Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cell wall extensins in root–microbe interactions and root secretions

Extensins are cell wall glycoproteins, belonging to the hydroxyproline-rich glycoprotein (HRGP) family, which are involved in many biological functions, including plant growth and defence. Several reviews have described the involvement of HRGPs in plant immunity but little focus has been given specifically to cell wall extensins. Yet, a large set of recently published data indicates that extensins play an important role in plant protection, especially in root-microbe interactions. Here, we summarise the current knowledge on this topic and discuss the importance of extensins in root defence. We first provide an overview of the distribution of extensin epitopes recognised by different monoclonal antibodies among plants and discuss the relevance of some of these epitopes as markers of the root defence response. We also highlight the implication of extensins in different types of plant interactions elicited by either pathogenic or beneficial micro-organisms. We then present and discuss the specific importance of extensins in root secretions, as these glycoproteins are not only found in the cell walls but are also released into the root mucilage. Finally, we propose a model to illustrate the impact of cell wall extensin on root secretions.
The role of radioactive iodine therapy in papillary thyroid cancer: an observational study based on SEER

Background Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is a common endocrine malignancy with relatively good prognosis. Radioactive iodine (RAI) is considered effective for patients with total or nearly total thyroidectomy, but the beneficial effects of RAI are still controversial. Materials and methods To determine whether RAI therapy could improve the survival rates of PTC patients, we conducted a retrospective analysis using data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. Disease-specific survival (DSS) was obtained using multivariate Cox proportional hazard regressions. Results DSS was improved by RAI ablation in patients with tumor >2 cm, age >45 years and gross extrathyroidal or lymph node metastasis. In a further analysis, RAI therapy did not improve the DSS in patients with tumor <2 cm except those with distant metastasis. For patients with tumor >2 cm, those involving gross extrathyroidal extension, age >45 years or disease in the lymph nodes, DSS was improved after RAI therapy. Patients with distant metastasis always benefited from RAI ablation. Conclusion RAI ablation should be recommended to patients with tumor <2 cm and distant metastasis or patients with tumor >2 cm and one of the following risk factors: gross extrathyroidal extension, age >45 years, lymph node and distant metastases.
The potential value of crowdsourced surveillance systems in supplementing sentinel influenza networks: the case of France

Introduction Participatory surveillance systems provide rich crowdsourced data, profiling individuals and their health status at a given time. We explored the usefulness of data from GrippeNet.fr, a participatory surveillance system, to estimate influenza-related illness incidence in France. Methods: GrippeNet.fr is an online cohort since 2012 averaging ca. 5,000 weekly participants reporting signs/symptoms suggestive of influenza. GrippeNet.fr has flexible criteria to define influenza-related illness. Different case definitions based on reported signs/symptoms and inclusions of criteria accounting for individuals’ reporting and participation were used to produce influenza-related illness incidence estimates, which were compared to those from sentinel networks. We focused on the 2012/13 and 2013/14 seasons when two sentinel networks, monitoring influenza-like-illness (ILI) and acute respiratory infections (ARI) existed in France. Results: GrippeNet.fr incidence estimates agreed well with official temporal trends, with a higher accuracy for ARI than ILI. The influenza epidemic peak was often anticipated by one week, despite irregular participation of individuals. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control ILI definition, commonly used by participatory surveillance in Europe, performed better in tracking ARI than ILI when applied to GrippeNet.fr data. Conclusion: Evaluation of the epidemic intensity from crowdsourced data requires epidemic and intensity threshold estimations from several consecutive seasons. The study provides a standardised analytical framework for crowdsourced surveillance showing high sensitivity in detecting influenza-related changes in the population. It contributes to improve the comparability of epidemics across seasons and with sentinel systems. In France, GrippeNet.fr may supplement the ILI sentinel network after ARI surveillance discontinuation in 2014.
Enhancing Sentence Embedding with Generalized Pooling

