Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“ Family-as-Unit ” Myth in Pediatric Ethics

In pediatrics, parents are the presumed surrogate decision-makers for their children. Parents are generally obligated to make decisions in the child’s best interest. When assessing what is in the child’s best interests, parents should consider the child’s experience of illness, potential for suffering (physical or psychological), and ability to understand and tolerate treatment. Yet, parents may consider a variety of factors other than best interest when making treatment decisions for their children. Moreover, parents may equate the child’s best interest with their own (or their family’s) and make decisions that, in some situations, will place children at significant risk of serious harm. Clinicians may be reluctant to challenge parents due to a perception that their obligations require treating the family “as a unit. ” After detailing a case from the author’s own practice in clinical ethics, this essay will challenge the view that “family-centered” (as opposed to “patient-centered”) care is an appropriate ethical model for pediatric decision-making. Specifically, the physician-patient relationship—or, in this context, the pediatrician-child relationship— ought not to be reconceptualized into the pediatrician-parent-child relationship, since the latter perspective potentially misidentifies who the patient is and may inadvertently suggest there is warrant for “treating” the family’s suffering at the expense of the child’s welfare.
From Gene Trees to Species Trees II: Species Tree Inference by Minimizing Deep Coalescence Events

When gene copies are sampled from various species, the resulting gene tree might disagree with the containing species tree. The primary causes of gene tree and species tree discord include incomplete lineage sorting, horizontal gene transfer, and gene duplication and loss. Each of these events yields a different parsimony criterion for inferring the (containing) species tree from gene trees. With incomplete lineage sorting, species tree inference is to find the tree minimizing extra gene lineages that had to coexist along species lineages; with gene duplication, it becomes to find the tree minimizing gene duplications and/or losses. In this paper, we present the following results: 1) The deep coalescence cost is equal to the number of gene losses minus two times the gene duplication cost in the reconciliation of a uniquely leaf labeled gene tree and a species tree. The deep coalescence cost can be computed in linear time for any arbitrary gene tree and species tree. 2) The deep coalescence cost is always not less than the gene duplication cost in the reconciliation of an arbitrary gene tree and a species tree. 3) Species tree inference by minimizing deep coalescence events is NP-hard.
Private context-aware recommendation of points of interest: An initial investigation

Several context-aware mobile recommender systems have been recently proposed to suggest points of interest (POIs). Ideally, a user of these systems should not be allowed to know the preferred POIs of another user, since they reveal sensitive information like political opinions, religious beliefs, or sexual orientations. Unfortunately, existing POI recommender systems do not provide any formal guarantee of privacy. In this paper, we report an initial investigation of this challenging research issue. We propose the use of differential privacy methods to extract statistics about users' preferences for POIs. Actual recommendations are generated by querying those statistics, in order to formally enforce privacy. We also present a high-level architecture to apply our methods.
EXPLORING THE CORRELATION BETWEEN EDUCATION AND INCOME: THE IMPACT OF EDUCATION ON PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES IN THE FORMAL SECTOR

Education is the key gateway for people with disabilities to become skilled laborers for self-reliance and to create better welfare. Using Sakernas data for 2021, this study aims to analyze the impact of education level on people with disabilities between two groups, namely people with disabilities with high education and people with low education, with additional observations on people with disabilities working in the formal or informal sector. The sample selected for the study is made up of workers with disabilities who have an income of 27,049. The higher education category is the level of education completed by persons with disabilities at the equivalent of high school to doctoral level, while the low education group is the level of education of persons with disabilities at the junior high school level and below. The results of the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method state that higher education and working in the formal sector have an impact of more than 58 percent on increasing their income compared to persons with disabilities who have low education and work in the informal sector.
Altered Vascular Reactivity in Mice Made Hypertensive by Nitric Oxide Synthase Inhibition

