Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Treatment with a uroselective α1-blocker improves voiding and sexual function: a study in Thai men with lower urinary tract symptoms.

INTRODUCTION Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) and erectile dysfunction (ED) negatively affect quality of life. The α1-blockers are effective for LUTS suggestive of benign prostatic hypertrophy. AIM To analyze the effect of a uroselective α1-blocker on both voiding and sexual dysfunction in Thai men with LUTS. METHODS Of 488 men with LUTS who received 10 mg alfuzosin monotherapy once daily (OD) at a men's health clinic, 313 men (64%) completed 8 months of alfuzosin treatment and filled the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) and the International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF)-5 questionnaires. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE The relationships among the IPSS, IIEF-5 score, and select clinical characteristics were analyzed using multiple regression analysis. To identify changes from the baseline, the chi-square or Fisher's exact test was used for categorical or dichotomous variables and a paired Student's t-test was used for continuous variables. RESULTS The 313 men were followed up for a mean (standard deviation [SD]) of 35.6 (2.2) weeks. LUTS were categorized by IPSS as moderate in 100 patients (31.9%) and severe in 213 patients (68.1%). ED was graded according to the IIEF-5 as normal in 46 patients (14.7%), mild in 29 patients (9.3%), mild to moderate in 81 patients (25.9%), moderate in 47 patients (15.0%), and severe in 110 patients (35.1%). ED is associated with LUTS (P=0.008). After 8 months of alfuzosin treatment, the mean (SD) IPSS and IIEF-5 score significantly improved from 19.95 (6.4) to 11.13 (4.6) (P<0.001) and from 11.5 (6.9) to 14.9 (5.7) (P<0.001), respectively. However, the IIEF-5 score did not improve significantly in patients with severe LUTS as determined using the IPSS. The most common adverse event with alfuzosin treatment was mild (dizziness, 2.2%). CONCLUSION Treatment with 10 mg alfuzosin OD is safe and effective in improving voiding and sexual function in Thai men with LUTS and ED.
Pemanfaatan Limbah Medis Padat Infeksius RSUD Arifin Achmad Pekanbaru dengan Teknik Solidifikasi sebagai Campuran Batako

Hospital solid medical waste contain hazardous and toxic materials. One way to manage solid medical waste is a mixed hospital as one of the ingredients in the manufacture of concrete blocks. The purpose of this study was to test the initial testing and the final content of cadmium (Cd) and chromium (Cr) heavy metals through the test the concentration of heavy metals, and to test the compressive strength of concrete blocks. In this research, the B3 waste treatment method using solidification technology by varying the 0%, 10%, 20%, 30% and drying time 14, 21 and 28 days and the test concentrations of heavy metals. The results showed that in terms of compressive strength 28 days, brick with a variation of 10% of age 14 days 105 kg/ cm2, 10% aged 21 days 135 kg/cm2 and 10% u it 28 days to 200 kg/cm2 where it is strong pressure to rise. From the test results are known concentrations of heavy metals mostly heavy metal content is 30% at 0.00034 ppm Cd of 0.180 ppm after disolidifikasi. Likewise, 30% of heavy metals in Cr is 8.509 ppm 0,044 ppm of immobilized so well that solid infectious medical waste can be used as a mixture of brick that is safe for the environment.
Estimation of the Calorific Power of a Heating Element

The present paper is aimed to determine the calorific power of a heating source, consisting of a laterally isolated aluminum cylinder, which incorporates an internal electrical resistance for controlling the heat, adjusted to a preset temperature. For this, a glass vessel covering the heating surface and containing a certain mass of water is placed on the cylinder, while the thermal evolution of the water, is monitored by means of a thermocouple probe. We describe a simple model, based on the resolution of the differential equation for the heat balance associated with water, incorporating two gain and loss coefficients (the latter directly associated with the heating power required) and its application to the stationary response achieved at a given time with a steady final temperature. In this way and for different preset temperatures ranging from 30 to 70 ° C (in each case, the actual temperature of the source is determined by infrared thermometer), a table of power values is obtained, whose results can be used in other experiments that require it, such as those related to measures heat conductivities in disk shaped samples.
Exploiting fast matrix multiplication within the level 3 BLAS

The Level 3 BLAS (BLAS3) are a set of specifications of FORTRAN 77 subprograms for carrying out matrix multiplications and the solution of triangular systems with multiple right-hand sides. They are intended to provide efficient and portable building blocks for linear algebra algorithms on high-performance computers. We describe algorithms for the BLAS3 operations that are asymptotically faster than the conventional ones. These algorithms are based on Strassen's method for fast matrix multiplication, which is now recognized to be a practically useful technique once matrix dimensions exceed about 100. We pay particular attention to the numerical stability of these “fast BLAS3. ” Error bounds are given and their significance is explained and illustrated with the aid of numerical experiments. Our conclusion is that the fast BLAS3, although not as strongly stable as conventional implementations, are stable enough to merit careful consideration in many applications.
[Evaluation of the variability in the susceptibility of Acinetobacter baumannii to tigecycline in the same medium with two methods of quantitative diffusion different commercial].

