Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arm and Hand Movement in Children Suspected of Having Autism Spectrum Disorder

The aim of this study was to describe arm and hand movement in children suspected of having autism spectrum disorder (ASD; age range 29–43 months). A videotaped retrospective review of five children with symptoms of ASD during Communication Temptation Tasks was completed at two time points (pre-testing and 6 weeks later). Categories of arm and hand movement were classified and examined. Findings revealed that mean proportional use of arm and hand movement types were generally stable between time points. Only 2 of 17 coded arm and hand movements significantly changed over the 6-week developmental period for appropriate actions on objects and the “give” meaningful communicative act. Appropriate actions on objects were represented at the highest proportion at each time point. Aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) was inconsistently used. The findings support the need to examine motor and language co-developments in children suspected of having ASD to inform clinical practice.
Political Resource Allocation: Benefits and Costs of Voter Initiatives

This article explores the benefits and costs of the voter initiative, a direct democracy device that allows policy decisions to be made by voters rather than their elected representatives. Previous research suggests that by introducing "competition" into the proposal process, the initiative leads to policies that are closer to the median voter's ideal point. In our model, in contrast, the effect of the initiative is conditional on the severity of representative agency problems and uncertainty about voter preferences. The initiative always makes the voter better off when representatives are faithful agents, but when voter preferences are uncertain, initiatives can cause "shirking" representatives to choose policies farther from the voter's ideal point. Our evidence shows that initiatives are more common in states with heterogeneous populations, and initiatives reduce state spending when Democrats control the government and when citizens have diverse preferences. Copyright 2001 by Oxford University Press.
Characteristics and contributions of non-kin carers of older people: a closer look at friends and neighbours

ABSTRACT Research on informal care-giving has largely neglected the contributions of non-kin carers. This paper investigated the characteristics and contributions of non-kin who care for older adults with a long-term health problem, and investigated friends and neighbours as distinct categories of care providers. Using data from 324 non-kin carers in the 1996 General Social Survey of Canada, this study compared individual and relationship characteristics, care tasks and amount of care provided for the two groups. Interpersonal and socio-demographic characteristics were investigated as mediators of potential differences between friends and neighbours in patterns of care. Results demonstrate that friend and neighbour carers differed on age, marital status, geographical proximity and relationship closeness. Friends were more likely than neighbours to assist with personal care, bills and banking, and transportation. Neighbours were more likely to assist with home maintenance. Friends provided assistance with a greater number of tasks and provided more hours of care per week, suggesting a more prominent role in the care of non-kin than neighbours. Age, income, a minor child in the household, proximity and relationship closeness significantly predicted amount of care provided, and relationship closeness largely explained differences between friends and neighbours. Future research on informal care-giving can build on the findings that distinguish friend and neighbour carers to further discriminate the dynamics of non-kin care.
A comparison of the efferents of the amygdala and the hippocampal formation in the rhesus monkey: I. Convergence in the entorhinal, prorhinal, and perirhinal cortices

This is the first in a series of papers investigating the neuroanatomical basis for the interaction of the amygdala and the hippocampal formation in the rhesus monkey. The present report focuses on the complementary and convergent projections of the amygdala and hippocampal formation to the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices. These results were obtained from complementary experiments using injections of radioactively labeled amino acids to identify the anterograde projection patterns and injections of horseradish peroxidase and fluorescent retrograde tracers to confirm the cytoarchitectonic location of the neurons of origin for each projection.
The Generalized Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff of the MIMO Z Interference Channel

