Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tight blood pressure control and cardiovascular outcomes among hypertensive patients with diabetes and coronary artery disease.

CONTEXT Hypertension guidelines advocate treating systolic blood pressure (BP) to less than 130 mm Hg for patients with diabetes mellitus; however, data are lacking for the growing population who also have coronary artery disease (CAD). OBJECTIVE To determine the association of systolic BP control achieved and adverse cardiovascular outcomes in a cohort of patients with diabetes and CAD. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Observational subgroup analysis of 6400 of the 22,576 participants in the International Verapamil SR-Trandolapril Study (INVEST). For this analysis, participants were at least 50 years old and had diabetes and CAD. Participants were recruited between September 1997 and December 2000 from 862 sites in 14 countries and were followed up through March 2003 with an extended follow-up through August 2008 through the National Death Index for US participants. INTERVENTION Patients received first-line treatment of either a calcium antagonist or beta-blocker followed by angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, a diuretic, or both to achieve systolic BP of less than 130 and diastolic BP of less than 85 mm Hg. Patients were categorized as having tight control if they could maintain their systolic BP at less than 130 mm Hg; usual control if it ranged from 130 mm Hg to less than 140 mm Hg; and uncontrolled if it was 140 mm Hg or higher. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Adverse cardiovascular outcomes, including the primary outcomes which was the first occurrence of all-cause death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, or nonfatal stroke. RESULTS During 16,893 patient-years of follow-up, 286 patients (12.7%) who maintained tight control, 249 (12.6%) who had usual control, and 431 (19.8%) who had uncontrolled systolic BP experienced a primary outcome event. Patients in the usual-control group had a cardiovascular event rate of 12.6% vs a 19.8% event rate for those in the uncontrolled group (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 1.46; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.25-1.71; P < .001). However, little difference existed between those with usual control and those with tight control. Their respective event rates were 12.6% vs 12.7% (adjusted HR, 1.11; 95% CI, 0.93-1.32; P = .24). The all-cause mortality rate was 11.0% in the tight-control group vs 10.2% in the usual-control group (adjusted HR, 1.20; 95% CI, 0.99-1.45; P = .06); however, when extended follow-up was included, risk of all-cause mortality was 22.8% in the tight control vs 21.8% in the usual control group (adjusted HR, 1.15; 95% CI, 1.01-1.32; P = .04). CONCLUSION Tight control of systolic BP among patients with diabetes and CAD was not associated with improved cardiovascular outcomes compared with usual control. TRIAL REGISTRATION clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00133692.
Global prevalence of, and risk factors for, uninvestigated dyspepsia: a meta-analysis

Objectives Many cross-sectional surveys have reported the prevalence of uninvestigated dyspepsia, but there has been no recent systematic review of data from all studies to determine its global prevalence and risk factors. Design MEDLINE, EMBASE and EMBASE Classic were searched (until January 2014) to identify population-based studies that reported the prevalence of uninvestigated dyspepsia in adults (≥15 years old); dyspepsia was defined using symptom-based criteria or questionnaires. The prevalence of dyspepsia was extracted for all studies and according to the criteria used to define it. Pooled prevalence, according to study location and certain other characteristics, ORs and 95% CIs were calculated. Results Of the 306 citations evaluated, 103 reported the prevalence of uninvestigated dyspepsia in 100 separate study populations, containing 312 415 subjects. Overall pooled prevalence in all studies was 20.8% (95% CI 17.8% to 23.9%). The prevalence varied according to country (from 1.8% to 57.0%) and criteria used to define dyspepsia. The greatest prevalence values were found when a broad definition of dyspepsia (29.5%; 95% CI 25.3% to 33.8%) or upper abdominal or epigastric pain or discomfort (20.4%; 95% CI 16.3% to 24.8%) were used. The prevalence was higher in women (OR 1.24; 95% CI 1.13 to 1.36), smokers (OR 1.25; 95% CI 1.12 to 1.40), non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) users (OR 1.59; 95% CI 1.27 to 1.99) and Helicobacter pylori-positive individuals (OR 1.18; 95% CI 1.04 to 1.33). Conclusions The overall pooled prevalence of uninvestigated dyspepsia was 21%, but varied among countries and according to the criteria used to define its presence. Prevalence is significantly higher in women, smokers, NSAID users and H. pylori-positive individuals, although these associations were modest.
Arithmetic Accuracy in Children From High- and Low-Income Schools

This study investigated income group differences in kindergartners’ and first graders’ (N = 161) arithmetic by examining the link between accuracy and strategy use on simple and complex addition problems. Low-income children were substantially less accurate than high-income children, in terms of both percentage of correctly solved problems and the magnitude of errors, with low-income first graders being less accurate than high-income kindergartners. Higher-income children were more likely to use sophisticated mental strategies than their lower-income peers, who used predominantly inefficient counting or inappropriate strategies. Importantly, this difference in strategies mediated the relation between income group and addition. Examining underlying strategies has implications for understanding income group differences in arithmetic and potential means of remedying it via instruction.
Bronchiolitis obliterans after human lung transplantation.

