Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal assessment of noise exposure in a cohort of construction workers.

OBJECTIVES To address questions surrounding noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) from variable noise, we have been evaluating noise exposures and changes in hearing in a prospective cohort of construction workers (representing eight trades) and controls. In this paper, we develop and explore several long-term exposure estimates for cohort members. METHODS We followed cohort members between 1999 and 2009 and interviewed them approximately annually to obtain a detailed work history for the previous subject-interval while also collecting tests of hearing sensitivity. Over the same period, we also collected a sample of full-shift average noise measurements and activity information. We used data from these two sources to develop various exposure estimates for each subject for specific subject intervals and for the duration of the study. These estimates included work duration, trade-mean (TM)-equivalent continuous exposure level (L(EQ)), task-based (TB) L(EQ), a hybrid L(EQ) combining TB and subjective information, and an estimate of noise exposure 'peakiness'. RESULTS Of the 456 subjects enrolled in the study, 333 had at least 2 interviews and met several inclusion criteria related to hearing sensitivity. Depending on the metric used, between one-third and three-quarters of 1310 measured full-shift noise exposures exceeded permissible and recommended exposure limits. Hybrid and TB exposure estimates demonstrated much greater variability than TM estimates. Work duration and estimates of exposure peakiness showed poor agreement with average exposures, suggesting that these metrics evaluate different aspects of exposure and may have different predictive value for estimating NIHL. CONCLUSIONS Construction workers in the cohort had subject-interval and study-average exposures which present a substantial potential risk of NIHL. In a subsequent paper, we will use these estimates to evaluate the exposure-response relationship between noise and NIHL.
On The (Un)importance of Working Memory in Speech-in-Noise Processing for Listeners with Normal Hearing Thresholds

With the advent of cognitive hearing science, increased attention has been given to individual differences in cognitive functioning and their explanatory power in accounting for inter-listener variability in the processing of speech in noise (SiN). The psychological construct that has received much interest in recent years is working memory. Empirical evidence indeed confirms the association between WM capacity (WMC) and SiN identification in older hearing-impaired listeners. However, some theoretical models propose that variations in WMC are an important predictor for variations in speech processing abilities in adverse perceptual conditions for all listeners, and this notion has become widely accepted within the field. To assess whether WMC also plays a role when listeners without hearing loss process speech in adverse listening conditions, we surveyed published and unpublished studies in which the Reading-Span test (a widely used measure of WMC) was administered in conjunction with a measure of SiN identification, using sentence material routinely used in audiological and hearing research. A meta-analysis revealed that, for young listeners with audiometrically normal hearing, individual variations in WMC are estimated to account for, on average, less than 2% of the variance in SiN identification scores. This result cautions against the (intuitively appealing) assumption that individual variations in WMC are predictive of SiN identification independently of the age and hearing status of the listener.
Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation in Preschoolers With ADHD: Identification, Comorbidity, and Interpersonal Functioning

Objective: This study aims to develop an age-adjusted Child Behavior Checklist- (CBCL) and Teacher Report Form (TRF)-based method for the detection of deficient emotional self-regulation (DESR) in preschoolers with ADHD and to assess its incidence, comorbidities, and consequences on interpersonal functioning. Method: Eighty-six ADHD preschoolers and 104 controls were assessed using CBCL, TRF/1½ to 5, Psychiatric Interview With Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment, Leiter-R, and ADHD rating scales. Results: Greatest sensitivity and specificity were obtained applying slightly lower threshold scores compared with school-age children (CBCL: Anxiety/Depression [A/D] ≥ 59, Attention Problems [AP] ≥ 60, Aggression Behaviors [AB] ≥ 58; TRF: A/D ≥ 59, AP ≥ 60, AB ≥ 60). DESR was detected in 33/86 (38.4%) and in 16/54 (29.6%) ADHD preschoolers versus 2/104 (1.9%) controls using CBCL and TRF, respectively. DESR is associated with significantly greater comorbidity and impairment in interpersonal functioning. Conclusion: Among ADHD preschoolers, DESR (a) requires lower CBCL and TRF threshold scores for detection, compared with school-age children, (b) displays similar incidence rates, and (c) is associated with enhanced psychiatric comorbidity and interpersonal difficulties.
‘I Can Accept My Child is Transsexual but if I Ever See Him in a Dress I’ll Hit Him’: Dilemmas in Parenting a Transgendered Adolescent