The generalized diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (GDMT) of the two-user, quasi-static fading, multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) Z interference channel (Z-IC) is established for the general case with an arbitrary number of antennas at each node under the assumptions of full channel state information at the transmitters (CSIT) and a short-term average power constraint. In the GDMT framework, which captures the rate versus reliability tradeoff in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the direct link SNR and cross-link interference-to-noise ratio (INR) are allowed to be disparate, so that their ratios relative to a nominal SNR in the decibel scale, i.e., the SNR and INR exponents, are arbitrary and fixed. It is shown that a simple Han-Kobayashi message-splitting/partial interference decoding scheme that uses only partial CSIT-in which the second transmitter's signal depends only on its cross-link channel matrix and the first user's transmit signal does not need any CSIT-can achieve the full-CSIT GDMT of the MIMO Z-IC. The GDMT of the MIMO Z-IC under the No-CSIT assumption is also obtained for some range of multiplexing gains. The size of this range depends on the numbers of antennas at the four nodes and the SNR and INR exponents of the direct and cross links, respectively. For certain classes of channels including those in which the interfered receiver has more antennas than do the other nodes, or when the INR exponent is greater than a certain threshold, the GDMT of the MIMO Z-IC under the No-CSIT assumption is also completely characterized.
Segmentation of Brain Image Volumes Using the Data List Management Library

The segmentation of head images is useful to detect neuroanatomical structures and to follow and quantify the evolution of several brain lesions. 2D images correspond to brain slices. The more images are used the higher the resolution obtained is, but more processing power is required and parallelism becomes desirable. We present a new approach to segmentation of brain image volumes using DLML (data list management library), a tool developed by our team. We organise the integer numbers identifying images into a list, and our DLML version process them both in parallel and with dynamic load balancing transparently to the programmer. We compare the performance of our DLML version to other typical parallel approaches developed with MPI (master-slave and static data distribution), using cluster configurations with 4-32 processors.
Durability of class I American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association clinical practice guideline recommendations.

IMPORTANCE Little is known regarding the durability of clinical practice guideline recommendations over time. OBJECTIVE To characterize variations in the durability of class I ("procedure/treatment should be performed/administered") American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) guideline recommendations. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Textual analysis by 4 independent reviewers of 11 guidelines published between 1998 and 2007 and revised between 2006 and 2013. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES We abstracted all class I recommendations from the first of the 2 most recent versions of each guideline and identified corresponding recommendations in the subsequent version. We classified recommendations replaced by less determinate or contrary recommendations as having been downgraded or reversed; we classified recommendations for which no corresponding item could be identified as having been omitted. We tested for differences in the durability of recommendations according to guideline topic and underlying level of evidence using bivariable hypothesis tests and conditional logistic regression. RESULTS Of 619 index recommendations, 495 (80.0%; 95% CI, 76.6%-83.1%) were retained in the subsequent guideline version, 57 (9.2%; 95% CI, 7.0%-11.8%) were downgraded or reversed, and 67 (10.8%; 95% CI, 8.4%-13.3%) were omitted. The percentage of recommendations retained varied across guidelines from 15.4% (95% CI, 1.9%-45.4%) to 94.1% (95% CI, 80.3%-99.3%; P < .001). Among recommendations with available information on level of evidence, 90.5% (95% CI, 83.2%-95.3%) of recommendations supported by multiple randomized studies were retained, vs 81.0% (95% CI, 74.8%-86.3%) of recommendations supported by 1 randomized trial or observational data and 73.7% (95% CI, 65.8%-80.5%) of recommendations supported by opinion (P = .001). After accounting for guideline-level factors, the probability of being downgraded, reversed, or omitted was greater for recommendations based on opinion (odds ratio, 3.14; 95% CI, 1.69-5.85; P < .001) or on 1 trial or observational data (odds ratio, 3.49; 95% CI, 1.45-8.41; P = .005) vs recommendations based on multiple trials. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE The durability of class I cardiology guideline recommendations for procedures and treatments promulgated by the ACC/AHA varied across individual guidelines and levels of evidence. Downgrades, reversals, and omissions were most common among recommendations not supported by multiple randomized studies.
Phthalimide neovascular factor 1 (PNF1) modulates MT1‐MMP activity in human microvascular endothelial cells

