Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Treatment of syphilis in HIV-infected subjects: a systematic review of the literature

Background The optimal antimicrobial regimen to treat syphilis in HIV-infected subjects remains controversial. Objective To systematically assess the literature for studies evaluating syphilis treatment regimens in this population. Methods Two reviewers independently assessed studies published between 1980 and June 2008 in electronic databases, trial registries and bibliographies (with no language restrictions) for content and quality. Studies that included 10 or more people, with documented HIV status, type and duration of syphilis treatment and at least 6 months of follow-up were included. The primary outcome was syphilis serological or clinical failure stratified by syphilis stage. Results Of 1380 unique citations, 23 studies (22 published papers and 1 conference abstract) were included in the systematic review. Owing to the significant heterogeneity among studies, pooled summary statistics could not be generated. The range of probabilities for serological failure with 2.4 million units (MU) of intramuscular benzathine penicillin G (BPG) was 6.9% (95% CI 2.6% to 14.4%) to 22.4% (11.7% to 36.6%); that of 7.2 MU of BPG in late latent syphilis was 19.4% (11.9% to 28.9%) to 31.1% (22.3% to 40.9%) and failure estimates with 18–24 MU of aqueous penicillin for the treatment of neurosyphilis were 27.3% (6.0% to 61.0%) to 27.8% (14.2% to 45.2%). Conclusions The optimal antimicrobial regimen to treat syphilis in HIV-infected subjects is unknown; guideline recommendations in this population are based on little objective data.
Review of Spectral Subtraction Techniques for Speech Enhancement

Speech enhancement aims to improve speech quality by using various techniques and algorithms. The Spectral subtraction technique is historically one of the first algorithms proposed for removal of additive background noise. It is a single channel speech enhancement technique for the enhancement of speech degraded by additive background noise. Background noise can effect our conversation in a noisy environment like in streets or in a car, when sending speech from the cockpit of an airplane to the ground or to the cabin and can effect both quality and intelligibility of speech. With the passage of time Spectral subtraction has undergone many modifications. This is a review paper and its objective is to provide an overview of the variety of spectral subtraction techniques that have been proposed for enhancement of speech degraded by additive background noise during past decades . Section I gives the Introduction to Speech enhancement and explain basic Spectral Subtraction technique. Section II gives the various modified versions of spectral subtraction till date.
A review: mid-infrared photonic crystals in silicon and porous silicon based on ion beam irradiation

Silicon and porous silicon based photonic crystals are key aspects of photonic circuits with good compatibility with integrated circuits. Here a brief review is carried out on the fabrication of mid infrared photonic crystals using experimental processes of combining ion beam irradiation and electrochemical anodisation of silicon. Experimental processes have been developed to fabricate high aspect ratio trenches in porous silicon, high aspect ratio silicon pillars, buried channels in porous silicon, and multilevel freestanding silicon wires. These structures have the potential to be used for photonic crystals. Several 2D, quasi-3D and 3D mid infrared photonic crystals in porous silicon and silicon have been designed and fabricated.
Role of microRNAs in skeletal muscle hypertrophy

Skeletal muscle comprises approximately 40% of body weight, and is important for locomotion, as well as for metabolic homeostasis. Adult skeletal muscle mass is maintained by a fine balance between muscle protein synthesis and degradation. In response to cytokines, nutrients, and mechanical stimuli, skeletal muscle mass is increased (hypertrophy), whereas skeletal muscle mass is decreased (atrophy) in a variety of conditions, including cancer cachexia, starvation, immobilization, aging, and neuromuscular disorders. Recent studies have determined two important signaling pathways involved in skeletal muscle mass. The insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1)/Akt pathway increases skeletal muscle mass via stimulation of protein synthesis and inhibition of protein degradation. By contrast, myostatin signaling negatively regulates skeletal muscle mass by reducing protein synthesis. In addition, the discovery of microRNAs as novel regulators of gene expression has provided new insights into a multitude of biological processes, especially in skeletal muscle physiology. We summarize here the current knowledge of microRNAs in the regulation of skeletal muscle hypertrophy, focusing on the IGF-1/Akt pathway and myostatin signaling.
Approximate Sum-Capacity of the Y-Channel

A network where three users want to establish multiple unicasts between each other via a relay is considered. This network is called the Y-channel and resembles an elemental ingredient of future wireless networks. The sum-capacity of this network is studied. A characterization of the sum-capacity within an additive gap of 2 bits, and a multiplicative gap of 4, for all values of channel gains and transmit powers is obtained. Contrary to similar setups where the cut-set bounds can be achieved within a constant gap, they cannot be achieved in our case, where they are dominated by our new genie-aided bounds. Furthermore, it is shown that a time-sharing strategy, in which at each time two users exchange information using coding strategies of the bidirectional relay channel, achieves the upper bounds to within a constant gap. This result is further extended to the K-user case, where it is shown that the same scheme achieves the sum-capacity within 2log(K-1) bits.
Colligative Property of ATP: Implications for Enteric Purinergic Neuromuscular Neurotransmission

