Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Caster Semenya: sport, categories and the creative role of ethics

Caster Semenya, a South African 18-year-old, won the 800-metre track running title at the Berlin World Athletics Championships in 2009. Only 3 h later, her gender was being harshly contested. The investigation of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) was neither discreet nor respectful of her privacy. Caster's case has implications for the ethics of sports and debates about gender and enhancement, and for the philosophical debate about the nature of categories and the classification of people. The IAAF has not disclosed the results of their tests on Caster, and the South African Ministry of Sport has decreed that in any case she can continue running with women in her own country. But could a scientific or medical test offer uncontroversial answers regarding Caster's gender? The concept of ‘gender’ is partly a social construction. The authors argue that ethics may guide science and medicine at addressing such questions.
Insulin-Like Growth Factors and Binding Proteins in Early Milk from Mothers of Preterm and Term Infants

Breast-fed preterm infants often show a better outcome, partly ascribed to the benefit of insulin-like growth factors (IGFs) and their binding proteins (IGFBP). We compared IGF-I, IGF-II, IGFBP-2 and IGFBP-3 levels, measured by radioimmunoassays in milk samples from 30 mothers of preterm (<31 weeks) and from 19 mothers of term (>37 weeks) infants at days 7 and 21 postpartum. Proteolysis of IGFBP-2 within mother’s milk and digestion of 125I-IGF-II and 125I-IGFBP-2 by gastric juice from neonates were assessed by electrophoretic techniques. Mean concentrations did not differ between preterm and term milk: IGF-I (2.8 ± 0.2 vs. 2.3 ± 0.1 ng/ml), IGF-II (12.0 ± 0.4 vs. 12.2 ± 0.5 ng/ml), IGFBP-3 (100.0 ± 5.1 vs. 80.0 ± 5.8 ng/ml), but did so for IGFBP-2 (3,144 ± 172 vs. 2,428 ± 188 ng/ml, p < 0.02). Immunoblots revealed 42% (p < 0.05) more IGFBP-2 fragments of 14 and 25 kDa in preterm milk. Incubation with gastric juice caused cleavage of 125I-IGFBP-2 and partial cleavage of 125I-IGF-II. Mutual complexation protected IGF-II and IGFBP-2 from cleavage, suggesting that both are likely to arrive in the bowel in an intact form to exert promotive effects. The results provide further evidence that IGFBP-2 and IGF-II in breast milk are relevant factors for the early development of preterm infants.
Bayesian Inference of Bijective Non-Rigid Shape Correspondence

Many algorithms for the computation of correspondences between deformable shapes rely on some variant of nearest neighbor matching in a descriptor space. Such are, for example, various point-wise correspondence recovery algorithms used as a postprocessing stage in the functional correspondence framework. In this paper, we show that such frequently used techniques in practice suffer from lack of accuracy and result in poor surjectivity. We propose an alternative recovery technique guaranteeing a bijective correspondence and producing significantly higher accuracy. We derive the proposed method from a statistical framework of Bayesian inference and demonstrate its performance on several challenging deformable 3D shape matching datasets.
Extracellular signal‐regulated kinase activation involved in human sperm‐zona pellucida binding

Summary. In a previous study involving the inhibition of the mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK), extracellular signal regulated kinase (ERK), we found that the very specific MAPK kinase (MEK) inhibitor, PD098059, inhibited the zona pellucida (ZP) induced acrosome reaction. As an intact acrosome on the spermatozoa is a prerequisite in ensuring tight binding to the ZP, we investigated the zona binding potential of spermatozoa after PD098059 treatment of sperm, followed by exposure to solubilised human ZP and calcium ionophore (A23187). PD098059 treated spermatozoa, exposed to solubilised ZP, bound significantly more to the ZP, as compared to control spermatozoa also exposed to solubilised ZP (26.5±3.7 vs. 13.8±2.8, P<0.05). No significant differences in binding to the ZP were observed between PD098059 treated and untreated sperm populations after A23187 exposure. These results can be interpreted to support the idea that the ZP‐induced AR is the physiologically relevant exocytotic event, as it is the ZP‐induced AR, and not the spontaneous (culture medium) or A23187 induced AR, that appears to be mediated through an ERK‐mediated signal transduction process.
Front-to-back ratio improvement of a microstrip patch antenna using an isolated soft surface structure

