Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genomic prediction of reproduction traits for Merino sheep

Economically important reproduction traits in sheep, such as number of lambs weaned and litter size, are expressed only in females and later in life after most selection decisions are made, which makes them ideal candidates for genomic selection. Accurate genomic predictions would lead to greater genetic gain for these traits by enabling accurate selection of young rams with high genetic merit. The aim of this study was to design and evaluate the accuracy of a genomic prediction method for female reproduction in sheep using daughter trait deviations (DTD) for sires and ewe phenotypes (when individual ewes were genotyped) for three reproduction traits: number of lambs born (NLB), litter size (LSIZE) and number of lambs weaned. Genomic best linear unbiased prediction (GBLUP), BayesR and pedigree BLUP analyses of the three reproduction traits measured on 5340 sheep (4503 ewes and 837 sires) with real and imputed genotypes for 510 174 SNPs were performed. The prediction of breeding values using both sire and ewe trait records was validated in Merino sheep. Prediction accuracy was evaluated by across sire family and random cross-validations. Accuracies of genomic estimated breeding values (GEBVs) were assessed as the mean Pearson correlation adjusted by the accuracy of the input phenotypes. The addition of sire DTD into the prediction analysis resulted in higher accuracies compared with using only ewe records in genomic predictions or pedigree BLUP. Using GBLUP, the average accuracy based on the combined records (ewes and sire DTD) was 0.43 across traits, but the accuracies varied by trait and type of cross-validations. The accuracies of GEBVs from random cross-validations (range 0.17-0.61) were higher than were those from sire family cross-validations (range 0.00-0.51). The GEBV accuracies of 0.41-0.54 for NLB and LSIZE based on the combined records were amongst the highest in the study. Although BayesR was not significantly different from GBLUP in prediction accuracy, it identified several candidate genes which are known to be associated with NLB and LSIZE. The approach provides a way to make use of all data available in genomic prediction for traits that have limited recording.
Matrix Metalloproteinase Expression Is Related to Hemorrhagic Transformation After Cardioembolic Stroke

Background and Purpose— In animal models of cerebral ischemia, matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) expression was significantly increased and related to blood-brain barrier disruption, edema formation, and hemorrhagic transformation (HT). MMP inhibitors reduce HT after embolic ischemia in tissue-type plasminogen activator-treated animals. We aimed to determine the relationship between MMPs and HT after human ischemic stroke. Methods— Serial MMP-2 and MMP-9 determinations were performed by means of ELISA in 39 cardioembolic strokes in the middle cerebral artery territory. Hemorrhagic events were classified according to clinical and CT criteria (hemorrhagic infarction [HI] and parenchymal hematoma [PH]). HT was evaluated on CT at 48 hours (early HT) and again between day 5 and 7 (late HT). Results— HT was present in 41% of the patients (43.75% early HI, 25% early PH and 31.25% late HI). MMP-2 values were within normal range and were unrelated to HT. Increased expression of MMP-9 (normal range <97 ng/mL) was found among patients with and without HT (159.3±82 versus 143.9±112.6 ng/mL;P =0.64). According to HT subtypes, the highest baseline MMP-9 levels corresponded to patients with late HI (240.4±111.2 versus 102.5±76.7 ng/mL for all other patients, P =0.002). Baseline MMP-9 was the only variable associated with late HI in the multiple logistic regression model (OR 9; CI 1.46, 55.24;P =0.010). Peak of MMP-9 at the 24-hour time point (250.6 ng/mL) was found before appearance of PH. Conclusions— MMPs are involved in some subtypes of HT after human cardioembolic stroke. Baseline MMP-9 level predicts late HI and a 24-hour peak precedes early PH.
Acute Antithrombotic Effect of a Front-Loaded Regimen of Clopidogrel in Patients With Atherosclerosis on Aspirin

There is a need for a rapid antithrombotic effect after the administration of antiplatelet drugs in the setting of acute coronary syndromes and percutaneous interventions. Clopidogrel, a new thienopyridine derivative, is an efficient antiplatelet agent. However, the standard regimen of clopidogrel (75 mg/d) requires 2 to 3 days before significant antithrombotic effects. Patients with stable arterial disease on chronic aspirin therapy (n=20) were treated with clopidogrel either with a front-loaded regimen, 300 mg the first day and 75 mg/d the next 7 days, or with a standard regimen, 75 mg/d for 8 days. Blood thrombogenicity was assessed by quantification of platelet-thrombus formation in an ex vivo perfusion chamber, by ADP-induced platelet aggregation, and by ADP-induced fibrinogen binding. At 2 hours, mean total thrombus area with the standard regimen was not significantly reduced. In contrast, at 2 hours, the mean total thrombus area with the front-loaded regimen was significantly decreased by 23.1±8.5% versus baseline (P <0.05). ADP-induced platelet aggregation (with 5 and 10 &mgr;mol/L) was also significantly (P <0.05) reduced with the front-loaded regimen at 2 hours, with the mean platelet aggregation being 82.2±4.4% and 81.8±4.5%, respectively, versus baseline. Similarly, flow cytometry demonstrated a significant decrease (P <0.05) in the ADP-induced fibrinogen binding (with 0.12 and 0.6 &mgr;mol/L) at 2 hours in this front-loaded regimen group (36.1±2.0% and 53.2±9.3%). With the standard regimen, platelet activity was not significantly reduced at 2 hours. Our data suggest that a front-loaded regimen of clopidogrel added to aspirin achieves a significant antithrombotic effect at 2 hours in patients with known atherosclerotic disease on chronic aspirin therapy. This provides a rationale for using front-loaded clopidogrel in combination with aspirin in percutaneous coronary interventions.
Methylation study of a population environmentally exposed to arsenic in drinking water.