A recent report by Estévez-Herrera et al. (2016) suggested that ATP, the energy coin, also a neurotransmitter, controls the osmotic pressure of vesicular contents (Estévez-Herrera et al., 2016). Since the discovery and description of quantal transmission (Katz, 1971; Bennett and Kearns, 2000), membrane-delimited packeted structures, the vesicles, have been morphologically identified and correlated with secretion in several secretory tissues, including nerve terminals of central and peripheral neurons, chromaffin cells, platelets, and insulin-secreting beta cells of the pancreas (Goyal and Chaudhury, 2013; Südhof, 2013; Thorn et al., 2016). Though it is now known for some time that ATP is concentrated in the vesicles, the demonstration that ATP, by virtue of being negatively charged, and its ability to associate with positively charged molecules like amines, agglomerates vesicular particles, is a significant finding. Vesicles do not release their contents randomly within the cytosol, but rather are transported to the membranes for exocytosis (Jena, 2009). An important contributor to this site-specific release of vesicular contents may be the constant fine tuning and maintenance of osmotic pressure isotonic with the cytosol of the vesicle-containing structure. In the light of such plausible dynamic regulation of osmotic pressure of vesicles, the demonstration of the likely role of ATP in regulating this vesicular osmotic pressure acquires importance (Estévez-Herrera et al., 2016). In this perspective, we discuss the implications of these findings on enteric purinergic inhibitory musculomotor neurotransmission.
Late-Onset Meningeal Metastases in Liposarcoma: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

Intracranial metastases from liposarcoma are rare and almost always preceded by the development of systemic tumour spread. We report here a case of liposarcoma with spread to the cranial nervous system 23 years after treatment of the primary tumour. The literature on brain metastases from soft tissue sarcoma is also reviewed.
Joint symbol timing and CFO estimation in multiuser OFDM/OQAM systems

In this paper we consider the problem of data-aided synchronization in the up-link of a multiple access (MA) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system based on offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OQAM). In particular, the joint maximum-likelihood (ML) phase offset, carrier-frequency offset (CFO) and symbol timing (ST) estimator exploiting a short known preamble embedded in the burst received from each of U users is considered. Under the assumption that the CFO of each user is sufficiently small the considered approach leads to U different approximate ML (AML) joint phase offset, CFO and ST estimators. Specifically, the phase and CFO estimators are in closed form while the AML ST estimator requires a one-dimensional maximization procedure. The performance of the proposed joint AML estimator is assessed via computer simulations both in AWGN and multipath channel, and for three different allocation schemes.
ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression

In a first experiment, subjects verbalizing the stream of consciousness for a 5-min period were asked to try not to think of a white bear, but to ring a bell in case they did. As indicated both by mentions and by bell rings, they were unable to suppress the thought as instructed. On being asked after this suppression task to think about the white bear for a 5-min period, these subjects showed significantly more tokens of thought about the bear than did subjects who were asked to think about a white bear from the outset. These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against. A second experiment replicated these findings and showed that subjects given a specific thought to use as a distracter during suppression were less likely to exhibit later preoccupation with the thought to be suppressed.
An Empirical Study of Human Altruistic Behaviors in Opportunistic Networks

The success of data forwarding applications in opportunistic networks (OppNets) primarily depends on the altruistic behavior of users who form the network. Therefore, a good study of user altruism is crucial in designing and building effective OppNets. Here battery is the resource constraint and relaying data for others is the altruistic decision. We conducted two types of experiments, one with an Android application and the other based on AMT platform. With around 800 subjects, we found that users are approximately 0.50 - 0.70 altruistic on average and they are less likely to perform altruistic behavior when the cost is higher than 10% of the remaining battery level. Social ties have impact on users' altruism. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work to study human altruism using mobile computing application, which not only bring us fundamental understanding on human behaviours but also help to gain insights for boosting efficiency of relevant computing frameworks.
Evaluation of Bentonite-Fly Ash Mix for Its Application in Landfill Liners

