Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detecting the extent of control over selection bias relating to oral health and otorhinolaryngology: cross-sectional study

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND: The authors of randomized controlled trials will usually claim that they have met the randomization process criterion. However, sequence generation schemes differ and some schemes that are claimed to be randomized are not genuinely randomized. Even less well understood, and often more difficult to ascertain, is whether the allocation was really concealed. OBJECTIVE: To detect the extent of control over selection bias, in a comparison between two Cochrane groups: oral health and otorhinolaryngology; and to describe the methods used to control for this bias. DESIGN AND SETTING: Cross-sectional study conducted in a public university in São Paulo, Brazil. METHODS: The risk of selection bias in 1,714 records indexed in Medline database up to 2018 was assessed, independent of language and access. Two dimensions implicated in the allocation were considered: generation of the allocation sequence; and allocation concealment. RESULTS: We included 420 randomized controlled trials and all of them were evaluated to detect selection bias. In the sample studied, only 28 properly controlled the selection bias. Lack of control over selection bias was present in 80% of the studies evaluated in both groups. CONCLUSION: The two groups were similar regarding control over selection bias. They are also similar to the methods used. The dimension of allocation concealment appears to be a limiting factor with regard to production of randomized controlled trials with low risk of selection bias. The quality of reporting in studies on oral health and otorhinolaryngology is suboptimal and needs to be improved, in line with other fields of healthcare.
MIND: A Large-scale Dataset for News Recommendation

News recommendation is an important technique for personalized news service. Compared with product and movie recommendations which have been comprehensively studied, the research on news recommendation is much more limited, mainly due to the lack of a high-quality benchmark dataset. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset named MIND for news recommendation. Constructed from the user click logs of Microsoft News, MIND contains 1 million users and more than 160k English news articles, each of which has rich textual content such as title, abstract and body. We demonstrate MIND a good testbed for news recommendation through a comparative study of several state-of-the-art news recommendation methods which are originally developed on different proprietary datasets. Our results show the performance of news recommendation highly relies on the quality of news content understanding and user interest modeling. Many natural language processing techniques such as effective text representation methods and pre-trained language models can effectively improve the performance of news recommendation. The MIND dataset will be available at https://msnews.github. io.
Future of preventing and managing common chronic inflammatory diseases.

Chronic inflammation has emerged as a key factor that contributes to some common chronic diseases and reduces lifespan. Studies have identified multiple types of chronic inflammation ranging from autoimmune disease, which attacks specific tissues, to autoinflammatory diseases, which cause low-grade systemic inflammation and contribute to several common chronic diseases. This article highlights new perspectives on the role of chronic inflammation in cardiovascular disease. Such information is being leveraged to develop new treatment strategies for cardiovascular disease and may inform how periodontal disease influences cardiovascular disease. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
How do Uremic Toxins Affect the Endothelium?

Uremic toxins can induce endothelial dysfunction in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Indeed, the structure of the endothelial monolayer is damaged in CKD, and studies have shown that the uremic toxins contribute to the loss of cell–cell junctions, increasing permeability. Membrane proteins, such as transporters and receptors, can mediate the interaction between uremic toxins and endothelial cells. In these cells, uremic toxins induce oxidative stress and activation of signaling pathways, including the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB), and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways. The activation of these pathways leads to overexpression of proinflammatory (e.g., monocyte chemoattractant protein-1, E-selectin) and prothrombotic (e.g., tissue factor) proteins. Uremic toxins also induce the formation of endothelial microparticles (EMPs), which can lead to the activation and dysfunction of other cells, and modulate the expression of microRNAs that have an important role in the regulation of cellular processes. The resulting endothelial dysfunction contributes to the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases, such as atherosclerosis and thrombotic events. Therefore, uremic toxins as well as the pathways they modulated may be potential targets for therapies in order to improve treatment for patients with CKD.
Thromboembolic and bleeding outcomes in patients with atrial fibrillation and valvular heart disease: A descriptive nationwide cohort study

The risks of thromboembolism and bleeding in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and valvular heart disease (VHD) are sparsely described. We described the risk of events in non‐anticoagulated and anticoagulated patients with AF and VHD according to the evaluated heart valves, rheumatic or artificial valve classification (EHRA classification), EHRA Type 1 and Type 2 VHD, and within subgroups of EHRA Type 1 and Type 2 VHD.
Learning Interpretable Relationships between Entities, Relations and Concepts via Bayesian Structure Learning on Open Domain Facts