Pooling is an essential component of a wide variety of sentence representation and embedding models. This paper explores generalized pooling methods to enhance sentence embedding. We propose vector-based multi-head attention that includes the widely used max pooling, mean pooling, and scalar self-attention as special cases. The model benefits from properly designed penalization terms to reduce redundancy in multi-head attention. We evaluate the proposed model on three different tasks: natural language inference (NLI), author profiling, and sentiment classification. The experiments show that the proposed model achieves significant improvement over strong sentence-encoding-based methods, resulting in state-of-the-art performances on four datasets. The proposed approach can be easily implemented for more problems than we discuss in this paper.
Computational Analysis of Insurance Complaints: GEICO Case Study

The online environment has provided a great opportunity for insurance policyholders to share their complaints with respect to different services. These complaints can reveal valuable information for insurance companies who seek to improve their services; however, analyzing a huge number of online complaints is a complicated task for human and must involve computational methods to create an efficient process. This research proposes a computational approach to characterize the major topics of a large number of online complaints. Our approach is based on using the topic modeling approach to disclose the latent semantic of complaints. The proposed approach deployed on thousands of GEICO negative reviews. Analyzing 1,371 GEICO complaints indicates that there are 30 major complains in four categories: (1) customer service, (2) insurance coverage, paperwork, policy, and reports, (3) legal issues, and (4) costs, estimates, and payments. This research approach can be used in other applications to explore a large number of reviews.
Accountability and Taxation: Experimental Evidence

The Rentier State Hypothesis states that taxation promotes government accountability. The argument is that citizens demand more accountability for spending of tax revenue than for spending of windfall revenue (e.g., natural resource revenue). This paper presents evidence from a between-subject experiment that tests the effect of taxation on demand for accountability and the underlying mechanisms explaining this effect. The design focuses on two main features that distinguish tax from windfall revenue: Tax revenue is produced by citizens' work and has been in their possession before being collected as tax. These features are theorized to increase the salience of fairness considerations in public service provision, and this increased salience of fairness is in turn hypothesized to increase demand for accountability. The main finding is that taxation causes a higher demand for accountability when both features of taxation are present. This result is evidence in support of the Rentier State Hypothesis.
Forecasting the effectiveness of indoor residual spraying for reducing dengue burden

Background Historically, mosquito control programs successfully helped contain malaria and yellow fever, but recent efforts have been unable to halt the spread of dengue, chikungunya, or Zika, all transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. Using a dengue transmission model and results from indoor residual spraying (IRS) field experiments, we investigated how IRS-like campaign scenarios could effectively control dengue in an endemic setting. Methods and findings In our model, we found that high levels of household coverage (75% treated once per year), applied proactively before the typical dengue season could reduce symptomatic infections by 89.7% (median of 1000 simulations; interquartile range [IQR]:[83.0%, 94.8%]) in year one and 78.2% (IQR: [71.2%, 88.0%]) cumulatively over the first five years of an annual program. Lower coverage had correspondingly lower effectiveness, as did reactive campaigns. Though less effective than preventative campaigns, reactive and even post-epidemic interventions retain some effectiveness; these campaigns disrupt inter-seasonal transmission, highlighting an off-season control opportunity. Regardless, none of the campaign scenarios maintain their initial effectiveness beyond two seasons, instead stabilizing at much lower levels of benefit: in year 20, median effectiveness was only 27.3% (IQR: [-21.3%, 56.6%]). Furthermore, simply ceasing an initially successful program exposes a population with lowered herd immunity to the same historical threat, and we observed outbreaks more than four-fold larger than pre-intervention outbreaks. These results do not take into account evolving insecticide resistance, thus long-term effectiveness may be lower if new, efficacious insecticides are not developed. Conclusions Using a detailed agent-based dengue transmission model for Yucatán State, Mexico, we predict that high coverage indoor residual spraying (IRS) interventions can largely eliminate transmission for a few years, when applied a few months before the typical seasonal epidemic peak. However, vector control succeeds by preventing infections, which precludes natural immunization. Thus, as a population benefits from mosquito control, it gradually loses naturally acquired herd immunity, and the control effectiveness declines; this occurs across all of our modeled scenarios, and is consistent with other empirical work. Long term control that maintains early effectiveness would require some combination of increasing investment, complementary interventions such as vaccination, and control programs across a broad region to diminish risk of importation.
Investigation of the temperature dependent field emission from individual ZnO nanowires for evidence of field-induced hot electrons emission