Compacted landfill liners are required to minimize the migration of harmful contaminants to the surrounding geoenvironment and groundwater. This is mainly achieved by restricting hydraulic conductivity of the compacted liners within a permissible limit of 10−7 cm/s. For geomaterials used in liners, it is important to determine the appropriate range of compaction parameters (water content and dry unit weight) that would ensure hydraulic conductivity and strength characteristics within safe limits. There are not many studies in the literature for specifying such a range for bentonite-fly ash mixes. The addition of cohesionless fly ash would improve the strength and reduce the shrinkage behavior of bentonite but at the same time would increase the hydraulic conductivity. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to determine the ranges of water content and dry unit weight for different bentonite-fly ash mixes that would satisfy the desired ranges of hydraulic conductivity and strength. The objective is to identify the bentonite-fly ash mix that enables maximum use of fly ash, which is advantageous from an environmental perspective. The performance evaluation of different compacted mixes has been done using hydraulic conductivity and unconfined compressive strength as the two reference parameters. The study clearly demonstrates the utility of a bentonite-fly ash mix as a compacted landfill liner. On the basis of the results, it can be noted that up to 70 % by weight of fly ash can be mixed with bentonite for satisfying the requirements of compacted landfill liners.
Assessment of various display devices on a virtual reality-based hand rehabilitation system

The purpose of the present study is to assess the effect of an auxiliary lateral image and display devices on manipulation performance in a virtual reality-based hand rehabilitation system. The system consists of a personal computer, a tracker, a data glove, and a display device. For this study, a projector, a monitor, and a head-mounted display were respectively used as the display devices to present three-dimensional virtual environments. Twelve volunteers were recruited to take a pick-and-place procedure at different levels of difficulty. Task time and collision frequency were the parameters used to evaluate the manipulation performance. It was found that the presence of an auxiliary lateral image was a significant factor only for the performance of the projector group and the monitor group. In addition, no statistically significant difference was found in the comparison between the projector group and the monitor group.
A diversity-controlling adaptive genetic algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows

This paper presents an adaptive genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) to near optimal solutions. The algorithm employs a unique decoding scheme with the integer strings. It also automatically adapts the crossover probability and the mutation rate to the changing population dynamics. The adaptive control maintains population diversity at user-defined levels, and therefore prevents premature convergence in search. Comparison between this algorithm and a normal fixed parameter GA clearly demonstrates the advantage of population diversity control. Our experiments with the 56 Solomon benchmark problems indicate that this algorithm is competitive and it paves way for future research on population-based adaptive genetic algorithm.
Metabolic imaging of anterior capsular stimulation in refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder: a key role for the subgenual anterior cingulate and ventral striatum.

UNLABELLED High-frequency anterior capsular stimulation is a new, promising, and reversible neuromodulatory treatment in the research stage for patients with refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The mechanism of action is unknown but hypothesized to be secondary to interruption of the corticothalamostriatocortical circuit. METHODS (18)F-FDG PET was performed on 6 consecutive OCD patients preoperatively and after stimulation. The results were compared with those of 20 age- and sex-matched healthy volunteers by using both a standardized volume-of-interest-based approach for subcortical areas and statistical parametric mapping. Correlations were investigated with Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale scores (Y-BOCS) and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale scores (HAM-D). RESULTS Chronic anterior capsular electrostimulation resulted in a further decrease of prefrontal metabolic activity, especially in the subgenual anterior cingulate (P < 0.001). Correlation analysis demonstrated that decreases in Y-BOCS and HAM-D with anterior capsular electrostimulation were inversely related to the metabolic activity changes in the left ventral striatum, left amygdala, and left hippocampus (P < 0.01). Preoperative resting metabolic activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate was predictive of therapeutic response (P = 0.001). CONCLUSION These observations provide evidence that the subgenual anterior cingulate and ventral striatum have a key role in the neuronal circuitry involved in the pathophysiology of OCD with associated major depression and in the neuromodulatory mechanism of anterior capsular stimulation.
Improving Utilization Infrastructure Management in Private and Hybrid Clouds 26

–A key advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) clouds is providing users on-demand access to resources. However, to provide on-demand access, cloud providers must either significantly overprovision their infrastructure (and pay a high price for operating resources with low utilization) or reject a large proportion of user requests (in which case the access is no longer on-demand). At the same time, not all users require truly on-demand access to resources. Many applications and workflows are designed for recoverable systems where interruptions in service are expected. For instance, many scientists utilize High Throughput Computing (HTC)-enabled resources, such as Condor, where jobs are dispatched to available resources and terminated when the resource is no longer available. We propose a cloud infrastructure that combines on-demand allocation of resources with opportunistic provisioning of cycles from idle cloud nodes to other processes by deploying backfill Virtual Machines (VMs). For demonstration and experimental evaluation, we extend the Nimbus cloud computing toolkit to deploy backfill VMs on idle cloud nodes for processing an HTC workload. Initial tests show an increase in IaaS cloud utilization from 37.5% to 100% during a portion of the evaluation trace but only 6.39% overhead cost for processing the HTC workload. We demonstrate that a shared infrastructure between IAAS cloud providers and an HTC job management system can be highly beneficial to both the IAAS cloud provider and HTC users by increasing the utilization of the cloud infrastru cture (thereby decreasing the overall cost) and contributing cycles that would otherwise be idle to processing HTC jobs. Keywords––Cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, High Throughput Computing
Transient response of carbon nanotubes with inhomogeneous coating under radial impact loading and magnetic field