Concept graphs are created as universal taxonomies for text understanding in the open-domain knowledge. The nodes in concept graphs include both entities and concepts. The edges are from entities to concepts, showing that an entity is an instance of a concept. In this paper, we propose the task of learning interpretable relationships from open-domain facts to enrich and refine concept graphs. The Bayesian network structures are learned from open-domain facts as the interpretable relationships between relations of facts and concepts of entities. We conduct extensive experiments on public English and Chinese datasets. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the learned network structures help improving the identification of concepts for entities based on the relations of entities on both datasets.
Evaluation of the Efficacy of Mycotoxin Modifiers and Mycotoxin Binders by Using an In Vitro Rumen Model as a First Screening Tool

Ruminal microbiota of cattle are not able to detoxify all mycotoxins. In addition, detoxification can be hampered by adverse ruminal conditions (e.g., low ruminal pH). Hence, in the cattle husbandry, mycotoxin binders and modifiers could be used to prevent animal exposure to mycotoxins. In this study, an in vitro rumen model, including feed matrix, was established as first screening tool to test the efficacy of five products claiming to detoxify mycotoxins. The detoxifiers had different modes of action: (a) binding (three products); (b) enzymatic detoxification of zearalenone (ZEN; one product, ZenA); and (c) bacterial transformation of trichothecenes (one product, BBSH 797). For the mycotoxin binders, the binding to the mycotoxins enniatin B (ENN B), roquefortine C (ROQ-C), mycophenolic acid (MPA), deoxynivalenol (DON), nivalenol (NIV), and zearalenone (ZEN) were tested at a dose recommended by the manufacturers. The in vitro model demonstrated that all binders adsorbed ENN B to a certain extent, while only one of the binders also partially adsorbed ROQ-C. The binders did not change the concentrations of the other mycotoxins in the ruminal fluid. The enzyme ZenA detoxified ZEN very quickly and prevented the formation of the more toxic metabolite α-zearalenol (α-ZEL), both at normal (6.8) and low ruminal pH (5.8). The addition of BBSH 797 enhanced detoxification of DON and NIV, both at normal and low ruminal pH. The in vitro rumen model demonstrated that the addition of ZenA seems to be a very promising strategy to prevent estrogenic effects of ZEN contaminated feed, and BBSH 797 is efficient in the detoxification of trichothecenes.
Basic Cognitive Abilities Relevant to Male Adolescents’ Soccer Performance

While there is a theoretical and empirical consensus that specific cognitive abilities gained through deliberate sports practice influence sports performance, it is less clear whether basic cognitive abilities that are not specifically related to sports practice are relevant to sports performance. Accordingly, this research examined the roles of basic concentration and visuospatial ability in adolescent soccer performance. Participants were 46 adolescent male soccer players (Mage = 16.15 years, standard deviation = 1.13) who averaged 7.21 years (standard deviation = 2.2) of prior soccer training. We measured participant’s basic cognitive abilities with the Corsi block and the concentration grid tasks, and we measured their soccer performance through five soccer skills. Concentration had no predictive role in elements of soccer performance, but visuospatial ability was significantly related to tactical abilities, technical skills, mental toughness, and situational awareness and thus, to overall soccer performance. These findings provided support for the importance of visuospatial ability but not concentration (as measured by the concentration grid) in young males’ soccer performance.
Roles of Chk2/CHEK2 in guarding against environmentally-induced DNA damage and replication-stress.

Checkpoint kinase 2 (human CHEK2; murine Chk2) is a critical mediator of the DNA damage response and has established roles in DNA Double Strand Break (DSB)-induced apoptosis and cell cycle arrest. DSBs may be invoked directly by ionizing radiation (IR) but may also arise indirectly from environmental exposures such as solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation. The primary forms of DNA damage induced by UV are DNA photolesions (such as cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers CPD and 6-4 photoproducts) which interfere with DNA synthesis and lead to DNA replication fork stalling. Persistently-stalled and unresolved DNA replication forks can "collapse" to generate DSBs that induce signaling via Chk2 and its upstream activator the Ataxia Telangiectasia-Mutated (ATM) protein kinase. This review focuses on recently-defined roles of Chk2 in protecting against DNA replication-associated genotoxicity. Several DNA damage response factors such as Rad18, Nbs1 and Chk1 suppress stalling and collapse of DNA replication forks. Defects in the primary responders to DNA replication fork stalling lead to generation of DSB and reveal "back-up" roles for Chk2 in S-phase progression and genomic stability. In humans there are numerous variants of the CHEK2 gene, including CHEK2*1100delC. Individuals with the CHEK2*1100delC germline alteration have an increased risk of developing breast cancer and malignant melanoma. DNA replication fork-stalling at estrogen-DNA adducts and UV-induced photolesions are implicated in the etiology of breast cancer and melanoma respectively. It is likely therefore that the Chk2/CHEK2-deficiency is associated with elevated risk for tumorigenesis caused by replication-associated genotoxicities that are exacerbated by environmental genotoxins and intrinsic DNA-damaging agents. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Experimenting with Generative Adversarial Networks to Expand Sparse Physiological Time-Series Data