We are creating synthetic pharmaceuticals with angiogenic activity and potential to promote vascular invasion. We previously demonstrated that one of these molecules, phthalimide neovascular factor 1 (PNF1), significantly expands microvascular networks in vivo following sustained release from poly(lactic‐co‐glycolic acid) (PLAGA) films. In addition, to probe PNF1 mode of action, we recently applied a novel pathway‐based compendium analysis to a multi‐timepoint, controlled microarray data set of PNF1‐treated (vs. control) human microvascular endothelial cells (HMVECs), and we identified induction of tumor necrosis factor‐alpha (TNF‐α) and, subsequently, transforming growth factor‐beta (TGF‐β) signaling networks by PNF1. Here we validate this microarray data set with quantitative real‐time polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) analysis. Subsequently, we probe this data set and identify three specific TGF‐β‐induced genes with regulation by PNF1 conserved over multiple timepoints—amyloid beta (A4) precursor protein (APP), early growth response 1 (EGR‐1), and matrix metalloproteinase 14 (MMP14 or MT1‐MMP)—that are also implicated in angiogenesis. We further focus on MMP14 given its unique role in angiogenesis, and we validate MT1‐MMP modulation by PNF1 with an in vitro fluorescence assay that demonstrates the direct effects that PNF1 exerts on functional metalloproteinase activity. We also utilize endothelial cord formation in collagen gels to show that PNF1‐induced stimulation of endothelial cord network formation in vitro is in some way MT1‐MMP‐dependent. Ultimately, this new network analysis of our transcriptional footprint characterizing PNF1 activity 1–48 h post‐supplementation in HMVECs coupled with corresponding validating experiments suggests a key set of a few specific targets that are involved in PNF1 mode of action and important for successful promotion of the neovascularization that we have observed by the drug in vivo. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2009;103: 796–807. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Comparison of the light-sensitive and cyclic GMP-sensitive conductances of the rod photoreceptor: noise characteristics

Patch-clamp recordings were made from outer segments of single rod photoreceptors isolated from toad retina. Cyclic GMP (cGMP) and its hydrolysis-resistant analog, 8-bromo-cGMP, increased the conductance of excised membrane patches when applied to the intracellular face of the membrane but not when applied to the extracellular face. The rectification properties of the cGMP-dependent conductance depended on the concentration of divalent cations bathing the intra- and extracellular membrane faces. Current flow was favored from the side of the membrane, either internal or external, that was exposed to bathing fluid free of divalent cations. The power spectral density of cGMP- induced noise was fitted by a sum of 2 Lorentzian components, with corner frequencies differing approximately 15-fold on average. This suggests that channel gating is controlled by 2 kinetic components. To compare the cGMP-sensitive conductance with the light-sensitive conductance of the rod, cell-attached patch-clamp recordings were made from intact, dark-adapted rods, and noise arising from the light- sensitive conductance was analyzed. The power spectrum of the light- sensitive noise also exhibited 2 Lorentzian components similar to those of the cGMP-sensitive conductance in excised patches. These results are consistent with the idea that cGMP opens the light-sensitive channel of the rod outer segment.
Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to salami, British Columbia, Canada, 1999

An outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections was identified in November 1999 with a fivefold increase in the occurrence of laboratory-confirmed cases of E. coli O157:H7 infection. A matched case-control study was conducted. Samples of food from cases and from retailers were analysed for the presence of E. coli O157:H7. A total of 143 cases were identified over a 12-week period with the same pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern. The case-control study found that Company A salami was significantly associated with illness (Mantel–Haenszel matched odds ratio 10·0, 95% CI 1·4–434, P=0·01). Company A salami tested positive for E. coli O157:H7 and isolates had the same PFGE pattern as case isolates. An immediate voluntary national recall of Company A dry fermented meat products took place. Findings from the investigation of this outbreak suggest that the hold-and-test option may not be adequate to prevent shiga-toxigenic Escherichia coli (STEC) infection in salami consumers.
Distinct molecular mechanisms for protein sorting within immature secretory granules of pancreatic beta-cells

