Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of neurofibromatosis 1 in German children at elementary school enrollment.

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of neurofibromatosis 1 (NF1) among 6-year-old children in Germany. SETTING AND PATIENTS A total of 152819 children aged 6 years in 6 German states were screened for NF1 during routine medical examinations at elementary school enrollment in cooperation with local health departments in 2000 and 2001. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE The prevalence of NF1 among 6-year-old German children was estimated to be 1:2996 (95% confidence interval, 1:2260 to 1:3984). RESULTS Fifty-one NF1 cases were identified and confirmed by evaluation by appropriate medical specialists. Seven other children were found to have multiple cafe au lait spots without other apparent features of NF1. A minimum estimate of the crude prevalence was 3.0 per 10 000 (95% confidence interval, 2.3-4.0 per 10 000 population). The incidence of NF1 in this population was probably in the range of 30 to 38 cases per 100 000 live births. CONCLUSION Our study obtained a nearly unbiased birth incidence of NF1 of approximately 1 in 2600 to 1 in 3000 and demonstrates that NF1 can be diagnosed by age 6 years in most cases by routine physical examination with special attention to the disease-associated skin stigmata.
GABAB receptor‐mediated inhibition of Ca2+ currents and synaptic transmission in cultured rat hippocampal neurones.

1. The effects of activation of GABAB receptors on Ca2+ currents (ICa) were investigated by application of whole‐cell patch‐clamp techniques to pyramidal neurones and non‐pyramidal interneurones from the rat hippocampus grown in cell culture. 2. (+/‐)‐Baclofen (10 microM) reduced ICa evoked in pyramidal neurones at 0 mV from a holding potential of ‐80 mV by 33 +/‐ 3%. Inhibition could be observed at the peak of ICa with significant inhibition still present after 200 ms at 0 mV. When Ba2+ was used as the charge carrier (IBa) baclofen inhibited 28 +/‐ 3% of the current at ‐20 mV from a holding potential of ‐80 mV. The GABAB receptor antagonist 2‐OH‐saclofen (50‐200 microM) blocked the actions of baclofen. 3. The selective Ca2+ channel blocker, omega‐conotoxin fraction GVIA (omega‐CgTX), was used to characterize the Ca2+ currents inhibited by baclofen. omega‐CgTX (5 microM) blocked 24 +/‐ 3% of IBa. Following block of the omega‐CgTX‐sensitive current, baclofen inhibited significantly less current than under control conditions. 4. Addition of the dihydropyridine Ca2+ channel antagonist nimodipine (1 microM) inhibited 18 +/‐ 5% of ICa at 0 mV from a holding potential of ‐80 mV and 44 +/‐ 9% from a holding potential of ‐40 mV. In addition, nimodipine partially occluded subsequent responses to application of baclofen. 5. In the presence of both 5 microM‐omega‐CgTX and 200 nM‐nimodipine, responses to baclofen were almost completely blocked at depolarized holding potentials where the dihydropyridines are most effective. 6. Inclusion of 500 microM‐guanosine 5'‐O‐(3‐thiotriphosphate) (GTP‐gamma‐S) in the patch pipette enhanced the response to a subsaturating concentration of baclofen and rendered the response irreversible. Subsequent addition of the adenosine receptor agonist 2‐Cl‐adenosine (2‐CA) (1 microM; which also reduces ICa under control conditions) was without effect, suggesting that these two receptor‐effector pathways converge. 7. The actions of baclofen on ICa were blocked by pre‐treatment of the cultures with pertussis toxin (250 ng/ml). 8. Baclofen also inhibited ICa in non‐pyramidal neurones from the hippocampus, but was slightly less effective. 9. Baclofen reduced both excitatory‐ and inhibitory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs and IPSCs) recorded as a consequence of extracellular stimulation of presynaptic neurones. This action was blocked by 2‐OH‐saclofen (200 microM) and also by pretreatment of the cultures with pertussis toxin. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Robust localisation of multiple speakers exploiting head movements and multi-conditional training of binaural cues

