Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dentists’ perceptions of antimicrobial use for dental procedures

iors.7 In contrast, the summary TPB scores did not correlate with antibiotic prescribing behavior. This finding contrasts with a systematic review of TPB domain scores reporting an association with antibiotic prescription behaviors.8 It is plausible that the weight of the individual TPB determinants requires future refinement.8 A second study finding was the key predictor of “considering patients as first priority” as a key predictor of appropriate antibiotic use. This finding suggests a patient safety and quality-improvement opportunity, while additional efforts may exist to minimize unnecessary antibiotic combinations for surgical prophylaxis and to shorten postoperative antibiotic duration. The limitations of this study include acknowledgment of reported findings which may not be generalizable to other study populations, given the exploratory study design, small sample size, and single institutional study site. Additionally, despite structured interviews, inherent bias may have occurred in the TTM and TPB assessments, and have influenced the unweighted, cumulative TPB scores. Future work is planned for assessment of TTM stage–based prescriber interventions associated with antibiotic prescribing practices along with further characterization of the TPB intrapersonal behavior theory.
Prececal amino acid digestibility and phytate degradation in broiler chickens when using different oilseed meals, phytase and protease supplements in the feed

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of phytase and protease supplementation on prececal (pc) amino acid (AA) digestibility, phytate (InsP6) degradation, and MEn concentration in diets using 3 oilseed meals as main protein sources in broiler chicken feed. The broiler chicken diets, which lacked mineral phosphorus, contained either soybean meal (SBM), SBM and rapeseed meal (SBM/RSM), or SBM and sunflower meal (SBM/SFM) as main protein sources. Diets were not supplemented with enzymes or supplemented with 1,500 or 3,000 FTU phytase/kg, or with 1,600 mg protease/kg. For diets containing SBM as the main protein source, the effects of phytase supplementation with and without monocalcium phosphate were also investigated. Data were obtained during 2 subsequent runs from days 14 to 22 and from days 23 to 31. Each diet was tested using 8 replicates with 4 replicates per run. For pc AA digestibility, no significant interactions were observed between main protein sources, enzyme supplementation, or addition of monocalcium phosphate except for Cys. Supplementation of 1,500 FTU phytase/kg increased pc digestibility of all AA. No differences in pc AA digestibility were observed between 1,500 and 3,000 FTU phytase/kg supplementation treatments. Prececal disappearance of InsP6 and pc P digestibility were greater in the high phytase supplementation treatment. Protease supplementation increased pc digestibility of all AA except for Cys when SBM/RSM was the main protein source. Supplementation of protease and 3,000 FTU phytase/kg increased MEn concentrations. The effect of phytase on pc AA digestibility was fully expressed at a lower supplementation level than needed for a maximized pc InsP6 disappearance and MEn concentration.
Exogenous RNAi mechanisms contribute to transcriptome adaptation by phased siRNA clusters in Paramecium

Abstract Extensive research has characterized distinct exogenous RNAi pathways interfering in gene expression during vegetative growth of the unicellular model ciliate Paramecium. However, role of RNAi in endogenous transcriptome regulation, and environmental adaptation is unknown. Here, we describe the first genome-wide profiling of endogenous sRNAs in context of different transcriptomic states (serotypes). We developed a pipeline to identify, and characterize 2602 siRNA producing clusters (SRCs). Our data show no evidence that SRCs produce miRNAs, and in contrast to other species, no preference for strand specificity of siRNAs. Interestingly, most SRCs overlap coding genes and a separate group show siRNA phasing along the entire open reading frame, suggesting that the mRNA transcript serves as a source for siRNAs. Integrative analysis of siRNA abundance and gene expression levels revealed surprisingly that mRNA and siRNA show negative as well as positive associations. Two RNA-dependent RNA Polymerase mutants, RDR1 and RDR2, show a drastic loss of siRNAs especially in phased SRCs accompanied with increased mRNA levels. Importantly, most SRCs depend on both RDRs, reminiscent to primary siRNAs in the RNAi against exogenous RNA, indicating mechanistic overlaps between exogenous and endogenous RNAi contributing to flexible transcriptome adaptation.
Design Requirements of Generic Hand Exoskeletons and Survey of Hand Exoskeletons for Rehabilitation, Assistive, or Haptic Use

Most current hand exoskeletons have been designed specifically for rehabilitation, assistive, or haptic applications to simplify the design requirements. Clinical studies on poststroke rehabilitation have shown that adapting assistive or haptic applications into physical therapy sessions significantly improves the motor learning and treatment process. The recent technology can lead to the creation of generic hand exoskeletons that are application-agnostic. In this paper, our motivation is to create guidelines and best practices for generic exoskeletons by reviewing the literature of current devices. First, we describe each application and briefly explain their design requirements, and then list the design selections to achieve these requirements. Then, we detail each selection by investigating the existing exoskeletons based on their design choices, and by highlighting their impact on application types. With the motivation of creating efficient generic exoskeletons in the future, we finally summarize the best practices in the literature.
Comparison of the Protective Effects of Bee Venom Extracts with Varying PLA2 Compositions in a Mouse Model of Parkinson’s Disease