This study tested the hypothesis that nitric oxide (NO) synthase inhibition in mice would result in hypertension characterized by increased agonist-induced vasoconstrictor responsiveness and attenuated endothelium-dependent vasodilation. Administration of Nω-nitro-L-arginine (L-NNA), an NO synthase inhibitor (1 g/L, 4 weeks), via drinking water to mice resulted in significant elevations in blood pressure. Phenylephrine-induced contraction was significantly increased in aortic rings from L-NNA-treated mice compared with rings from control mice. Aortic rings from control mice showed a concentration-dependent relaxation to acetylcholine whereas those obtained from L-NNA-treated mice showed a biphasic response, contracting at lower concentrations while relaxing at higher concentrations. Aortic rings from L-NNA-treated mice had decreased relaxation to acetylcholine and increased sensitivity to sodium nitroprusside compared with control rings. The relaxation induced by an NO-independent soluble guanylyl cyclase activator was not different between groups. In aortic rings from control and L-NNA-treated mice pre-contracted with phenylephrine, the administration of L-NNA to the organ bath caused additional and sustained contraction. When compared with the contraction induced by phenylephrine, L-NNA-induced contraction in aorta from control mice was significantly higher than that in aorta from L-NNA-treated mice. We conclude that mice treated with L-NNA develop hypertension and that a reduction in NO availability is responsible for the changes observed in vascular reactivity.
Valley-polarized exciton dynamics in a 2D semiconductor heterostructure

Stacking to prolong valley lifetime In the material MoSe2, which, like graphene, has a two-dimensional honeycomb crystal lattice, the electronic structure has two “valleys. ” Electrons can be distinguished by the valley they reside in, making them act as potential information carriers. However, electrons easily lose this information by scattering into the other valley. Rivera et al. placed single layers of MoSe2 and WSe2 on top of each other and shone circularly polarized light on the structure. The light caused excitons—pairs of electrons and holes—to form so that the hole and electron came from the same valley but different layers. The valley-specific character of such excitons persisted far longer than would be possible in a single layer of either material. Science, this issue p. 688 Photoluminescence measurements are used to deduce a valley lifetime of 40 nanoseconds in heterostructures of MoSe2 and WSe2. Heterostructures comprising different monolayer semiconductors provide an attractive setting for fundamental science and device technologies, such as in the emerging field of valleytronics. We realized valley-specific interlayer excitons in monolayer WSe2-MoSe2 vertical heterostructures. We created interlayer exciton spin-valley polarization by means of circularly polarized optical pumping and determined a valley lifetime of 40 nanoseconds. This long-lived polarization enables the visualization of the expansion of a valley-polarized exciton cloud over several micrometers. The spatial pattern of the polarization evolves into a ring with increasing exciton density, a manifestation of valley exciton exchange interactions. Our work introduces van der Waals heterostructures as a promising platform from which to study valley exciton physics.
Clinical implications of variations of common carotid artery trifurcation

Introduction and Objective. Common carotid arteries are paired vessels supplying the head and neck, and in surgical practice their trifurcation can impact the effectiveness of various oncologic, reconstructive, and interventional procedures. Understanding anatomical variations is crucial for avoiding complications and improving procedural safety. The aim of the study was to review the literature and systematize knowledge regarding the anatomy of the common carotid a. trifurcation, with particular emphasis on its role in procedures such as carotid a. stenting, carotid endarterectomy, tumour embolization, glossectomy, thyroidectomy, and lymph node resection. Review Methods
Presence or Semantic Information in Sentiment Classification?

This paper analyses the implications in the use of a content vector based on the presence or the semantic information of the features that represent an opinion. In our phrase pattern-based method, we automatically construct semantic lexicons to determine the semantic orientation of each feature, that is, the degree of subjectivity associated with each particular n-gram. Using two different datasets with two different learning models: our unsupervised learning approach as well as the use of Bayesian learning methods, our results show that it is possible to maintain a state-of-the art classification accuracy.
Hypothalamic deep brain stimulation in the treatment of chronic cluster headache

Cluster headache (CH) is a short-lasting unilateral headache associated with ipsilateral craniofacial autonomic manifestations. A positron emission tomography (PET) study has shown that the posterior hypothalamus is activated during CH attacks, suggesting that hypothalamic hyperactivity plays a key role in CH pathophysiology. On this basis, stimulation of the ipsilateral posterior hypothalamus was hypothesized to counteract such hyperactivity to prevent intractable CH. Ten years after its introduction, hypothalamic stimulation has been proved to successfully prevent attacks in more than 60% of 58 hypothalamic implanted drug-resistant chronic CH patients. The implantation procedure has generally been proved to be safe, although it carries a small risk of brain haemorrhage. Long-term stimulation is safe, and nonsymptomatic impairment of orthostatic adaptation is the only noteworthy change. Microrecording studies will make it possible to better identify the target site. Neuroimaging investigations have shown that hypothalamic stimulation activates ipsilateral trigeminal complex, but with no immediate perceived sensation within the trigeminal distribution. Other studies on the pain threshold in chronically stimulated patients showed increased threshold for cold pain in the distribution of the first trigeminal branch ipsilateral to stimulation. These studies suggest that activation of the hypothalamus and of the trigeminal system are both necessary, but not sufficient to generate CH attacks. In addition to the hypothalamus, other unknown brain areas are likely to play a role in the pathophysiology of this illness. Hypothalamus implantation is associated with a small risk of intracerebral haemorrhage and must be performed by an expert neurosurgical team, in selected patients.
SQLStor: Blockage of stored procedure SQL injection attack using dynamic query structure validation

