Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Psychological View of Sexual Pain among Women: Applying the Fear-Avoidance Model

Aim: The purpose of this paper is to examine how well research findings on dyspareunia (intercourse pain) fit the fear-avoidance (FA) model on pain. Results: The evidence suggests that the experience of pain in dyspareunia functions similarly to the pain reported in other pain conditions. There are also accumulating data showing that the central mechanisms of the FA model, such as catastrophizing, fear, hypervigilance and disability, are central to the experience of sexual pain. However, there are also some potential differences between sexual pain and other pain conditions that demand further attention in terms of the role of the partner, specific emotional consequences of avoidance and the effect of hypervigilance on sexual arousal. Conclusion: The results demonstrate the relevance of the FA model in sexual pain. They also imply that treatment methods for fear and avoidance in other pain conditions offer new avenues for treating sexual pain problems in the clinic. Future studies should focus on expanding how the mechanisms in the FA model contribute to sexual pain, as well as how treatments based on the model may be applied clinically.
Genetic Diversity of an Imperiled Neotropical Catfish and Recommendations for Its Restoration

The long-whiskered catfish Steindachneridion parahybae (Family Pimelodidae) is endemic to the Paraíba do Sul River basin in southeastern Brazil. This species was heavily exploited by artisanal fisheries and faces challenges posed by dams, introduced species, and deterioration of critical habitat. The remaining populations are small and extirpated from some locales, and the species is listed as critically endangered in Brazil. Screening variation at a partial mitochondrial control region sequence (mtCR) and 20 microsatellite loci, we: (i) describe the patterns of genetic diversity along its current distributional range; (ii) test the null hypothesis of panmixia; (iii) investigate the main factors driving its current population structure, and (iv) propose management of broodstock for fostering recovery of wild populations through genetically cognizant restocking. Our microsatellite data for 70 individuals from five collections indicate moderate levels of heterozygosity (HO = 0.45) and low levels of inbreeding (FIS = 0.016). Individual-based cluster analyses showed clear genetic structure, with three clusters of individuals over the collection area with no mis-assigned individuals, suggesting no recent migration among the three clusters. Pairwise DEST values showed moderate and significant genetic differentiation among all populations so identified. The MUR population may have suffered a recent demographic reduction. mtCRs for 70 individuals exhibited 36 haplotypes resulting from 38 polymorphic sites. Overall, mitochondrial haplotype diversity was 0.930 (±0.023) and nucleotide diversity was 0.011 (±0.002). Significant population structure was observed, with ϕST = 0.226. Genetic markers could be used in a hatchery-based restoration program emphasizing breeding of pairs with low kinship values in order to promote retention of genetic diversity and avoid inbreeding. Individual average kinship relationships showed 87.3% advised matings, 11.0% marginal matings, and 1.7% advised against. While these results comprise a contribution toward planning better breeding management and monitoring, parallel actions to be undertaken include surveying healthy riverine habits for reintroduction and continued searching for wild individuals to introduce new variation into the captive broodstock to avoid adaptation to captivity and to minimize inbreeding.
Non-invasive Measurement of Fibrin Concentration by Fast Field-Cycling NMR Technique

-1 fibrin sample (dots) and the curve obtained by the fitting algorithm (solid line). The curve fitting used for the evaluation of R1 and the quadrupolar signal was performed with Matlab (Mathworks) using its curve fitting toolbox. The values of T1 were calculated using a monoexponential model, checking that the R 2 values of the fits were greater than 0.999. The model used to fit the quadrupolar peaks in R1 used Lorentzian-shaped bells with a power-law background curve (4). The amplitude of the dips, denoted ΔR1, was given by the fit and correspond to the difference between the highest point of the peak and the baseline, as indicated in Fig. 1 for the 65 mT peak. Results The samples prepared had typical values of T1 of 1.5 s and could be analysed in 45 min each. Fig. 2 presents the amplitude of the quadrupolar peaks measured for different fibrin concentrations from all three experiments performed. The linear fits obtained have p-values of 0.87 and 0.96 for the 49 and 65 mT peaks respectively. The average slope of the 65-mT peak is 1.18 times lower than that of the 49-mT peak (5.94 +/- 0.69 x10 -3
Rich360

This paper presents Rich360, a novel system for creating and viewing a 360° panoramic video obtained from multiple cameras placed on a structured rig. Rich360 provides an as-rich-as-possible 360° viewing experience by effectively resolving two issues that occur in the existing pipeline. First, a deformable spherical projection surface is utilized to minimize the parallax from multiple cameras. The surface is deformed spatio-temporally according to the depth constraints estimated from the overlapping video regions. This enables fast and efficient parallax-free stitching independent of the number of views. Next, a non-uniform spherical ray sampling is performed. The density of the sampling varies depending on the importance of the image region. Finally, for interactive viewing, the non-uniformly sampled video is mapped onto a uniform viewing sphere using a UV map. This approach can preserve the richness of the input videos when the resolution of the final 360° panoramic video is smaller than the overall resolution of the input videos, which is the case for most 360° panoramic videos. We show various results from Rich360 to demonstrate the richness of the output video and the advancement in the stitching results.
Recognition of Steel Billet Image with Different Orientations in Production Line

