Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TICK-BORNE PATHOGENS IN INDIVIDUALS WITH HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS TYPE 1 (HIV-1) INFECTION

Abstract The studies on the occurrence and diversity of tick-borne infections in HIV-infected individuals have been few, and the subject has been relatively neglected when compared with other infections associated with HIV. Non-specific symptoms of tick-borne diseases pose a challenge in clinical care and may lead to misdiagnosis, especially in HIV-positive patients, who often experience many non-specific clinical symptoms. Additionally, in immunocompromised patients, a significant delay of antibody production may occur, and the results of a serological test may be misinterpreted. This review focuses on the most common tick-borne infections in HIV-positive patients in Europe. 1. Introduction. 2. Ticks as vectors. 3. Babesiosis. 3.1. Diagnostics and treatment. 4. Lyme borreliosis. 4.1. Diagnostics and treatment. 5. Rickettsiosis. 5.1. Diagnostics and treatment. 6. Conclusions
Effect of Glycemic Control on Right Heart Functions in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients Free of Clinical Cardiovascular Disease

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the most common endocrine disorders. 90% percent of all diabetics are diagnosed with type 2 DM. DM is closely associated with various vascular diseases, and successful glycemic control prevents micro and macrovascular complications. Although there is data about the relation between glycemic control and left ventricle function, there is hardly any data about the relation between the right ventricular function. We analyzed the relationship between glycemic control and right ventricle function in type 2 DM patients free of clinical cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Patients were selected from the cardiology outpatient clinic. 53 patients formed the DM group; 51 patients formed the control group. All patients' demographic data were recorded. Biochemical tests and echocardiographic examinations were performed. RA and RV diameters were significantly higher in DM group (3.36±0.32 vs 3.13±0.34, P=0.015; 2.80±0.32 vs 2.56±0.22 P=0.005 respectively). Myocardial velocity during isovolumetric contraction (RV/IVV) and myocardial acceleration during Isovolumetric contraction (RV/IVA) were significantly lower in the DM group (14.4±3.17 vs 16.04±4.13 P=0,019; 3.25±0.75 vs 3.95±1,25 P=0.015). There was an intermediate negative correlation between RV/IVV and HBA1C (r=-0.406; P=0.036). HBA1C level was an independent risk factor for RV IVV (β=-0.406; P=0.036). It is shown that RA, RV diameter were significantly higher; RV/IVV and RV/IVA were significantly lower in diabetes mellitus patients free of CVD. Furthermore, there was a significant negative correlation between RV/IVV and HBA1C levels. HBA1C level was an independent risk factor for RV/IVV.
Moving Medical Image Analysis to GPU Embedded Systems: Application to Brain Tumor Segmentation

ABSTRACT With the growth of medical data stored as bases for researches and diagnosis tasks, healthcare providers are in need of automatic processing methods to make accurate and fast image analysis such as segmentation or restoration. Most of the existing solutions to deal with these tasks are based on Deep Learning methods that require the use of powerful dedicated hardware to be executed and address a power consumption problem that is not compatible with the aforementioned requests. There is thus a demand in the development of low-cost image analysis systems with increased performances. In this work, we address this problem by proposing a fully-automatic brain tumor segmentation method based on a Convolutional Neural Network, executed by a low-cost, Deep Learning ready GPU embedded platform. We validated our approach using the BRaTS 2015 dataset to segment brain tumors and proved that an artificial neural network can be trained and used in the medical field with limited resources by redefining some of its inner operations.
Convex polyominoes revisited: enumeration of outer site perimeter, interior vertices, and boundary vertices of certain degrees

The main contribution of this paper is a new column-by-column method for the decomposition of generating functions of convex polyominoes suitable for enumeration with respect to various statistics including but not limited to interior vertices, boundary vertices of certain degrees, and outer site perimeter. Using this decomposition, among other things, we show that (A) the average number of interior vertices over all convex polyominoes of perimeter is asymptotic to (B) the average number of boundary vertices with degree two over all convex polyominoes of perimeter is asymptotic to Additionally, we obtain an explicit generating function counting the number of convex polyominoes with n boundary vertices of degrees at most three and show that this number is asymptotic to Moreover, we show that the expected number of the boundary vertices of degree four over all convex polyominoes with n vertices of degrees at most three is asymptotically (C) the number of convex polyominoes with the outer-site perimeter n is asymptotic to and show the expected number of the outer-site perimeter over all convex polyominoes with perimeter is asymptotic to Lastly, we prove that the expected perimeter over all convex polyominoes with the outer-site perimeter n is asymptotic to .
Evidence that more than a third of Paleozoic articulate brachiopod genera (Strophomenata) lived infaunally