Machine Learning research and its application have gained enormous relevance in recent years. Their usage in medical settings could support patients, increase patient safety and assist health professionals in various tasks. However, medical data is often sparse, which renders big data analytics methods like deep learning ineffective. Data synthesis helps to augment small data sets and potentially improves patient data integrity. The presented work illustrates how Generative Adversarial Networks can be applied specifically to small data sets for enlarging sparse data. Following a state-of-the-art analysis is conducted, experimental methods with such networks are documented, which have been applied to three different data sets. Results from all three sets are presented and take-away messages are summarized. Concluding, the results' quality and limitations of the work are discussed.
ON THE DISPERSAL OF LOBSTER LARVAE INTO THE EAST PACIFIC BARRIER (DECAPODA, PALINURIDEA)

The seaward drift ofphyllosoma larvae oflobsters occurring along the coast and adjacent islands ofthe eastern tropical Pacific Ocean was studied from plankton collections made jointly by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Tuna Oceanography Research Program, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, La Jolla, Calif. Numerous samples taken with trawl and plankton nets were made across the Equatorial current system in two areas: lat. 15°N·5°S, long. 115°·125°W, and lat. 5°N·15°S, long. 95°·115°W. Many late developmental stages ofPanuliruspenicillatus and P. gracilis and a few Scyllarides astori were found, all apparently having drifted mainly with the South Equatorial Current over a distance of 1,800 to 2,000 or more nautical miles from their likely origin, the Galapagos Islands or the coast of Central America. A few larvae were found in the North Equatorial Countercurrent. This is at times a possible route for return to the adult habitat, but it is doubtful that any of the larvae that have drifted to the most western survey area will be returned by countercurrents in time for metamorphosis or that they can successfully negotiate the remainder of the expanse of the East Pacific Barrier to reach the
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs

The prosperity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provides fodder for many NLP and AI research for education applications, e.g., course concept extraction, prerequisite relation discovery, etc. However, the publicly available datasets of MOOC are limited in size with few types of data, which hinders advanced models and novel attempts in related topics. Therefore, we present MOOCCube, a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource. Moreover, we conduct a prerequisite discovery task as an example application to show the potential of MOOCCube in facilitating relevant research. The data repository is now available at http://moocdata.cn/data/MOOCCube.
Interpretable Operational Risk Classification with Semi-Supervised Variational Autoencoder

Operational risk management is one of the biggest challenges nowadays faced by financial institutions. There are several major challenges of building a text classification system for automatic operational risk prediction, including imbalanced labeled/unlabeled data and lacking interpretability. To tackle these challenges, we present a semi-supervised text classification framework that integrates multi-head attention mechanism with Semi-supervised variational inference for Operational Risk Classification (SemiORC). We empirically evaluate the framework on a real-world dataset. The results demonstrate that our method can better utilize unlabeled data and learn visually interpretable document representations. SemiORC also outperforms other baseline methods on operational risk classification.
The activation of antiviral RNA interference not only exists in neural progenitor cells but also in somatic cells in mammals

ABSTRACT The RNA interference (RNAi) pathway directs an important antiviral immunity mechanism in plants and invertebrates. Recently, we and others have demonstrated that the antiviral RNAi response is also conserved in mammals, at least to five distinct RNA viruses, including Zika virus (ZIKV). ZIKV may preferentially infect neuronal progenitor cells (NPCs) in the developing foetal brain. Ex vivo ZIKV infection induces RNAi-mediated antiviral response in human NPCs, but not in the more differentiated NPCs or somatic cells. However, litter is known about the in vivo property or function of the virus-derived small-interfering RNAs (vsiRNAs) targeting ZIKV. Here we report a surprising observation: different from ex vivo observations, viral small RNAs (vsRNAs) targeting ZIKV were produced in vivo upon infection in both central neuron system (CNS) and muscle tissues. In addition, our findings demonstrate the production of canonical vsiRNAs in murine CNS upon antiviral RNAi activation by Sindbis virus (SINV), suggesting the possibility of antiviral immune strategy applied by mammals in the CNS.
ECPE-2D: Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction based on Joint Two-Dimensional Representation, Interaction and Prediction