Methylation is considered the detoxification pathway for inorganic arsenic (InAs), an established human carcinogen. Urinary speciation analysis is used to assess the distribution of metabolites [monomethylarsonate (MMA), dimethylarsinate (DMA), and unmethylated arsenic (InAs)], as indicators of methylation capacity. We conducted a large biomarker study in northern Chile of a population chronically exposed to high levels of arsenic in drinking water. We report the results of the methylation study, which focused on the effects of exposure and other variables on the percent InAs, MMA, DMA, and the ratio of MMA to DMA in urine. The study consisted of 122 people in a town with arsenic water levels around 600 micrograms/l and 98 participants in a neighboring town with arsenic levels in water of about 15 micrograms/l. The corresponding mean urinary arsenic levels were 580 micrograms/l and 60 micrograms/l, of which 18.4% and 14.9% were InAs, respectively. The main differences were found for MMA:DMA; exposure, smoking, and being male were associated with higher MMA:DMA, while longer residence, Atacameño ethnicity, and being female were associated with lower MMA:DMA. Together, these variables explained about 30% of the variability in MMA:DMA. Overall, there was no evidence of a threshold for methylation capacity, even at very high exposures, and the interindividual differences were within a much wider range than those attributed to the variables investigated. The differences in percent InAs were small and within the ranges of other studies of background exposure levels. The biological significance of MMA:DMA, which was more than 1.5 times greater in the exposed group, and its relationship to sex, length of exposure, and ethnicity need further investigation because its relevance to health risk is not clear. Imagesp620-aFigure 1.Figure 2.Figure 2.Figure 2.Figure 2.
The Silent Partner: News Agencies and 21st Century News

This article investigates the ubiquitous presence of news agencies (or wire services) in the daily news. While considering the international environment, it focuses on the sole Australian news agency, Australian Associated Press (AAP), and on its dominance within the Australian news landscape. The article presents the findings of two case studies, tracing press releases through AAP and into the daily news around the world, while also analyzing the media culture that accepts copy from news agencies as “gospel”—a commodity to be used and reused without checking accuracy, and often without attribution. In addition, we identify that the heightened status of news agency copy, coupled with the “not wrong for long” approach which permeates online news, is a combination which increases the potential for error and inaccuracy. The article suggests the need for a shakeup in how media researchers view news sources, as well as a closer analysis of news agency domination within the news environment. Drawing on political economy theory, it sets the foundations for a larger study which could investigate the contemporary production of news.
Towards Internet of Things: Survey and Future Vision

Internet of things is a promising research due to its importance in many commerce, industry, and education applications. Recently, new applications and research challenges in numerous areas of Internet of things are fired. In this paper, we discuss the history of Internet of things, different proposed architectures of Internet of things, research challenges and open problems related to the Internet of things. We also introduce the concept of Internet of things database and discuss about the future vision of Internet of things. These are the manuscript preparation guidelines used as a standard template for all journal submissions. Author must follow these instructions while preparing/modifying these guidelines.
Outcomes of Work-Family Conflict Among Married Male and Female Professionals

The assumption that work and family are separate domains with little cross-impact has been increasingly questioned. Drawing on a sample of 423 male and 335 female accounting professionals, this study evaluates a model of the process by which work-related role stress and parental demands interact to influence job satisfaction and marital satisfaction and, ultimately, overall life satisfaction. Results indicate general support for the hypothesized model, revealing only minor sex differences. The relationship between parental demands and life satisfaction was mediated by satisfaction with childcare arrangementsfor women, but not men, with young children at home.
Sensors-Based Wearable Systems for Monitoring of Human Movement and Falls

