Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The importance of the individual in the ‘causal’ relationship between attractiveness and self-esteem

This paper argues that many psychological explanations underlying health and social behaviour stress the importance of the relationship between attractiveness and self-esteem. The nature of this relationship is not well understood, yet can have important implications for the individual in areas of medical intervention which involve treatment on aesthetic grounds. A survey of psychosocial factors among 1018 children aged 11-12 years is reported. The study examined the association between perception of physical attractiveness and self-esteem in order to clarify the relationship between self-esteem and self versus others' perception of attractiveness. Self-ratings of attractiveness were linked to judges' ratings to determine whether subjects underrated, over-rated, or accurately perceived their own physical attractiveness. The results showed that although ratings of general facial attractiveness by others were associated with self-perceived attractiveness, in the specific area of dental health, attractiveness (as judged by others) was not. There were no significant relationships between ratings of attractiveness by others and self-esteem. Self-perception of attractiveness, however, was significantly associated with self-esteem. Further analyses showed that children who under-rated their own facial attractiveness had a lower mean score for self-esteem than over-raters or accurate perceivers (who did not differ significantly). In contrast, under-raters of dental attractiveness had a lower mean score for self-esteem than over-raters, but did not differ significantly from accurate perceivers. Over-raters of dental attractiveness had a higher mean score for self-esteem than accurate perceivers. These finding suggest that if an over-rater were to receive treatment on aesthetic grounds it is unlikely, given that they have high self-esteem already, that such intervention will have a profound psychological impact. These data indicate the importance of determining the way in which individuals evaluate their appearance compared to others, and may help to clarify previously equivocal findings concerning the relationship between self-esteem and attractiveness.
Structural Effects of Protein Aging: Terminal Marking by Deamidation in Human Triosephosphate Isomerase

Deamidation, the loss of the ammonium group of asparagine and glutamine to form aspartic and glutamic acid, is one of the most commonly occurring post-translational modifications in proteins. Since deamidation rates are encoded in the protein structure, it has been proposed that they can serve as molecular clocks for the timing of biological processes such as protein turnover, development and aging. Despite the importance of this process, there is a lack of detailed structural information explaining the effects of deamidation on the structure of proteins. Here, we studied the effects of deamidation on human triosephosphate isomerase (HsTIM), an enzyme for which deamidation of N15 and N71 has been long recognized as the signal for terminal marking of the protein. Deamidation was mimicked by site directed mutagenesis; thus, three mutants of HsTIM (N15D, N71D and N15D/N71D) were characterized. The results show that the N71D mutant resembles, structurally and functionally, the wild type enzyme. In contrast, the N15D mutant displays all the detrimental effects related to deamidation. The N15D/N71D mutant shows only minor additional effects when compared with the N15D mutation, supporting that deamidation of N71 induces negligible effects. The crystal structures show that, in contrast to the N71D mutant, where minimal alterations are observed, the N15D mutation forms new interactions that perturb the structure of loop 1 and loop 3, both critical components of the catalytic site and the interface of HsTIM. Based on a phylogenetic analysis of TIM sequences, we propose the conservation of this mechanism for mammalian TIMs.
The Acquisition of Intellectual Expertise: A Computational Model

Intellectual expertise means knowledge and ability that a person has that allows them to solve complex problems. It is important to understand how people become experts so that we can improve educational strategies, and help learners achieve their full academic potential. Unfortunately, the process of acquiring intellectual expertise is not well understood. Art ificial neural networks (ANNs) have already been successful in modeling other types of human learning. This paper shows that they can also be trained as a model of expert human learning, and address many of the difficulties found in trying to study expertise in humans. The results confirm three hypotheses: (1) An artificial neural network can be used as a model to investigate how people learn under different training scenarios; (2) Different methods for delivering the training material result in different final performance; (3) The best performanc e is achieved by incrementally increasing the complexity of the material. These results provide educators with computational evidence that structured, integrated delivery methods are better for learners than oversimplification and isolation of le arning tasks.
A Neuronal Sec1 Homolog Regulates Neurotransmitter Release at the Squid Giant Synapse

