Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two-year changes in lipids and lipoproteins associated with the maintenance of a 5% to 10% reduction in initial weight: some findings and some questions.

OBJECTIVE This study assessed whether a 5% to 10% reduction in initial weight would be associated with as favorable long-term (i.e., 100 weeks) changes in lipids and lipoproteins, as have been observed on a short-term basis (i.e., 8 weeks). RESEARCH METHODS AND PROCEDURES This was a prospective evaluation of 25 obese women, each of whom had lost > or =5% of initial weight during 48 weeks of treatment and had maintained a weight loss of this magnitude at 1-year follow-up (week 100). Lipids and lipoproteins were obtained at baseline and at weeks 8, 24, 48, and 100. All participants had a baseline total cholesterol > or =5.17 mmol/L (200 mg/dL). RESULTS At the end of the first 8 weeks, weight fell an average of 11.7+/-2.8%, total cholesterol 20.6+/-7.5%, low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol 23.0+/-18.1%, and triglycerides 26.0+/-20.1%. At week 48, weight had fallen to 20.1+/-7.0% below baseline, but total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol were reduced only 11.5+/-10.4% and 12.0+/-14.0% below baseline, respectively. These latter reductions were significantly (p<0.05) smaller than those observed at week 8, despite the larger weight loss at week 48. High-density-lipoprotein cholesterol declined significantly (p<0.05) during the first 8 weeks, but returned to baseline values by week 24. Patients gained 7.4+/-7.4 kg from weeks 48 to 100, during which time total and LDL cholesterol (but not triglycerides) rose significantly (p<0.05). Patients who, at week 100, maintained losses >10% of initial weight had significantly greater reductions in total and LDL cholesterol values than did patients who maintained losses of only 5% to 10% of initial weight. DISCUSSION Results of this study underscore the importance of assessing long-term changes in weight-related health complications when patients have lost weight but are no longer dieting (and exercising) as aggressively as they did during the initial months of treatment.
The role of the cell wall in fungal pathogenesis

Fungal infections are a serious health problem. In recent years, basic research is focusing on the identification of fungal virulence factors as promising targets for the development of novel antifungals. The wall, as the most external cellular component, plays a crucial role in the interaction with host cells mediating processes such as adhesion or phagocytosis that are essential during infection. Specific components of the cell wall (called PAMPs) interact with specific receptors in the immune cell (called PRRs), triggering responses whose molecular mechanisms are being elucidated. We review here the main structural carbohydrate components of the fungal wall (glucan, mannan and chitin), how their biogenesis takes place in fungi and the specific receptors that they interact with. Different model fungal pathogens are chosen to illustrate the functional consequences of this interaction. Finally, the identification of the key components will have important consequences in the future and will allow better approaches to treat fungal infections.
Regulation of the tyrosine hydroxylase and dopamine β‐hydroxylase genes by the transcription factor AP‐2

The retinoic acid‐inducible and developmentally regulated transcription factor AP‐2 plays an important role during development. In adult mammals, AP‐2 is expressed in both neural and non‐neural tissues. However, the function of AP‐2 in different neuronal phenotypes is poorly understood. In this study, transcriptional regulation of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and dopamine β‐hydroxylase (DBH) genes by AP‐2 was investigated. AP‐2 binding sites were identified in the upstream regions of both genes. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) and DNase I footprinting analyses indicate that the AP−2 interaction with these motifs is more prominent in catecholaminergic SK‐N‐BE(2)C and CATH.a than in non‐catecholaminergic HeLa and HepG2 cell lines. Exogenous expression of AP‐2 robustly transactivated TH and DBH promoter activities in non‐catecholaminergic cell lines. While AP‐2 regulates the DBH promoter activity via a single site, transactivation of the TH promoter by AP‐2 appears to require multiple sites. In support of this, mutation of multiple AP‐2 binding sites but not that of single site diminished the basal promoter activity of the TH gene in cell lines that express TH and abolished transactivation by exogenous AP‐2 expression in cell lines that do not express TH. In contrast, mutation of a single AP‐2 binding site of the DBH gene completely abolished transactivation by AP‐2. Double‐label immunohistochemistry showed that AP‐2 is coexpressed with TH in noradrenergic and adrenergic neurons in both the central and peripheral nervous systems of adult rodents. Numerous non‐catecholaminergic cell groups within the spinal cord, medulla, cerebellum, and pons also express AP‐2. The concentration of AP‐2 in dorsomedial locations along the neuraxis suggests a regionally specific role for this transcription factor in the regulation of neuronal function. Based on these findings we propose that AP‐2 may coregulate TH and DBH gene expression and thus participate in expression/maintenance of neurotransmitter phenotypes in (nor)adrenergic neurons and neuroendocrine cells.
Association between Myopia, Biometry and Occludable Angle: The Jiangning Eye Study