This paper addresses the problem of localising multiple competing speakers in the presence of room reverberation, where sound sources can be positioned at any azimuth on the horizontal plane. To reduce the amount of front-back confusions which can occur due to the similarity of interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs) in the front and rear hemifield, a machine hearing system is presented which combines supervised learning of binaural cues using multi-conditional training (MCT) with a head movement strategy. A systematic evaluation showed that this approach substantially reduced the amount of front-back confusions in challenging acoustic scenarios. Moreover, the system was able to generalise to a variety of different acoustic conditions not seen during training.
Helper threads via virtual multithreading on an experimental itanium® 2 processor-based platform

Helper threading is a technology to accelerate a program by exploiting a processor's multithreading capability to run ``assist'' threads. Previous experiments on hyper-threaded processors have demonstrated significant speedups by using helper threads to prefetch hard-to-predict delinquent data accesses. In order to apply this technique to processors that do not have built-in hardware support for multithreading, we introduce virtual multithreading (VMT), a novel form of switch-on-event user-level multithreading, capable of fly-weight multiplexing of event-driven thread executions on a single processor without additional operating system support. The compiler plays a key role in minimizing synchronization cost by judiciously partitioning register usage among the user-level threads. The VMT approach makes it possible to launch dynamic helper thread instances in response to long-latency cache miss events, and to run helper threads in the shadow of cache misses when the main thread would be otherwise stalled.The concept of VMT is prototyped on an Itanium ® 2 processor using features provided by the Processor Abstraction Layer (PAL) firmware mechanism already present in currently shipping processors. On a 4-way MP physical system equipped with VMT-enabled Itanium 2 processors, helper threading via the VMT mechanism can achieve significant performance gains for a diverse set of real-world workloads, ranging from single-threaded workstation benchmarks to heavily multithreaded large scale decision support systems (DSS) using the IBM DB2 Universal Database. We measure a wall-clock speedup of 5.8% to 38.5% for the workstation benchmarks, and 5.0% to 12.7% on various queries in the DSS workload.
Estimating the burden of scrub typhus: A systematic review

Background Scrub typhus is a vector-borne zoonotic disease that can be life-threatening. There are no licensed vaccines, or vector control efforts in place. Despite increasing awareness in endemic regions, the public health burden and global distribution of scrub typhus remains poorly known. Methods We systematically reviewed all literature from public health records, fever studies and reports available on the Ovid MEDLINE, Embase Classic + Embase and EconLit databases, to estimate the burden of scrub typhus since the year 2000. Findings In prospective fever studies from Asia, scrub typhus is a leading cause of treatable non-malarial febrile illness. Sero-epidemiological data also suggest that Orientia tsutsugamushi infection is common across Asia, with seroprevalence ranging from 9.3%–27.9% (median 22.2% IQR 18.6–25.7). A substantial apparent rise in minimum disease incidence (median 4.6/100,000/10 years, highest in China with 11.2/100,000/10 years) was reported through passive national surveillance systems in South Korea, Japan, China, and Thailand. Case fatality risks from areas of reduced drug-susceptibility are reported at 12.2% and 13.6% for South India and northern Thailand, respectively. Mortality reports vary widely around a median mortality of 6.0% for untreated and 1.4% for treated scrub typhus. Limited evidence suggests high mortality in complicated scrub typhus with CNS involvement (13.6% mortality), multi-organ dysfunction (24.1%) and high pregnancy miscarriage rates with poor neonatal outcomes. Interpretation Scrub typhus appears to be a truly neglected tropical disease mainly affecting rural populations, but increasingly also metropolitan areas. Rising minimum incidence rates have been reported over the past 8–10 years from countries with an established surveillance system. A wider distribution of scrub typhus beyond Asia is likely, based on reports from South America and Africa. Unfortunately, the quality and quantity of the available data on scrub typhus epidemiology is currently too limited for any economical, mathematical modeling or mapping approaches.
Kinin- and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor-mediated nitric oxide production in endothelial cells