INTRODUCTION Tigecycline may be a therapeutic alternative for the control of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, although there is no consensus on the cutoffs or susceptibility to the variability of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) according to the culture medium and strips for the antibiogram against this microorganism by quantitative diffusion method. Therefore, the objective was to verify this variability and propose epsilometer test strip that more closely resemble to the standard method. MATERIAL AND METHODS 38 strains of A. baumannii were selected and evaluated their susceptibility to tigecycline with two different commercial strips (E-TEST and Liofilchem). MICs were compared with those obtained by the standard technique of microdilution broth. RESULTS MICs obtained by the Liofilchem strip were more similar to standard method than those obtained by E-TEST strips. CONCLUSION In the two studied strips, higher MICs to those obtained by the standard method were observed leading to false-positive tigecicline resistance in many cases. However, the Liofilchem strip showed the results more closely resemble to the standard method.
Local-to-global extensions of representations of fundamental groups

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A Novel Two-stage Framework for Extracting Opinionated Sentences from News Articles

This paper presents a novel two-stage framework to extract opinionated sentences from a given news article. In the first stage, Na¨ ive Bayes classifier by utilizing the local features assigns a score to each sentence - the score signifies the probability of the sentence to be opinionated. In the second stage, we use this prior within the HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search) schema to exploit the global structure of the article and relation between the sentences. In the HITS schema, the opinionated sentences are treated as Hubs and the facts around these opinions are treated as the Authorities. The algorithm is implemented and evaluated against a set of manually marked data. We show that using HITS significantly improves the precision over the baseline NaBayes classifier. We also argue that the proposed method actually discovers the underlying structure of the article, thus extracting various opinions, grouped with supporting facts as well as other supporting opinions from the article.
Cytokine Expression of Microscopic Colitis Including Interleukin-17

Background/Aims Microscopic colitis is characterized by chronic watery diarrhea with specific pathological changes that can be diagnosed by microscopic examination. We performed immunohistochemical analysis of proinflammatory cytokines to investigate the pathogenic mechanism of microscopic colitis. Methods This study consisted of six patients with lymphocytic colitis, six patients with collagenous colitis, and six patients with functional diarrhea but normal pathology. We performed an immunohistochemical analysis of the colonic mucosal biopsies to assess the expression of cyclo-oxygenase-2, interleukin-17, nuclear factor-κB, interferon-γ, inducible nitric oxide synthase, and tumor necrosis factor-α. We compared the quantity score of immunohistochemical staining among the groups. Results The microscopic colitis group showed significantly higher expression of cyclo-oxygenase-2, interleukin-17, nuclear factor-κB, and interferon-γ compared with the control group. Cytokine expression was similar between collagenous colitis and lymphocytic colitis. However, the expression of cyclo-oxygenase-2 was higher in collagenous colitis. Conclusions Proinflammatory cytokines, including interleukin-17 and interferon-γ, are highly expressed in microscopic colitis. The expression of cyclo-oxygenase-2 was higher in collagenous colitis than in lymphocytic colitis. This study is the first on interleukin-17 expression in microscopic colitis patients.
DNA gyrase binds to the family of prokaryotic repetitive extragenic palindromic sequences.

A family of repetitive extragenic palindromic (REP) sequences is composed of hundreds of copies distributed throughout the chromosome. Their palindromic nature and conservation suggested that they are specifically recognized by a protein(s). We have identified DNA gyrase [DNA topoisomerase (ATP-hydrolysing), EC 5.99. 1.3] as one of the REP-binding proteins. Gyrase has at least a 10-fold higher affinity for DNA containing REP sequences than for DNA not containing REP sequences. Binding effectiveness correlates directly with the number of REP sequences in the DNA. DNase I footprinting shows that gyrase protects 205 base pairs on a REP-containing DNA fragment enclosing the REP sequences. In agreement with the above results, a comparison of the REP consensus sequence with the sequence of previously identified pBR322 "strong" gyrase cleavage sites reveals a high degree of homology. Because REP sequences are numerous and found throughout the genome, we suggest they have physiological functions mediated through their interaction with gyrase, such as being sites of action for the maintenance of DNA supercoiling. In addition, we speculate that these interactions may be of a structural nature, such as involvement in the higher-order structure of the bacterial chromosome.
Design of adaptive steganographic schemes for digital images