Over the last decade, improvements in surgical techniques, lung preservation, immunosuppression, and management of ischemia–reperfusion injury and infections have contributed to increase the 1-year patient survival after lung transplantation to 70–80% (1). However, long-term survival is threatened by bronchiolitis obliterans, which is thought to be a form of chronic allograft rejection. Bronchiolitis obliterans after lung transplantation was first described in 1984 at Stanford University in heart–lung transplant recipients who showed a progressive decline in FEV 1 (2). Lung biopsies from these patients showed intraluminal polyps comprised of fibromyxoid granulation tissue and plaques of dense submucosal eosinophilic scar. Obliteration of the small airways by these lesions produces progressive airflow obstruction, often accompanied by recurrent lower respiratory tract infection. Bronchiolitis obliterans, and its clinical correlate bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome, affect up to 50–60% of patients who survive 5 years after transplantation (3). In most patients, bronchiolitis obliterans is a progressive process that responds poorly to augmented immunosuppression, and it accounts for more than 30% of all deaths occurring after the third postoperative year (1). Survival at 5 years after the onset of bronchiolitis obliterans is only 30–40%, and survival at 5 years after transplantation is 20–40% lower in patients with than in patients without bronchiolitis obliterans (4). In this review, we present current concepts regarding post-transplant bronchiolitis obliterans, including: ( 1 ) the recently updated classification system for bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS), ( 2 ) an overview of current concepts regarding its pathogenesis and risk factors, ( 3 ) potential surrogate markers that may contribute to early detection, and ( 4 ) approaches to the management of this devastating complication.
Diversity of aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria in paddy soil and their response to elevated atmospheric CO2

Aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria (AAnPB) are recognized as an important group driving the global carbon cycling. However, the diversity of AAnPB in terrestrial environment remains largely unknown as well as their responses to the elevated atmospheric CO2. By using culture‐independent techniques, the diversity of AAnPB in paddy soil and the changes in response to the rising atmospheric CO2 were investigated within China FACE (Free‐air CO2 enrichment) platform. There was a phylogenetically diverse AAnPB community with large population size residing in paddy soil. The community structure of AAnPB in bulk and rhizospheric soils stayed almost identical, while the population size was higher in rhizospheric [2.0–2.5 × 108 copy number of pufM genes g−1 dry weight soil (d.w.s.)] than that in bulk (0.7–0.8 × 108 g−1 d.w.s.) soils. Elevated atmospheric CO2 appeared to significantly stimulate AAnPB abundance (up to 1.4–1.5 × 108 g−1 d.w.s.) and result in a higher AAnPB percentage in total bacterial community (from 0.5% up to 1.5%) in bulk soil, whereas no significant effect was observed in rhizospheric soil. Our results would extend the functional ecotypes of AAnPB and indicate that environmental changes associated with the rising atmospheric CO2 might affect AAnPB community in paddy soil.
Novel Perspectives on Mucormycosis: Pathophysiology, Presentation, and Management

SUMMARY Mucormycosis is a life-threatening fungal infection that occurs in immunocompromised patients. These infections are becoming increasingly common, yet survival remains very poor. A greater understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease may lead to future therapies. For example, it is now clear that iron metabolism plays a central role in regulating mucormycosis infections and that deferoxamine predisposes patients to mucormycosis by inappropriately supplying the fungus with iron. These findings raise the possibility that iron chelator therapy may be useful to treat the infection as long as the chelator does not inappropriately supply the fungus with iron. Recent data support the concept that high-dose liposomal amphotericin is the preferred monotherapy for mucormycosis. However, several novel therapeutic strategies are available. These options include combination therapy using lipid-based amphotericin with an echinocandin or with an azole (largely itraconazole or posaconazole) or with all three. The underlying principles of therapy for this disease remain rapid diagnosis, reversal of underlying predisposition, and urgent surgical debridement.
A robotic platform for domestic applications

—During the last years, robots are leaving industrial or research environments and sharing the same space with humans. This paper describes a robotic platform and its behavior architecture created to develop the necessary skills to help a human being in its own environment. This mobile robot is equipped with one robotic arm with 7 degrees of freedom and a RGBD depth camera as main sensor. The software behavior architecture developed for this robot can develop complex behaviors in a simple way, providing real-time features with low computational consumption. This architecture will be validated in a public robot competition called RoCKIn@home.
Creation of Phylogenetic Trees Based on Genome Samples