In this article I describe the accounts of a group of parents with transgendered adolescents. I look specifically at how the parents try to build an intelligible story of the young people’s gender identity and how their story shapes their coping strategies. For the qualitative study on which this article is based, I interviewed adolescents with a well-established cross-gender identification and their parents from families referred to a specialist NHS service. The first-person reports were analysed using grounded theory methodology. There were a number of suggestive findings. First, communication about gender identity issues within the family and outside was handled with enormous care; second, it was clear that these parents are aware that their response to the gender problems is a deeply moral issue; third, there was an iterative relationship between the activities of making-meaning and accepting (or not) the child’s claims, and a similar interaction between the activity of meaning-making and the tasks of practical coping; fourth, a belief in biological causation of transgenderism was associated with a more benign view of the adolescent; and fifth, there were interesting differences between the accounts of mothers and fathers. The findings of the study hopefully illuminate clinical encounters, stimulate further research into how families cope with this unusual predicament and encourage reflexive thinking in practitioners in related fields.
BLSSpeller: exhaustive comparative discovery of conserved cis-regulatory elements

Motivation: The accurate discovery and annotation of regulatory elements remains a challenging problem. The growing number of sequenced genomes creates new opportunities for comparative approaches to motif discovery. Putative binding sites are then considered to be functional if they are conserved in orthologous promoter sequences of multiple related species. Existing methods for comparative motif discovery usually rely on pregenerated multiple sequence alignments, which are difficult to obtain for more diverged species such as plants. As a consequence, misaligned regulatory elements often remain undetected. Results: We present a novel algorithm that supports both alignment-free and alignment-based motif discovery in the promoter sequences of related species. Putative motifs are exhaustively enumerated as words over the IUPAC alphabet and screened for conservation using the branch length score. Additionally, a confidence score is established in a genome-wide fashion. In order to take advantage of a cloud computing infrastructure, the MapReduce programming model is adopted. The method is applied to four monocotyledon plant species and it is shown that high-scoring motifs are significantly enriched for open chromatin regions in Oryza sativa and for transcription factor binding sites inferred through protein-binding microarrays in O.sativa and Zea mays. Furthermore, the method is shown to recover experimentally profiled ga2ox1-like KN1 binding sites in Z.mays. Availability and implementation: BLSSpeller was written in Java. Source code and manual are available at http://bioinformatics.intec.ugent.be/blsspeller Contact: Klaas.Vandepoele@psb.vib-ugent.be or jan.fostier@intec.ugent.be Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Candidate genes and functional dyspepsia

Dear Editors, We read with great interest the paper from the Utrecht group on the candidate genes associated with functional dyspepsia and were pleased to see that the results confirm the association with GNb3 TT homozygous which we first described. There are two points raised in the discussion on which we wish to comment. Firstly, the authors appropriately raised the question as to whether our small control group may have led to a type I error and a spurious association with GNb3 polymorphisms. We have, therefore, reanalysed the data from patients with functional dyspepsia using the larger healthy control group (n = 152 instead of n = 39). This analysis confirms the significant associations of GNb3 with meal unrelated dyspepsia as previously reported: CC allele odds ratio 4.0 (95% CI 1.3, 12.4) relative to TC; and for TT, odds ratio 7.2 (95% CI 1.8, 29.0) relative to TC. Secondly, the authors question the likelihood that the same phenotype is associated with both CC and TT alleles. Given the fact that the dyspepsia phenotype is diverse and its pathophysiology multifactorial such that diverse functions (e.g. accelerated or delayed gastric emptying) are associated with functional dyspepsia, we would suggest that the association with both CC and TT alleles cannot be dismissed on the basis of a ‘common phenotype’ of dyspepsia. We have recently shown that GNb3 T allele is associated with lower fasting gastric volume, which is one of the factors that predicts a portion of the variance in the symptoms of patients with dyspepsia.
To Build or Not To Build: Addressing Facilities Needs While Controlling Costs

hen trustees, presidents, and senior college administrators meet, one topic dominates the conversation: how to keep education quality high and costs down. To keep quality high, college leaders need to have strong faculties and state-of-the-art facilities for teaching and research. Quality counts but it also costs, and that’s where the pressures come in: Institutions need to determine how best to balance investments in quality, such as modern facilities that will attract and retain students and faculty, and at the same time keep costs in check.
Personal characteristics, resources, and environment as predictors of business survival

Although new venture success is frequently investigated in entrepreneurship, economics, and psychology, the studies published to date vary widely in their theoretical basis, study design, and research methodology. Based on organizational life-cycle theory and interactional personality theory, this longitudinal study analyses predictors of venture survival. Of 354 small business owners observed over 8 years, 283 (79.9%) still had active businesses at the end of the observation period. A survey instrument was developed to measure the relevant characteristics of the entrepreneurs, their resources, and the environment. Logistic regression models predicting medium- and long-term business survival included these characteristics and the interactions between them entered stepwise as blocks. Startup decisions (line of business, type, and size of planned business) were used as control variables. Much of the variance is explained by our research model (Nagelkerkes R 2 = .36 for survival at 4 years, and .33 for survival at 8 years). Although long-term business survival is predicted by the individual variables of startup size and social capital (networks), a larger part of the variance is explained by environment/resource interactions.
All White Mate? Cricket and Race in Oz

