Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quality of Life in Patients With Irritable Bowel Syndrome

There has been an underestimation of the impact of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) on an individual's functioning and quality of life (QoL). The general health status of both young and elderly individuals with IBS is generally found to be poorer than that of the general population. Patients with IBS seem to have worse health-related quality of life (HRQoL) than patients with certain other conditions such as gastroesophageal reflux disease, diabetes, and end-stage renal disease. Various disease-specific instruments are now available and are widely used in clinical trials to measure changes in QoL in patients with IBS after treatment intervention. Although few such data are presently available from clinical trials, it seems that patients who have a therapeutic response to therapy for IBS have a corresponding improvement in HRQoL. There seems to be no major differences in HRQoL based on IBS subtype (constipation-dominant or diarrhea-dominant). However, the severity of bowel symptoms in IBS is associated with a corresponding impact on HRQoL and patients with worse bowel symptoms have a greater diminished QoL compared with patients with milder symptoms. Evidence also indicates that HRQoL in patients with IBS is affected by sex and psychological conditions. Careful consideration of these factors may help to individualize a therapeutic strategy to optimize long-term outcomes.
A Novel Image Data Hiding Scheme with Diamond Encoding

A novel data hiding scheme in digital images with the diamond encoding by pixel value adjustment is proposed. The proposed method is the extension of the exploiting modification direction (EMD) embedding scheme. First, the process of embedding partitions the cover image into nonoverlapping blocks of two consecutive pixels and transforms the secret messages to a series of -ary digits. For each block, the diamond encoding technique is applied to calculate the diamond characteristic value, and one secret -ary digit is concealed into the diamond characteristic value. The diamond characteristic value is modified to secret digit and it can be obtained by adjusting pixel values in a block. This scheme is designed in such a way that the distortion of each block after diamond encoding is never out of the embedding parameter , and the block capacity is equal to . The diamond encoding provides an easy way to produce a more perceptible result than those yielded by simple least-significant-bit substitution methods. The embedded secret data can be extracted without the original cover image. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method is capable of hiding more secret data while keeping the stego-image quality degradation imperceptible.
Early signaling events that underlie fate decisions of naive CD4+ T cells toward distinct T‐helper cell subsets

CD4+ T‐helper (Th) cells are a major cell population that play an important role in governing acquired immune responses to a variety of foreign antigens as well as inducing some types of autoimmune diseases. There are at least four distinct Th cell subsets (Th1, Th2, Th17, and inducible T‐regulatory cells), each of which has specialized functions to control immune responses. Each of these cell types emerge from naive CD4+ T cells after encounter with foreign antigens presented by dendritic cells (DCs). Each Th cell subset expresses a unique set of transcription factors and produces hallmark cytokines. Both T‐cell receptor (TCR)‐mediated stimulation and the cytokine environment created by activated CD4+ T cells themselves, by ‘partner’ DCs, and/or other cell types during the course of differentiation, play an important role in the fate decisions toward distinct Th subsets. Here, we review how TCR‐mediated signals in collaboration with the cytokine environment influence the fate decisions of naive CD4+ T cells toward distinct Th subsets at the early stages of activation. We also discuss the roles of TCR‐proximal signaling intermediates and of the Notch pathway in regulating the differentiation to distinct Th phenotypes.
Regularized transformation optics for transient heat transfer

We report on certain cloaking strategies for transient heat transfer. Regularized Kohn's transform is employed to design cylindrical cloaks and to prove a near-cloak result. Our main result says that, after the lapse of a certain threshold time, the temperature field outside the cylindrical cloak is close to that of the uniformly conducting medium irrespective of the conductivity enclosed in the cloaked region.
Marriage, Abortion, or Unwed Motherhood? How Women Evaluate Alternative Solutions to Premarital Pregnancies in Japan and the United States

In this article, the authors argue that to understand the very low incidence of outside-of-marriage childbearing in contemporary Japan one needs to take into account perceptions of all possible solutions to a premarital pregnancy: marriage, abortion, and childbearing outside wedlock. To demonstrate the particular impact of these perceptions in Japan, the authors compare them with those in the United States, a country where many more children are born outside wedlock. Using mixed methods, the authors demonstrate that for a typical Japanese woman, giving birth outside marriage is the morally inferior solution. For many American women, in contrast, choosing to bear a child outside wedlock rather than rushing into a marriage or having an abortion is often seen as a sign of greater maturity. These preferences play an important role in maintaining the norm of childbearing within marriage in Japan and also contribute to our understanding of how this norm has waned in the United States.
A Study on the Hardware-Based Security Solutions for Smart Devices