In the beta-cells of pancreatic islets, insulin is stored as the predominant protein within storage granules that undergo regulated exocytosis in response to glucose. By pulse-chase analysis of radiolabeled protein condensation in beta-cells, the formation of insoluble aggregates of regulated secretory protein lags behind the conversion of proinsulin to insulin. Condensation occurs within immature granules (IGs), accounting for passive protein sorting as demonstrated by constitutive-like secretion of newly synthesized C- peptide in stoichiometric excess of insulin (Kuliawat, R., and P. Arvan. J. Cell Biol. 1992. 118:521-529). Experimental manipulation of condensation conditions in vivo reveals a direct relationship between sorting of regulated secretory protein and polymer assembly within IGs. By contrast, entry from the trans-Golgi network into IGs does not appear especially selective for regulated secretory proteins. Specifically, in normal islets, lysosomal enzyme precursors enter the stimulus-dependent secretory pathway with comparable efficiency to that of proinsulin. However, within 2 h after synthesis (the same period during which proinsulin processing occurs), newly synthesized hydrolases are fairly efficiently relocated out of the stimulus- dependent pathway. In tunicamycin-treated islets, while entry of new lysosomal enzymes into the regulated secretory pathway continues unperturbed, exit of nonglycosylated hydrolases from this pathway does not occur. Consequently, the ultimate targeting of nonglycosylated hydrolases in beta-cells is to storage granules rather than lysosomes. These results implicate a post-Golgi mechanism for the active removal of lysosomal hydrolases away from condensed granule contents during the storage process for regulated secretory proteins.
Historical Perspective—From Institution to Community

Over the course of history, people living with mental illness who have the experience of being confined in institutional settings have made significant impacts in their efforts to reform and transform the mental health service delivery system. This article will examine individual, social, and political forces influencing a movement of interested stakeholders, once confined, who became inspired to create a peer-operated service model. This model will be described, including types of the peer-delivered services. An overview of peer-operated services research will be discussed briefly, including the development of two fidelity instruments. This article will provide the historical context in regards to how the peer-operated service model evolved and why the peer-operated service model should be considered an important resource for mental health systems transformation.
Estimation and Reporting of Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects

Patient populations within a research study are heterogeneous. That is, they embody characteristics that vary between individuals, such as age, sex, disease etiology and severity, presence of comorbidities, concomitant exposures, and genetic variants. These varying patient characteristics can potentially modify the effect of a treatment on outcomes. Despite the presence of this heterogeneity, many studies estimate an average treatment effect (ATE) that implicitly assumes a similar treatment effect across heterogeneous patient characteristics. While this assumption may be warranted for some treatments, for others the treatment effect within subgroups may vary considerably from the ATE. This treatment effect heterogeneity may arise from an underlying causal mechanism or may be due to artifacts of measurements or methods (e.g., chance, bias, or confounding). Heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE) is the nonrandom, explainable variability in the direction and magnitude of treatment effects for individuals within a population. The main goals of HTE analysis are to estimate treatment effects in clinically relevant subgroups and to predict whether an individual might benefit from a treatment. Subgroup analysis is the most common analytic approach for examining HTE. Selection of subgroups should be based on mechanism and plausibility (including clinical judgment), taking into account prior knowledge of treatment effect modifiers. This chapter focuses on defining and describing HTE and offers guidance on how to evaluate and report such heterogeneous effects using subgroup analysis. Understanding HTE is critical for decisions that are based on knowing how well a treatment is likely to work for an individual or group of similar individuals, and is relevant to most stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, and policymakers. The chapter concludes with a checklist of key considerations for discussion of HTE and for addressing planned subgroup analysis in an observational comparative effectiveness research (CER) protocol. " If it were not for the great variability between individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art " (William Osler, 1892).
Load Balancing of Requests with Keys Whose Frequencies Exhibit a Big-Head and Long-Tail Distribution