Abstract Carboxypeptidase cleavage of the C-terminal Arg of kinins generates specific agonists of the B1 receptor. Activation of B1 receptors produces nitric oxide via eNOS in bovine endothelial cells and iNOS in cytokine-stimulated human endothelial cells. Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors are direct agonists of B1 receptors in endothelial cells, although they release NO via a different signaling pathway than peptide ligands in bovine cells. This brief review discusses carboxypeptidase M as a required processing enzyme for generating B1 agonists, how ACE inhibitors and peptide ligands stimulate NO production and the evidence for, as well as some consequences of, the direct activation of B1 receptors by ACE inhibitors.
A study on semantic integration of remote sensing image data based on multi-agent cooperation

The work presented in this paper is an attempt to bridge two co-existing realties: Semantic information and MultiAgent Systems, the aim is to provide multi-domain experts or users with uniform semantic interoperability framework in heterogeneous distributed environment. We focus on the domain Ontology's original data source remote sensing imagery, bridging gap of the high-level semantic information to low-level image features in a domain-ontology and combining it with intelligent agent model which is called Ontology Agent. Based on those technology we provide a novel Multi-Agent Semantic Integration Framework (MASIS), the analysis of its application in different domains shows that the use of intelligent Agent for semantic integration in resolving the heterogeneous information integration and ontology maintained has a good result, it is a new and effective ways for semantic integration.
Cooling flows and the entropy of the intragroup medium

We study steady, homogeneous and subsonic cooling flows in poor clusters of galaxies in light of the recent proposal that radiative cooling of the intracluster gas can explain the observations of the 'entropy floor' and other related X-ray observations. We study a family of cooling flow solutions parametrized by the mass flux rate, and then determine the resulting entropy and the X-ray luminosity. We find that cooling flows with mass flux rates in excess of 1000 M O . yr - 1 are required to explain the observations of entropy and X-ray luminosity. In view of the observed lack of such large flows in rich clusters, our calculations suggest that heating sources are needed, in addition to the effect of radiative cooling, to explain the observations.
Automatic selection of tube potential for radiation dose reduction in CT: a general strategy.

PURPOSE To optimize radiation dose efficiency in CT while maintaining image quality, it is important to select the optimal tube potential. The selection of optimal tube potential, however, is highly dependent on patient size and diagnostic task. The purpose of this work was to develop a general strategy that allows for automatic tube potential selection for each individual patient and each diagnostic task. METHODS The authors propose a general strategy that allows automatic adaptation of the tube potential as a function of patient size and diagnostic task, using a novel index of image quality, "iodine contrast to noise ratio with a noise constraint (iCNR_NC)," to characterize the different image quality requirements by various clinical applications. The relative dose factor (RDF) at each tube potential to achieve a target image quality was then determined as a function of patient size and the noise constraint parameter. A workflow was developed to automatically identify the optimal tube potential that is both dose efficient and practically feasible, incorporating patient size and diagnostic task. An experimental study using a series of semianthropomorphic thoracic phantoms was used to demonstrate how the proposed general strategy can be implemented and how the radiation dose reduction achievable by the tube potential selection depends on phantom sizes and noise constraint parameters. RESULTS The proposed strategy provides a flexible and quantitative way to select the optimal tube potential based on the patient size and diagnostic task. The noise constraint parameter alpha can be adapted for different clinical applications. For example, alpha = 1 for noncontrast routine exams; alpha = 1.1- 1.25 for contrast-enhanced routine exams; and alpha = 1.5-2.0 for CT angiography. For the five thoracic phantoms in the experiment, when alpha = 1, the optimal tube potentials were 80, 100, 100, 120, 120, respectively. The corresponding RDFs (relative to 120 kV) were 78.0%, 90.9%, 95.2%, 100%, and 100%. When alpha = 1.5, the optimal tube potentials were 80, 80, 80, 100, 100, respectively, with corresponding RDFs of 34.7%, 44.7%, 54.7%, 60.8%, and 89.5%. CONCLUSIONS A general strategy to automatically select the most dose efficient tube potential for CT exams was developed that takes into account patient size and diagnostic task. Dependent on the patient size and the selection of noise constraint parameter for different diagnostic tasks, the dose reduction at each tube potential, quantified explicitly with the RDF, varies significantly.
Real time appearance based hand tracking

