Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF RECOMBINANT HUMAN DEOXYRIBONUCLEASE ON PULMONARY FUNCTION IN CYSTIC FIBROSIS PATIENTS

The problem of evaluating the long-term effects of recombinant human deoxyribonuclease (rhDNase) on forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients was considered. A two-stage mixed effects model, incorporating relevant predictive variables, captured the diverse patterns of decline of FEV1 for patients with different demographic characteristics. Based on the results of modeling the dropout process, it is clear that the probability of early dropout was closely related to patient's responsiveness to rhDNase treatment. Failure to consider the existence of informative censoring severely biased the estimates of the rate of decline and affected the interpretation of the results.
Multifactorial intervention and cardiovascular disease in patients with type 2 diabetes.

BACKGROUND Cardiovascular morbidity is a major burden in patients with type 2 diabetes. In the Steno-2 Study, we compared the effect of a targeted, intensified, multifactorial intervention with that of conventional treatment on modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular disease in patients with type 2 diabetes and microalbuminuria. METHODS The primary end point of this open, parallel trial was a composite of death from cardiovascular causes, nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, revascularization, and amputation. Eighty patients were randomly assigned to receive conventional treatment in accordance with national guidelines and 80 to receive intensive treatment, with a stepwise implementation of behavior modification and pharmacologic therapy that targeted hyperglycemia, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and microalbuminuria, along with secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease with aspirin. RESULTS The mean age of the patients was 55.1 years, and the mean follow-up was 7.8 years. The decline in glycosylated hemoglobin values, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels measured after an overnight fast, and urinary albumin excretion rate were all significantly greater in the intensive-therapy group than in the conventional-therapy group. Patients receiving intensive therapy also had a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular disease (hazard ratio, 0.47; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.24 to 0.73), nephropathy (hazard ratio, 0.39; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.17 to 0.87), retinopathy (hazard ratio, 0.42; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.21 to 0.86), and autonomic neuropathy (hazard ratio, 0.37; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.18 to 0.79). CONCLUSIONS A target-driven, long-term, intensified intervention aimed at multiple risk factors in patients with type 2 diabetes and microalbuminuria reduces the risk of cardiovascular and microvascular events by about 50 percent.
Diffusible factors released by fibroblasts support epidermal morphogenesis and deposition of basement membrane components

Epithelial–mesenchymal interactions play an important role in controlling epidermal morphogenesis and homeostasis but little is known about the mechanisms of these interactions. To examine whether diffusible factors produced by fibroblasts and/or keratinocytes support epidermal morphogenesis and basement membrane formation, organotypic keratinocyte monocultures were established in media collected either from organotypic fibroblast or keratinocyte‐monocultures or from keratinocyte‐fibroblast cocultures, and the expression of keratin 10, 16, and 17 and basement membrane components (types IV and VII collagen, laminin 5, nidogen, BP 180, LAD‐1) were examined. We found that diffusible factors released by keratinocytes were not sufficient to support the establishment of normalized epidermal phenotype and deposition of basement membrane components in contrast to fibroblast‐ or keratinocyte/fibroblast‐derived factors. Keratinocytes appear to affect the spectrum of secreted soluble factors, as keratinocyte/fibroblast‐derived factors were more effective to accomplish continuous linear deposition of laminin 5 and of nidogen. The finding that released amounts of keratinocyte growth factor and granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor were not sufficient to fully support epidermal morphogenesis and deposition of basement membrane components is suggestive for the involvement of other released diffusible factors. Generation of organotypic keratinocyte monocultures in the presence of fibroblast‐ or keratinocyte/fibroblast‐derived soluble factors resulted in enhanced expression of keratins K16 and K17 and the absence of type IV collagen. This observation indicates that next to paracrine acting factors, epidermal homeostasis is controlled by mutual keratinocyte–fibroblast interaction.
SPERM PREDOMINANCE AMONG DROSOPHILA PSEUDOOBSCURA KARYOTYPES

Female Drosophila store sperm after mating and utilize them to fertilize eggs as they are laid. Often a female mates with a second male while sperm from the first mate still remain in her sperm storage organs. Parker (1970) defined sperm competition as the interaction between, and differential utilization of, sperm from separate ejaculates. When multiple matings occur, a male can increase the number of offspring he fathers-his fitnessin two major ways (Boorman and Parker, 1976): by increasing the proportion of eggs he fertilizes when he is the first mate (P1); or by increasing the proportion when he is the second mate (P2). Both are adaptations which increase the fertility component of fitness in multiple matings. In Drosophila and some other insects, sperm from the last mate usually predominate in fertilization (Boorman and Parker, 1976). This preponderance has been termed sperm displacement or sperm predominance. The term sperm predominance seems preferable for Drosophila, since a physical displacement of previously stored sperm has yet to be demonstrated (Gromko et al., in press). Sperm predominance differs in an important way from some related phenomena, such as sperm preference (Childress and Hartl, 1972) and meiotic drive (Sandler and Novitski, 1957). These other phenomena involve selection directly on haploid gametes, while sperm predominance involves selection on diploid male genotypes. Prout and Bundgaard (1977) derived a
Survival Outcome after the First Central Nervous System Relapse in Children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: A Retrospective Analysis of 79 Patients in a Joint Program Involving the Experience of Three Japanese Study Groups