Most steganographic schemes for real digital media embed messages by minimizing a suitably defined distortion function. In practice, this is often realized by syndrome codes which offer near-optimal rate-distortion performance. However, the distortion functions are designed heuristically and the resulting steganographic algorithms are thus suboptimal. In this paper, we present a practical framework for optimizing the parameters of additive distortion functions to minimize statistical detectability. We apply the framework to digital images in both spatial and DCT domain by first defining a rich parametric model which assigns a cost of making a change at every cover element based on its neighborhood. Then, we present a practical method for optimizing the parameters with respect to a chosen detection metric and feature space. We show that the size of the margin between support vectors in soft-margin SVMs leads to a fast detection metric and that methods minimizing the margin tend to be more secure w.r. t. blind steganalysis. The parameters obtained by the Nelder-Mead simplex-reflection algorithm for spatial and DCT-domain images are presented and the new embedding methods are tested by blind steganalyzers utilizing various feature sets. Experimental results show that as few as 80 images are sufficient for obtaining good candidates for parameters of the cost model, which allows us to speed up the parameter search.
Unsupervised Analysis for Decipherment Problems

We study a number of natural language decipherment problems using unsupervised learning. These include letter substitution ciphers, character code conversion, phonetic decipherment, and word-based ciphers with relevance to machine translation. Straightforward unsupervised learning techniques most often fail on the first try, so we describe techniques for understanding errors and significantly increasing performance.
Exemplar-based production of prosody: evidence from segment and syllable durations

We present results from experiments on the temporal properties of prosodic events, providing evidence that accumulations of exemplars implicitly define perceptual target regions in prosody production. We argue that z-scores of segment and syllable durations are the relevant perceptual dimension of these regions. To support this hypothesis, we present experimental results confirming that realizations of segments and syllables in different prosodic contexts show significantly different z-score distributions. Further experiments show that the relationship between syllable z-scores and the z-scores of the corresponding segments is significantly stronger for infrequent than for frequent syllables. We claim that this is due to the fact that infrequent syllables have to be assembled from smaller units because they are not represented by enough exemplars to establish a syllable-level target region.
Robust Joint Feature Weights Learning Framework

Feature selection, selecting the most informative subset of features, is an important research direction in dimension reduction. The combinatorial search in feature selection is essentially a binary optimization problem, known as NP hard, which can be alleviated by learning feature weights. Traditional feature weights algorithms rely on heuristic search path. These approaches neglect the interaction and dependency between different features, and thus provide no guarantee for optimality. In this paper, we propose a novel joint feature weights learning framework, which imposes both nonnegative and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{2,1}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="yan-ieq1-2515613.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-norm constraints on the feature weights matrix. The nonnegative property ensures the physical significance of learned feature weights. Meanwhile, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{2,1}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="yan-ieq2-2515613.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-norm minimization achieves joint selection of the most relevant features by exploiting the whole feature space. More importantly, an efficient iterative algorithm with proved convergence is designed to optimize a convex objective function. Using this framework as a platform, we propose new supervised and unsupervised joint feature selection methods. Particularly, in the proposed unsupervised method, nonnegative graph embedding is developed to exploit intrinsic structure in the weighted space. Comparative experiments on seven real-world data sets indicate that our framework is both effective and efficient.
Identification and Functional Mapping of the Mycoplasma fermentans P29 Adhesin

ABSTRACT Initial adherence interactions between mycoplasmas and mammalian cells are important for host colonization and may contribute to subsequent pathogenic processes. Despite significant progress toward understanding the role of specialized, complex tip structures in the adherence of some mycoplasmas, particularly those that infect humans, less is known about adhesins through which other mycoplasmas of this host bind to diverse cell types, even though simpler surface components are likely to be involved. We show by flow cytometric analysis that a soluble recombinant fusion protein (FP29), representing the abundant P29 surface lipoprotein of Mycoplasma fermentans, binds human HeLa cells and inhibits M. fermentans binding to these cells, in both a quantitative and a saturable manner, whereas analogous fusion proteins representing other mycoplasma surface proteins did not. Constructs representing nested N- or C-terminal truncations of FP29 allowed initial mapping of this specific adherence function to a central region of the P29 sequence containing a 36-amino-acid disulfide loop. A derivative of FP29 containing a mutation converting one participating Cys to Ser, precluding intrachain disulfide bond formation, retained full activity. Together these results suggest that the direct interaction of M. fermentans with a ligand on the HeLa cell surface involves a limited segment of the P29 surface lipoprotein and requires neither the disulfide bond nor the contribution of adjacent portions of the protein. Earlier results indicating phase-variable display of monoclonal antibody surface epitopes on P29, now recognized to be outside this ligand binding region, raise the possibility that variation of mycoplasma surface architecture might alter the presentation of the binding region and the adherence phenotype. Preliminary results further indicated that FP29 could inhibit binding to HeLa cells by Mycoplasma hominis, a distinct human mycoplasma species displaying the phase-variable adhesin Vaa, but not that by Mycoplasma capricolum, an organism infecting caprine species. This result raises the additional, testable possibility that a common host cell ligand for two human mycoplasma species may be recognized through structurally dissimilar adhesins that undergo phase variation by two distinct mechanisms, governing protein expression (Vaa) or surface masking (P29).
Strategies of Conflict in Coexisting Streaming Overlays