Abstract. The Strophomenata, which includes two large orders, the Strophomenida and Productida, is the largest group of Paleozoic brachiopods. Nearly all uncemented strophomenatans possessed an unusual concave brachial valve. Most of these have been considered to have lived epifaunally, but had they rested on the seafloor, not only would they have faced intense predation, but their physical instability would have been fatal. I conclude that nearly all strophomenatans, like similar concavo-convex pectinid bivalves, lived infaunally by ejecting water to create a pit into which they descended, to be protected by sediment covering the concave valve. Strophomenatans have been discovered with this sediment preserved in place. If exhumed and turned upside down, a strophomenatan could have righted itself by squirting water. Many productides had anchoring spines, and some had hinge areas with stabilizing flanges. Small spines on the brachial valves of some productides served to trap disguising sediment. Evolutionary loss of hinge teeth within both the Strophomenida and Productida reduced the friction of valve clapping. Partly because of their slender shape, strophomenides were typically more vulnerable to exhumation than productides. Strophomenides also ejected water less effectively than productides and would have been less adept at righting themselves. The virtual disappearance of the strophomenides during the Devonian can be attributed to their vulnerability to intensifying benthic bulldozing and predation. The success of the productides during the late Paleozoic can be attributed to their relatively deep sequestration in the sediment and ability to right themselves and reburrow effectively when exhumed and overturned.
Chemical Composition and Antioxidant Activities of Tunisian Thymus capitatus L. Methanolic Extract

Thymus capitatus has traditionally been considered as an anthelmintic, antispasmodic, carminative, emmenagogue, expectorant, rubefactient, sedative, stimulant, and tonic. This work was carried out to determine total polyphenol and total flavonoids chemical composition of phenolics and to evaluate the antioxidant activities of the methanolic extract. Total phenolic contents were assayed using the Folin–Ciocalteu reagent, total flavonoid content was measured spectrophotometrically and phenolics were analyzed by reverse phase–high performance liquid chromatography. The 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl and reducing power were calculated. Total phenols and total flavonoids varied significantly among the studied regions. Chromatographic analysis by reverse phase–high performance liquid chromatography showed that phenolic acids: tannic, gallic, chlorogenic hemihydrate, caffeic, syringic, ferulic, p-coumaric acid, and trans-cinnamic rosmarinic were the main compounds. The anti-radical activity was region-dependent and could be summarized as follows in ascending order: Boukornine > Kef > Bizerte > Grombelia. Reducing power in the four studied regions was stronger than positive control (ascorbic acid). From these results we have conclude that thyme methanolic extract may have a role in pharmaceutical preparations and preservatives as an antioxidant.
ATHENA++

Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDB) systems eliminate the requirement for an end user to use complex query languages like SQL, by translating the input natural language (NL) queries to SQL automatically. Although a significant volume of research has focused on this space, most state-of-the-art systems can at best handle simple select-project-join queries. There has been little to no research on extending the capabilities of NLIDB systems to handle complex business intelligence (BI) queries that often involve nesting as well as aggregation. In this paper, we present Athena++, an end-to-end system that can answer such complex queries in natural language by translating them into nested SQL queries. In particular, Athena++ combines linguistic patterns from NL queries with deep domain reasoning using ontologies to enable nested query detection and generation. We also introduce a new benchmark data set (FIBEN), which consists of 300 NL queries, corresponding to 237 distinct complex SQL queries on a database with 152 tables, conforming to an ontology derived from standard financial ontologies (FIBO and FRO). We conducted extensive experiments comparing Athena++ with two state-of-the-art NLIDB systems, using both FIBEN and the prominent Spider benchmark. Athena++ consistently outperforms both systems across all benchmark data sets with a wide variety of complex queries, achieving 88.33% accuracy on FIBEN benchmark, and 78.89% accuracy on Spider benchmark, beating the best reported accuracy results on the dev set by 8%.
Suffix rank

We investigate the problem of building a suffix array substring index for inputs significantly larger than main memory. This problem is especially important in the context of biological sequence analysis, where biological polymers can be thought of as very large contiguous strings. The objective is to index every substring of these long strings to facilitate efficient queries. We propose a new simple, scalable, and inherently parallelizable algorithm for building a suffix array for out-of-core strings. Our new algorithm, Suffix Rank, scales to arbitrarily large inputs, using disk as a memory extension. It solves the problem in just O(log n) scans over the disk-resident data. We evaluate the practical performance of our new algorithm, and show that for inputs significantly larger than the available amount of RAM, it scales better than other state-of-the-art solutions, such as eSAIS, SAscan, and eGSA.
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger: the COVID-19 pandemic transforms anonymous citizens into devoted actors (Lo que no nos mata nos hace más fuertes: la pandemia de COVID-19 transforma a los ciudadanos anónimos en actores devotos)