Background Myopia subjects usually have long axial lengths and are predisposed to deep anterior chamber depths and open angles. Jiangning eye study is a randomized, population based study in Shanghai to determine whether myopia has an effect on the prevalence of occludable angles. Methods A total of 2478 residents aged 50 years and over were randomly selected, and 2044 (82.5%) individuals of them participated in ophthalmic examinations between November 2012 and February 2013. Eye examinations included autorefraction, noncontact tonometry, measurement of axial length, anterior chamber depth, lens thickness and spectral domain optical coherence tomography. Results The crude prevalences of iris trabecular meshwork contact in Jiangning Chinese individuals with myopia, emmetropia, and hyperopia are 1.25%, 6.44%, and 7.43%, respectively. There is also iris trabecular meshwork contact and shallow anterior chamber depth in myopia subjects even with long axial lengths. Conclusions The prevalence of iris trabecular meshwork contact in myopia subjects is lower than their emmetropia or hyperopia counterparts. Axial length is an important factor associate with occludable angle.
Towards an Autonomic Framework : Self-Configuring Network Services and Developing Autonomic Applications

Autonomic services in the enterprise are becoming more and more of a requirement in all types of networked environments. With an ever-increasing number, type, and complexity of network services available to individual computing systems comes an increasing complexity in establishing and maintaining the configurations of these services. Many network services are already selfconfiguring today, but this capability is not yet universally available for the broad spectrum of network services or networked environments. Without wide-reaching network services self-configurability, the benefits of reduced management complexity will remain unrealized. We begin by examining existing network services configuration technologies and identifying incomplete or inconsistent capabilities for dynamically self-configuring these network services. We present for consideration the requirements of an architecture for dynamically selfconfiguring network services that drives enhanced yet simplified capabilities both to end users and to IT technicians and engineers in a corporate IT environment, as well as to roaming wireless users and home networks. We then continue by examining the practical implementation of autonomic network service configuration. Purely autonomic systems cannot easily be built today due to a lack of comprehensive framework support. However, substantial pieces of autonomic technology exist in forms suitable for early adoption. Specifically, we focus on the IBM Autonomic Computing Toolkit, an open set of Java-class libraries, plug-ins, and tools created for the Eclipse development environment. The IBM Autonomic Computing Toolkit represents a * Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners. modern framework for enterprise software integration. We examine the toolkit’s standard interfaces and data formats to identify its applicability to network services configuration problems. We conclude with a summary of findings and recommendations for prospective enterprise developers and integrators of autonomic toolkits.
Thermal Dynamic Modeling for Home Energy Management : A Case Study

The modeling of power system loads is a very important problem since loads are ultimately the driving force behind the entire system. In this report, we consider the problem of thermal dynamics air conditioner load models for residential homes. In particular, we investigate a physical-based load modeling methodology. We propose a method using minimization of the least square error to obtain the essential parameters α, G, and c from the linear differential equation in which the indoor temperature represents the state of energy storage in the house. The essential parameters describe the energy balance for a single house.The data used for this study corresponds to real measurements taken from a house and it was provided by Intel. The data consists of indoor and outdoor temperatures as well as HVAC power consumption for the different compartments of the house. Upon experiments that includes computational simulation, extensive data analysis, it is concluded that 1 day of training samples for parameter prediction performs reasonable well in comparison of 7 and 14 days. The validation of the model is performed using data in two different months. The modeling and prediction mean squared error obtained are below 0.1 degree. These results open the possibility to investigate techniques to incorporate adaptive temperature learning.
Development of THz harmonic mixer for QCL phase locking application

A practical solution using a THz optical source as a Local Oscillator (LO) for radio astronomy above 2 THz requires that the source to be frequency or phase locked. Therefore, it is crucial to enable a high conversion efficiency heterodyne mixer to produce a stable LO source that can operate at room temperature. Harmonically pumped 1.9-3.2 THz Schottky diode based mixers have been designed to enable high harmonic mixing. The harmonic mixers will be used to phase lock a Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) to a stable microwave source. The design and characterization of a 1.9-3.2 THz harmonic mixer is presented.
Cancer risk modelling and radiological protection

Statistical models describing how the radiation-related risks of particular types of cancer vary with the doses of radiation received by specific tissues are derived from data gathered in epidemiological studies of exposed groups of people, guided by an incomplete understanding of radiobiological mechanisms gleaned from experimental studies. Cancer risk models have been developed for a dozen or so different types of cancer, and take account of the effect of important risk modifying factors such as age at exposure and time since exposure. Of primary importance in the development of cancer risk models is the experience of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, but other exposed groups contribute information, including those exposed to radiation from internally deposited radioactive material, such as inhaled radon. Cancer risk models predict that at low doses or low dose rates the excess risk of cancer is directly proportional to the dose of radiation received, with no threshold dose—the linear no threshold (LNT) dose–response model—and the inferred summary estimate of the overall average lifetime excess risk of developing a serious cancer is ∼ 5%/Sv. It is these cancer risk models and this inferred nominal risk estimate that provide the technical basis of radiological protection. Although it is difficult to definitively test the LNT model at low doses or low dose rates, because the predicted excess risk is small compared with fluctuations in the baseline risk, evidence exists that a small risk of cancer results from low-level exposure to radiation and that the excess risk is around that predicted by current risk models.
Language of At-Risk First Graders