ZnO nanowires as field emitters have important applications in flat panel display and x-ray source. Understanding the intrinsic field emission mechanism is crucial for further improving the performance of ZnO nanowire field emitters. In this article, the temperature dependent field emission from individual ZnO nanowires was investigated by an in situ measurement in ultra-high vacuum. The divergent temperature-dependent Fowler–Nordheim plots is found in the low field region. A field-induced hot electrons emission model, that takes into account penetration length, is proposed to explain the results. The carrier density and temperature dependence of the field-induced hot electrons emission current are derived theoretically. The obtained results are consistent with the experimental results, which could be attributed to the variation of effective electron temperature. All of these are important for a better understanding on the field emission process of semiconductor nanostructures.
Maternal smoking during pregnancy and cord blood DNA methylation: new insight on sex differences and effect modification by maternal folate levels

ABSTRACT Maternal smoking during pregnancy may affect newborn DNA methylation (DNAm). However, little is known about how these associations vary by a newborn’s sex and/or maternal nutrition. To fill in this research gap, we investigated epigenome-wide DNAm associations with maternal smoking during pregnancy in African American mother-newborn pairs. DNAm profiling in cord (n = 379) and maternal blood (n = 300) were performed using the Illumina HumanMethylation450 BeadChip array. We identified 12 CpG sites whose DNAm levels in cord blood were associated with maternal smoking, at a false discovery rate <5%. The identified associations in the GFI1 gene were more pronounced in male newborns than in females (P = 0.002 for maternal smoking × sex interaction at cg18146737). We further observed that maternal smoking and folate level may interactively affect cord blood DNAm level at cg05575921 in the AHRR gene (P = 5.0 × 10−4 for interaction): compared to newborns unexposed to maternal smoking and with a high maternal folate level (>19.2 nmol/L), the DNAm level was about 0.03 lower (P = 3.6 × 10−4) in exposed newborns with a high maternal folate level, but was 0.08 lower (P = 1.2 × 10−8) in exposed newborns with a low maternal folate level. Our data suggest that adequate maternal folate levels may partly counteract the impact of maternal smoking on DNAm. These findings may open new avenues of inquiry regarding sex differences in response to environmental insults and novel strategies to mitigate their intergenerational health effects through optimization of maternal nutrition.
Living a successful weight loss after severe obesity

ABSTRACT Purpose: Losing weight and keeping it off for the long term is difficult. Weight regain is common. Experiences of successful non-surgical weight loss after severe obesity are largely unexplored. We know little about long-term weight loss processes, and how health care services can be of help to those living them. Methods: Drawing on in-depth interviews of 8 women and 2 men, the aim of this phenomenological study is to describe the experiences of adults who have been severely obese, who have lost weight and maintained weight loss for the long term (>5 years). Results: Findings show that after severe obesity, sustained weight loss has no endpoint, yet is always easy to end. Keeping weight off means committing to oneself, continuing profound changes and cultivating sensitivity towards oneself and others. A phenomenological understanding of sustained weight loss can inform professionals who deal with health issues and challenges occurring in the life of people leaving severe obesity.
Vaccination with Live Attenuated L. Major and TLR4 Agonist Promotes a Th1 Immune Response and Induces Protection against L. Major Infection in BALB/c Mice.