The rapid aging of the world's population, along with an increase in the prevalence of chronic illnesses and obesity, requires adaption and modification of current healthcare models. One such approach involves telehealth applications, many of which are based on sensor technologies for unobtrusive monitoring. Recent technological advances, in particular, involving microelectromechnical systems, have resulted in miniaturized wearable devices that can be used for a range of applications. One of the leading areas for utilization of body-fixed sensors is the monitoring of human movement. An overview of common ambulatory sensors is presented, followed by a summary of the developments in this field, with an emphasis on the clinical applications of falls detection, falls risk assessment, and energy expenditure. The importance of these applications is considerable in light of the global demographic trends and the resultant rise in the occurrence of injurious falls and the decrease of physical activity. The potential of using such monitors in an unsupervised manner for community-dwelling individuals is immense, but entails an array of challenges with regards to design c onsiderations, implementation protocols, and signal analysis processes. Some limitations of the research to date and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
Self supervised learning for automatic text summarization by text span extraction

We describe a system for automatic text summarization that operates by extracting the most relevant sentences from documents with regard to a query. The lack of labeled corpora makes it difficult to develop automatic techniques for summarization. We propose to use a self-supervised method which does not rely on the availability of labeled corpora for learning to rank sentences for the summary. The method operates in two steps: first a statistical similarity based system which does not require any training is developed, second a classifier is trained using self-supervised learning in order to improve this baseline method. This idea is evaluated on the Reuters news-wire corpus and compared to other strategies.
On boundary perturbations in Liouville theory and brane dynamics in noncritical string theories

We study certain relevant boundary perturbations of Liouville theory and discuss implications of our results for the brane dynamics in noncritical string theories. Our results include (i) There exist monodromies in the parameter μB of the Neumann-type boundary condition that can create an admixture represented by the Dirichlet type boundary condition, for example. (ii) Certain renormalization group flows can be studied perturbatively, which allows us to determine the results of the corresponding brane decays. (iii) There exists a simple renormalization group flow that can be calculated exactly. In all the cases that we have studied the renormalization group flow acts like a covering transformation for the monodromies mentioned under (i).
Reaffirming a proud tradition

Although the term ‘lifelong learning’ has a long and distinguished history, for many people it has erroneously been thought of as a synonym for adult education or, more particularly, for selfdirected learning. In recent years, however, there has been a recognition that it includes all aspects of education and training–formal, non-formal and informal–at all ages and stages of life, irrespective of where it occurs or who organizes it. As part of this recognition, universities and other institutions of higher education have had to consider their place within the total domain of lifelong learning. Broadly speaking, there are two aspects to this: the steps they might take to produce lifelong learners, and those that they can take–both administratively and pedagogically–to support and encourage lifelong learning itself. In relation to the first of these issues, this article considers five facets of the undergraduate experience in particular: the content of the curriculum, the structure of the curriculum, teaching methods, assessment approaches and the place of student support services. With respect to the broader question of supporting and encouraging lifelong learning more generally, the article considers a range of approaches involving institutional linkages: ‘vertically’ to the school and adult education sectors;‘sideways’ to learning which occurs in the home, workplace or community; and ‘forwards’ to embrace students’ post-graduation learning experiences, including their participation in further formal study. It is concluded that lifelong learning not only provides a valuable unifying theme for the current work of universities, but that historically it has been the mandate of universities to provide lifelong learning opportunities for members of their communities.
Contrasting Patterns of Coral Bleaching Susceptibility in 2010 Suggest an Adaptive Response to Thermal Stress

Background Coral bleaching events vary in severity, however, to date, the hierarchy of susceptibility to bleaching among coral taxa has been consistent over a broad geographic range and among bleaching episodes. Here we examine the extent of spatial and temporal variation in thermal tolerance among scleractinian coral taxa and between locations during the 2010 thermally induced, large-scale bleaching event in South East Asia. Methodology/Principal Findings Surveys to estimate the bleaching and mortality indices of coral genera were carried out at three locations with contrasting thermal and bleaching histories. Despite the magnitude of thermal stress being similar among locations in 2010, there was a remarkable contrast in the patterns of bleaching susceptibility. Comparisons of bleaching susceptibility within coral taxa and among locations revealed no significant differences between locations with similar thermal histories, but significant differences between locations with contrasting thermal histories (Friedman = 34.97; p<0.001). Bleaching was much less severe at locations that bleached during 1998, that had greater historical temperature variability and lower rates of warming. Remarkably, Acropora and Pocillopora, taxa that are typically highly susceptible, although among the most susceptible in Pulau Weh (Sumatra, Indonesia) where respectively, 94% and 87% of colonies died, were among the least susceptible in Singapore, where only 5% and 12% of colonies died. Conclusions/Significance The pattern of susceptibility among coral genera documented here is unprecedented. A parsimonious explanation for these results is that coral populations that bleached during the last major warming event in 1998 have adapted and/or acclimatised to thermal stress. These data also lend support to the hypothesis that corals in regions subject to more variable temperature regimes are more resistant to thermal stress than those in less variable environments.
Induction of Rules for Biological Macromolecular Crystallization