A microstrip patch antenna fabricated on a substrate, shows significant performance degradation by surface waves. Particularly when the patch antenna is printed on high dielectric substrates or thick substrate, its front-to-back ratio is considerably affected. Various solutions for the surface wave suppression such as photonic bandgap (PBG), electromagnetic bandgap (EBG), micromachining technology and complex artificial soft surfaces, which requires considerable area to form a bandgap structure. In microstrip patch antenna design, the size of ground plane is limited. To solve this problem, we propose new isolated soft surfaces structure which does not share the ground plane of a patch. By removing the ground plane edges of the patch and forming soft surfaces within the bare substrate, the front-to-back ratio of a patch antenna significantly improved. A numerical investigation is presented for a patch antenna surrounded by the proposed new soft surface structure and the effectiveness of the soft surface in terms of front-to back ratio improvement is verified by its implementation. It is shown that the broadside gain of a patch antenna can be decreased by about 1 dBi while the backside level can be increased by about 11 dBi. As a result, the improvement for the front-to-back ratio of a patch antenna can be increased to about 10 dB through the use of the proposed new soft surface structure.
Discrepancy between clinical practice and standardized indications for an implantable loop recorder in patients with unexplained syncope†

AIM An implantable loop recorder (ILR) is indicated in patients with unexplained syncope after complete conventional work-up. Data from the literature imply that, in clinical practice, the ILR is underused. The aim of the study was to verify if there is any discrepancy between the use of ILRs in clinical practice and the potential indications based on the most potentially appropriate guideline indications. METHOD AND RESULTS We compared the prevalence of ILRs actually implanted in patients with unexplained syncope in the Syncope Unit Project (SUP) study and the potential one using the standard given by the guidelines. In the SUP study, 28 (18%) out of 159 patients with unexplained syncope received an ILR. Appropriate criteria for implantation of ILRs according to guidelines were present in 110 (69%) patients. Moreover, 7 (25%) of ILRs actually implanted did not satisfy the guideline standards. During the follow-up, 32% of patients who had received an ILR had a diagnosis compared with 5% of those who did not (P= 0.001). CONCLUSIONS The estimated indications were four times higher than those observed. Moreover, in about one quarter of the cases, the use of ILRs proved to be potentially inappropriate according to guideline indications. Two-thirds of patients with unexplained syncope had indications potentially appropriate for ILRs.
MANAJEMEN KOMUNIKASI PEMERINTAH DESA KOPO KABUPATEN BOGOR DALAM MENDORONG WARGA MELAKUKAN VAKSINASI COVID 19

This study aimed to describe the communication management of the Kopo Village Government, Bogor Regency, in encouraging residents to vaccinate during a pandemic. Data collection was carried out in August 2022, at which time the government was still promoting the vaccination program. But the problem was many people feel that they no longer need to be vaccinated because apart from the fact that conditions were starting to look normal, people also think that the symptoms of Covid were no longer scary. The data was collected by means of in-depth interviews with informants including the village head, as well as the task force team represented by the head of the Kopo Village PKK and the head of RW 01. The technique of testing the validity of the data was an effort to triangulate sources. In encouraging residents to do vaccines, the Kopo Village Government together with the task force team carried out communication management including preparing messages and ways of communicating, utilizing network-based media such as WAG to disseminate vaccine schedule information and in implementing it carried out persuasive communication through the door prize program and carried out monitoring and evaluation to see the target achievement. Based on the results of the research and discussion, it could be concluded that the Kopo Village Government had carried out quite good communication management in encouraging residents to vaccinate, even though the planning and organizing stages were still not optimal
A Fully-Automated Pipeline for Detection and Segmentation of Liver Lesions and Pathological Lymph Nodes

We propose a fully-automated method for accurate and robust detection and segmentation of potentially cancerous lesions found in the liver and in lymph nodes. The process is performed in three steps, including organ detection, lesion detection and lesion segmentation. Our method applies machine learning techniques such as marginal space learning and convolutional neural networks, as well as active contour models. The method proves to be robust in its handling of extremely high lesion diversity. We tested our method on volumetric computed tomography (CT) images, including 42 volumes containing liver lesions and 86 volumes containing 595 pathological lymph nodes. Preliminary results under 10-fold cross validation show that for both the liver lesions and the lymph nodes, a total detection sensitivity of 0.53 and average Dice score of $0.71 \pm 0.15$ for segmentation were obtained.
Bad Peripherals

Modern computer systems benefit from a plethora of peripheral devices that provide such features as removable data storage, wireless network connectivity, multimedia capabilities, high-speed data transfers, and other enhancements for the human-machine interface. The hardware and software industries have made sensible efforts in defining and refining specifications, standards, and APIs that support several types of peripheral devices while fostering new development, which might prove to be a new battleground for sophisticated attackers and defenders. I analyze how peripheral devices interact with the operating system and what threats that interaction poses
The Relative Importance of Size of Food and Interfood Distance in Eliciting Aggression in Captive Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta)

We conducted an experiment on a group of captive rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) in which we manipulated both food size and interfood distance independently to examine which factor was more important in causing aggressive competition. For each of 254 trials, the monkeys were offered simultaneously two apple pieces ranging in size from 1 to 40 g at interfood distances ranging from 1 to 5 m. In contrast to other studies, food size and interfood distance were not conflated in this study. Multiple regression analyses revealed that food size was a better predictor of aggression whereas interfood distance was a better predictor of the ability to monopolize foods. Growing evidence suggests that factors such as food size, quality and depletion time are more important than interfood distance in influencing aggression within groups.
The Electroretinogram of a Diurnal Gecko