Web applications are becoming an important part of our daily life. So attacks against them also increases rapidly. Of these attacks, a major role is held by SQL injection attacks (SQLIA). This paper proposes a new method for preventing SQL injection attacks in JSP web applications. The basic idea is to check before execution, the intended structure of the SQL query. For this we use semantic comparison. This method prevents different kinds of injection attacks including stored procedure attack which is more difficult and less considered in the literature.
Kernel Pooled Local Subspaces for Classification

We study the use of kernel subspace methods for learning low-dimensional representations for classification. We propose a kernel pooled local discriminant subspace method and compare it against several competing techniques: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Kernel PCA (KPCA), and linear local pooling in classification problems. We evaluate the classification performance of the nearest-neighbor rule with each subspace representation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and performance superiority of the kernel pooled subspace method over competing methods such as PCA and KPCA in some classification problems.
Accountability in public health units: using a modified nominal group technique to develop a balanced scorecard for performance measurement.

BACKGROUND Little attention has been paid to the need for accountability instruments applicable across all health units in the public health system. One tool, the balanced scorecard was created for industry and has been successfully adapted for use in Ontario hospitals. It consists of 4 quadrants: financial performance, outcomes, customer satisfaction and organizational development. The aim of the present study was to determine if a modified nominal group technique could be used to reach consensus among public health unit staff and public health specialists in Ontario about the components of a balanced scorecard for public health units. METHODS A modified nominal group technique consensus method was used with the public health unit staff in 6 Eastern Ontario health units (n=65) and public health specialists (n=18). RESULTS 73.8% of the public health unit personnel from all six health units in the eastern Ontario region participated in the survey of potential indicators. A total of 74 indicators were identified in each of the 4 quadrants: program performance (n=44); financial performance (n=11); public perceptions (n=11); and organizational performance (n=8). INTERPRETATION The modified nominal group technique was a successful method of incorporating the views of public health personnel and specialists in the development of a balanced scorecard for public health.
Lung function and bronchodilator response in 4-year-old children with different wheezing phenotypes

Persistent wheeze is a common chronic disease in early childhood and later may progress to asthma. However, the association between pre- and post-bronchodilator lung function and the wheezing phenotype in preschool children is not known. Children 4 yrs of age involved in a prospective birth cohort study (in Antwerp, Belgium) concerning perinatal factors and the occurrence of asthma and allergies, were invited to participate in lung function measurements with the forced oscillation technique. The wheezing phenotype was assessed via (bi)annual questionnaires. Wheezing phenotype and baseline respiratory impedance data were available for 325 children, 96% of whom underwent bronchodilation tests. The baseline resistance at 4 Hz was higher in children with early transient (11.0 hPa·s·L−1, n = 127) or persistent wheeze (11.9 hPa·s·L−1, n = 54) than in children who never wheezed (10.3 hPa·s·L−1, n = 144). After bronchodilation, the resistance decreased on average by 22%. The decrease was greater among the persistent wheezers than among those who never wheezed (3.4 versus 2.3 hPa·s·L−1). The baseline lung function was poorer and the bronchodilator response was greater in 4-yr-old children with persistent wheeze than in those who never wheeze or who had early transient wheeze, implying a higher bronchomotor tone in the former group.
Evolution of Spatial Pattern Formation by Autonomous Bio-Inspired Cellular Controllers