In multimedia applications such as IPTV, it is natural to accommodate multiple coexisting peer-to-peer streaming overlays, corresponding to channels of programming. With coexisting streaming overlays, one wonders how these overlays may efficiently share the available upload bandwidth on peers. In order to satisfy the required streaming rate in each overlay, as well as to minimize streaming costs. In this paper, we seek to design simple, effective and decentralized strategies to resolve conflicts among coexisting streaming overlays. Since such strategies of conflict are game theoretic in nature, we characterize them as a decentralized collection of dynamic auction games, in which downstream peers submit bids for bandwidth at the upstream peers. With extensive theoretical analysis and performance evaluation, we show that the outcome of these local games is an optimal topology for each overlay that minimizes streaming costs. These overlay topologies evolve and adapt to peer dynamics, fairly share peer upload bandwidth, and can be prioritized.
Concordance measures of a new class of bivariate Copula

We study the concordance measures Kendall's σ and Spearman's ρ of a new class of bivariate Copulas. Taking the relief factors of debris flow of drainage height difference and cutting degree for the example, we calculate the concordance measures σ and ρ of the two relief factors, with the relationship of them can be better prepared to that of the new class of Copulas. Furthermore, the value ranges of σ and ρ in the values of the four parameters are discussed to set out a few specific Copulas, which can be better fitting to the dependence structure of drainage height difference and cutting degree.
Improving Output Performance of a Z-Source Sparse Matrix Converter Under Unbalanced Input-Voltage Conditions

In this paper, we present a novel Z-source sparse matrix converter (ZSMC) and a compensation method based on a fuzzy logic controller to compensate unbalanced input voltages. The ZSMC is developed based on the structure of an SMC to reduce the number of unipolar power semiconductor switches and employs a Z-source network to overcome the inherent limitation of the low voltage transfer ratio of conventional matrix converters. Although the ZSMC is a two-stage converter, it directly connects between a source and a load through a Z-source network, which is designed to have smaller passive components as the only purpose is voltage boosting. Therefore, the output of the ZSMC is directly affected by disturbances of the input-voltage source. The operational principle of the ZSMC is described and its modulation strategy is explained. Simulation and experimental results are shown to verify the feasibility of the ZSMC and its compensation method.
Effect of asymmetric terminal structures of short RNA duplexes on the RNA interference activity and strand selection

Short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are valuable reagents for sequence-specific inhibition of gene expression via the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway. Although it has been proposed that the relative thermodynamic stability at the 5′-ends of siRNAs plays a crucial role in siRNA strand selection, we demonstrate here that a character of the 2-nt 3′-overhang of siRNAs is the predominant determinant of which strand participates in the RNAi pathway. We show that siRNAs with a unilateral 2-nt 3′-overhang on the antisense strand are more effective than siRNAs with 3′-overhangs at both ends, due to preferential loading of the antisense strand into the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC). Regardless of the relative thermodynamic stabilities at the ends of siRNAs, overhang-containing strands are predominantly selected as the guide strand; whereas, relative stability markedly influences opposite strand selection. Moreover, we show that sense strand modifications, such as deletions or DNA substitutions, of siRNAs with unilateral overhang on the antisense strand have no negative effect on the antisense strand selection, but may improve RNAi potency. Our findings provide useful guidelines for the design of potent siRNAs and contribute to understanding the crucial factors in determining strand selection in mammalian cells.
Fatigue influences the dynamic stability of the torso

Fatigue in the extensor muscles of the torso affects neuromuscular recruitment and control of the spine. The goal of this study was to test whether fatigue influences stability of dynamic torso movements. A controlled laboratory experiment measured the change in the maximum finite-time Lyapunov exponent, λmax, before and after fatigue of the extensor muscles. Non-linear analyses were used to compute stability from the embedding dimension and Lyapunov exponent recorded during repetitive dynamic trunk flexion tasks. Torso extensor muscles were fatigued to 60% of their unfatigued isometric maximum voluntary exertion force then stability was re-measured. Independent variables included fatigue, task asymmetry and lower-limb constraint. λmax values increased with fatigue suggesting poorer dynamic stability when fatigued. Embedding dimension declined with fatigue indicating reduced dynamic complexity when fatigued. Fatigue-related changes in spinal stability may contribute to the risk of low-back injury during fatiguing occupational lifting tasks. The findings reported here indicate that one mechanism by which fatigue contributes to low back disorders may be spinal instability. This information may contribute to the development of ergonomic countermeasures to help prevent low back disorders.