Using the electroretinogram as the criterion of retinal activity the flicker fusion frequency, course of dark adaptation, and spectral sensitivity of the pure cone retina of the diurnal gecko, Phelsuma inunguis, were investigated. Both the curve relating flicker fusion frequency to stimulus intensity and that relating the amplitude of the flicker response to stimulus intensity showed a break as the intensity was increased. The dark adaptation curve was that typical of cone retinae; there was no break, adaptation was relatively rapid, and there was a total increase of sensitivity of only about 3 log units. The spectral sensitivity curve showed two maxima, a major one at about 560 mµ and another at about 460 mµ. Chromatic adaptation with red and blue lights demonstrated the presence of two independent mechanisms. Although red adaptation could not have had a direct effect on the pigment responsible for the "blue" mechanism the sensitivity of this mechanism was depressed by red adaptation. The possible relationships of the two mechanisms are discussed.
An infinite-horizon robust filter for uncertain hidden Markov models with conditional relative entropy constraints

We consider a robust filtering problem for uncertain discrete-time, homogeneous, first-order, finite-state hidden Markov models (HMMs). The class of uncertain HMMs considered is described by a conditional relative entropy constraint on measures perturbed from a nominal regular conditional probability distribution given the previous posterior state distribution and the latest measurement. Under this class of perturbations, a robust infinite horizon filtering problem is first formulated as a constrained optimization problem before being transformed via variational results into an unconstrained optimization problem; the latter can be elegantly solved using a risk-sensitive information-state based filtering.
Early Changes in the Serotype Distribution of Invasive Pneumococcal Isolates from Children after the Introduction of Extended-valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccines in Korea, 2011-2013

This study was performed to measure early changes in the serotype distribution of pneumococci isolated from children with invasive disease during the 3-year period following the introduction of 10- and 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) in Korea. From January 2011 to December 2013 at 25 hospitals located throughout Korea, pneumococci were isolated among children who had invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD). Serotypes were determined using the Quellung reaction, and the change in serotype distribution was analyzed. Seventy-five cases of IPD were included. Eighty percent of patients were aged 3-59 months, and 32% had a comorbidity that increased the risk of pneumococcal infection. The most common serotypes were 19A (32.0%), 10A (8.0%), and 15C (6.7%). The PCV7 serotypes (4, 6B, 9V, 14, 18C, 19F, 23F, and 6A) accounted for 14.7% of the total isolates and the PCV13 minus PCV7 types (1, 3, 5, 7F and 19A) accounted for 32.0% of the total isolates. Serotype 19A was the only serotype in the PCV13 minus PCV7 group. The proportion of serotype 19A showed decreasing tendency from 37.5% in 2011 to 22.2% in 2013 (P = 0.309), while the proportion of non-PCV13 types showed increasing tendency from 45.8% in 2011 to 72.2% in 2013 (P = 0.108). Shortly after the introduction of extended-valent PCVs in Korea, serotype 19A continued to be the most common serotype causing IPD in children. Subsequently, the proportion of 19A decreased, and non-vaccine serotypes emerged as an important cause of IPD. The impact of extended-valent vaccines must be continuously monitored.
Acute Ethanol Administration Impairs Spatial Performance While Facilitating Nonspatial Performance in Rats

Acute ethanol administration produces learning and memory impairments similar to those found following lesions to the hippocampal system in rats. For example, both ethanol and hippocampal lesions impair performance on spatial learning and memory tasks while sparing performance on many nonspatial learning and memory tasks. Lesions to the hippocampal system can also alter the nature of the information that the animal uses to guide its behavior, from using spatial information to using individual cues. In the present experiment, rats were trained, while sober, to navigate on an eight-arm radial arm maze to a specific arm for food reward. During training, the rewarded arm was always in the same specific location and contained well-defined cues. After the rat learned the task, a memory test was conducted under different doses of ethanol (0.0 g/kg [saline control], 1.0, 1.5, or 2.0 g/kg, intraperitoneal). On the test day the maze was rotated so that the cued arm was 90 degrees to the right of its original position. During testing, intact rats showed a significant bias to approach the place where they had been previously rewarded, even though the cue was no longer located there. Acute ethanol administration dose dependently reduced approaches to the rewarded place. However, ethanol administration did not result in increases in random choices; rather, it resulted in a dose-dependent increase in approaches to the cued arm, now in a new location. These results extend previous research showing that acute ethanol administration and lesions to the hippocampal system produce similar effects on learning and memory in rats.
Identifying Patterns for Unsupervised Grammar Induction