ABSTRACT COVID-19 is transforming our lives. We could frame this illness by surrendering to disaster or striving to get over it. We suggest that the pandemic is converting ‘some’ citizens into devoted actors, individuals viscerally connected — fused — to a group who share a sacred value. Since devoted actors are willing to make costly self-sacrifices for their peers and convictions, the virus, instead of ‘killing us’, could well make us stronger.
A Numerical Study on the Regularity of d-Primes via Informational Entropy and Visibility Algorithms

Let a - prime be a positive integer number with divisors. From this definition, the usual prime numbers correspond to the particular case . Here, the seemingly random sequence of gaps between consecutive - primes is numerically investigated. First, the variability of the gap sequences for is evaluated by calculating the informational entropy. Then, these sequences are mapped into graphs by employing two visibility algorithms. Computer simulations reveal that the degree distribution of most of these graphs follows a power law. Conjectures on how some topological features of these graphs depend on are proposed.
A Game Mechanism of Individual Value Decision-Making Based on SVO Differences

As the externalized carrier of intrinsic value, value decision-making is an important factor affecting the social value system. As an old Chinese saying goes, “A friend in need is a friend indeed,” crisis environment provides the background for the conflicts of multiple values, while individual social value orientation (SVO) determines the ranking of the value states. This paper defined the SVO types by means of Slider Measure method on the basis of environment description, constructed a decision-making game model in accordance with SVO differences, and finally analysed the mechanism of people’s decision-making. Taking the epidemic situation as the background, this paper conducted an empirical analysis with the sample of college students. The results showed that the most SVO types of college students were prosocial orientation, followed by individualistic orientation, altruistic orientation, and competitive orientation. In the crisis environment, individual SVO type and decision-making constituted a mapping relationship. There was an equilibrium point in the decision of prosocial orientation, and the dominant decision of altruistic orientation or individualistic orientation is relatively stable.
Sentence Embedding Based Semantic Clustering Approach for Discussion Thread Summarization

Huge data on the web come from discussion forums, which contain millions of threads. Discussion threads are a valuable source of knowledge for Internet users, as they have information about numerous topics. The discussion thread related to single topic comprises a huge number of reply posts, which makes it hard for the forum users to scan all the replies and determine the most relevant replies in the thread. At the same time, it is also hard for the forum users to manually summarize the bulk of reply posts in order to get the gist of discussion thread. Thus, automatically extracting the most relevant replies from discussion thread and combining them to form a summary are a challenging task. With this motivation behind, this study has proposed a sentence embedding based clustering approach for discussion thread summarization. The proposed approach works in the following fashion: At first, word2vec model is employed to represent reply sentences in the discussion thread through sentence embeddings/sentence vectors. Next, K-medoid clustering algorithm is applied to group semantically similar reply sentences in order to reduce the overlapping reply sentences. Finally, different quality text features are utilized to rank the reply sentences in different clusters, and then the high-ranked reply sentences are picked out from all clusters to form the thread summary. Two standard forum datasets are used to assess the effectiveness of the suggested approach. Empirical results confirm that the proposed sentence based clustering approach performed superior in comparison to other summarization methods in the context of mean precision, recall, and F-measure.
Metabolic Regulation, Oxygen Limitation and Heat Tolerance in a Subtidal Marine Gastropod Reveal the Complexity of Predicting Climate Change Vulnerability