This paper introduces a real-time method for tracking hands through image sequences. Our method combines efficiently calculated color likelihood maps with a modified version of the maximally stable extremal region (MSER)-tracker. The proposed algorithm allows to robustly track hands through image sequences and additionally provides accurate hand segmentations per frame. Experimental evaluation proves the high accuracy of the segmentation results and a first application for human-computer interaction is presented.
Categorizing chlordecone potential degradation products to explore their 1 environmental fate 2 3

22 Chlordecone (C10Cl10O; CAS number 143-50-0) has been used extensively as an 23 organochlorine insecticide but is nowadays banned and listed on annex A in The 24 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). Although experimental 25 evidences of biodegradation of this compound are scarce, several dechlorination 26 products have been proposed by Dolfing et al. (2012), using Gibbs free energy 27 calculations to explore different potential transformation routes. We here present the 28 results of an in silico classification (TyPol Typology of Pollutants) of chlordecone 29 transformation products (TPs) based on statistical analyses combining several 30 environmental endpoints and structural molecular descriptors. Starting from the list of 31 putative chlordecone TPs and considering available data on degradation routes of other 32 organochlorine compounds, we used different clustering strategies to explore the 33 potential environmental behaviour of putative chlordecone TPs from the knowledge on 34 their molecular descriptors. The method offers the possibility to focus on TPs present in 35 different classes and to infer their environmental fate. Thus, we have deduced some 36 hypothetical trends for the environmental behaviour of TPs of chlordecone assuming 37 that TPs, which were clustered away from chlordecone, would have different 38 environmental fate and ecotoxicological impact compared to chlordecone. Our findings 39 suggest that mono and di-hydrochlordecone, which are TPs of chlordecone often found 40 in contaminated soils, may have similar environmental behaviour in terms of 41 persistence. 42 43
ASU: An Experimental Study on Applying Deep Learning in Twitter Named Entity Recognition.

This paper describes the ASU system submitted in the COLING W-NUT 2016 Twitter Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. We present an experimental study on applying deep learning to extracting named entities (NEs) from tweets. We built two Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models for the task. The first model was built to extract named entities without types while the second model was built to extract and then classify them into 10 fine-grained entity classes. In this effort, we show detailed experimentation results on the effectiveness of word embeddings, brown clusters, part-of-speech (POS) tags, shape features, gazetteers, and local context for the tweet input vector representation to the LSTM model. Also, we present a set of experiments, to better design the network parameters for the Twitter NER task. Our system was ranked the fifth out of ten participants with a final f1-score for the typed classes of 39% and 55% for the non typed ones.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANINGS OF "POSITIVE SPIRITUAL ENVIRONMENT" AND "PLACES TO COMMUNICATE WITH GOD"

The spaces that surround and sustain daily life significantly influence people’s way of thinking, feeling and behaving. They also reflect personal and meaningful aspects of their lives. This study was aimed at investigating conceptions regarding spiritual environments and characteristics of places wherein individuals communicate with God or a “higher power”, seeking to find empirical support to the idea of positive spiritual environments (spiritual contexts that, simultaneously, promote human wellbeing and environmental conservation). Ninety-one undergraduate students participated in the study. The network of spiritual environment generated a network size of 137 words with a core of 28 words. The highest semantic weights were produced by peace, God, tranquility, love, faith, church, pray, harmony, beliefs, wellbeing, happiness, and relaxation. Characteristics of the place wherein people communicate with God produced a network size of 104 words and a core of 27 words. The most important of those words were: church, home, calm, room, quiet, school, sacred, natural, alone, street, prayer, and clean. Few words communicating concern for environmentally conservation behaviors were found within the network.
Sad emotion produces differential attention to emotion congruence targets