This paper describes a new method for unsupervised grammar induction based on the automatic extraction of certain patterns in the texts. Our starting hypothesis is that there exist some classes of words that function as separators, marking the beginning or the end of new constituents. Among these separators we distinguish those which trigger new levels in the parse tree. If we are able to detect these separators we can follow a very simple procedure to identify the constituents of a sentence by taking the classes of words between separators. This paper is devoted to describe the process that we have followed to automatically identify the set of separators from a corpus only annotated with Part-of-Speech (POS) tags. The proposed approach has allowed us to improve the results of previous proposals when parsing sentences from the Wall Street Journal corpus.
An efficient solution to locate sparsely congested links by network tomography

Locating individual congested links in large scale networks is an important but difficult problem, because of the hardness to directly measure the massive links. Current advantages of network tomography propose to infer the link congestion states by end-to-end measurements via solving a set of linear equations in Boolean algebra. But one challenging problem in such approaches is the requirement to construct n linearly independent measurements for uniquely identifying the states of n links. It is especially cost inefficient when the congested links are sparse, but requiring larger than n measurements to form a full-rank observation matrix. In this paper, we focus on efficient methods to take only limited number of path measurements to locate the sparsely congested links. To avoid the ambiguity of solving the boolean equations, at first, we propose a compressive sensing method to estimate the congestion probabilities of the individual links based on the deficient measurements (routing matrix is not full rank). Based on the congestion probability estimation, a greedy iterative estimation algorithm is developed to locate the congested links by online snapshot of the deficient measurements. Extensive simulations shows the effectiveness of proposed methods which reduce the measurement costs while preserving the detection accuracy.
Recent origin of low trabecular bone density in modern humans

Significance The human skeleton is unique in having low trabecular density representing a lightly built human body form. However, it remains unknown when during human evolution this unique characteristic first appeared. To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine trabecular bone density throughout the skeleton of fossil hominins spanning several million years. The results show that trabecular density remained high throughout human evolution until it decreased significantly in recent modern humans, suggesting a possible link between changes in our skeleton and increased sedentism. Humans are unique, compared with our closest living relatives (chimpanzees) and early fossil hominins, in having an enlarged body size and lower limb joint surfaces in combination with a relatively gracile skeleton (i.e., lower bone mass for our body size). Some analyses have observed that in at least a few anatomical regions modern humans today appear to have relatively low trabecular density, but little is known about how that density varies throughout the human skeleton and across species or how and when the present trabecular patterns emerged over the course of human evolution. Here, we test the hypotheses that (i) recent modern humans have low trabecular density throughout the upper and lower limbs compared with other primate taxa and (ii) the reduction in trabecular density first occurred in early Homo erectus, consistent with the shift toward a modern human locomotor anatomy, or more recently in concert with diaphyseal gracilization in Holocene humans. We used peripheral quantitative CT and microtomography to measure trabecular bone of limb epiphyses (long bone articular ends) in modern humans and chimpanzees and in fossil hominins attributed to Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus/early Homo from Swartkrans, Homo neanderthalensis, and early Homo sapiens. Results show that only recent modern humans have low trabecular density throughout the limb joints. Extinct hominins, including pre-Holocene Homo sapiens, retain the high levels seen in nonhuman primates. Thus, the low trabecular density of the recent modern human skeleton evolved late in our evolutionary history, potentially resulting from increased sedentism and reliance on technological and cultural innovations.
The Vortex Approach to Integration and Coordination of Workflows

While many organizations use workflow management systems, few tools or techniques have been developed to support the interaction and coordination of workflows residing in different organizations. We distinguish two related aspects of such coordination, namely transactional (concerned with ensuring atomicity and durability of specified groups of actions) and semantic (concerned with the flow of information between, and intended meaning of, groups of actions performed by different workflows). This position paper identifies several issues that arise in connection with the semantic aspect of workflow coordination. The paper goes on to illustrate how a new declarative workflow paradigm called Vortex (see [HLS+99]) can be used to overcome these issues. It is crucial to use a clearly defined framework and language for specifying workflow interaction. The framework must address the heterogeneity between workflow systems and schemas, and between data representations. The language must support data translations and restructurings, coordination of the input and output of existing workflows, and semantic enrichments and extensions of existing workflows. Furthermore, it is essential that the framework and language facilitate formal analysis of workflow interactions, such as whether data flow dependencies between data in different workflows can lead to deadlocks. Vortex is a new programming paradigm for specific application domains, including in particular, workflow. The focus of Vortex programs is on information gathering, decision making, and launching and monitoring of external tasks. The Vortex language is declarative: programmers specify the conditions under which decisions and tasks should be performed, but ∗Part of work was done while visiting the Bell Labs. and part of work was supported by NSF grants IRI-9411330 and IRI-9700370.