Response to intervention (RTI) is changing the way children who are at risk for academic difficulties are identified. The focus of RTI is to identify and ameliorate children’s decoding and reading fluency difficulties before referral to special education. These aspects of reading involve phonological processing and other aspects of language. However, much of language is not examined in the decodingand fluency-focused RTI models. As a result, the language needs of RTIidentified at-risk readers may be overlooked, particularly those children who may appear to have resolved their initial difficulties. Reading competence involves a set of decoding skills and the large domain of comprehension. Because of the differing natures of these two domains, code-based RTI models may be missing the linguistic side of reading. Many young children who are identified with code-based difficulties will also present with language difficulties that are manifested concurrently or later in oral language and reading comprehension (Bishop & Adams, 1990; Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002; Nation, Clarke, Marshall, & Durand, 2004). The purpose of this study was to determine whether narrative language performance differentiates learner types who have been identified through code-based RTI procedures.
Values and Assumptions in the Development of DSM-III and DSM-III-R: An Insider's Perspective and a Belated Response to Sadler, Hulgus, and Agich's "On Values in Recent American Psychiatric Classification"

It is widely acknowledged that the approach taken in the development of a classification of mental disorders is guided by various values and assumptions. The author, who played a central role in the development of DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association [1980] Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 3rd ed. Washington, DC:Author) and DSM-III-R (American Psychiatric Association [1987] Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 3rd ed, rev. Washington, DC:Author) will explicate the basic values and assumptions that guided the development of these two diagnostic manuals. In so doing, the author will respond to the critique of DSM-III and DSM-III-R made by Sadler et al. in their 1994 paper (Sadler JZ, Hulgus YF, Agich GJ [1994] On values in recent American psychiatric classification. J Med Phil 19:261-277). The author will attempt to demonstrate that the stated goals of DSM-III and DSM-III-R are not inherently in conflict and are easily explicated by appealing to widely held values and assumptions, most of which appeared in the literature during the development of the manuals. Furthermore, we will demonstrate that it is not true that DSM-III places greater emphasis on reliability over validity and is covertly committed to a biological approach to explaining psychiatric disturbance.
The Arts Connection

Artist-in-residency experiences (puppetry, creative drama, music, and movement) indicated a connection with emotional transformative learning as a venue for professional development. This small teacher practitioner-based study involved teacher participants engaged in four-weeklong artist residencies at four childcare centers. Thirteen teachers participated in a presurvey phase and eight teachers participated in a postsurvey phase designed to measure their attitudes and beliefs about how children learn. Teachers’ presurvey responses indicated firm beliefs in a direct instruction approach to teaching young children while postsurvey responses showed movement toward a facilitator approach to children’s learning. Four informal teacher interviews with 2 of the 13 teachers at one of the four centers suggested emotional transformative learning in an artist-in-residency experience allows teachers to begin to understand that attitudes, feelings, and beliefs are a part of change.
Surface Mesh Qualities

3D surface models are often stored as indexed face sets, whereas algorithms can typically treat only a subset of the so-representable surfaces. Besides this gap between “potential” input and “allowed” input, more and more algorithms specify their input requirements at a high level of abstraction (e.g. “natural” shapes), and this makes it difficult to automatically assess the appropriateness of a specific model. In this article, surface meshes are analyzed in terms of indexed face sets and are characterized based on a collection of “qualities”. Qualities of a surface mesh represent the peculiarities of both the surface and its combinatorial representation, can be combined to formally define input requirements of algorithms, can be exploited to effectively estimate high-level categorizations of 3D objects in a collection, and can be used to quickly produce benchmarks for geometry processing algorithms starting from unstructured digital libraries.
Robust Color Texture Features Under Varying Illumination Conditions

Under varying illumination, both the statistical and structural contents of color texture are modified, leading to changes in the observed texture surface. We model the effect of illumination as a perturbation on an ideal color texture and show that the spectra of the ambient light have a significant impact on the observed texture patterns in the individual color channels. Motivated by studies in human color constancy, we propose a correlation-based transformation that minimizes the effect of illumination variation in color texture analysis. Experimental results are included, which validate the performance of the proposed minvariance model in the analysis of color texture.
Global Analysis of Mouse Polyomavirus Infection Reveals Dynamic Regulation of Viral and Host Gene Expression and Promiscuous Viral RNA Editing

