end of grade one. However, the English children showed better awareness of simple onsets than the Czech children on one oral task. Together, these results suggest that the early development of PA is shaped to some extent by aspects of the phonological input and that the nature of the orthography additionally impacts on the rate and pattern of development of PA and literacy skills.
Shared Memory Parallel Subgraph Enumeration

The subgraph enumeration problem asks us to find all subgraphs of a target graph that are isomorphic to a given pattern graph. Determining whether even one such isomorphic subgraph exists is NP-complete—and therefore finding all such subgraphs (if they exist) is a time-consuming task. Subgraph enumeration has applications in many fields, including biochemistry and social networks, and interestingly the fastest algorithms for solving the problem for biochemical inputs are sequential. Since they depend on depth-first tree traversal, an efficient parallelization is far from trivial. Nevertheless, since important applications produce data sets with increasing difficulty, parallelism seems beneficial. We thus present here a shared-memory parallelization of the state-of-the-art subgraph enumeration algorithms RI and RI-DS (a variant of RI for dense graphs) by Bonnici et al. [BMC Bioinformatics, 2013]. Our strategy uses work stealing and our implementation demonstrates a significant speedup on real-world biochemical data---despite a highly irregular data access pattern. We also improve RI-DS by pruning the search space better; this further improves the empirical running times compared to the already highly tuned RI-DS.
Covariance between Arctic sea ice and clouds within atmospheric state regimes at the satellite footprint level

Understanding the cloud response to sea ice change is necessary for modeling Arctic climate. Previous work has primarily addressed this problem from the interannual variability perspective. This paper provides a refined perspective of sea ice‐cloud relationship in the Arctic using a satellite footprint‐level quantification of the covariance between sea ice and Arctic low cloud properties from NASA A‐Train active remote sensing data. The covariances between Arctic low cloud properties and sea ice concentration are quantified by first partitioning each footprint into four atmospheric regimes defined using thresholds of lower tropospheric stability and midtropospheric vertical velocity. Significant regional variability in the cloud properties is found within the atmospheric regimes indicating that the regimes do not completely account for the influence of meteorology. Regional anomalies are used to account for the remaining meteorological influence on clouds. After accounting for meteorological regime and regional influences, a statistically significant but weak covariance between cloud properties and sea ice is found in each season for at least one atmospheric regime. Smaller average cloud fraction and liquid water are found within footprints with more sea ice. The largest‐magnitude cloud‐sea ice covariance occurs between 500 m and 1.2 km when the lower tropospheric stability is between 16 and 24 K. The covariance between low cloud properties and sea ice is found to be largest in fall and is accompanied by significant changes in boundary layer temperature structure where larger average near‐surface static stability is found at larger sea ice concentrations.
Protection by Pyruvate against Transient Forebrain Ischemia in Rats

Pyruvate has a remarkable protective effect against zinc neurotoxicity. Because zinc neurotoxicity is likely one of the key mechanisms of ischemic brain injury, the neuroprotective effect of pyruvate was tested in a rat model of transient forebrain ischemia. Control experiments in mouse cortical culture showed that pyruvate almost completely blocked zinc toxicity but did not attenuate calcium-overload neuronal death. Adult rats subjected to 12 min forebrain ischemia exhibited widespread zinc accumulation and neuronal death throughout hippocampus and cortex 72 hr after reperfusion. However, rats injected intraperitoneally with sodium pyruvate (500-1000 mg/kg) within 1 hr after 12 min forebrain ischemia showed almost no neuronal death. In addition, the mortality was markedly decreased in the pyruvate-protected groups (3.8%) compared with the NaCl-injected control group (58.1%). The neuroprotective effect persisted even at 30 d after the insult. The spectacular protection without noticeable side effects makes pyruvate a promising neuroprotectant in human ischemic stroke.
Pure-let deconvolution of 3D fluorescence microscopy images

Three-dimensional (3D) deconvolution microscopy is very effective in improving the quality of fluorescence microscopy images. In this work, we present an efficient approach for the deconvolution of 3D fluorescence microscopy images based on the recently developed PURE-LET algorithm. By combining multiple Wiener filtering and wavelet denoising, we parametrize the deconvolution process as a linear combination of elementary functions. Then the Poisson unbiased risk estimate (PURE) is used to obtain the optimal coefficients. The proposed approach is non-iterative and outperforms existing techniques (usually, variants of Richardson-Lucy algorithm) both in terms of computational efficiency and quality. We illustrate its effectiveness on both synthetic and real data.
Does cardiovascular reactivity to stress measured in the laboratory generalize to thesis and dissertation meetings among doctoral students?

This study extends previous work investigating the generalizability of cardiovascular reactivity to stress obtained in response to laboratory-based tasks to cardiovascular reactivity measured in response to a naturally occurring event. Heart rate (HR) and blood pressure reactivity to stress were measured with ambulatory monitoring equipment in 6 male and 16 female healthy, White, graduate students in two settings: during five standardized stressors in the laboratory, and during the proposal or defense of a thesis or dissertation. Results indicate that for all cardiovascular parameters, the magnitude of change was greatest in response to the natural event, and that among the laboratory tasks, the greatest degree of reactivity was observed in response to a speech task. However, the cardiovascular reactivity associated with the speech task was not the best predictor of the natural speech task, despite the structural similarity of these two tasks. Overall, greater correlations were noted among all of the tasks based on absolute values of HR and blood pressure versus residualized change scores for HR and blood pressure, and greater correlations also were observed among anticipation periods than among task periods. Partial support was provided for the hypothesis that the generalizability of cardiovascular reactivity to stress would be enhanced by using multiple laboratory tasks rather than single tasks. This effect was observed for HR but not blood pressure. Consistent with the literature in this field, we observed only limited generalizability of cardiovascular response to stress from laboratory to the field.
Minorities and tourism: community perspectives from Yunnan, China

Tourism has significant impacts on many communities where options for development are often limited. This paper examines ethnic minorities' perceptions of tourism impacts and their attitudes towards further development. Multiple research methods, including surveys, interviews, and observations were adopted in case studies conducted in two ethnic tourist villages, Dai Yuan and Mengjinglai, in Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China. The findings indicate that these minority people generally have favourable perceptions of tourism impacts from socio-cultural, economic, and environmental perspectives, and would welcome further development of tourism. However, some negative aspects of tourism are perceived by a minority but considerable number of people. Tourism is operated by outside companies and local residents are generally excluded from park management and receive little economic benefit. Thus, minority residents should be more involved in tourism planning and management.