Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Demonstrating the Potential for Dynamic Auditory Stimulation to Contribute to Motion Sickness

Auditory cues can create the illusion of self-motion (vection) in the absence of visual or physical stimulation. The present study aimed to determine whether auditory cues alone can also elicit motion sickness and how auditory cues contribute to motion sickness when added to visual motion stimuli. Twenty participants were seated in front of a curved projection display and were exposed to a virtual scene that constantly rotated around the participant's vertical axis. The virtual scene contained either visual-only, auditory-only, or a combination of corresponding visual and auditory cues. All participants performed all three conditions in a counterbalanced order. Participants tilted their heads alternately towards the right or left shoulder in all conditions during stimulus exposure in order to create pseudo-Coriolis effects and to maximize the likelihood for motion sickness. Measurements of motion sickness (onset, severity), vection (latency, strength, duration), and postural steadiness (center of pressure) were recorded. Results showed that adding auditory cues to the visual stimuli did not, on average, affect motion sickness and postural steadiness, but it did reduce vection onset times and increased vection strength compared to pure visual or pure auditory stimulation. Eighteen of the 20 participants reported at least slight motion sickness in the two conditions including visual stimuli. More interestingly, six participants also reported slight motion sickness during pure auditory stimulation and two of the six participants stopped the pure auditory test session due to motion sickness. The present study is the first to demonstrate that motion sickness may be caused by pure auditory stimulation, which we refer to as “auditorily induced motion sickness”.
A Review of Research on Masculinity Ideologies Using the Male Role Norms Inventory

Within the past twenty five years, the new psychology of men has pioneered advancements in understanding and conceptualizing gender role expectations using the Gender Role Strain Paradigm. Gender ideology, an individual's in-ternalization of cultural belief systems regarding gender role norms, is the core construct of the Gender Role Strain Paradigm. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive summary of findings from research on masculinity ideologies using the Male Role Norms Inventory (MRNI) conducted over the past 15 years. A review of data on the psychometric properties of the MRNI, along with cross-cultural and cross-national analyses will be presented, as will the relationship between traditional ideologies and other constructs. The article concludes with suggested directions for future research and practice using the MRNI.
Cytomegalovirus immunoglobulin G antibody is associated with subclinical carotid artery disease among HIV-infected women.

BACKGROUND Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection has been implicated in immune activation and accelerated progression of immunodeficiency from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) coinfection. We hypothesized that CMV is associated with vascular disease in HIV-infected adults. METHODS In the Women's Interagency HIV Study, we studied 601 HIV-infected and 90 HIV-uninfected participants. We assessed the association of CMV immunoglobulin G (IgG) level with carotid artery intima-media thickness, carotid artery distensibility, Young's elastic modulus, and blood pressures. Multivariable models adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, smoking, diabetes, and body mass index. RESULTS Mean CMV IgG levels were higher in HIV-infected women compared with HIV-uninfected women (P < .01). Among HIV-infected women, higher CMV IgG level was associated with decreased carotid artery distensibility (P < .01) and increased Young's modulus (P = .02). Higher CMV IgG antibody level was associated with increased prevalence of carotid artery lesions among HIV-infected women who achieved HIV suppression on antiretroviral therapy, but not among viremic or untreated HIV-infected women. Adjustment for Epstein-Barr virus antibody levels and C-reactive protein levels had no effect on the associations between CMV IgG levels and vascular parameters. CONCLUSIONS Cytomegalovirus antibody titers are increased in HIV-infected women and associated with subclinical cardiovascular disease. Host responses to CMV may be abnormal in HIV infection and associated with clinical disease.
ELECTRONIC PUBLIC PROCUREMENT OF CONSTRUCTION AND PUBLIC WORKS : TOWARDS A NEW REALITY

This paper will describe a new approach towards electronic public procurement of construction and public Works. The paper will analyse how the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are changing the processes within the Building and Construction sector, namely the Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach combined with the Model-Driven Architecture, Service-Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing. The combination of these technological approaches enable a full dematerialization of the whole building or public Works life-cycle and the possibility of public procurement become more efficient and increase market competitiveness.
Gilles De La Tourette's Syndrome