Predictions for climate vulnerability of ectotherms have focused on performance-enhancing physiology, even though an organism’s energetic state can also be balanced by lowering resting maintenance costs. Adaptive metabolic depression (hypometabolism) enables animals to endure food scarcity, and physically extreme and variable environmental conditions. Hypometabolism is common in terrestrial and intertidal marine gastropod species, though this physiology and tolerance of environmental change are poorly understood in subtidal benthic gastropods. We investigated oxygen limitation tolerance, hypometabolism and thermal performance in the subtidal, tropical snail Turritella bacillum. Survival, cardiac activity and oxygen debt repayment were determined when oxygen uptake was limited by gill function impairment (air exposure) or exposure to hypoxic seawater. Thermal performance and tolerance were assessed from survival and cardiac performance when heated. The ability of snails to regulate metabolism during oxygen limitation was demonstrated by their tolerance of air exposure (>36 h) and hypoxia (>16 h), rhymicity and reversibility of bradycardia, and inconsistent anaerobic compensation. Under acute heating, mean heart rate was temperature-insensitive in water and temperature-dependent in air. Converging or peaking of individual heart rates during heating suggest maximization of thermal performance at 38–39°C, whereas survival and heartbeat flatlining suggest an upper thermal limit exceeding 42°C. Snails survived 16 h in seawater at 38°C. Their metabolic regulation complies with the oxygen-limiting, sediment-burrowing lifestyle of the species. Although a tropical organism, the species’ thermal tolerance so far exceeds present habitat temperatures as to question its susceptibility to centennial climate warming. Our findings reveal the importance of knowing the metabolic regulatory capabilities and conserved physiological attributes of species used in climate vulnerability tests. Studies of ectotherm climate vulnerability that identify generalized trends based on physiologically similar animals may be misleading by missing information on physiological diversity.
Diagonal Compression Test of Mortar Interlocking Masonry Walls With Various Block Shapes and Different Support Conditions

The collapse of masonry buildings has caused numerous fatalities during past earthquakes. To reduce casualties due to earthquakes, the reinforcement of masonry buildings is necessary. Since masonry buildings are still used due to the low cost of the building materials, cheap reinforcement measures are desirable. Therefore, this study investigates the use and shape of the interlocking blocks instead of the regular rectangular blocks to increase the strength of masonry buildings without using expensive reinforcing materials. First, diagonal compression tests of masonry walls made of interlocking blocks with various shapes under different support conditions were conducted. Regarding the block shapes, two types of I-shaped blocks and two types of hourglass-shaped blocks were compared. For the support conditions, glued and contact conditions were compared. Next, finite element analysis was conducted to understand the mechanism. From the experiment and the finite element analysis, a similar tendency was observed. The walls made of I-shaped blocks with a right angle have less strength than the I-shaped block walls with an obtuse angle and the two hourglass-shaped block walls. It was also found that the support condition has a slight effect on the results of the I-shaped block wall with a right angle but large effect on the results of the other three block walls where the wall under the contact condition has larger strength than the wall under the glued condition. The strain was locally concentrated where the adjacent blocks interlock with each other or the block interlocks with the jig, and failure occurred at the area where the strain was concentrated. Strength can be increased by changing the block shape with less interlocking effect such as the I-shaped block walls with an obtuse angle or hourglass-shaped block walls. However, the displacement increases due to the dislocation and rotation of blocks as the interlocking effect decreases.
The Rolf Method of Structural Integration on Fascial Tissue Stiffness, Elasticity, and Superficial Blood Perfusion in Healthy Individuals: The Prospective, Interventional Study

Introduction: There are multiple theories surrounding the physiological impact of structural integration (SI) with little evidence or research corroborating any of these. The aim of the study was to assess the effectiveness of 10 sessions of SI on fascial tissue (FT) superficial blood perfusion, stiffness, and elasticity in 13 healthy women. Methods: This was a prospective, interventional study. The primary outcome measures were FTs’ superficial blood perfusion, stiffness, and elasticity of bilateral selected FT points on the body. Data were collected before and after 10 sessions of SI intervention. Statistical analysis was performed using the non-parametric Wilcoxon test (intragroup comparison). Results: The superficial blood perfusion increased significantly in the most selected FT points on the body (p < 0.05). SI interventions produced significant decreases in selected points (brachioradialis, biceps brachii, and trapezius; p < 0.05) of FT stiffness and significant increases in elasticity (brachioradialis, biceps brachii, triceps surae, and trapezius; p < 0.05), especially in the FT of the right (dominant) upper limb. Conclusion: A 10-session of SI demonstrated positive effects on increasing superficial blood perfusion contributed to a decrease in FT stiffness and an increase in elasticity properties in the dominant upper limb. Data collection for this study is currently underway, and the trial is registered at ISRCTN.com with the identifier: ISRCTN46707309.
Media Literacy, Scientific Literacy, and Science Videos on the Internet

Although video is not a new format for communicating about science, video-sharing platforms have democratized the process. Individuals who wish to share information or ideas about science can use these platforms to connect with potentially large and diverse audiences. This has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are related to increased access to scientific information and greater public engagement with science. The drawbacks are related to communication within echo chambers and the spread of misinformation. This mini-review presents these benefits and drawbacks with respect to the science video landscape and media and scientific literacies. It concludes with a brief synthesis of ideas and recommendations for future research avenues.