1 Abstract Many modern questions in biology involve explanations for life and evolution. A common way to represent relationships of evolution amongst species to answer these questions is to construct phylogenetic trees. Although there are multiple approaches to constructing such graphs, they are now often based on genetic sequencing. The goal of this project was to make a simple program that could produce phylogenetic trees from the input of a short sequence of DNA from multiple species.
Knowledge Practices Laboratory – Guidelines and models on implementing design principles of KP-Lab , application scenarios and best practices v 2

This deliverable provides an updated and extended description of the KP-Lab co-design framework as well as a summary of main design methods used so far. The purpose of this deliverable is to explicate the underlying rationale as well as systematic structure of the co-design process. The report starts with a brief outline of the theoretical considerations underlying the design-framework as well as a comparison with current approaches in software-engineering. Against this background, the main methodological challenges are sketched. In the main part of the report the actual co-design framework, including its guiding principles, the overall process framework as well as concrete design practices are depicted. The report ends with an outlook on the next steps to be taken. This document replaces Deliverable 2.1 “Guidelines and models on implementing design principles in KPLab, application scenarios and best practice, v.1” submitted at M6.
Pitavastatin Increases ABCA 1 Expression by Dual Mechanisms : SREBP 2-Driven Transcriptional Activation and PPAR α-Dependent Protein Stabilization but Without Activating LXR in Rat Hepatoma McARH 7777 Cells

Hepatic ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1) plays a key role in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) production by apolipoprotein A-I (ApoA-I) lipidation. 3-Hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitors, statins, increase ABCA1 mRNA levels in hepatoma cell lines, but their mechanism of action is not yet clear. We investigated how statins increase ABCA1 in rat hepatoma McARH7777 cells. Pitavastatin, atorvastatin, and simvastatin increased total ABCA1 mRNA levels, whereas pravastatin had no effect. Pitavastatin also increased ABCA1 protein. Hepatic ABCA1 expression in rats is regulated by both liver X receptor (LXR) and sterol regulatory element–binding protein (SREBP2) pathways. Pitavastatin repressed peripheral type ABCA1 mRNA levels and its LXR-driven promoter, but activated the liver-type SREBPdriven promoter, and eventually increased total ABCA1 mRNA expression. Furthermore, pitavastatin increased peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor α (PPARα) and its downstream gene expression. Knockdown of PPARα attenuated the increase in ABCA1 protein, indicating that pitavastatin increased ABCA1 protein via PPARα activation, although it repressed LXR activation. Furthermore, the degradation of ABCA1 protein was retarded in pitavastatin-treated cells. These data suggest that pitavastatin increases ABCA1 protein expression by dual mechanisms: SREBP2mediated mRNA transcription and PPARα-mediated ABCA1 protein stabilization, but not by the PPAR–LXR–ABCA1 pathway. [Supplementary Figures: available only at http://dx.doi. org/10.1254/jphs.10241FP]
Reliability and Portability Assessment Tool Based on Hazard Rates for an Embedded Open Source Software

An embedded OSS (Open Source Software) known as one of OSS has been gaining a lot of attention in the embedded system area, i.e., Android, BusyBox, TRON, etc. However, the poor handling of quality problem and customer support prohibit the progress of embedded OSS. Therefore, many companies have been hesitant to innovate the embedded OSS because of OSS includes several software versions. Also, it is difficult for developers to assess reliability and portability of the porting-phase in case of installing the embedded OSS on a single-board computer. In this paper, we develop a method of software reliability/portability assessment tool based on a hazard rate model for the embedded OSS. Especially, we analyze actual software failure-occurrence time-interval data to show numerical examples of software reliability/portability assessment for the embedded OSS. Moreover, we show that our model and tool can assist quality improvement for embedded OSS systems development.
Sharing information across community portals with FOAFRealm 353

Community portals such as blogs, wikis and photo-sharing sites have become the new channels for information dissemination on the web. They contain a huge amount of valuable information that is often voluntarily delivered by experts. The most useful results of searching the web very often come from some sort of a community site. We present a method of sharing information across multiple community portals through a Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering (SSCF) system. It utilises FOAFRealm, a user profile management system which extends the popular ‘Friend of a Friend’ (FOAF) metadata and enables users to share the bookmarks and community documents that they create. Moreover, the proposed solution allows both a seamless connection of different portals and the easy identification of contributors. We describe the required infrastructure, including the components that enable content sharing and browsing. Finally, we demonstrate a verification of our idea.
A frequency and correlation analysis of motor deficits in Parkinson patients.