Sec1-related proteins are essential for membrane fusion at distinct stages of the constitutive and regulated secretory pathways in eukaryotic cells. Studies of neuronal isoforms of the Sec1 protein family have yielded evidence for both positive and negative regulatory functions of these proteins in neurotransmitter release. Here, we have identified a squid neuronal homolog (s-Sec1) of Sec1 proteins and examined its function in neurotransmitter release at the squid giant synapse. Microinjection of s-Sec1 into the presynaptic terminal of the giant synapse inhibited evoked neurotransmitter release, but this effect was prevented by coinjecting the cytoplasmic domain of squid syntaxin (s-syntaxin), one of the binding partners of s-Sec1. A 24 amino acid peptide fragment of s-Sec1, which inhibited the binding of s-Sec1 to s-syntaxin in vitro, completely blocked release, suggesting an essential function of the s-Sec1/s-syntaxin interaction in transmitter release. Electron microscopy showed that injection of s-Sec1 did not change the spatial distribution of synaptic vesicles at presynaptic release sites (“active zones”), whereas the inhibitory peptide increased the number of docked vesicles. These distinct morphological effects lead us to conclude that Sec1 proteins function at different stages of synaptic vesicle exocytosis, and that an interaction of s-Sec1 with syntaxin—at a stage blocked by the peptide—is necessary for docked vesicles to fuse.
Coexistence of urethritis with genital ulcer disease in South Africa: influence on provision of syndromic management

Objective: To assess whether syndromic management of genital ulcer disease was sound, if based on the premise that men with genital ulcers rarely have a concomitant urethral infection. Methods: Specimens were taken in 1998 from 186 mine workers in Carletonville, South Africa, who were seen consecutively with genital ulcers. The specimens comprised a swab from the ulcer, a urethral swab for a Gram stained smear, and 10–15 ml of a first catch urine sample. The latter was tested by ligase chain reaction assays for Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Chlamydia trachomatis specific DNA sequences and by a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay for Mycoplasma genitalium. Ulcer inducing micro-organisms were detected either by a multiplex PCR assay, or in the case of lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) serologically, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection was detected by an enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test. Results: Most (54%) of the ulcers were chancroidal, 18% were herpetic (HSV type 2), 6.5% primary syphilitic, and 3.2% due to LGV. More than one micro-organism was detected in 9.1% of the ulcers and less than 10% were undiagnosed. Microscopic examination of the urethral smears showed that 99 (53%) of the men had urethritis, of whom 45 (45%) were infected with N gonorrhoeae. Of the 54 men (55%) who had non-gonococcal urethritis (NGU), 11 (19.6%) harboured C trachomatis or M genitalium. Almost two thirds (64.5%) of the men had HIV infection, but this did not seem to have influenced the aetiology of the ulcers. Nor was a particular ulcer associated with one type of urethritis more than the other. Neither C trachomatis nor M genitalium was associated significantly with non-gonococcal urethritis (NGU) in either HIV positive or HIV negative men. Conclusion: The combination of antibiotics used for the management of genital ulcer disease in men in this South African mining population needs to be widened to encompass frequently occurring concomitant gonococcal urethritis and NGU infections. This means treatment with long acting penicillin, combined with ciprofloxacin and azithromycin or erythromycin. A similar situation may exist in other geographical locations with a need to provide appropriate antimicrobial combinations depending on the patterns of infection detected.
Flood-Risk Management, Mapping, and Planning: The Institutional Politics of Decision Support in England

Flood maps play an increasingly prominent role in government strategies for flood-risk management. Maps are instruments not just for defining and communicating flood risks, but also for regulating them and for rationalizing the inevitable limits and failures of those controls. Drawing on policy document analysis, official statistics, and 66 key-informant interviews, this paper explores the institutional conflicts over the use of the Environment Agency (EA) Flood Map to support decision making by English local planning authorities (LPAs), whose local political mandate, statutory obligations, and professionalized planning culture put them at odds with the narrower bureaucratic imperative of the Agency to restrict developments at risk of flooding. The paper shows how the Flood Map was designed to standardize and script the planning process and ensure that LPA decisions were aligned with EA views about avoiding development in zones at risk of flooding without actually banning such development outright. But technologies are also shaped by their users, and so the paper documents how planners accommodated and resisted this technology of indirect rule. Their concerns about sterilizing areas depicted as being at risk of flooding and about the difficulties of actually using the Flood Map for speedy and defensible development-control decisions were crucial in its eventual replacement by a new decision-support technology, Strategic Flood Risk Assessments, which then led to the descripting of the Flood Map to influence a new set of users: the public. The paper closes with some wider reflections on the significance of the case for risk-based governance.
SuperTarget goes quantitative: update on drug–target interactions

There are at least two good reasons for the on-going interest in drug–target interactions: first, drug-effects can only be fully understood by considering a complex network of interactions to multiple targets (so-called off-target effects) including metabolic and signaling pathways; second, it is crucial to consider drug-target-pathway relations for the identification of novel targets for drug development. To address this on-going need, we have developed a web-based data warehouse named SuperTarget, which integrates drug-related information associated with medical indications, adverse drug effects, drug metabolism, pathways and Gene Ontology (GO) terms for target proteins. At present, the updated database contains >6000 target proteins, which are annotated with >330 000 relations to 196 000 compounds (including approved drugs); the vast majority of interactions include binding affinities and pointers to the respective literature sources. The user interface provides tools for drug screening and target similarity inclusion. A query interface enables the user to pose complex queries, for example, to find drugs that target a certain pathway, interacting drugs that are metabolized by the same cytochrome P450 or drugs that target proteins within a certain affinity range. SuperTarget is available at http://bioinformatics.charite. de/supertarget.
General formulas for the Neyman-Pearson type-II error exponent subject to fixed and exponential type-I error bounds