Bee venom contains a number of pharmacologically active components, including enzymes and polypeptides such as phospholipase A2 (PLA2) and melittin, which have been shown to exhibit therapeutic benefits, mainly via attenuation of inflammation, neurotoxicity, and nociception. The individual components of bee venom may manifest distinct biological actions and therapeutic potential. In this study, the potential mechanisms of action of PLA2 and melittin, among different compounds purified from honey bee venom, were evaluated against Parkinson’s disease (PD). Notably, bee venom PLA2 (bvPLA2), but not melittin, exhibited neuroprotective activity against PD in a 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) mouse model of PD. MPTP-induced behavioral deficits were also abolished after bvPLA2 treatment, depending on the PLA2 content. Further, bvPLA2 administration activated regulatory T cells (Tregs) while inhibiting inflammatory T helper (Th) 1 and Th17 cells in the MPTP mouse model of PD. These results indicate that bvPLA2, but not melittin, protected against MPTP and alleviated inflammation in PD. Thus, bvPLA2 is a promising and effective therapeutic agent in Parkinson’s disease.
Statistical verification techniques for stochastic dynamic systems

Dr. Rajeev Narayanan Electrical Engineering Master of Science by Mohammad Massoud Electronic chip design, aircraft stability, finance, economy and even our social life can be affected by random events. Noise is a random process that occurs due to unwanted signal interactions in electronic circuits and environmental phenomena such as thunder, manufacturing defects or thermal increment. Noise affects the performance of our design and will cause unpredictable results on the output of the system. Consequently, we need to model noise and analyze the system at its presence. Verifying the performance of a dynamic system in the presence of noise requires a highly complicated mathematical skills. There are different verification techniques that rely on impractically expensive techniques. Flight dynamics characterizes the response of an aircraft vehicle to its control inputs, gravitational forces, and perturbations and has to adhere to strict design and safety requirements. In this thesis, we are interested in modeling and verifying the stability of aircrafts such as F4 in presence of noise. In order to study the random behavior of noise, we propose an approach based on modeling the designs using stochastic differential equations (SDE) in the time domain. Furthermore, we propose a modeling and estimation methodology that allows us to capture the perturbation in the form of Stochastic Differential Equations for the statistical monitoring of the stability property. Finally, pattern matching and Monte Carlo based verification methods are used for qualitative estimation of the simulation traces.
Public Health Threats in Mass Gatherings: A Systematic Review

ABSTRACT Mass gatherings (MGs) are held throughout the world. The aim of this review was to assess and identify the health threats based on the type of the MG, type of diseases, and injuries. Research platforms such as Web of Science, Medline, and Scopus were searched through June 2017. All epidemiologic studies that investigated the health threats during the MGs, such as communicable diseases, injuries, high-risk behaviors, and environmental health problems, were included in this review. Out of 1264 references, 45 articles were included in the review. Three main types of MGs include religious, festival, and sporting event; and fairs such as trade, book, and agricultural types were also reported in the selected studies. In the religious MGs, infectious diseases were the most common health threat. Road traffic accidents and environmental health problems were additional health threats. At MG sporting events, injuries were the most common health problems. Infectious diseases and alcohol and drug-related disorders were other reported public health concerns. In the festival MGs, alcohol and drug-related problems were commonly reported. This review showed that health threats vary, based on the type of mass gathering. The health organizers of MGs should consider the type of the MG and the health needs and safety of the participants to help them plan their action and provide the needed health care services.
Early language exposure supports later language skills in infants with and without autism

The way that parents communicate with their typically developing infants is associated with later infant language development. Here we aim to show that these associations are observed in infants subsequently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study had three groups: high‐familial‐risk infants who did not have ASD (n = 46); high‐familial‐risk infants who had ASD (n = 14); and low‐familial‐risk infants who exhibited typical development (n = 36). All‐day home language recordings were collected at 9 and 15 months, and language skills were assessed at 24 months. Across all infants in the study, including those with ASD, a richer home language environment (e.g., hearing more adult words and experiencing more conversational turns) at 9 and 15 months was associated with better language skills. Higher parental educational attainment was associated with a richer home language environment. Mediation analyses showed that the effect of education on child language skills was explained by the richness of the home language environment. Exploratory analyses revealed that typically developing infants experience an increase in caregiver–child conversational turns across 9–15 months, a pattern not seen in children with ASD. The current study shows that parent behavior during the earliest stages of life can have a significant impact on later development, highlighting the home language environment as means to support development in infants with ASD. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1784–1795. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
An overview of new antitubercular drugs, drug candidates, and their targets

The causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), Mycobacterium tuberculosis and more recently totally drug‐resistant strains of M. tuberculosis, display unique mechanisms to survive in the host. A four‐drug treatment regimen was introduced 40 years ago but the emergence of multidrug‐resistance and more recently TDR necessitates the identification of new targets and drugs for the cure of M. tuberculosis infection. The current efforts in the drug development process are insufficient to completely eradicate the TB epidemic. For almost five decades the TB drug development process remained stagnant. The last 10 years have made sudden progress giving some new and highly promising drugs including bedaquiline, delamanid, and pretomanid. Many of the candidates are repurposed compounds, which were developed to treat other infections but later, exhibited anti‐TB properties also. Each class of drug has a specific target and a definite mode of action. These targets are either involved in cell wall biosynthesis, protein synthesis, DNA/RNA synthesis, or metabolism. This review discusses recent progress in the discovery of newly developed and Food and Drug Administration approved drugs as well as repurposed drugs, their targets, mode of action, drug‐target interactions, and their structure‐activity relationship.
Cross-Layer Routing for a Mobility Support Protocol Based on Handover Mechanism in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

Wireless sensor networks with mobile collectors or sinks face some challenges regarding the data collection process and the continuous connectivity and delivering of data while the mobile sink is moving throughout the network. These challenges increase as the network grows. For this aim, we propose in this paper a cross-layer routing protocol which supports mobility for large-scale wireless sensor networks, which we name CLR-MSPH. We adapt CLR-MSPH for the hierarchical architecture of the network, and it performs on cluster-based wireless sensor networks where the network is organized in clusters. Our proposed protocol deals with the problem of handover data after the mobile sink leaves the radio range of cluster head without sending all data stored in the cluster head’s buffer. We also introduce a mobility model for the mobile sink for a better data collection process. CLR-MSPH is considered as an extending implementation of BMAC protocol with handover mechanism (BMAC-H). In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed protocol, we compare CLR-MSPH to BMAC-H, where we adapted BMAC-H to perform in cluster-based wireless sensor networks. The simulation results show that CLR-MSPH performs better than BMAC-H in terms of packets reception rate, energy, and latency.
CD117hi expression identifies a human fetal hematopoietic stem cell population with high proliferation and self-renewal potential

Fetal hematopoiesis occurs in multiple embryonic niches during development: after their emergence in the aorta/gonad/mesonephros (AGM) region, hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) migrate to the fetal liver (FL) where they actively proliferate and expand, before fetal bone marrow (BM) colonization. In contrast, adult hematopoiesis takes place primarily in BM, and adult HSC are quiescent. At the moment, very little is known about the changes in cell surface markers and regulators of HSC amplification and self-renewal occurring during human FL development: we described a transient CD34CD45CD144 HSC population in the first trimester (T1) FL, and CD90/GPI-80 and CD143 were shown to allow HSC enrichment in the second trimester (T2) FL. However, no surface marker allowing HSC enrichment of CD34CD38 population both in T1 and T2 FL has been described so far. Deciphering regulatory mechanisms that control HSC expansion and self-renewal during FL development could provide important clues to expand HSC for clinical use, and to highlight new fetal signatures which persist abnormally during childhood, leading to pediatric leukemias. We focused on CD117 (c-KIT), widely used in the mouse to isolate HSC-enriched populations in the AGM, FL and placenta during development, and in adult bone marrow. In humans, CD117 also marks the first HSC in the AGM, and the SCF/KIT signaling pathway regulates self-renewal properties of fetal HSC and maintenance of quiescent adult HSC, with many downstream effectors identified as important regulators of the change of HSC proliferative and self-renewal behavior during development. Using CD34CD38as the referent HSC-enriched population, we sorted CD34CD38CD45CD117 cells from T1 and T2 FL, and showed that CD117 expression allows isolation of an HSC-enriched population with high proliferation and self-renewal potential during hepatic hematopoiesis in human development. We first looked for CD117 expression in the CD34CD38 fraction of T1 FL. Since CD34 also marks endothelial cells, we added CD45 to ensure to be looking at the hematopoietic population. As shown in Figure 1, a CD34CD38CD45CD117 (hereafter called CD117) population could be detected as early as 6 weeks of gestation (WG) in T1 FL. It represents 0.35±0.07% of mononuclear cells between 6 and 9 WG and 0.21±0.05% between 9 and 12 WG. This CD117 population is still present in the T2 FL (0.15±0.07%) (Figure 1). Fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) analysis showed that the CD117 population from T1 or T2 FL are CD45RA and did not overlap with the described populations enriched in HSC during FL development or in the umbilical cord blood, such as the CD144CD45, the CD90GPI80, and the CD34CD143 populations,
The Resale Price Prediction of Secondhand Jewelry Items Using a Multi-modal Deep Model with Iterative Co-Attention