PURPOSE The present study explored the frequency and pattern of functional motor problems of a group of Parkinson patients, as a first step towards developing a rational approach to rehabilitation intervention addressing the primary symptoms of the disease. METHOD Sixty patients, consisting of 40% women and 60% men with a mean age of 63.5 years and of which 88% were taking L-dopa, underwent a number of standardized clinical tests including part III of the UPDRS. They were also interviewed about the frequency of motor problems occurring at home. RESULTS Loss of trunk rotation as expressed in rolling in supine and reduced arm swing were the most frequently registered motor disorders (73%, 75%). Freezing at the start of, or during, walking was not observed during clinical testing but was frequently claimed to occur at home (48%, 23%). A broad spectrum of deficits regarding gait, posture, transfers and distal motor problems formed a cluster, which was strongly correlated with bradykinesia (p < 0.001). Principal component analysis identified four distinct problem areas: (1) axial motor performance; (2) akinetic gait problems; (3) rigidity; and (4) tremor. CONCLUSIONS Parkinson patients, particularly in the later stages of the disease, presented with significant levels of functional disability which was mainly linked with the underlying impairment of bradykinesia.
Spatiotemporal Distribution of PM2.5 and O3 and Their Interaction During the Summer and Winter Seasons in Beijing, China

This study analyzed the spatiotemporal variations in PM2.5 and O3, and explored their interaction in the summer and winter seasons in Beijing. To this aim, hourly PM2.5 and O3 data for 35 air quality monitoring sites were analyzed during the summer and winter of 2016. Results suggested that the highest PM2.5 concentration and the lowest O3 concentration were observed at traffic monitoring sites during the two seasons. A statistically significant (p < 0.05) different diurnal variation of PM2.5 was observed between the summer and winter seasons, with higher concentrations during daytime summer and nighttime winter. Diurnal variations of O3 concentrations during the two seasons showed a single peak, occurring at 16:00 and 15:00 in summer and winter, respectively. PM2.5 presented a spatial pattern with higher concentrations in southern Beijing than in northern areas, particularly evident during wintertime. On the contrary, O3 concentrations presented a decreasing spatial trend from the north to the south, particularly evident during summer. In addition, we found that PM2.5 concentrations were positively correlated (p < 0.01, r = 0.57) with O3 concentrations in summer, but negatively correlated (p < 0.01, r = −0.72) with O3 concentrations in winter.
Birds adjust acoustic directionality to beam their antipredator calls to predators and conspecifics

Animals in many vertebrate species vocalize in response to predators, but it is often unclear whether these antipredator calls function to communicate with predators, conspecifics or both. We evaluated the function of antipredator calls in 10 species of passerines by measuring the acoustic directionality of these calls in response to experimental presentations of a model predator. Acoustic directionality quantifies the radiation pattern of vocalizations and may provide evidence about the receiver of these calls. We predicted that antipredator calls would have a lower directionality if they function to communicate with surrounding conspecifics, and a higher directionality and aimed at the receiver if they function to communicate with the predator. Our results support both of these functions. Overall, the birds produce antipredator calls that have a relatively low directionality, suggesting that the calls radiate in many directions to alert conspecifics. However, birds in some species increase the directionality of their calls when facing the predator. They can even direct their calls towards the predator when facing lateral to it—effectively vocalizing sideways towards the predator. These results suggest that antipredator calls in some species are used to communicate both to conspecifics and to predators, and that birds adjust the directionality of their calls with remarkable sophistication according to the context in which they are used.
VIDEO SUMMARIZATION USING TRANSFORMERS

Video Captioning and Summarization have become very popular in the recent years due to advancements in Sequence Modelling, with the resurgence of Long-Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and introduction of Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). Existing architectures [1, 2] extract spatio-temporal features using CNNs and utilize either GRUs or LSTMs to model dependencies with soft attention layers. These attention layers do help in attending to the most prominent features and improve upon the recurrent units, however, these models suffer from the inherent drawbacks of the recurrent units themselves. Although these techniques have helped in capturing long term dependencies, a 30fps 5 minute video can contain about 9000 frames, making it difficult for the gradients to backpropagate through time. Each training example has to be modelled sequentially and hence, prohibits parallelization within training examples. Given that videos can be very large in size, training a recurrent model for Video captioning can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Another problem with existing techniques is that they take into account only the video features, while video’s text descriptions are completely ignored [3].
Pension Reform in an Overlapping Model with Multiple Social Security Systems

Primarily due to financial sustainability problems, social security reforms have been on the policy agenda of both developed and developing countries for the last decade. Turkish social security system has also been reformed from 1999 to 2008. One aim of this reform is the convergence of social security institutions through convergence of social security parameters. The aim of this study is to analyze the effects of social security parameter convergence, through a replacement rate shock. Research literature on the subject tends to use overlapping generations (OLG) models with single representative household and presents reforms as shock to the constructed model. In order to broadly represent the Turkish social security system, this study presents an OLG model with three separate social security institutions where the heterogeneity is through different benefit payments and contribution rates. Convergence across various institutions is enabled by a replacement ratio shock. This parametric reform is similar to the institutional convergence aimed by the Turkish social security reform. The study concludes by discussing steady state results, model dynamics and implications on Turkish social security reform.