The general formulas for the Neyman-Pearson type-II error exponent subject to two different type-I error constraints, as indicated in the title of the correspondence, are established. As revealed in the formulas, the type-II error exponents are fully determined by the ultimate statistical characteristic of the normalized log-likelihood ratio evaluated under the null hypothesis distribution. Applications of the general formulas to distributed Neyman-Pearson detection, and the channel reliability function are also demonstrated.
Sedation During Mechanical Ventilation in Infants and Children: Dexmedetomidine Versus Midazolam

Background: We sought to compare the efficacy of midazolam versus dexmedetomidine for sedation during mechanical ventilation in infants and children. Methods: We performed a prospective, randomized trial in a pediatric intensive care unit in a tertiary care center. Infants and children requiring mechanical ventilation underwent a continuous infusion of either midazolam (starting dose of 0.1 mg/kg/h) or dexmedetomidine (starting dose of either 0.25 or 0.5 μg/kg/h) with intermittent morphine, as needed. The efficacy of sedation was assessed using the Ramsay sedation scale, pediatric intensive care unit sedation score, and the tracheal suctioning score as well as bispectral monitoring. Results: There were 10 patients in each group. Sedation as assessed by the clinical sedation scores and the bispectral index was equivalent in the 3 groups. There were 36 morphine boluses administered to the midazolam group versus 29 and 20 morphine boluses administered respectively to the 0.25 and 0.5 μg/kg/h dexmedetomidine groups (P = 0.02 for midazolam versus 0.5 μg/kg/h dexmedetomidine). Total morphine use (mg/kg/24 h) was 0.74 ± 0.5, 0.55 ± 0.38, and 0.28 ± 0.12 in the midazolam and the two dexmedetomidine groups respectively (P = not significant for midazolam versus 0.25 dexmedetomidine, P = 0.01 for midazolam versus 0.5 dexmedetomidine). In the two dexmedetomidine groups, 5 of 6 patients who at some point had a Ramsay score of 1 were less than 12 months of age while only 1 was more than 12 months of age (P < 0.05). Conclusions: At a dose of 0.25 μg/kg/h, dexmedetomidine was approximately equivalent to midazolam at 0.22 mg/kg/h. At 0.5 μg/kg/h, dexmedetomidine provided more effective sedation as demonstrated by the need for fewer bolus doses of morphine, a decrease in the 24-hour requirements for supplemental morphine, as well as a decrease in the total number of assessment points with a Ramsay score of 1 (inadequate sedation) and the number of patients who had a Ramsay score of 1.
Multilayer Projective Dictionary Pair Learning and Sparse Autoencoder for PolSAR Image Classification

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification is a vital application in remote sensing image processing. In general, PolSAR image classification is actually a high-dimensional nonlinear mapping problem. The methods based on sparse representation and deep learning have shown a great potential for PolSAR image classification. Therefore, a novel PolSAR image classification method based on multilayer projective dictionary pair learning (MDPL) and sparse autoencoder (SAE) is proposed in this paper. First, MDPL is used to extract features, and the abstract degree of the extracted features is high. Second, in order to get the nonlinear relationship between elements of feature vectors in an adaptive way, SAE is also used in this paper. Three PolSAR images are used to test the effectiveness of our method. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves very competitive results in PolSAR image classification.
Propiedades psicométricas del cuestionario multidimensional de memoria en población chilena adulta