Four cases of Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome are reported, and these, together with 65 previously published cases are analysed. The condition is less rare in boys than in girls. It generally starts in children between 5 and 8 years of age with motor tics. Explosive utterances occur later and are frequently of an obscene nature. Spontaneous remissions lasting several years may occur, and may be mistakenly attributed to treatment. Improvement following psychotherapy or changes in milieu have been reported. Symptoms were partially controlled by phenothiazines or haloperidol, but other drugs were ineffective. Leucotomy, carbon dioxide inhalations and massed practice were occasionally associated with improvement, while electroplexy and direct suggestion under hypnosis were never effective. Children who developed the illness frequently held a special position in their families or had parents with "unhealthy" attitudes. They were often neurotic or of high intelligence. The syndrome could be precipitated by physical illness or mental stress. Neurological examination is usually normal. Non-specific electroencephalographic abnormalities are often reported, usually over parieto-temporal or rolandic areas. Patients with this illness rarely had a family history of mental illness, but sometimes had relatives with tics. The syndrome seldom leads to schizophrenia, and only two patients were reported to have become permanent inmates of an institution because of their illness. There is a dearth of reported autopsy material and the aetiology of the condition is unknown.
Full adaptive neural predistortion for satellite non linear high power amplifiers

This paper proposes a novel on-line method to predistort the nonlinear high power amplifier (HPA) on-board the satellite by neural networks (NN). The proposed method consists of two NNs: a NN to model the HPA on-line and another NN to pre-distort it. The updating rules of the predistortion NN depend on the instantaneous parameters of the modeling NN. The ordinary gradient descent algorithm suffers from a long transient phase and a slow convergence speed since the two NNs evolves si-multaneously. Using the natural gradient descent exhibits good convergence speed and more accurate model and pre-distorter in a short time.
R-ECS: reliable elastic computing services for building virtual computing environment

Grid computing has gained wide interests for being an innovative approach that leverages existing IT infrastructure for large volume computing/data processing. However, a challenging issue faced by Grid computing is that the available resources often do not match the needs of a specific application requirement because of their heterogeneity, distributive and dynamic nature. The mismatching between resources and application requirement leads to resources underutilization and user frustration. Cloud computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as services can deal with the problem well. In this paper we propose a mechanism of Reliable Elastic Computing Service (R-ECS) based on the Cloud computing concept. ECS aggregates resources to construct a virtual computing environment based on virtualization technologies which reduce the coupling between software and hardware. In addition, it provides services supporting on-demand user-customized resources management, which achieves better resource utilization and user satisfaction. Reliability issue is also addressed by appropriate exception detection and fault recovery. Performance evaluation results show that the user-customized virtual computing environment is efficient and increases resources utilization.
Aspect and Verbal Prepositions

In this paper, we explore some previously unanalysed interactions between verbal aktionsart and prepositional complementation in Norwegian, namely the alternations between a DP object and PP complements with pa ‘on/at’ and til ‘to/at’. We argue that a simple account based on [±telic] or [±quantized] features cannot be correct. Instead, we generalize the notion of path and homomorphism, and integrate it in a syntactic theory of how complex events are built up compositionally. The path structure introduced by the PP interacts with the path structure of the VP to produce complex events based on ‘homomorphic unity’ in much the same way as has been argued for in the Verb + Nominal domain (Krifka 1992). Specifically, an extended location (a pa -PP) in the complement of and activity verb (in our terms, a process subevental projection) gives rise to a non-directed path for the event; a point location ( a til -PP) in the complement of an accomplishment verb (one which in our terms will contain a result subevental projection) gives rise to the specification of an endpoint.
Emerging principles and neural substrates underlying tonic sleep-state-dependent influences on respiratory motor activity

Respiratory muscles with dual respiratory and non-respiratory functions (e.g. the pharyngeal and intercostal muscles) show greater suppression of activity in sleep than the diaphragm, a muscle almost entirely devoted to respiratory function. This sleep-related suppression of activity is most apparent in the tonic component of motor activity, which has functional implications of a more collapsible upper airspace in the case of pharyngeal muscles, and decreased functional residual capacity in the case of intercostal muscles. A major source of tonic drive to respiratory motoneurons originates from neurons intimately involved in states of brain arousal, i.e. neurons not classically involved in generating respiratory rhythm and pattern per se. The tonic drive to hypoglossal motoneurons, a respiratory motor pool with both respiratory and non-respiratory functions, is mediated principally by noradrenergic and glutamatergic inputs, these constituting the essential components of the wakefulness stimulus. These tonic excitatory drives are opposed by tonic inhibitory glycinergic and γ-amino butyric acid (GABA) inputs that constrain the level of respiratory-related motor activity, with the balance determining net motor tone. In sleep, the excitatory inputs are withdrawn and GABA release into the brainstem is increased, thus decreasing respiratory motor tone and predisposing susceptible individuals to hypoventilation and obstructive sleep apnoea.
Management of rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) can be defined as an autoimmune inflammatory disease which is represented in about1% of the world population and occurs in the middle age with increasing frequency in older population. RA has several types which can be caused by joint inflammation,bone or joint damage. Scientists were unable to determine the causes of such inflammation until few years ago when some evidences or clues were unveiled that involved mainly genetics and environmental factors. Although there is no known complete cure of RA, treatment aim to achieve several goals which are pain relief, slow joint degeneration and improve patient wellbeing. To achieve that, several approaches could be applied including lifestyle, medication, routine monitoring and surgery.
Scan Chain Design Targeting Dual Power and Delay Optimization for 3D Integrated Circuit