The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task is uniquely suited to studying the association between emotion and attention. We conducted an RSVP experiment in which the emotion of the participant (sad and neutral) and the emotional valence of the targets (sad, neutral and happy) were varied to test an emotion-congruent processing hypothesis. We found a significant emotion by target interaction in which the sad targets were identified better in the sad condition than in the neutral condition. The neutral and happy targets were identified equally well regardless of emotion condition. This indicates that experiencing a sad emotion influences changes in attention to sad words but not in attention to happy or neutral words.
Stress and Burnout among Collegiate Tennis Coaches

The purpose of this investigation was to examine stress and burnout among collegiate tennis coaches. Three alternative models of stress-mediated relationships between personal/situational variables (hardiness, coaching issues, competitive level, gender, trait anxiety, initiating and consideration leadership styles) and burnout among men (n = 163) and women (n = 98) collegiate head tennis coaches were examined. Preliminary analysis revealed that the tennis coaches in this investigation were suffering from levels of burnout similar to those of other helping professionals working in higher education (Maslach & Jackson, 1986). A gender-by-competition-level (2 × 2) MANOVA on study variables revealed a significant main effect for gender but not for competition level. The women had a higher tendency than the men did to find coaching issues stressful. Structural equation modeling revealed that the stress-mediation model, also featuring direct effects of personality/dispositional variables on burnout, accounted fo.
SUBTRACTION OF ADDITIVE NOISE FROM CORRUPTED SPEECH FOR ROBUST SPEECH RECOGNITION

There are many sources of acoustical distortion that can degrade the performance of speech recognition systems. For many speech recognition applications the most important source of acoustical distortion is the additive noise. Much research effort in robust speech recognition has been devoted to compensation for the effects of additive noise. In this paper, we will present an approach to remove the additive noise from corrupted speech signal to make speech front-ends immune to additive noise. We address two problems, i.e., noise estimation and noise removal. For noise estimation, we introduce a new method called long-term Fourier estimation. We also discuss how to convert the spectra after subtraction to MFCC-like feature coefficients. We report on experiments on DARPA speech in noisy environments evaluation (SPINE) database to justify the proposed approach. 1. NOISE EFFECT ESTIM ATION If ) (t s is the original clean speech signal, the received speech signal ) (t y is modeled as ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( * ) ( ) ( t n t x t n t h t s t y + = + = (1) where ) (t h is the impulse response of channel distortion and ) (t n the ambient noise. * denotes the convolution operation, and ) (t x the noise-free speech. Speech signal is time-variant and non-stationary. It is usually analyzed on the frame-by-frame basis. For one frame of speech signal, the Eq. (1) is written as ) , ( ) , ( ) ) 1 ( ( ) ( ) , ( t k n t k x k t w t y t k y + = − − = τ (2) where index k denotes the k frame. ) (t w is a window function which only has non-zero values when t is in [0,T]. T is length of the window.τ is the window shift. Assume that the noise in (2) is uncorrelated with speech signal, the power spectrum of the above received speech signal is ) , ( ) , ( ) , ( f k N f k X f k Y + = (3) Compared with speech signal, the effect of noise varies much slowly and is often treated as a stationary process. Hence Eq. (3) can be rewritten as ) ( ) , ( ) , ( f N f k X f k Y + = (4) There has been considerable interest to compensate the noise component in the right hand side of Eq. (4). One technique called spectral subtraction [1] has proved to be an important strategy to cope with additive noise. In general, spectral subtraction approach attempts to achieve an estimate of noise power spectrum during the absence of speech, and then subtracts the estimate from the power spectra of corrupted speech. If the noise estimate is ) ( ˆ f N , the k frame of spectrum, after spectral subtraction, is written as ) ( ) , ( ) , ( f N f k Y f k YSS − = (5) Obviously, this approach assumes that the noise estimate achieved in the absence of speech can represent the noise in the presence of speech. In addition, a good speech signal detector which can distinguish speech segments from non-speech segments is necessary for the method. To avoid a speech signal detector, a continuous spectral subtraction (CSS) was proposed [2-4]. In this approach, the average of N consecutive frames of short-term power spectra is used as a noise estimate, i. e. ,