El estudio presenta los datos de confiabilidad, validez convergente, de contenido y validez factorial del Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire [MMQ] en una muestra de 740 participantes correspondientes a poblacion chilena normal, sin problemas de salud, en rangos de edad de 20 a 81 anos. El MMQ posee 56 items tipo likert, correspondientes a tres dimensiones referidas a confianza en la memoria, capacidad y estrategias o ayudas usadas diariamente para recordar informacion. A partir del analisis realizado es posible afirmar que el instrumento presenta validez de contenido, validez factorial y confiabilidad de consistencia interna, similar a la reportada en su version original. Se presenta ademas, la relacion existente con sexo, edad, satisfaccion vital y salud subjetiva. El MMQ es un instrumento adecuado para ser usado tanto en contextos clinicos como de investigacion para evaluar metamemoria.
Reliability of radiographic assessment in hip and knee osteoarthritis.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the reproducibility of commonly used radiographic measures in hip and knee OA and to overcome certain limits of existing knowledge on their reliability from previous studies. DESIGN Three readers evaluated 100 hip joints (50 pelvic X-rays) and 100 antero-posterior and lateral knee films of a hospital-based sample of patients with radiographic OA at two time points 3 months apart. They retrospectively estimated the presence and severity of joint specific individual radiographic features (osteophyte formation and joint space narrowing at different sites, cysts, subchondral sclerosis, bony deformity and chondrocalcinosis) and two different overall scores. Within and between observer reproducibility was calculated by intra-class correlation coefficient. RESULTS At the hip joint excellent intra- as well as inter-observer reliability for superior joint space narrowing (JSN) and femoral head deformity could be demonstrated, while the assessment of medial JSN, osteophytes and acetabular sclerosis depends on the level of the investigator's experience. At the knee joint, femorotibial and patellofemoral osteophytes showed a high intra- and inter-observer reliability. Grading of JSN is highly reader dependent; rating of subchondral sclerosis and chondrocalcinosis does not seem to be reproducible enough. The overall scores showed an excellent reproducibility both at hip and knee joints. CONCLUSION A reliable radiographic severity grading of hip and knee OA is possible with the application of global scores and individual features, if joint specific items are selected and readers are trained enough.
Towards Collusive Fraud Detection in Online Reviews

Online review fraud has evolved in sophistication by launching intelligent campaigns where a group of coordinated participants work together to deliver deceptive reviews for the designated targets. Such collusive fraud is considered much harder to defend against as these campaign participants are capable of evading detection by shaping their behaviors collectively so as not to appear suspicious. The present work complements existing studies by exploring more subtle behavioral trails connected with collusive review fraud. A novel statistical model is proposed to further characterize, recognize, and forecast collusive fraud in online reviews. The proposed model is completely unsupervised, which bypasses the difficulty of manual annotation required for supervised modeling. It is also highly flexible to incorporate collusion characteristics available for better modeling and prediction. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the improvements in learning and predictive abilities.
Hormonal testing and pharmacologic treatment of erectile dysfunction: a clinical practice guideline from the American College of Physicians.

DESCRIPTION The American College of Physicians developed this guideline to present the available evidence on hormonal testing in and pharmacologic management of erectile dysfunction. Current pharmacologic therapies include phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitors, such as sildenafil, vardenafil, tadalafil, mirodenafil, and udenafil, and hormonal treatment. METHODS Published literature on this topic was identified by using MEDLINE (1966 to May 2007), EMBASE (1980 to week 22 of 2007), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (second quarter of 2007), PsycINFO (1985 to June 2007), AMED (1985 to June 2007), and SCOPUS (2006). The literature search was updated by searching for articles in MEDLINE and EMBASE published between May 2007 and April 2009. Searches were limited to English-language publications. This guideline grades the evidence and recommendations by using the American College of Physicians' clinical practice guidelines grading system. RECOMMENDATION 1: The American College of Physicians recommends that clinicians initiate therapy with a PDE-5 inhibitor in men who seek treatment for erectile dysfunction and who do not have a contraindication to PDE-5 inhibitor use (Grade: strong recommendation; high-quality evidence). RECOMMENDATION 2: The American College of Physicians recommends that clinicians base the choice of a specific PDE-5 inhibitor on the individual preferences of men with erectile dysfunction, including ease of use, cost of medication, and adverse effects profile (Grade: weak recommendation; low-quality evidence). RECOMMENDATION 3: The American College of Physicians does not recommend for or against routine use of hormonal blood tests or hormonal treatment in the management of patients with erectile dysfunction (Grade: insufficient evidence to determine net benefits and harms).
Structure-Activity Relationships of Imperialine Derivatives and their Anticholinergic Activity

In order to check the structure-activity relationship and prepare more potent derivatives of imperialine with anticholinergic activity, imperialinol (2), 3 beta-acetoxyimperialine (3), 3 beta-propionoxyimperialine (4), and 3 beta-butyroxyimperialine (5) were prepared. Compounds 4 and 5 displayed better anticholinergic activity against muscarinic receptors of the heart and brain than imperialine (1). The decrease in activity in 2 showed the importance of the 6-keto functionality in imparting the anticholinergic activity.
A Real-Time, Controllable Simulator for Plausible Smoke

While many games and other virtual world applications include real-time simulation of rigid bodies, fluids and gasses have proven harder to animate efficiently. This report describes a method for extending previous work with particle systems to efficiently simulate smoke that interacts with rigid bodies, using an existing rigid body simulator. The method is applicable compressible fluids and gasses other than smoke. Although the animations produced by this method are not physically correct, they exhibit the phenomenology of real smoke, including dissipation, vortices, and compression. The animations can also be controlled through aesthetically meaningful parameters like drag and vortex axis. Thus the simulator is wellsuited to applications where interactive performance and expressive power are preferred to realism; for example, video games and rapid development of animation.