In a retrospective review of the survival outcome of children with isolated central nervous system (CNS) relapse of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), we identified 79 patients with CNS relapse among the eligible patients enrolled in ALL trials of 3 Japanese pediatric oncology study groups (Japanese Children’s Cancer and Leukemia Study Group [JCCLSG], Tokyo Children’s Cancer Study Group [TCCSG], and Japan Association of Childhood Leukemia Study [JACLS]) between 1989 and 1999. CNS relapses were diagnosed as the first adverse event between 1991 and 1999. The median age at the time of CNS relapse was 5.0 years (range, 0.7-15.1 years). The duration of the first remission ranged from 1.4 to 54 months (median, 12.4 months), and the observation period after CNS relapse ranged from 1 to 131 months (median, 27 months). Overall, 75 of the 79 patients achieved a second complete remission, 44 of whom had second relapses in the following sites: CNS, 18 patients; bone marrow, 15 patients; combined sites, 8 patients; and testis, 2 patients. Rates of overall survival and event-free survival at 4 years were 43.7% ± 5.8% (mean ± SE) and 32.9% ± 5.5%, respectively.The probability of remaining in second remission was significantly correlated with the leukocyte count (P = .005) and age (P = .02) at the initial diagnosis.
Sound therapy for tinnitus management: practicable options.

BACKGROUND The authors reviewed practicable options of sound therapy for tinnitus, the evidence base for each option, and the implications of each option for the patient and for clinical practice. PURPOSE To provide a general guide to selecting sound therapy options in clinical practice. INTERVENTION Practicable sound therapy options. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Where available, peer-reviewed empirical studies, conference proceedings, and review studies were examined. Material relevant to the purpose was summarized in a narrative. RESULTS The number of peer-reviewed publications pertaining to each sound therapy option reviewed varied significantly (from none to over 10). Overall there is currently insufficient evidence to support or refute the routine use of individual sound therapy options. It is likely, however, that sound therapy combined with education and counseling is generally helpful to patients. CONCLUSIONS Clinicians need to be guided by the patient's point of care, patient motivation and expectations of sound therapy, and the acceptability of the intervention both in terms of the sound stimuli they are to use and whether they are willing to use sound extensively or intermittently. Clinicians should also clarify to patients the role sound therapy is expected to play in the management plan.
Atazanavir: improving the HIV protease inhibitor class

Protease inhibitors are potent agents against HIV but their use is constrained by poor pharmacokinetics, cross-resistance and metabolic toxicities. Atazanavir [Reyataz™] is a new protease inhibitors with once-daily dosing and minimal lipid and glycemic effects. Resistance studies of clinical isolates reveal a mutational pattern distinctive from that of other protease inhibitors. Atazanavir selects for the I50L mutation in HIV protease that confers increased susceptibility to other protease inhibitors in vitro. Clinical trials have shown comparable efficacy to nelfinavir (Viracept®) and efavirenz (Sustiva®) in treatment-naive patients, and in preliminary studies, ritonavir-boosted atazanavir is effective in patients failing previous protease inhibitor-containing regimens. Reversible elevations in bilirubin occur in some patients but are not associated with hepatic injury. Atazanavir improves upon aspects of currently-available protease inhibitors and appears useful for initial and possibly subsequent HIV therapy.
Ruminal lactic acidosis in cow: clinical assessment.

Ruminal lactic acidosis is a condition that arises in ruminants due to the ingestion of excess quantities of easily digestible grains leading to diarrhea, anorexia and physiological derangements which can be fatal in severe cases. A clinical case of cow with history of rice flour ingestion showing signs of acute ruminal lactic acidosis was managed. The pH of ruminal fluid was 5.1. The number of live protozoa in the ruminal fluid was almost nil. Blood analysis confirmed marked alterations due to dehydration. Electrolyte imbalance was evident in biochemical tests. Cow was treated with intraruminal administration of Magnesium hydroxide and Sodium bicarbonate. Full recovery was achieved without any complications.
Efforts grow to keep mentally ill out of jails.