An automatic recognition method for steel billet images with different orientations is proposed in this paper. A crucial part of this method is to segment the image firstly, and then use the projection features of the segmented image to distinguish the different orientations of the steel billet in production line. After the string is segmented into individual characters, the segmented characters can be recognized by template matching. Experiments on steel billet image recognition demonstrate that the proposed method can distinguish the steel billet image orientation and recognize the characters automatically, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.
General law of growth and replication. Growth equation and its applications

We present significantly advanced studies of the previously introduced physical growth mechanism and unite it with biochemical growth factors. Obtained results allowed formulating the general growth law which governs growth and evolutional development of all living organisms, their organs and systems. It was discovered that the growth cycle is predefined by the distribution of nutritional resources between maintenance needs and biomass production. This distribution is quantitatively defined by the growth ratio parameter, which depends on the geometry of an organism, phase of growth and, indirectly, organism's biochemical machinery. The amount of produced biomass, in turn, defines the composition of biochemical reactions. Changing amount of nutrients diverted to biomass production is what forces organisms to proceed through the whole growth and replication cycle. The growth law can be formulated as follows: the rate of growth is proportional to influx of nutrients and growth ratio. Considering specific biochemical components of different organisms, we find influxes of required nutrients and substitute them into the growth equation; then, we compute growth curves for amoeba, wild type fission yeast, fission yeast's mutant. In all cases, predicted growth curves correspond very well to experimental data. Obtained results prove validity and fundamental scientific value of the discovery.
Cyclostationarity based air interface recognition for software radio systems

Reconfigurable software radio equipment is seen as the next evolutionary step in mobile communications. One of the most important properties of a software radio terminal is that it is capable of using a wide range of air interface standards, providing a seamless interoperability between different air interface standards and an enhanced roaming capability. This multimode operation has to be supported by a number of key functionalities, one of which is the air interface recognition. A software radio terminal has to be able to detect, recognize and monitor the air interfaces available in the frequency environment. In our work, we propose exploiting the distinct cyclostationary properties of signals from different air interfaces as features for air interface recognition.
Brain tissue segmentation using a convolutional neural network

The segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) brain images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM) and cerebrospinal uid (CSF) play an importantrole in diagnostics and research of brain diseases. A multitude of approaches to automatic brain tissue segmentation have been reported in literature. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) by reducing the segmentation task to a classication problem, an area in which CNNs have proven effective. Our CNN implementation analyses the neighborhood around each voxel to correctly classify the tissue type. The network was trained and evaluated on the IBSR in accordance with the comparison methodology for segmentation algorithms presented in Valverde et al. The results show promising performance and potential for the voxel based CNN approach to brain tissue segmentation.
Clinicoeconomics and Outcomes Research Dovepress Cost-effectiveness Analysis of Corticosteroid Inhaler Devices in Primary Care Asthma Management: a Real World Observational Study

Purpose: To evaluate and compare real world cost-effectiveness of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) administered by metered dose inhaler (MDI), breath-actuated MDI (BAI), or dry powder inhaler (DPI) in asthma. Patients and methods: This retrospective database study analyzed the direct health care costs and proportion of patients (aged 5–60 years) achieving asthma control over 1 year in two population groups: those starting ICS (initiation population) and those receiving a first increase in ICS dose (step-up population). Asthma control was defined as no unplanned asthma visits, oral corticosteroids, or antibiotics for lower respiratory infection; outcomes were adjusted for confounding variables. Cost-effectiveness of BAI and DPI were compared with MDI. Results: For the initiation population (n = 56,347), average annual health care costs per person (adjusted results), as compared with MDIs, were £9 higher (95% CI: −1.65 to 19.71) for BAIs and £32 higher (95% CI: 19.51 to 43.66) for DPIs. The probability of BAIs being the dominant strategy (more effective and less costly than MDIs) was 5% and of BAIs being more effective and more costly than MDIs was 94%. DPIs were consistently more effective and more costly than MDIs, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of £1711 (95% CI: 760 to 3,576) per additional controlled patient per year. For the step-up population (n = 9169), mean total health care costs per person, (adjusted) as compared with MDIs, were £1 higher (95% CI: −27.28 to 31.55) for BAIs and £73 higher (95% CI: 44.48 to 103.29) for DPIs. The probability of BAIs being dominant was 48% and of BAIs being more effective but more costly than MDIs was 52%; the probability of DPIs being more effective but more costly than MDIs was 96%. Conclusion: The real world effectiveness of ICS inhalers may vary, and inhaler device selection for patients with asthma should take into consideration not only initial device cost but also the subsequent health care resource costs. Asthma affects over 300 million people worldwide and has a substantial economic impact. 1 Estimated costs of asthma to the National Health Service in the United Kingdom (UK NHS) are £1 billion per year, 2,3 with total associated costs in the UK of over £2.3 billion per year. 4 Much of the economic burden of asthma results from poorly controlled disease and asthma exacerbations, which contribute to increased direct medical expenditures related to emergency care as well as indirect costs of lost work time and lost …
An overview of Photovoltaic and Electronic-to-optical Material Based on Perovskite