For enhanced secure services on smart devices, hardware-based security solutions are required. To this end, the hardware security module is required and it should be physically separated from a smart device. In this paper, we describe the considerations for applying a hardware security module on smart devices. In particular, as smart devices have a limited resource and use a battery, a hardware security module for smart devices should be considered above mobile environment. In this paper, we implemented the hardware security chip for smart devices. In addition, in order to test and equip the implemented chip to a smart device, we implemented the smartphone and verified the secure service on the smart device based on the chip.
A study of pitch patterns of Japanese English analyzed via comparative linguistic features of English and Japanese

Certain defects in utterances of a word or phrase occur in English as spoken by Japanese native subjects, referred to in this article as Japanese English. This study considers such prosodic feature patterns as one of the most common causes of deficiencies in Japanese English. Japanese English is linguistically supposed to have the phonetic characteristics of the native language, Japanese. This supposition leads to the hypothesis that pitch patterns of Japanese English can be interpreted from the point of view of comparative linguistic features of English and Japanese, and that Japanese English would have better (i.e. closer to English) prosodic patterns if its particular characteristics were removed. In this study, the hypothesis was acoustically examined by means of a synthesis-by-analysis system, STRAIGHT, and then tested by listening experiments. Results of the experiments indicate practical verification of the hypothesis.
Microfilm, Paper, and OCR: Issues in Newspaper Digitization. The Utah Digital Newspapers Program

History of the UDN Program The Marriott Library at the University of Utah (U of U) has a long history of large-scale newspaper projects beginning with the National Endowment for the Humanities' United States Newspapers Program (USNP) in the 1980s, in which the Library led the effort to catalog and microfilm Utah newspapers. This involvement continues today with the Utah Digital Newspaper (UDN) program, which is digitizing historic Utah newspapers, making them searchable and available on the Internet.
Using a Problem Solving Method for Dynamic Configuration of Data Mining Applications on the Grid

In this paper, we describe how SmartBaseG, a knowledge-based architecture, can optimize dynamically data mining (DM) applications for the Grid. SMARTBASEG can be seen as a layer that intercepts the submission of a DM application to the Grid, identifies the procedures to be parallelized and optimizes the composition of the job to be submitted to the Grid. The job composition process is done by means of a problem solving method (PSM) of configuration that adopts a propose-and-revise strategy. We present our approach by describing formally the implementation of the PSM in SMARTBASEG and by exemplifying the representation of heuristics for DM application optimization by means of constraints and repairs. Finally, we show the preliminary results we have obtained in some experiments.
The complexity of analytic tableaux

The method of analytic tableaux is employed in many introductory texts and has also been used quite extensively as a basis for automated theorem proving. In this paper, we discuss the complexity of the system as a method for refuting contradictory sets of clauses, and resolve several open questions. We discuss the three forms of analytic tableaux: clausal tableaux, generalized clausal tableaux, and binary tableaux. We resolve the relative complexity of these three forms of tableaux proofs and also resolve the relative complexity of analytic tableaux versus resolution. We show that there is a quasi-polynomial simulation of tree resolution by analytic tableaux; this simulation cannot be improved, since we give a matching lower bound that is tight to within a polynomial.
The mammalian Na+/H+ antiporters NHE-1, NHE-2, and NHE-3 are electroneutral and voltage independent, but can couple to an H+ conductance

Na+/H+ exchange in vertebrates is thought to be electroneutral and insensitive to the membrane voltage. This basic concept has been challenged by recent reports of antiport-associated currents in the turtle colon epithelium (Post and Dawson, 1992, 1994). To determine the electrogenicity of mammalian antiporters, we used the whole-cell patch clamp technique combined with microfluorimetric measurements of intracellular pH (pHi). In murine macrophages, which were found by RT- PCR to express the NHE-1 isoform of the antiporter, reverse (intracellular Na(+)-driven) Na+/H+ exchange caused a cytosolic acidification and activated an outward current, whereas forward (extracellular Na(+)-driven) exchange produced a cytosolic alkalinization and reduced a basal outward current. The currents mirrored the changes in pHi, were strictly dependent on the presence of a Na+ gradient and were reversibly blocked by amiloride. However, the currents were seemingly not carried by the Na+/H+ exchanger itself, but were instead due to a shift in the voltage dependence of a preexisting H+ conductance. This was supported by measurements of the reversal potential (Erev) of tail currents, which identified H+ (equivalents) as the charge carrier. During Na+/H+ exchange, Erev changed along with the measured changes in pHi (by 60-69 mV/pH). Moreover, the current and Na+/H+ exchange could be dissociated. Zn2+, which inhibits the H+ conductance, reversibly blocked the currents without altering Na+/H+ exchange. In Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, which lack the H+ conductance, Na+/H+ exchange produced pHi changes that were not accompanied by transmembrane currents. Similar results were obtained in CHO cells transfected with either the NHE-1, NHE-2, or NHE-3 isoforms of the antiporter, indicating that exchange through these isoforms is electroneutral. In all the isoforms tested, the amplitude and time- course of the antiport-induced pHi changes were independent of the holding voltage. We conclude that mammalian NHE-1, NHE-2, and NHE-3 are electroneutral and voltage independent. In cells endowed with a pH- sensitive H+ conductance, such as macrophages, activation of Na(+)-H+ exchange can modulate a transmembrane H+ current. The currents reported in turtle colon might be due to a similar "cross-talk" between the antiporter and a H+ conductance.
PACK: Profile Analysis using Clustering and Kurtosis to find molecular classifiers in cancer