NEW YORK, NY—Putting seriously mentally ill people who commit crimes behind prison bars is not only a major public policy scandal, it also costs communities more than treating these offenders, according to speakers at a forum on reversing the criminalization of the seriously mentally ill at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) here in May. The broad and rapid release of patients from state mental hospitals that began in the 1950s and the concomitant failure to adequately fund the community mental health system led directly to the overpopulation of individuals with mental illness in adult and juvenile justice systems today, said Marcia Goin, MD, PhD, of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, immediate past APA president. Over the past 20 years, added Goin, federal and state governments have adopted more punitive policies, leading to the incarceration of nonviolent offenders, often for minor crimes, such as trespassing, and petty theft. Many of these individuals have both mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders.
Double-loop sigma-delta modulation with DC input

A discrete-time model having a two-bit (2-b) quantizer is analyzed exactly, and an analytical expression for the quantizer noise sequence is found. Rigorous answers are then provided to two fundamental questions for a double-loop sigma-delta modulation system with DC input: (1) What is the long-term statistical behavior of the internal quantizer noise? (2) How does the asymptotic mean square sigma-delta quantization error vary as a function of the oversampling ratio? >
Recurrent Relational Networks for Complex Relational Reasoning

Humans possess an ability to abstractly reason about objects and their interactions, an ability not shared with state-of-the-art deep learning models. Relational networks, introduced by Santoro et al. (2017), add the capacity for relational reasoning to deep neural networks, but are limited in the complexity of the reasoning tasks they can address. We introduce recurrent relational networks which increase the suite of solvable tasks to those that require an order of magnitude more steps of relational reasoning. We use recurrent relational networks to solve Sudoku puzzles and achieve state-of-the-art results by solving 96.6% of the hardest Sudoku puzzles, where relational networks fail to solve any. We also apply our model to the BaBi textual QA dataset solving 19/20 tasks which is competitive with state-of-the-art sparse differentiable neural computers. The recurrent relational network is a general purpose module that can augment any neural network model with the capacity to do many-step relational reasoning.
Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object

This article reviews the variety of definitions proposed for "resilience" within sustainability science and suggests a typology according to the specific degree of normativity. There is a tension between the original descriptive concept of resilience first defined in ecological science and a more recent, vague, and malleable notion of resilience used as an approach or boundary object by different scientific disciplines. Even though increased conceptual vagueness can be valuable to foster communication across disciplines and between science and practice, both conceptual clarity and practical relevance of the concept of resilience are critically in danger. The fundamental question is what conceptual structure we want resilience to have. This article argues that a clearly specified, descriptive concept of resilience is critical in providing a counterbalance to the use of resilience as a vague boundary object. A clear descriptive concept provides the basis for operationalization and application of resilience within ecological science.
An Implementation of Compact Genetic Algorithm on FPGA for Extrinsic Evolvable Hardware

Traditional genetic algorithms require a lot of memory and processing power on embedded logic projects. Representing populations of candidate solutions through vectors of probabilities rather than sets of bit strings saves memory and processing. The compact genetic algorithm (CGA) is a probability vector based genetic algorithm. The article presents an FPGA implementation of the standard compact genetic algorithm with a few changes to improve search power. A data flow and a block diagram design are shown and described in the paper. Results demonstrate the requirements (logical blocks) needed for implementation, the architecture processing speed and the solving power of the CGA for evolvable hardware.
Significance of cytokines and CD68‐positive microparticles in immune thrombocytopenic purpura

Abstract: We investigated the significance of cytokines (soluble interleukin‐2 receptor, granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor, interleukin‐6, and interferon‐gamma) and CD68‐positive microparticles in immune thrombocytopenic purpura. Cytokines were measured by enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay and microparticles were detected by flow cytometry. CD68 expression by histiocytic U937 cells incubated with lipopolysaccharide or cytokines was also assessed in a control study. The level of CD68‐positive microparticles was significantly higher in the patients with thrombocytopenia than in normal controls (p<0.01). The soluble interleukin‐2 receptor level was also significantly higher in patients than in controls (p<0.01), but the other cytokines did not show a significant difference. However, patients with severe thrombocytopenia (platelet count >20000/μl) had significantly higher levels of granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor and interleukin‐6 than the controls (p<0.05). When opsonized platelets were incubated with activated U937 cells, lipopolysaccharide and granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor caused an increase of CD68‐positive microparticles in the supernatant. These results suggest that granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor is released by activated T cells in immune thrombocytopenic purpura and activates monocyte/macrophage phagocytosis, resulting in an increase of circulating CD68‐positive microparticles and enhanced platelet destruction.
Microtubule C‐Terminal Tails Can Change Characteristics of Motor Force Production