The efficiency of perovskite materials solar cells skyrockets from 3.8% in 2009 when it is first developed in this field to 19.3% in 2014, and higher efficiency is also anticipated by researchers and merchants all over the world. Simultaneously, new kinds of LED and semiconductor laser equipments based on pervoskite are also developed with the bright future into a new era and the development treads on the heel of perovskite solar cells. In this paper the state-of-the-art and highlight progress in these related fields will be reviewed and the scientific challenges and comments on the current and future issues are mentioned.
Forest: a language and toolkit for programming with filestores

A filestore is a structured collection of data files housed in a conventional hierarchical file system. Many applications use filestores as a poor-man's database, and the correct execution of these applications requires that the collection of files, directories, and symbolic links stored on disk satisfy a variety of precise invariants. Moreover, all of these structures must have acceptable ownership, permission, and timestamp attributes. Unfortunately, current programming languages do not provide support for documenting assumptions about filestores, detecting errors in them, or safely loading from and storing to them. This paper describes the design, implementation, and semantics of Forest, a new domain-specific language for describing filestores. The language uses a type-based metaphor to specify the expected structure, attributes, and invariants of filestores. Forest generates loading and storing functions that make it easy to connect data on disk to an isomorphic representation in memory that can be manipulated as if it were any other data structure. Forest also generates metadata that describes the degree to which the structures on the disk conform to the specification, making error detection easy. In a nutshell, Forest extends the rigorous discipline of typed programming languages to the untyped world of file systems. We have implemented Forest as an embedded domain-specific language in Haskell. In addition to generating infrastructure for reading, writing and checking file systems, our implementation generates type class instances that make it easy to build generic tools that operate over arbitrary filestores. We illustrate the utility of this infrastructure by building a file system visualizer, a file access checker, a generic query interface, description-directed variants of several standard UNIX shell tools and (circularly) a simple Forest description inference engine. Finally, we formalize a core fragment of Forest in a semantics inspired by classical tree logics and prove round-tripping laws showing that the loading and storing functions behave sensibly.
Evolutionary potential in the Alpine: trait heritabilities and performance variation of the dwarf willow Salix herbacea from different elevations and microhabitats

Abstract Alpine ecosystems are seriously threatened by climate change. One of the key mechanisms by which plants can adapt to changing environmental conditions is through evolutionary change. However, we still know little about the evolutionary potential in wild populations of long‐lived alpine plants. Here, we investigated heritabilities of phenological traits, leaf size, and performance traits in natural populations of the long‐lived alpine dwarf shrub Salix herbacea using relatedness estimates inferred from SSR (Simple Sequence Repeat) markers. Salix herbacea occurs in early‐ and late‐snowmelt microhabitats (ridges and snowbeds), and we assessed how performance consequences of phenological traits and leaf size differ between these microhabitats in order to infer potential for evolutionary responses. Salix herbacea showed low, but significant, heritabilities of leaf size, clonal and sexual reproduction, and moderate heritabilities of phenological traits. In both microhabitats, we found that larger leaves, longer intervals between snowmelt and leaf expansion, and longer GDD (growing‐degree days) until leaf expansion resulted in a stronger increase in the number of stems (clonal reproduction). In snowbeds, clonal reproduction increased with a shorter GDD until flowering, while the opposite was found on ridges. Furthermore, the proportion of flowering stems increased with GDD until flowering in both microhabitats. Our results suggest that the presence of significant heritable variation in morphology and phenology might help S. herbacea to adapt to changing environmental conditions. However, it remains to be seen if the rate of such an evolutionary response can keep pace with the rapid rate of climate change.
Real-time CALM Synthesizer: New Approaches in Hands-Controlled Voice Synthesis