Mouse polyomavirus (MPyV) lytically infects mouse cells, transforms rat cells in culture, and is highly oncogenic in rodents. We have used deep sequencing to follow MPyV infection of mouse NIH3T6 cells at various times after infection and analyzed both the viral and cellular transcriptomes. Alignment of sequencing reads to the viral genome illustrated the transcriptional profile of the early-to-late switch with both early-strand and late-strand RNAs being transcribed at all time points. A number of novel insights into viral gene expression emerged from these studies, including the demonstration of widespread RNA editing of viral transcripts at late times in infection. By late times in infection, 359 host genes were seen to be significantly upregulated and 857 were downregulated. Gene ontology analysis indicated transcripts involved in translation, metabolism, RNA processing, DNA methylation, and protein turnover were upregulated while transcripts involved in extracellular adhesion, cytoskeleton, zinc finger binding, SH3 domain, and GTPase activation were downregulated. The levels of a number of long noncoding RNAs were also altered. The long noncoding RNA MALAT1, which is involved in splicing speckles and used as a marker in many late-stage cancers, was noticeably downregulated, while several other abundant noncoding RNAs were strongly upregulated. We discuss these results in light of what is currently known about the MPyV life cycle and its effects on host cell growth and metabolism.
Evolution of analytical performance in portable glucose meters in the last decade.

OBJECTIVE To assess and compare the technical accuracy of portable glucose meters during the last decade. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS One-thousand preprandial (pre) and postprandial (post) capillary whole-blood glucose values measured with meters owned mainly by diabetic patients were compared with a single laboratory method yearly from 1989 to 1999. A total of 21,950 capillary measurements and their corresponding laboratory reference values were analyzed at our clinic. RESULTS The lowest mean absolute difference was found in 1989 (pre: 2 +/- 22 mg/dl, post: 9 +/- 31 mg/dl) (mean +/- SD). The highest mean absolute difference was observed in 1993 (pre: 31 +/- 33 mg/dl) and 1996 (post: 50 +/- 35 mg/dl). The highest mean relative deviation was observed in 1990 (pre: 16.4%) and 1996 (post: 20.6%). The highest percentage of readings that were within a 5% deviation limit were observed in 1998 (pre: 44.5%) and in 1997 (post: 36.7%). Based on blood glucose levels within +/-5 and +/-10% of laboratory values, the technical accuracy of meters was similar for 1989 and 1999 (P = 0.27 and 0.52, respectively). The percentage of pre values in zone A of Clarke's error grid analysis was >90% in 1989, 1997, 1998, and 1999. CONCLUSIONS The analytical performance of glucose meters decreased between 1990 and 1996 but was restored between 1997 and 1999. Nevertheless, our data suggest that the technical accuracy of glucose meters has not significantly improved during the last decade. Complementary studies taking into account the preanalytical improvements of the recent meters, as well as their calibration method, appear necessary.
European Roma and Inclusive Education: Notes on Promises and Shortcomings

A b s t r a c t This paper discusses the policy and politics of inclusion of European Roma students into mainstream educational system. It argues that critical discussions around inclusion cannot avoid detours into examination of (self)exclusion, (self)separation, and the visions and ideals of more socially just education. In examining these topics, the paper contributes to the discussion on amalgamation of educational policies and practices that would acknowledge the possibilities, ambiguities, and setbacks of travelling practices such as inclusion.
Matrix metalloproteinases are required for retinal ganglion cell axon guidance at select decision points

Axons receive guidance information from extrinsic cues in their environment in order to reach their targets. In the frog Xenopus laevis, retinal ganglion cell (RGC) axons make three key guidance decisions en route through the brain. First, they cross to the contralateral side of the brain at the optic chiasm. Second, they turn caudally in the mid-diencephalon. Finally, they must recognize the optic tectum as their target. The matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) and a disintegrin and metalloproteinase (ADAM) families are zinc (Zn)-dependent proteolytic enzymes. The latter functions in axon guidance, but a similar role has not yet been identified for the MMP family. Our previous work implicated metalloproteinases in the guidance decisions made by Xenopus RGC axons. To test specifically the importance of MMPs, we used two different in vivo exposed brain preparations in which RGC axons were exposed to an MMP-specific pharmacological inhibitor (SB-3CT), either as they reached the optic chiasm or as they extended through the diencephalon en route to the optic tectum. Interestingly, SB-3CT affected only two of the guidance decisions, with misrouting defects at the optic chiasm and tectum. Only at higher concentrations was RGC axon extension also impaired. These data implicate MMPs in the guidance of vertebrate axons, and suggest that different metalloproteinases function to regulate axon behaviour at distinct choice points: an MMP is important in guidance at the optic chiasm and the target, while either a different MMP or an ADAM is required for axons to make the turn in the mid-diencephalon.