This study considers the question of why Australian cricket is still seen as a sport dominated by the white population. It takes as its starting point the riots on Cronulla beach at the end of 2005 to highlight a country that holds a number of conflicting cultural beliefs. That these beliefs can place barriers to playing cricket is shown by an examination of the Aborigine populations' relationship to the sport, looking at why they were initially encouraged to play cricket, and then why they stopped. A look at immigration patterns confirms Australia as a diverse nation that has to come to terms with the inclusion of a number of minority groups, and concludes that it will ignore these groups at its peril. To claim that a group of people share a common ancestry may be scientifically justifiable; to claim that they share inherent virtues or vices which make them inherently better or worse than other people is quite unwarranted. [1]
Death Threat, Concern, Anxiety, Fear and Acceptance in Death-Involved and ‘At-Risk’ Groups

The Death Threat Index and four scales focussed on death concern, anxiety, fear and acceptance were applied to three groups: a death-involved group comprised of funeral directors, mortuary attendants and nurses; an ‘at-risk’ group comprised of parachutists and hang-gliders; and a control group whose contact with death was no more than a past and not recent bereavement. Consideration of the data focussed on the performance of the Index and the four scales in the Australian context, and on the effects of ‘proximity’ to death and dying on scores of the five measures. The Index was found to be problematic, though three of the four scales proved to have satisfactory reliability and validity. There were no significant differences on any measure across the three groups (though trends were in three cases as predicted), and only minor variations on the measures for ad hoc groups defined in terms of choices of options for questions concerning religious belief and belief in an afterlife; while self-report of death orientation was appropriately related to each measure.
ToA estimation system for efficient cycling in Smart Cities

Smartphone sensing enables efficient Time-of-Arrival (ToA) estimation of moving cyclists towards traffic lights in a Smart City. GPS sensors locate the actual position of cyclists on their way to traffic lights. Since the constant use of GPS sensors drain the battery of the smartphones there is a need of efficient energy consumption techniques. In this paper we propose a velocity based ToA estimation system to face the GPS energy consumption inefficiency. In addition we aim to enable efficient cycling in Smart Cities by turning traffic lights to green proactively thus achieving overall citizen's wellbeing.
Convolutive blind separation of non-stationary sources

Acoustic signals recorded simultaneously in a reverberant environment can be described as sums of differently convolved sources. The task of source separation is to identify the multiple channels and possibly to invert those in order to obtain estimates of the underlying sources. We tackle the problem by explicitly exploiting the nonstationarity of the acoustic sources. Changing cross correlations at multiple times give a sufficient set of constraints for the unknown channels. A least squares optimization allows us to estimate a forward model, identifying thus the multipath channel. In the same manner we can find an FIR backward model, which generates well separated model sources. Furthermore, for more than three channels we have sufficient conditions to estimate underlying additive sensor noise powers. We show the good performance in a real room environments and demonstrate the algorithm's utility for automatic speech recognition.
Les familles pauvres sont-elles plus mal traitées en France ? Une comparaison des revenus minima garantis dans douze pays européens

Le fondement des revenus minima garantis, quand ils existent, est d’assurer un montant minimum de ressources monétaires aux membres de la société. Par construction, ils sont attribués aux ménages avec peu ou pas de revenus et constituent un élément central des politiques de lutte contre la pauvreté. Deux arguments principaux sont cependant fréquemment opposés si ce n’est au principe même de ces mécanismes, tout du moins au niveau considéré trop élevé des ressources garanties. L’un est relatif au coût de ces dispositifs pour les finances publiques. L’autre est relatif aux effets pervers ou de désincitation, ce qui revient à aller chercher du côté de l’offre de travail l’explication principale à l’exclusion du marché du travail, dit autrement à imputer l’existence même de personnes pauvres et privées d’emploi à la trop grande générosité de l’assistance couplée à l’inclination à la paresse ou « préférence pour le loisir ». Ces objections expliquent sans doute que, malgré une opulence jamais atteinte auparavant, nos sociétés accordent de faibles montants. Les barèmes peuvent être, comme c’est le cas en France, très en dessous des seuils de pauvreté monétaires même lorsque le seuil privilégié par les instituts statistiques et les pouvoirs publics est parmi les plus faibles à disposition sur le marché (Concialdi, 2002). En France, le niveau des minima sociaux est notoirement connu pour être insuffisant pour permettre à un ménage bénéficiaire de se nourrir, se vêtir, se loger, éduquer ses enfants, bref de vivre décemment voire de survivre longtemps
Treatment of adolescent drug abusers.