X-ray crystallography is the method of choice for determining the 3-D structure of large macromolecules at a high enough resolution. The rate limiting step in structure determination is the crystallization itself. It takes anywhere between a few weeks to several years to obtain macromolecular crystals that yield good diffraction patterns. The theory of forces that promote and maintain crystal growth is preliminary, and crystallographers systematically search a large parameter space of experimental settings to grow good crystals. There is a wealth of experimental data on crystal growth most of which is in paper laboratory notebooks. Some of the data has been gathered in electronic form, e.g., the Biological Macromolecular Crystallization Database (BMCD) which is a repository of successful experimental conditions for growing over 800 different macromolecules (Gilliland 1987). Crystallographers are in need of computational tools to gather and analyze past data to design new crystal growth trails. We are building the Crystallographer's Assistant (CA) to help crystallographers record and maintain experimental context in electronic form, offer suggestions on experimental conditions that are likely to be successful, and provide explanations for failed experiments. As an initial step in this project, we have applied RL, an inductive learning program, to the BMCD. In this paper we report initial experiments and findings in applying RL to the BMCD. From the point of view of crystallography, we have discovered possibly significant new empirical relationships in crystal growth. From the point of view of machine learning, our work suggests refinements of existing methods for incorporating detailed domain knowledge into inductive analysis techniques.
Rheumatic Heart Disease Screening by Echocardiography: The Inadequacy of World Health Organization Criteria for Optimizing the Diagnosis of Subclinical Disease

Background— Early case detection is vital in rheumatic heart disease (RHD) in children to minimize the risk of advanced valvular heart disease by preventive measures. The currently utilized World Health Organization (WHO) criteria for echocardiographic diagnosis of subclinical RHD emphasize the presence of pathological valve regurgitation but do not include valves with morphological features of RHD without pathological regurgitation. We hypothesized that adding morphological features to diagnostic criteria might have significant consequences in terms of case detection rates. Methods and Results— We screened 2170 randomly selected school children aged 6 to 17 years in Maputo, Mozambique, clinically and by a portable ultrasound system. Two different echocardiographic sets of criteria for RHD were assessed: “WHO” (exclusively Doppler-based) and “combined” (Doppler and morphology-based) criteria. Independent investigators reviewed all suspected RHD cases using a higher-resolution, nonportable ultrasound system. On-site echocardiography identified 18 and 124 children with suspected RHD according to WHO and combined criteria, respectively. After consensus review, 17 were finally considered to have definite RHD according to WHO criteria, and 66 had definite RHD according to combined criteria, giving prevalence rates of 7.8 (95% confidence interval, 4.6 to 12.5) and 30.4 (95% confidence interval, 23.6 to 38.5) per 1000 children, respectively (P<0.0001, exact McNemar test). Conclusions— Important consideration should be given to echocardiographic criteria for detecting subclinical RHD because the number of cases detected may differ importantly according to the diagnostic criteria utilized. Currently recommended WHO criteria risk missing up to three quarters of cases of subclinically affected and therefore potentially treatable children with RHD.
An Architecture Supporting Proactive Robot Companion Behavior

An essential aspect of human robot interaction is proactive robot behavior particularly in situations where the robot is able to determine by itself if, how and when it can intervene and help. This is certainly valuable since it permits the user to be freed from the burden of permanently monitoring the robot and choosing the command that should be issued to the robot. In this work we present an architecture for proactive robot behavior. Its main features involve the ability to select high level goals based on scenario recognition. The goals are then reﬁned by a speciﬁc planner that is able to determine if the robot can contribute to the goal achievement and ﬁnally a human aware supervision system that allows the robot to share the human activity thanks to its ability to achieve task cooperatively. The paper describes the overall system and its implementation on a realistic testbed.
Exploring Visualizations in Real-time Motion Capture for Dance Education

In this paper, we describe an ongoing work towards developing a whole-body interaction interface for exploring different visualizations of movement, using real-time motion capture and 3D models, to apply in dance learning and improvisation within a creative, gamified context. A full inertial motion capture system is used by the performer while a simple user interface provides the option to the user to experiment with different avatars, and visualizations e.g., trace of motions on different parts of the body and to interact with virtual objects. The 3D simulation provides a real-time visual feedback for the movement. The interaction follows the paradigm of moving from mimicking kinetic material into a self-reflection teaching approach. The interactive avatar is the reflection of the performer, but on the same time the avatar depicts a character, a dance partner which can inspire the user who moves to explore different ways of moving. Either within the framework of artistic experimentation and creativity, or in the context of education, the visual metaphors of movement shape and qualities consist a powerful tool and raise many scientific and research questions.