In recent years, a new interesting task, called emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE), has emerged in the area of text emotion analysis. It aims at extracting the potential pairs of emotions and their corresponding causes in a document. To solve this task, the existing research employed a two-step framework, which first extracts individual emotion set and cause set, and then pair the corresponding emotions and causes. However, such a pipeline of two steps contains some inherent flaws: 1) the modeling does not aim at extracting the final emotion-cause pair directly; 2) the errors from the first step will affect the performance of the second step. To address these shortcomings, in this paper we propose a new end-to-end approach, called ECPE-Two-Dimensional (ECPE-2D), to represent the emotion-cause pairs by a 2D representation scheme. A 2D transformer module and two variants, window-constrained and cross-road 2D transformers, are further proposed to model the interactions of different emotion-cause pairs. The 2D representation, interaction, and prediction are integrated into a joint framework. In addition to the advantages of joint modeling, the experimental results on the benchmark emotion cause corpus show that our approach improves the F1 score of the state-of-the-art from 61.28% to 68.89%.
Comparative adaptive traits in green gram (Vigna radiata L.) and soybean (Glycine max L.) as influenced by varying regimes of shade

Study of shade adaptive traits of understorey crops is of utmost importance for their potential use in agroforestry system. The present study was conducted to decipher shade-adaptive traits through comparative changes in leaf pigments, epicuticular wax level and protein profiles in leaves of green gram and soybean grown in three different regimes of shade (33%, 50%, and 75% shade) and without shade (open sunlight). Chlorophyll a (Chl a), Chl b and total Chl progressively increased, whereas, Chl a/b ratio gradually decreased with increase in shade intensity in both the crops. Anthocyanin, wax level and soluble protein of leaves gradually decreased with increase in shade. Green gram showed higher anthocyanin than soybean in all the light environments. Wax level of leaf in green gram was higher in open than soybean, whereas, it was comparable in 33% shade in both the crops. Wax level of leaf in green gram decreased more in deep shade (50% shade and 75% shade) than soybean indicating more shade resilience of soybean. The rate of shade-induced reduction of leaf protein content in soybean was less than green gram. Protein profiling through SDS-PAGE clearly revealed degeneration of proteins in shade around ≃55 kDa which indicated to the RUBISCO (Ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase) proteins. Both the crops revealed their shade adaptation mainly through alteration in epicuticular wax, pigments and proteins mostly associated with LHCP (Light harvesting complex protein) complex and towards RUBISCO protein which assume significance for their use in crop improvement programme in searching shade tolerant crops for agroforestry system.
Insights into In Vitro Wound Closure on Two Biopolyesters—Polylactide and Polyhydroxyoctanoate

Two bio-based polymers have been compared in this study, namely: polylactide (PLA) and polyhydroxyoctanoate (PHO). Due to their properties such as biocompatibility, and biointegrity they are considered to be valuable materials for medical purposes, i.e., creating scaffolds or wound dressings. Presented biopolymers were investigated for their impact on cellular migration strategies of mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF) 3T3 cell line. Advanced microscopic techniques, including confocal microscopy and immunofluorescent protocols, enabled the thorough analysis of the cell shape and migration. Application of wound healing assay combined with dedicated software allowed us to perform quantitative analysis of wound closure dynamics. The outcome of the experiments demonstrated that the wound closure dynamics for PLA differs from PHO. Single fibroblasts grown on PLA moved 1.5-fold faster, than those migrating on the PHO surface. However, when a layer of cells was considered, the wound closure was by 4.1 h faster for PHO material. The accomplished work confirms the potential of PLA and PHO as excellent candidates for medical applications, due to their properties that propagate cell migration, vitality, and proliferation—essential cell processes in the healing of damaged tissues.
Vaccination Against Newcastle Disease and Infectious Bronchitis 1. Preliminary Studies in Mass Vaccination with Live Virus Dust Vaccines

Abstract MASS vaccination of poultry with nebulized sprays was first attempted by Hitchner and Johnson, and was reported in their original description of the B-1 strain of Newcastle disease virus (1948). This strain, when applied to baby chicks by means of the De Vilbiss #40 glass nebulizer, provoked considerable morbidity and mortality, and the method was abandoned in favor of individual vaccination by intranasal instillation. Subsequently, Johnson and Gross (1952) found that, by employing concentrations of virus lower than those first used, they could obtain satisfactory results. Hitchner, Reising and Van Roekel (1951) also re-investigated the spray method and succeeded when high concentrations of virus were dispersed with the De Vilbiss #251 atomizer. Bankowski (1950) and Crawley (1953) explored mass vaccination methods with other spray equipment and reported satisfactory results. These reports stimulated widespread interest because of the relative ease of application and the great economic advantages which mass vaccination methods …