BACKGROUND Toll like receptors play a major role in immune responses against Leishmania parasites. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy of vaccination with live attenuated L. major and TLR4 agonist in protection against L. major infection. METHODS Attenuated L. major was prepared by continuous sub-culturing of the parasite. A total of 90 mice were assigned to 9 groups including 6 groups of BALB/c (G1-6) and 3 groups (G7-9) of C57BL/6 mice. Group 1 was the control groups, group 2 received the wild-type L. major promastigotes, group 3 the attenuated line, group 4 the TLR4 agonist, group 5 the wild-type L. major and TLR4 agonist, and group 6 the attenuated line along with TLR4 agonist. Group 7 was control, group 8 received wild-type L. major and group 9 the wild-type along with TLR4 agonist. Vaccinated mice were then challenged with wild-type of L. major. Lesion size, parasite burden, and the expression levels of IL-4, IFN-γ, IL-2, 1L-17A, IL-10, TGF-β and TLR4 were evaluated before the challenge while parasite burden and lesion size were evaluated. RESULTS Vaccinated mice with a TLR4 agonist or attenuated L. major plus TLR4 agonist produced the highest levels of IFN-γ, IL-2, and IL-17A. Post-challenge analysis revealed that mice vaccinated with the attenuated line along with TLR4 agonist displayed the lowest lesion size and parasite load. These mice developed a predominant Th1 immune response. CONCLUSION Vaccination with the attenuated L. major along with TLR4 agonist promotes a Th1-mediated immune response which leads to the protection of BALB/c mice against L. major infection.
Comprehensive molecular classification of localized prostate adenocarcinoma reveals a tumour subtype predictive of non-aggressive disease

Background Management of localized prostate cancer (PCa) is a major clinical challenge since most of these cancers would not evolve but a majority of patients will still undergo a life-changing radical surgery. Molecular studies have shown that PCa can be classified according to their genomic alterations but none of the published PCa molecular classifications could identify a subtype corresponding to non-evolutive tumours. Materials and methods Multi-omics molecular profiling was carried out on post-radical prostatectomy material from a cohort of 130 patients with localized PCa. We used unsupervised classification techniques to build a comprehensive classification of prostate tumours based on three molecular levels: DNA copy number, DNA methylation, and mRNA expression. Merged data from our cohort and The Cancer Genome Atlas cohort were used to characterize the resulting tumour subtypes. We measured subtype-associated risks of biochemical relapse using Cox regression models and survival data from five cohorts including the two aforementioned. Results We describe three PCa molecular subtypes associated with specific molecular characteristics and different clinical outcomes. Particularly, one subtype was strongly associated with the absence of biochemical recurrence. We validated this finding on 746 samples from 5 distinct cohorts (P = 3.41 × 10-8, N = 746 tumour samples), and showed that our subtyping approach outperformed the most popular prognostic molecular signatures to accurately identify a subset of patients with a non-evolutive disease. We provide a set of 36 transcriptomic biomarkers to robustly identify this subtype of non-evolutive cases whose prevalence was estimated to 22% of all localized PCa tumours. Conclusion At least 20% of patients with localized PCa can be accurately predicted to have a non-evolutive disease on the basis of their molecular subtype. Those patients should not undergo immediate surgery and rather be placed under active surveillance.
Conservation of Reactive Stabilization Strategies in the Presence of Step Length Asymmetries During Walking

The ability to maintain dynamic balance in response to unexpected perturbations during walking is largely mediated by reactive control strategies. Reactive control during perturbed walking can be characterized by multiple metrics such as measures of whole-body angular momentum (WBAM), which capture the rotational dynamics of the body, and through Floquet analysis which captures the orbital stability of a limit cycle attractor. Recent studies have demonstrated that people with spatiotemporal asymmetries during gait have impaired control of whole-body dynamics as evidenced by higher peak-to-peak ranges of WBAM over the gait cycle. While this may suggest that spatiotemporal asymmetries could impair stability, no studies have quantified how direct modification of asymmetry influences reactive balance control. Here, we used a biofeedback paradigm that allows participants to systematically adopt different levels of step length asymmetry to test the hypothesis that walking asymmetrically impairs the reactive control of balance. In addition, we tested the hypothesis that perturbations to the non-dominant leg would cause less whole-body rotation due to its hypothesized role in weight support during walking. We characterized reactive control strategies in two ways. We first computed integrated angular momentum to characterize changes in whole-body configuration during multi-step responses to perturbations. We also computed the maximum Floquet multipliers (FMs) across the gait cycle, which represent the rate of convergence back to limit cycle behavior. Our results show that integrated angular momentum during the perturbation step and subsequent recovery steps, as well as the magnitude of maximum FMs over the gait cycle, do not change across levels of asymmetry. However, our results showed both limb-dependent and limb-independent responses to unexpected perturbations. Overall, our findings suggest that there is no causal relationship between step length asymmetry and impaired reactive control of balance in the absence of neuromotor impairments. Our approach could be used in future studies to determine if reducing asymmetries in populations with neuromotor impairments, such people post-stroke or amputees improves dynamic stability.
Comment on Raimo Tuomela. Joint Action: How Rational? How Irreducible?