MOTIVATION Elucidating the molecular taxonomy of cancers and finding biological and clinical markers from microarray experiments is problematic due to the large number of variables being measured. Feature selection methods that can identify relevant classifiers or that can remove likely false positives prior to supervised analysis are therefore desirable. RESULTS We present a novel feature selection procedure based on a mixture model and a non-gaussianity measure of a gene's expression profile. The method can be used to find genes that define either small outlier subgroups or major subdivisions, depending on the sign of kurtosis. The method can also be used as a filtering step, prior to supervised analysis, in order to reduce the false discovery rate. We validate our methodology using six independent datasets by rediscovering major classifiers in ER negative and ER positive breast cancer and in prostate cancer. Furthermore, our method finds two novel subtypes within the basal subgroup of ER negative breast tumours, associated with apoptotic and immune response functions respectively, and with statistically different clinical outcome. AVAILABILITY An R-function pack that implements the methods used here has been added to vabayelMix, available from (www.cran.r-project.org). CONTACT aet21@cam.ac. uk SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary information is available at Bioinformatics online.
The Ideological Congruence Controversy: The Impact of Alternative Measures, Data, and Time Periods on the Effects of Election Rules

Focusing on the left-right scale as a summary measure of citizens’ and representatives’ preferences, a growing body of literature has used a variety of approaches and data in measuring positions of citizens and representatives. The most recent studies, contrary to previous ones, show no significant difference between ideological congruence in single member district (SMD) and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. This article examines the major alternative measurement approaches and data sets, finding that recent results are due to differences in time period, not differences in measurement approach. The associations between election rules and ideological congruence are relatively robust to various measurement approaches, as are estimations of the causal processes shaping ideological congruence. The association between election rules and congruence has declined in the past decade, as shown by all three major approaches, due primarily to convergence toward the median of plurality parties in the.
HbVar database of human hemoglobin variants and thalassemia mutations: 2007 update

HbVar (http://globin.bx.psu.edu/hbvar) is a locus‐specific database (LSDB) developed in 2001 by a multi‐center academic effort to provide timely information on the genomic sequence changes leading to hemoglobin variants and all types of thalassemia and hemoglobinopathies. Database records include extensive phenotypic descriptions, biochemical and hematological effects, associated pathology, and ethnic occurrence, accompanied by mutation frequencies and references. In addition to the regular updates to entries, we report significant advances and updates, which can be useful not only for HbVar users but also for other LSDB development and curation in general. The query page provides more functionality but in a simpler, more user‐friendly format and known single nucleotide polymorphisms in the human α‐ and β‐globin loci are provided automatically. Population‐specific β‐thalassemia mutation frequencies for 31 population groups have been added and/or modified and the previously reported δ‐ and α‐thalassemia mutation frequency data from 10 population groups have also been incorporated. In addition, an independent flat‐file database, named XPRbase (http://www.goldenhelix.org/xprbase), has been developed and linked to the main HbVar web page to provide a succinct listing of 51 experimental protocols available for globin gene mutation screening. These updates significantly augment the database profile and quality of information provided, which should increase the already high impact of the HbVar database, while its combination with the UCSC powerful genome browser and the ITHANET web portal paves the way for drawing connections of clinical importance, that is from genome to function to phenotype. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Effects of age and pubertal status on depression in a large clinical sample