In this paper, a new voice source model for real-time gesture--controlled voice synthesis is described. The synthesizer is based on a causal-anticausal model of the voice source, a new approach giving accurate control of voice source dimensions like tenseness and effort. Aperiodic components are also considered, resulting in an elaborate model suitable not only for lyrical singing but also for various musical styles playing with voice qualities. The model is also tested using different gestural control interfaces: data glove, keyboard, graphic tablet, pedal board. Depending on parameter-to-interface mappings, several instruments with different musical abilities are designed, taking advantage of the highly expressive possibilities of the synthesis model.
Speaker diarization of heterogeneous web video files: A preliminary study

In the last ten years, internet as well as its applications changed significantly, mainly thanks to the raising of available personal resources. Concerning multimedia, the most impressive evolution is the continuous growing success of the video sharing websites. But with this success come the difficulties to efficiently search, index and access relevant information about these documents. Speaker diarization is an important task in the overall information retrieval process. This paper describes an audio/video database, especially built for the speaker diarization task, based on different video genres. Through some preliminary experiments, it highlights the difficulties encountered in this context, mainly linked to the database heterogeneity.
Targeting Autophagy Addiction in Cancer

Autophagy inhibition is a novel cancer therapeutic strategy in the early stages of clinical trial testing. The initial rationale for using autophagy inhibition was generated by research revealing that autophagy is upregulated in response to external stresses, including chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Combining autophagy inhibition with agents that induce autophagy as a pro-survival response may therefore increase their therapeutic efficacy. Recent research has shown that some cancer cells, particularly those driven by the K-Ras oncogene, also depend on elevated levels of autophagy for survival even in the absence of external stressors. In multiple in vitro as well as in vivo systems, oncogenic Ras-mediated transformation and tumor growth are dependent on autophagy to evade metabolic stress and cell death. These studies have subsequently led to further early phase clinical testing whether autophagy inhibition is a viable and effective strategy for targeting Ras-driven tumors. Even before the clinical results are available from these ongoing clinical trials, much work remains to optimally develop the approach of autophagy inhibition clinically; most notably reliably detecting levels of autophagy in human tumor samples, pharmacodynamics of currently available autophagy inhibitors (chloroquine and the derivative hydroxychloroquine), and new target identification and drug development.
Online Gaming to Apply for Jobs - The Impact of Self- and E-Assessment on Staff Recruitment

The process of recruiting employees has changed since the internet entered enterprises. From simply posting job ads and information on the internet to online application forms and holistic e-recruiting system architectures the way of recruiting has changed a lot. With the introduction of virtual worlds and the increasing number of online games this paper is discussing the next step of e-recruiting: online games to apply for jobs. With a single explorative case study the implementation of self- and e-assessment as online games could be explained. Furthermore with an SEM based on the empirical data of a survey with the Fortune 1,000 companies in Germany (response rate 19.1%) evidence for the motivation of companies to use online games can be provided. Perceived quality improvements, perceived cost savings and perceived time savings as well as perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are the most important drivers for companies intending to use online games in staff recruitment.
Minding Our Business and Losing Our Mind: How can we recover our full consciousness after losing it, in time to save our civilization from suicide?

My path of personal development has taken me on roundabout routes through the wholistic spectrum of body, emotions, mind, relationships (with other people and the environment) and spirit. My education and training in psychology, medicine and psychiatry thoroughly indoctrinated me in the theories, research, beliefs and practices of modern science, medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy. Unfortunately, these included skepticism and even serious disparagements of emotional, intuitive and spiritual aspects of life.
[Prognostic value of metastatic lymph node ratio for patients with gastric cancer].

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the prognostic value of metastatic lymph node ratio (MLR) for patients with gastric cancer. METHODS Data collected from 1247 patients with gastric cancer who underwent radical surgery (pT4 cases were excluded) at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University between 2005 and 2009 were analyzed retrospectively. MLR was compared to pathological N staging (pN) in terms of prognostic accuracy, homogenicity, and applicability. RESULTS MLR and pN were both positively correlated with the number of retrieved lymph nodes(both P<0.01). Significant differences were found in 5-year cumulative survival rate (5-YCSR) among different pN stages and MLR classification(all P<0.01). Multivariable analysis showed that both pN and MLR were independent prognostic factors(both P<0.01). The area under ROC curve(AUC) of MLR was larger than pN, however the difference was not statistically significant(P>0.05). There were significant differences in 5-YCSR among different MLR stages within the same pN stages(P<0.05), but not among different pN stages within the same MLR stage(P>0.05). Significant differences in 5-YCSR were also found among different retrieved-node groups within the same pN stage (P<0.05), but not within the same MLR stages (P>0.05). CONCLUSIONS MLR is an independent prognostic factor for patients with gastric cancer. The prognostic homogenicity and applicability of MLR are better than those of pN, however the prediction accuracy is not favorable.