Consistent hashing is known as a load balancing method for cases where a large number of requests are to be handled by multiple servers. However, if the frequencies of the requested keys, which are used for the hash calculation, are unbalanced, this causes an uneven distribution of the load to the servers. To solve this problem, this paper presents a load balancing method in which keys are classified into groups according to the frequency at which they are requested, and a different load balancing method is applied to each key group based on a single parameter. An evaluation of the proposed method using simulation has confirmed that the system can successfully balance the load with a reasonable number of commodity, low cost servers in cases where consistent hashing cannot be applied.
SMART: A single-cycle reconfigurable NoC for SoC applications

As technology scales, SoCs are increasing in core counts, leading to the need for scalable NoCs to interconnect the multiple cores on the chip. Given aggressive SoC design targets, NoCs have to deliver low latency, high bandwidth, at low power and area overheads. In this paper, we propose Single-cycle Multi-hop Asynchronous Repeated Traversal (SMART) NoC, a NoC that reconfigures and tailors a generic mesh topology for SoC applications at runtime. The heart of our SMART NoC is a novel low-swing clockless repeated link circuit embedded within the router crossbars, that allows packets to potentially bypass all the way from source to destination core within a single clock cycle, without being latched at any intermediate router. Our clockless repeater link has been proven in silicon in 45nm SOI. Results show that at 2GHz, we can traverse 8mm within a single cycle, i.e. 8 hops with 1mm cores. We implement the SMART NoC to layout and show that SMART NoC gives 60% latency savings, and 2.2X power savings compared to a baseline mesh NoC.
Internet future architectures for network and media independent services and protocols

Current Internet has become an essential communication infrastructure, not only for information transfer but also as a key component of social infrastructures, such as e-government, energy/traffic controls, finance, learning, health, etc. Even though the Internet has evolved towards high-bandwidth network architectures offering transparent transport services for fixed and mobile applications, its future depends on how it is going to cope with several concerns on different aspects such as scalability, ubiquity, security, robustness, mobility, heterogeneity, Quality of Service (QoS), re-configurability, context-awareness, manageability, data-centric, economics, etc. This paper exposes the approaches proposed in the Spanish Government funded research project tin2010-20136-c03 to overcome identified drawbacks of the current internet, such as energy efficiency, network ossification, heterogeneity of information and coexistence of optical and wireless networks. In order to do so, two technologies have been identified as potential solutions to face some of these problems: i) Media Independence and ii) Virtualization. On the one hand, Media Independence enables the decoupling of the control plane from the physical technology specificities, by introducing an abstract control API to configure, monitor and command the physical interface. On the other hand, network virtualization strategies allow the partition of electrical and optical network infrastructures into multiple parallel, dedicated virtual networks for a physical infrastructure sharing purpose, and enables the creation of overlay networks spanning multiple technologies and realms, hence being a very useful tool for context-aware service composition.
[11C]Methionine emerges as a new biomarker for tracking active myeloma lesions

tification within a large series of patients with inherited thrombocytopenia. Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 115, 1076–1079. Noris, P., Perrotta, S. , Seri, M. , Pecci, A. , Gnan, C. , Loffredo, G. , Pujol-Moix, N. , Zecca, M. , Scognamiglio, F. , De Rocco, D. , Punzo, F. , Melazzini, F. , Scianguetta, S. , Casale, M. , Marconi, C. , Pippucci, T. , Amendola, G. , Notarangelo, L.D. , Klersy, C. , Civaschi, E. , Balduini, C.L. & Savoia, A. (2011) Mutations in ANKRD26 are responsible for a frequent form of inherited thrombocytopenia: analysis of 78 patients from 21 families. Blood, 117, 6673–6680. Pecci, A. (2016) Diagnosis and treatment of inherited thrombocytopenias. Clinical Genetics, 89, 141–153.