Abstract The rate of depression rises overall between childhood and adolescence, and by early adulthood depression is twice as common in women as in men. However, study results are conflicting as to the relative rates of depression in prepubertal boys and girls, and it is not clear whether the rates in adolescent boys rise, fall, or remain steady. It is also uncertain when in adolescence the female preponderance emerges. A number of studies point to effects of the biological developments of puberty as having an important place in these changes. From a developmental point of view, the fact that the hormonal and physical changes of puberty differ in boys and girls, mean that a “biological explanation” fits in well with the gender differentiation in rates of depression across puberty. In a sample of 3,519 8–16-year-old psychiatric patients, both boys and girls shared increasing levels of depression across this age range, but the rate of increase was faster in girls. There was no difference in the rates of depression between boys and girls before the age of 11, but by the age of 16 girls were twice as likely as boys to have significant depressive symptomatology. When age was controlled for, pubertal status had no effect on depression scores. Thus, these results did not support the idea that the biological changes of puberty are a primary motive force in producing the changes in the sex ratio in depression in adolescence. Therefore, further research on this topic needs not only to address the etiology of depression in young people, but also to search for etiologic factors with differential distributions or effects on boys and girls.
Studies in vitro on the mechanism of the epithelial/mesenchymal interaction in the early fetal thymus

The effect of the mesenchyme on early thymus development was investigated in vitro by culturing tissue recombinants of the epithelium and mesenchyme derived from the earliest fetal thymus primordium. The thymus mesenchyme promoted the development of the epithelium as assessed by expression of epithelial surface molecules such as major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I and class II antigens; mesenchymes of other organs were similarly effective. We looked for the culture conditions in which the epithelium could normally express the MHC class II antigen without the mesenchyme and found that the insulin‐like growth factors — I and — II were able to support epithelial development under serum‐free conditions. When we cultured the prospective thymus region of a day 9 embryo which had not initiated lymphoid precursor migration, MHC class II antigen was expressed on the epithelium, indicating that lymphoid precursors are not required for early epithelial differentiation. This system provides a means to dissect the complex tissue interactions during the earliest stages of thymus development.
Analysis of two group signatures based on bilinear maps

Group signatures are broadly used to build E-voting, E-binding and fair E-cash systems. In 2004, Boneh et al proposed a short group signature (BBS04) and a group signature with verifier-local revocation (BS04). Both schemes are based on bilinear maps. In this paper, we revisit and improve them. The security of the revisited BBS04 scheme can be directly derived from the improved BS04. Our analysis is helpful to unveil the psychological activities during designing the two signatures. This will promote the techniques for analyzing cryptographic protocols.
WMAP confirming the ellipticity in BOOMERanG and COBE CMB maps

The recent study of BOOMERanG 150 GHz Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation maps have detected ellipticity of the temperature anisotropy spots independent on the temperature threshold. The effect has been found for spots up to several degrees in size, where the biases of the ellipticity estimator and of the noise are small. To check the effect, now we have studied, with the same algorithm and in the same sky region, the WMAP maps. We find ellipticity of the same average value also in WMAP maps, despite of the different sensitivity of the two experiments to low multipoles. Large spot elongations had been detected also for the COBE-DMR maps. If this effect is due to geodesic mixing and hence due to non precisely zero curvature of the hyperbolic Universe, it can be linked to the origin of WMAP low multipoles anomaly.
Quantitative analysis of TGFBR2 mutations in Marfan-syndrome-related disorders suggests a correlation between phenotypic severity and Smad signaling activity

Mutations in the gene encoding transforming growth factor-beta receptor type II (TGFBR2) have been described in patients with Loeys–Dietz syndrome (LDS), Marfan syndrome type 2 (MFS2) and familial thoracic aortic aneurysms and dissections (TAAD). Here, we present a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of TGFBR2 expression, turnover and TGF-β-induced Smad and ERK signaling activity for nine mutations identified in patients with LDS, MFS2 and TAAD. The mutations had different effects on protein stability, internalization and signaling. A dominant-negative effect was demonstrated for mutations associated with LDS and MFS2. No mutation showed evidence of an immediate cell-autonomous paradoxical activation of TGF-β signaling. There were no cell biological differences between mutations described in patients with LDS and MFS2. By contrast, R460C, which has been found in familial TAAD but not in MFS2 or LDS, showed a less-severe dominant-negative effect and retained residual Smad phosphorylation and transcriptional activity. TAAD is characterized primarily by thoracic aortic aneurysms or dissections. By contrast, MFS2 is characterized by numerous skeletal abnormalities, and patients with LDS additionally can display craniofacial and other abnormalities. Therefore, our findings suggest that the balance between defects in Smad and ERK signaling might be an important determinant of phenotypic severity in disorders related to mutations in TGFBR2.