Abstract In his ‘Cooperation as joint action’, Tuomela presents a we-mode account of cooperation, which he argues has several advantages over an individual account. This commentary examines to what extent this is true. In particular, I assess three related characteristics of we-mode joint action: its possible rationality, its greater efficiency, and its alleged irreducibility to purely individual properties, which are recurring points of the article.
Single Valued Neutrosophic Finite State Machine and Switchboard State Machine

Using single valued neutrosophic set we introduced the notion of single valued neutrosophic finite state machine, single valued neutrosophic successor, single valued neutrosophic subsystem and single valued submachine, single valued neutrosophic switchboard state machine, homomorphism and strong homomorphism between single valued neutrosophic switchboard state machine and discussed some related results and properties.
Crowdsourcing Emotional Speech

We describe the methodology for the collection and annotation of a large corpus of emotional speech data through crowdsourcing. The corpus offers 187 hours of data from 2,965 subjects. Data includes non-emotional recordings from each subject as well as recordings for five emotions: angry, happy-low-arousal, happy-high-arousal, neutral, and sad. The data consist of spontaneous speech elicited from subjects via a web-based tool. Subjects used their own personal recording equipment, resulting in a data set that contains variation in room acoustics, microphone, etc. This offers the advantage of matching the type of variation one would expect to see when exposing speech technology in the wild in a web-based environment. The annotation scheme covers the quality of emotion expressed through the tone of voice and what was said, along with common audio-quality issues. We discuss lessons learned in the process of the creation of this corpus.
Solução de problemas de otimização estrutural com restrições de frequências de vibração via PSO

José Pedro Gonçalves Carvalho Érica da Costa Reis Carvalho Heder Soares Bernardino Patrícia Habib Hallak Afonso Celso de Castro Lemonge jose.carvalho@engenharia.ufjf. br ericacrcarvalho@gmail.com heder@ice.ufjf. br patricia.hallak@ufjf.edu. br afonso.lemonge@ufjf.edu. br Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Juiz de Fora, MG, Brasil Resumo. Estratégias de penalização são comumente utilizadas para o tratamento de problemas com restrições. Tais técnicas têm apresentado relativo sucesso quando aplicadas em conjunto com Algoritmos Evolutivos (AEs). Este trabalho apresenta um AE baseado no comportamento de enxame de partículas (Particle Swarm Optimization PSO) adaptado para a solução de problemas de otimização estrutural com restrições. O PSO é um algoritmo de fácil implementação e competitivo perante aos demais algoritmos populacionais inspirados na natureza. São analisados problemas de otimização de estruturas reticuladas com restrições de frequências de vibração. Para o tratamento destas restrições incorpora-se ao PSO uma técnica de penalização adaptativa (Adaptive Penalty Method APM), que tem demonstrado robustez e eficiência na grande maioria dos problemas com restrições em que é adotada. O algoritmo proposto é validado através de experimentos computacionais em problemas de otimização estrutural amplamente discutidos na literatura. Palavras-chave: Otimização por Enxame de Partículas, Método de Penalizaçao Adaptativa, Otimização Estrutural, Restrições de frequência de vibração.