Adolescent drug abuse is acknowledged to be a major national problem, yet little is known about adolescent drug treatment programs and their effectiveness. There is, however, a growing body of knowledge on the correlates of adolescent drug use and the kinds of problems presented by adolescents entering treatment. The problems are complex (e.g., involved family situations, multiple drug use patterns, psychological and socioeconomic factors, and the challenge of the adolescent phase of development), and the resources are scarce. Some modest attempts have been made to analyze existing data sets and to evaluate promising treatment approaches and models directed to adolescent drug abusers, and the findings are encouraging. More needs to be done in terms of developing, testing, and evaluating treatment approaches for adolescent substance abusers.
Peace as (Low) Risk

** Prof. J. Niezing is Director of the Center for Polemology at the Free University of Brussels. 1. Peace research as a dependent &dquo;ariabl<> As far as peace research is concerned, the law of demand and supply functions in a rather perversive manner: the more it is needed, the less it is tolerated. Peace research may be viewed as Sit«atinnsgob«clon: its scope and nature reflect its encompassing political situation. The growth of peace research took place in a period of relatively low political tension, officially labelled as detell1e. In a previous stage, peace research was hardly tolerated as is the case nowadays. Thus, part of the ’cold war syndrome’ is the relative low level of growth as regards the institutionalization of peace research. The nature of peace research retlects the political situation as well. During its first
Fixed Rank Kriging for Cellular Coverage Analysis

Coverage planning and optimization is one of the most crucial tasks for a radio network operator. Efficient coverage optimization requires accurate coverage estimation. This estimation relies on geo-located field measurements that are gathered today during highly expensive drive tests (DT) and will be reported in the near future by users’ mobile devices thanks to the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) minimization of drive tests (MDT) feature. This feature consists of an automatic reporting of the radio measurements associated with the geographic location of the user's mobile device. Such a solution is still costly in terms of battery consumption and signaling overhead. Therefore, predicting the coverage on a location where no measurements are available remains a key and challenging task. This paper describes a powerful tool that gives an accurate coverage prediction on the whole area of interest: It builds a coverage map by spatially interpolating geo-located measurements using the Kriging technique. This paper focuses on the reduction of the computational complexity of the Kriging algorithm by applying fixed rank Kriging (FRK). The performance evaluation of the FRK algorithm both on simulated measurements and real field measurements shows a good tradeoff between prediction efficiency and computational complexity. In order to go a step further toward the operational application of the proposed algorithm, a multicellular use case is studied. Simulation results show good performance in terms of coverage prediction and detection of the best serving cell.
Empirical comparisons of various voting methods in bagging

Finding effective methods for developing an ensemble of models has been an active research area of large-scale data mining in recent years. Models learned from data are often subject to some degree of uncertainty, for a variety of resoans. In classification, ensembles of models provide a useful means of averaging out error introduced by individual classifiers, hence reducing the generalization error of prediction.The plurality voting method is often chosen for bagging, because of its simplicity of implementation. However, the plurality approach to model reconciliation is ad-hoc. There are many other voting methods to choose from, including the anti-plurality method, the plurality method with elimination, the Borda count method, and Condorcet's method of pairwise comparisons. Any of these could lead to a better method for reconciliation.In this paper, we analyze the use of these voting methods in model reconciliation. We present empirical results comparing performance of these voting methods when applied in bagging. These results include some surprises, and among other things suggest that (1) plurality is not always the best voting method; (2) the number of classes can affect the performance of voting methods; and (3) the degree of dataset noise can affect the performance of voting methods. While it is premature to make final judgments about specific voting methods, the results of this work raise interesting questions, and they open the door to the application of voting theory in classification theory.
Serum CEACAM1 Elevation Correlates with Melanoma Progression and Failure to Respond to Adoptive Cell Transfer Immunotherapy

Malignant melanoma is a devastating disease whose incidences are continuously rising. The recently approved antimelanoma therapies carry new hope for metastatic patients for the first time in decades. However, the clinical management of melanoma is severely hampered by the absence of effective screening tools. The expression of the CEACAM1 adhesion molecule on melanoma cells is a strong predictor of poor prognosis. Interestingly, a melanoma-secreted form of CEACAM1 (sCEACAM1) has recently emerged as a potential tumor biomarker. Here we add novel evidences supporting the prognostic role of serum CEACAM1 by using a mice xenograft model of human melanoma and showing a correlation between serum CEACAM1 and tumor burden. Moreover, we demonstrate that serum CEACAM1 is elevated over time in progressive melanoma patients who fail to respond to immunotherapy as opposed to responders and stable disease patients, thus proving a correlation between sCEACAM1, response to treatment, and clinical deterioration.