The resale price assessment of secondhand jewelry items relies heavily on the individual knowledge and skill of domain experts. In this paper, we propose a methodology for reconstructing an AI system that autonomously assesses the resale prices of secondhand jewelry items without the need for professional knowledge. As shown in recent studies on fashion items, multimodal approaches combining specifications and visual information of items have succeeded in obtaining fine-grained representations of fashion items, although they generally apply simple vector operations through a multimodal fusion. We similarly build a multimodal model using images and attributes of the product and further employ state-of-the-art multimodal deep neural networks applied in computer vision to achieve a practical performance level. In addition, we model the pricing procedure of an expert using iterative co-attention networks in which the appearance and attributes of the product are carefully and iteratively observed. Herein, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model using a large dataset of secondhand no brand jewelry items received from a collaborating fashion retailer, and show that the iterative co-attention process operates effectively in the context of resale price prediction. Our model architecture is widely applicable to other fashion items where appearance and specifications are important aspects.
Some remarks on the midrange crossing constant

We verify an upper bound of Pach and Tóth from 1997 on the midrange crossing constant. Details of their upper bound have not been available. Our verification is different from their method and hinges on a result of Moon from 1965. As Moon’s result is optimal, we raise the question whether the midrange crossing constant is .
Bow shocks, bow waves, and dust waves. IV. Shell shape statistics

Stellar bow shocks result from relative motions between stars and their environment. The interaction of the stellar wind and radiation with gas and dust in the interstellar medium produces curved arcs of emission at optical, infrared, and radio wavelengths. We recently proposed a new two-dimensional classification scheme for the shape of such bow shocks, which we here apply to three very different observational datasets: mid-infrared arcs around hot OB stars; far-infrared arcs around luminous cool stars; and H alpha emission-line arcs around proplyds and other young stars in the Orion Nebula. For OB stars, the average shape is consistent with simple thin-shell models for the interaction of a spherical wind with a parallel stream, but the diversity of observed shapes is many times larger than such models predict. We propose that this may be caused by time-dependent oscillations in the bow shocks, due to either instabilities or wind variability. Cool star bow shocks have markedly more closed wings than hot star bow shocks, which may be due to the dust emission arising in the shocked stellar wind instead of the shocked interstellar medium. The Orion Nebula arcs, on the other hand, have both significantly more open wings and significantly flatter apexes than the hot star bow shocks. We test several possible explanations for this difference (divergent ambient stream, low Mach number, observational biases, and influence of collimated jets), but the evidence for each is inconclusive.
E2E QoS Guarantee for the Tactile Internet via Joint NFV and Radio Resource Allocation

The Tactile Internet (TI) is one of the next generation wireless network services with end to end (E2E) delay as low as 1 ms. Since this ultra low E2E delay cannot be met in the current 4G network architecture, it is necessary to investigate this service in the next generation wireless network by considering new technologies such as networks function virtualization (NFV). On the other hand, given the importance of E2E delay in the TI service, it is crucial to consider the delay of all parts of the network, including the radio access part and the NFV core part. In this paper, for the first time, we investigate the joint radio resource allocation (R-RA) and NFV resource allocation (NFV-RA) in a heterogeneous network where queuing delays, transmission delays, and delays resulting from virtual network function (VNF) execution are jointly considered. For this setup, we formulate a new resource allocation (RA) problem to minimize the total cost function subject to guaranteeing E2E delay of each connection. Since the proposed optimization problem is highly non-convex, we exploit alternative search method (ASM), successive convex approximation (SCA), and heuristic algorithms to solve it. Besides, for the NFV-RA, we propose an online heuristic algorithm, and analyze its performance for the TI service. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the network costs compared to the case where the two problems are optimized separately. Moreover, we compare the online algorithm with its offline counterpart as well as a baseline approach and it is shown that the online algorithm outperforms both of them.
Dark matter heating of gas accreting onto Sgr A*

We study effects of heating by dark matter (DM) annihilation on black hole gas accretion. We observe that, for reasonable assumptions about DM densities in spikes around supermassive black holes, as well as DM masses and annihilation cross-sections within the standard WIMP model, heating by DM annihilation may have an appreciable effect on the accretion on to Sgr A* in the Galactic Centre. Motivated by this observation we study the effects of such heating on Bondi accretion, i.e. spherically symmetric, steady-state Newtonian accretion on to a black hole. We consider different adiabatic indices for the gas, and different power-law exponents for the DM density profile. We find that typical transonic solutions with heating have a significantly reduced accretion rate. However, for many plausible parameters, transonic solutions do not exist, suggesting a breakdown of the underlying assumptions of steady-state Bondi accretion. Our findings indicate that heating by DM annihilation may play an important role in the accretion onto supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, and may help explain the low accretion rate observed for Sgr A*.