In this paper, a gene regulatory network called FGRN (Fractal Gene Regulatory Network) and a reaction-diffusion system called AHHS (Artificial Homeostatic Hormone System) are investigated for spatial pattern formation. The two bioinspired controllers possess similar and different features in terms of their underlying processes, structures, and communication abilities. By comparing their behaviours and capabilities in pattern formation, we provide a deeper understanding of the effects of their features. The controllers are evolved and investigated for producing various patterns in presence of different implicit positional information as well as developing a memory in order to keep the desired pattern when the positional information is eliminated. The behaviours of the controllers in each case are discussed and a preliminary test of robustness is performed. The experiments represent a positive impact of diffusion process in AHHS that is compensated by the complex structure of FGRN in producing patterns in presence of positional information and a negative effect of diffusion process in memory capability.
Efficacy of BrighterSide, a Self-Guided App for Suicidal Ideation: Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background Self-guided digital interventions can reduce the severity of suicidal ideation, although there remain relatively few rigorously evaluated smartphone apps targeting suicidality. Objective This trial evaluated whether the BrighterSide smartphone app intervention was superior to a waitlist control group at reducing the severity of suicidal ideation. Methods A total of 550 adults aged 18 to 65 years with recent suicidal ideation were recruited from the Australian community. In this randomized controlled trial, participants were randomly assigned to receive either the BrighterSide app or to a waitlist control group that received treatment as usual. The app was self-guided, and participants could use the app at their own pace for the duration of the study period. Self-report measures were collected at baseline, 6 weeks, and 12 weeks. The primary outcome was severity and frequency of suicidal ideation, and secondary outcomes included psychological distress and functioning and recovery. Additional data were collected on app engagement and participant feedback. Results Suicidal ideation reduced over time for all participants, but there was no significant interaction between group and time. Similar improvements were observed for self-harm, functioning and recovery, days out of role, and coping. Psychological distress was significantly lower in the intervention group at the 6-week follow-up, but this was not maintained at 12 weeks. Conclusions The BrighterSide app did not lead to a significant improvement in suicidal ideation relative to a waitlist control group. Possible reasons for this null finding are discussed.
Zeta potential of porous rocks in contact with mixtures of monovalent and divalent electrolytes

The zeta potential is one of the most important parameters influencing the electrokinetic coupling. Most reservoir rocks are saturated or partially saturated by natural water containing various types of ions (mostly monovalent and divalent ions). Therefore, understanding how the zeta potential behaves for mixtures of electrolytes is very important. In this work, measurements of the zeta potential for four different silica‐based samples saturated by seven different mixtures of monovalent and divalent electrolytes are then carried out at a fixed ionic strength. It is seen that the magnitude of the measured zeta potential decreases with increasing divalent cation fraction. The experimental results are then explained by a model developed for mixtures of monovalent and divalent electrolytes. The result shows that the theoretical model is able to reproduce the main trend of the variation of the zeta potential with divalent cation fractions. Additionally, the model can fit the experimental data reported in literature well for reasonable values of the input parameters.
A complex adaptive syndrome in Drosophila caused by microclimatic contrasts

Temperature and humidity are among the most important environmental factors affecting insect adaptive strategies and evolution. Here, we report multiple adaptive differences between Drosophila melanogaster isofemale lines derived from the opposite slopes of Lower Nahal Oren canyon at Mount Carmel, Israel. The slopes are separated by 100 m at the bottom and 400 m at the top, and contrast sharply in physical and biotic factors. The multivariate fitness complex analysed in D. melanogaster included oviposition temperature preferences, viability and longevity changes, caused by short-term and lifetime temperature treatments, and resistance to drought stress at different temperatures. Some of these measures were obtained for the sibling species, D. simulans, and gave results that paralleled those of D. melanogaster. We conclude that strong microclimatic natural selection overrides migration in Drosophila at this microsite.
Identifying subtle interrelated changes in functional gene categories using continuous measures of gene expression

MOTIVATION Analysis of large-scale expression data is greatly facilitated by the availability of gene ontologies (GOs). Many current methods test whether sets of transcripts annotated with specific ontology terms contain an excess of 'changed' transcripts. This approach suffers from two main limitations. First, since gene expression is continuous rather than discrete, designating a gene as changed or unchanged is arbitrary and oblivious to the actual magnitude of the change. Second, by considering only the number of changed genes, finer changes in expression patterns associated with the category may be ignored. Since genes generally participate in multiple networks, widespread and subtle modifications in expression patterns are at least as important as extreme increases/decreases of a few genes. RESULTS Numerical simulations confirm that incorporating continuous measures of gene expression for all measured transcripts yields detection of considerably more subtle changes. Applying continuous measures to microarray data from brains of mice injected with the Parkinsonian neurotoxin, MPTP, enables detection of changes in various biologically relevant GO terms, many of which are overlooked by discrete approaches.