Control of intracellular transport is poorly understood, and functional ramifications of tubulin isoform differences between cell types are mostly unexplored. Motors' force production and detachment kinetics are critical for their group function, but how microtubule (MT) details affect these properties – if at all – is unknown. We investigated these questions using both a vesicular transport human kinesin, kinesin‐1, and also a mitotic kinesin likely optimized for group function, kinesin‐5, moving along either bovine brain or MCF7(breast cancer) MTs. We found that kinesin‐1 functioned similarly on the two sets of MTs – in particular, its mean force production was approximately the same, though due to its previously reported decreased processivity, the mean duration of kinesin‐1 force production was slightly decreased on MCF7 MTs. In contrast, kinesin‐5's function changed dramatically on MCF7 MTs: its average detachment force was reduced and its force–velocity curve was different. In spite of the reduced detachment force, the force–velocity alteration surprisingly improved high‐load group function for kinesin‐5 on the cancer‐cell MTs, potentially contributing to functions such as spindle‐mediated chromosome separation. Significant differences were previously reported for C‐terminal tubulin tails in MCF7 versus bovine brain tubulin. Consistent with this difference being functionally important, elimination of the tails made transport along the two sets of MTs similar.
Eventual nonsensitivity and tame dynamical systems

In this paper we characterize tame dynamical systems and functions in terms of eventual non-sensitivity and eventual fragmentability. As a notable application we obtain a neat characterization of tame subshifts $X \subset \{0,1\}^{\mathbb Z}$: for every infinite subset $L \subseteq {\mathbb Z}$ there exists an infinite subset $K \subseteq L$ such that $\pi_{K}(X)$ is a countable subset of $\{0,1\}^K$. The notion of eventual fragmentability is one of the properties we encounter which indicate some "smallness" of a family. We investigate a "smallness hierarchy" for families of continuous functions on compact dynamical systems, and link the existence of a "small" family which separates points of a dynamical system $(G,X)$ to the representability of $X$ on "good" Banach spaces. For example, for metric dynamical systems the property of admitting a separating family which is eventually fragmented is equivalent to being tame. We give some sufficient conditions for coding functions to be tame and, among other applications, show that certain multidimensional analogues of Sturmian sequences are tame. We also show that linearly ordered dynamical systems are tame and discuss examples where some universal dynamical systems associated with certain Polish groups are tame.
Wait-and-see policy for clinical complete responders after chemoradiation for rectal cancer.

PURPOSE Neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy for rectal cancer can result in complete disappearance of tumor and involved nodes. In patients without residual tumor on imaging and endoscopy (clinical complete response [cCR]) a wait-and-see-policy (omission of surgery with follow-up) might be considered instead of surgery. The purpose of this prospective cohort study was to evaluate feasibility and safety of a wait-and-see policy with strict selection criteria and follow-up. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients with a cCR after chemoradiotherapy were prospectively selected for the wait-and-see policy with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and endoscopy plus biopsies. Follow-up was performed 3 to 6 monthly and consisted of MRI, endoscopy, and computed tomography scans. A control group of patients with a pathologic complete response (pCR) after surgery was identified from a prospective cohort study. Functional outcome was measured with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) bowel function questionnaire and Wexner incontinence score. Long-term outcome was estimated by using Kaplan-Meier curves. RESULTS Twenty-one patients with cCR were included in the wait-and-see policy group. Mean follow-up was 25 ± 19 months. One patient developed a local recurrence and had surgery as salvage treatment. The other 20 patients are alive without disease. The control group consisted of 20 patients with a pCR after surgery who had a mean follow-up of 35 ± 23 months. For these patients with a pCR, cumulative probabilities of 2-year disease-free survival and overall survival were 93% and 91%, respectively. CONCLUSION A wait-and-see policy with strict selection criteria, up-to-date imaging techniques, and follow-up is feasible and results in promising outcome at least as good as that of patients with a pCR after surgery. The proposed selection criteria and follow-up could form the basis for future randomized studies.
Personalized Knowledge Acquisition through Interactive Data Analysis in E-learning System

Personalized knowledge acquisition is very important for promoting learning efficiency within E-learning system. To achieve this, two key problems involved are acquiring user’s knowledge requirements and discovering the people that can meet the requirements. In this paper, we present two approaches to realize personalized knowledge acquisition. The first approach aims to mine what knowledge the student requires and to what degree. All the interactive logs, accumulated during question answering process, are taken into account to compute each student’s knowledge requirement. The second approach is to construct and analyze user network based on the interactive data, which aims to find potential contributors list. Each student’s potential contributors may satisfy his/her requirement timely and accurately. Then we design an experiment to implement the two approaches. In order to evaluate the performance of our approaches, we make an evaluation with the percentage of satisfying recommendations. The evaluation results show that our approaches can help each student acquire the knowledge that he/she requires efficiently.