Scan chains are widely used to improve the testability of integrated circuits(ICs) and it is a major issue in circuit testing to optimize test overheads like area, delay andpower. Previous work on scan chain design methodology forthree-dimensional (3D) integrated circuits have been proposed for wire length optimization only. This paper has presented a Genetic Algorithm(GA) based formulation to provide a trade-off between delay and power optimization in scan chain reordering to come up with the ordering of flip-flops on the chain based upon a weighted cost function of delay and power consumption metrics. It has been observed that maximum improvement in power consumption is obtained as 53.78% for ISCAS89 benchmark circuits compared to unordered scan chain.
Estimating conditional volatility with neural networks

It is well known that one of the obstacles to effective forecasting of exchange rates is heteroscedasticity (non-stationary conditional variance). The autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (ARCH) model and its variants have been used to estimate a time dependent variance for many financial time series. However, such models are essentially linear in form and we can ask whether a non-linear model for variance can improve results just as non-linear models (such as neural networks) for the mean have done. In this paper we consider two neural network models for variance estimation. Mixture Density Networks (Bishop 1994, Nix and Weigend 1994) combine a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and a mixture model to estimate the conditional data density. They are trained using a maximum likelihood approach. However, it is known that maximum likelihood estimates are biased and lead to a systematic under-estimate of variance. More recently, a Bayesian approach to parameter estimation has been developed (Bishop and Qazaz 1996) that shows promise in removing the maximum likelihood bias. However, up to now, this model has not been used for time series prediction. Here we compare these algorithms with two other models to provide benchmark results: a linear model (from the ARIMA family), and a conventional neural network trained with a sum-of-squares error function (which estimates the conditional mean of the time series with a constant variance noise model). This comparison is carried out on daily exchange rate data for five currencies.
Evaluation of Altered Drug Pharmacokinetics in Critically Ill Adults Receiving Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a life‐support modality used in patients with refractory cardiac and/or respiratory failure. A significant resurgence in the use ECMO has been seen in recent years as a result of substantial improvements in technology and survival benefit. With expanding ECMO use, a better understanding of how ECMO affects drug pharmacokinetics (PK) is necessary. The vast majority of PK studies in patients receiving ECMO have been conducted within neonatal or pediatric populations or within a controlled environment (e.g., in vitro or ex vivo). Because of significant differences in absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion, it may be inappropriate to extrapolate these PK data to adults. Thus, the aims of this review are to evaluate the changes in drug PK during ECMO and to summarize the available PK data for common drugs used in the adult critically ill patients during ECMO support. A search of the PubMed (1965–July 2016), EMBASE (1965–July 2016), and Cochrane Controlled Trial Register databases was performed. All relevant studies describing PK alterations during ECMO in ex vivo experiments and in adults were included. Evaluation of the data indicated that drug PK in adults receiving ECMO support may be significantly altered. Factors influencing these alterations are numerous and have intricate relationships with each other but can generally be classified as ECMO circuit factors, drug factors, and patient factors. Commonly used drugs in these patients include antimicrobials, sedatives, and analgesics. PK data for most of these drugs are generally lacking; however, recent research efforts in this patient population have provided some limited guidance in drug dosing. With an improved understanding of altered drug PK secondary to ECMO therapy, optimization of pharmacotherapy within this critically ill population continues to move forward.
Vulnerabilities of PTEN-TP53-deficient prostate cancers to compound PARP-PI3K inhibition.

UNLABELLED Prostate cancer is the most prevalent cancer in males, and treatment options are limited for advanced forms of the disease. Loss of the PTEN and TP53 tumor suppressor genes is commonly observed in prostate cancer, whereas their compound loss is often observed in advanced prostate cancer. Here, we show that PARP inhibition triggers a p53-dependent cellular senescence in a PTEN-deficient setting in the prostate. Surprisingly, we also find that PARP-induced cellular senescence is morphed into an apoptotic response upon compound loss of PTEN and p53. We further show that superactivation of the prosurvival PI3K-AKT signaling pathway limits the efficacy of a PARP single-agent treatment, and that PARP and PI3K inhibitors effectively synergize to suppress tumorigenesis in human prostate cancer cell lines and in a Pten/Trp53-deficient mouse model of advanced prostate cancer. Our findings, therefore, identify a combinatorial treatment with PARP and PI3K inhibitors as an effective option for PTEN-deficient prostate cancer. SIGNIFICANCE The paucity of therapeutic options in advanced prostate cancer displays an urgent need for the preclinical assessment of novel therapeutic strategies. We identified differential therapeutic vulnerabilities that emerge upon the loss of both PTEN and p53, and observed that combined inhibition of PARP and PI3K provides increased efficacy in hormone-insensitive advanced prostate cancer.
The fatty acid desaturase 2 (FADS2) gene product catalyzes A4 desaturation to yield n‐3 docosahexaenoic acid and n‐6 docosapentaenoic acid in human cells

Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) is a Δ4‐desaturated C22 fatty acid and the limiting highly unsaturated fatty acid (HUFA) in neural tissue. The biosynthesis of Δ4‐desaturated docosanoid fatty acids 22:6n‐3 and 22:5n‐6 are believed to proceed via a circuitous biochemical pathway requiring repeated use of a fatty acid desaturase 2 (FADS2) protein to perform Δ6 desaturation on C24 fatty acids in the endoplasmic reticulum followed by 1 round of β‐oxidation in the peroxisomes. We demonstrate here that the FADS2 gene product can directly Δ4‐desaturate 22:5n‐3→22:6n‐3 (DHA) and 22:4n‐6→22:5n‐6. Human MCF‐7 cells lacking functional FADS2‐mediated Δ6‐desaturase were stably transformed with FADS2, FADS1, or empty vector. When incubated with 22:5n‐3 or 22:4n‐6, FADS2 stable cells produce 22:6n‐3 or 22:5n‐6, respectively. Similarly, FADS2 stable cells when incubated with d5‐18:3n‐3 show synthesis of d5‐22:6n‐3 with no labeling of 24:5n‐3 or 24:6n‐3 at 24 h. Further, both C24 fatty acids are shown to be products of the respective C22 fatty acids via elongation. Our results demonstrate that the FADS2 classical transcript mediates direct Δ4 desaturation to yield 22:6n‐3 and 22:5n‐6 in human cells, as has been widely shown previously for desaturation by fish and many other organisms. —Park, H. G. , Park, W. J., Kothapalli, K. S. D. , Brenna, J. T. The fatty acid desaturase 2 (FADS2) gene product catalyzes Δ4 desaturation to yield n‐3 docosahexaenoic acid and n‐6 docosapentaenoic acid in human cells. FASEB J. 29, 3911‐3919 (2015). www.fasebj. org
Antiparkinsonian and Behavioral Effects of Inactivation of the Substantia Nigra Pars Reticulata in Hemiparkinsonian Primates

Altered activity in one of the output nuclei of the basal ganglia, the internal segment of the globus pallidus, is known to play an important role in the generation of parkinsonism. These inactivation studies tested the hypothesis that altered activity in the second major output nucleus of the basal ganglia, the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr), also contributes to parkinsonian motor signs. To this end, three rhesus monkeys were rendered hemiparkinsonian by intracarotid injections of MPTP. The animals then received intra-SNr injections of the GABA(A) receptor agonist muscimol to inactivate small portions of the SNr. Before and after these injections, parkinsonian motor signs were evaluated with a battery of behavioral observation methods. Injections into the centrolateral SNr reduced contralateral limb akinesia and bradykinesia in two animals. By contrast, medial injections induced generalized activation, contralateral turning, and saccadic eye movements in all animals. Injections in the most lateral and posterior portions of the nucleus had no effects. Two of the animals also received ibotenic acid lesions of the SNr, followed by a series of similar observations. These injections induced improvements in limb akinesia, postural improvements, and turning. The experiments suggest that the anterolateral "motor" territory of the SNr is involved in the development of appendicular parkinsonian motor signs.
Alternating metabolic pathways in NGF-deprived sympathetic neurons affect caspase-independent death

Mitochondrial release of cytochrome c in apoptotic cells activates caspases, which execute apoptotic cell death. However, the events themselves that culminate in caspase activation can have deleterious effects because caspase inhibitor-saved cells ultimately die in a caspase-independent manner. To determine what events may underlie this form of cell death, we examined bioenergetic changes in sympathetic neurons deprived of NGF in the presence of a broad-spectrum caspase inhibitor, boc-aspartyl-(OMe)-fluoromethylketone. Here, we report that NGF-deprived, boc-aspartyl-(OMe)-fluoromethylketone-saved neurons rely heavily on glycolysis for ATP generation and for survival. Second, the activity of F0F1 contributes to caspase-independent death, but has only a minor role in the maintenance of mitochondrial membrane potential, which is maintained primarily by electron transport. Third, permeability transition pore inhibition by cyclosporin A attenuates NGF deprivation-induced loss of mitochondrial proteins, suggesting that permeability transition pore opening may have a function in regulating the degradation of mitochondria after cytochrome c release. Identification of changes in caspase inhibitor-saved cells may provide the basis for rational strategies to augment the effectiveness of the therapeutic use of postmitochondrial interventions.