An analytical method is presented to solve magnetoelastic dynamic stress responses and perturbation of the magnetic field vector in carbon nanotubes with inhomogeneous costing subjected to radial internal pressure shock and axial magnetic field. By utilizing finite Hankle transforms and Laplace transforms, the analytical solution for magnetodynamic stress response and perturbation of an axial magnetic field vector in the carbon nanotubes with inhomogeneous coating are obtained. From example calculations both magnetodynamic stress and perturbation of the axial magnetic field vector in carbon nanotubes with inhomogeneous coating are described and discussed.
Cargo Sequences Are Important for Som1p-dependent Signal Peptide Cleavage in Yeast Mitochondria*

The inner membrane protease (IMP) has two catalytic subunits, Imp1p and Imp2p, that exhibit nonoverlapping substrate specificity in mitochondria of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The IMP also has at least one noncatalytic subunit, Som1p, which is required to cleave signal peptides from a subset of Imp1p substrates. To understand how Som1p mediates Imp1p substrate specificity, we addressed the possibility that Som1p functions as a molecular chaperone, which binds to specific substrates and directs them to the catalytic site. Our results show that cargo sequences attached to the signal peptide are important for Som1p-dependent presequence cleavage; however, no specific cargo sequence is required. Indeed, we show that a substrate normally destined for Imp2p is cleaved in a Som1p-dependent manner when the substrate is directed to Imp1p. These results argue against the notion that Som1p is a molecular chaperone. Instead, we propose that the cargo of some Imp1p substrates can assume a conformation incompatible with presequence cleavage. Som1p could thus act through Imp1p to improve cleavage efficiency early during substrate maturation.
To Construct an Individual Credit Risk Assessment Method

To achieve low costs and better accuracy of individual risk assessments, we constructed a practical method based on multiple classifiers. The method includes many singal classifiers, such as decision trees and the cluster analysis. And we tested it empirically. The result shows that the application of the method can achieve better accuracy than any single classifier of it.
Use of biomarkers in depression diagnostics

Depression is a major and costly global health burden that affects millions of people. The current diagnostic screen for depression relies on subjective structured interviews, but there is growing interest in exploring objective methods that involve depression biomarkers. In the current paper we perform a systematic review of recent articles on depression biomarkers that were published from 2012 to 2016. A screening procedure was developed and implemented to identify articles that have examined and compared biomarker levels in control (healthy) and study (diagnosed with major depressive disorder) groups. Seven biomarkers from three research articles were identified: vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) in plasma; and citrate, tyrosine, hippurate, phenylalanine, and alanine in urine. 95% confidence intervals were calculated for biomarker levels in control and study groups. Differences in measured biomarker levels between these two groups were statistically significant for all biomarkers, and trends were consistent with prior studies. We also note that the detected levels vary widely (up to several orders of magnitude) across biomarkers. For low-level biomarkers, this can present an analytical challenge in regions where the required instrument for analysis is too costly or the analytical technique is too complex to perform. For the scientific community, this presents an opportunity for pursuing analytical methods development in tandem with research on identifying suitable biomarkers for depression diagnostics.
Phosphorylation of cAMP response element-binding protein in the extended amygdala of male rats is induced by novel environment and attenuated by estrous female-bedding.

OBJECTIVE We examined whether female pheromone, which would be contained in female-soiled bedding, affected the expression of phosphorylated cAMP response element-binding protein-like (pCREB) immunoreactive cells in the extended amygdala. METHODS Male rats were exposed to following conditions: maintained in their home cage (home cage group), or relocated to a cage containing clean bedding (clean-bedding exposed group), ovariectomized (OVX) rat-soiled bedding (OVX-bedding exposed group) or estrogen-treated OVX rat-soiled bedding (OVX+E2-bedding exposed group). Rats were sacrificed 10-20 min after exposure and brain sections were subject to immunocytochemical processing. RESULTS In the medial subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST) and the central amygdala (CeA), the number of pCREB immunoreactive (pCREB-ir) cells in the clean-bedding exposed group was significantly larger than in the home cage group, while the number of pCREB-ir cells in the OVX+E2-bedding exposed group did not differ from that in the home cage group. The bedding soiled by OVX rats was less effective. No significant difference in the number of pCREB-ir cells was detected in the other regions of the extended amygdala among all groups. CONCLUSIONS The present study suggests that the exposure of clean bedding to male rats induces the expression of pCREB-ir in the medial BST and the CeA; exposure to female pheromone attenuates this expression.