Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adenovirus-Delivered Angiopoietin 1 Accelerates the Resolution of Inflammation of Acute Endotoxic Lung Injury in Mice

BACKGROUND: The immune system plays a key role in protecting the organism from infection. Timely resolution of the inflammatory response to infection plays a vital role in returning homeostasis and maintaining normal organ function. Angiopoietin1 prevents endothelial activation, part of the inflammatory response to a pathogen, and has an anti-inflammatory effect in acute lung injury. We designed this study to investigate whether increasing serum production of angiopoietin1 by IV administration of adenoviral-delivered angiopoietin1 could accelerate the resolution of inflammation in endotoxin-induced acute lung injury in mice. METHODS: Lipopolysaccharide was intratracheally instilled to induce acute lung injury in animals pretreated for 24 hours with adenoviral-GFP vector or adenoviral-GFP-angiopoietin1, respectively. An additional 6 mice in each pretreatment group were killed before lipopolysaccharide instillation to serve as controls. Indices of resolution of inflammation were analyzed. Apoptotic polymorphonuclear leukocytes and their phagocytosis by macrophages were determined by fluorescent activated cell sorter. The expression of angiopoietin1 in tissues and granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid were measured. RESULTS: Lipopolysaccharide induced leukocyte infiltration into air spaces, with maximal infiltration 48 hours after lipopolysaccharide instillation. Pretreatment with adenovirus-GFP-angiopoietin1 markedly increased angiopoietin1 expression, reduced leukocyte, and neutrophil infiltration and shortened the duration of inflammation. Adenovirus-GFP-angiopoietin1 pretreatment augmented the magnitude without altering the time course of granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that angiopoietin1 pretreatment promotes resolution of inflammation in endotoxin-induced acute lung injury in mice by accelerating the apoptosis of neutrophils and their phagocytosis by macrophages.
From discourse to semantics: the development of verb morphology and forms of self-reference in the speech of a two-year-old

ABSTRACT Recent linguistic studies have proposed that verb morphology has evolved to serve particular functions inherent to discourse. In this paper, an attempt is made to apply this proposal to the development of verb morphology in the spontaneous speech of a child from 1;10. 16 to 2;0.2. The question asked was whether there were any aspects of the child's discourse which may have been in part responsible for her differential use of verb morphology. To answer this question, a distributional analysis is presented of the child's speech in two different speech contexts: dialogue vs. crib-monologue. Despite the exiguous amount of data in the corpus, the analysis yields striking patterns of co-occurrences involving verb morphology and forms of self-reference. The patterns were interpreted as provisional evidence that the child may have been sensitive to discourse factors in her selective use of verb morphology. The data is analysed into four developmental phases. It is suggested that the semantic-level meanings of Phase IV are due in part to the type of discourse use to which the morphology is put in the earlier phases.
Energy-Aware Resource Adaptation in the Tessellation OS

Modern devices must juggle the competing requirements of parallel high-throughput, interactive, and multimedia applications while conserving energy where possible. Each requires some combination of CPU, cache, memory, and network bandwidth, and allocating resources among applications is a complex optimization problem. Application requirements are often conflicting, and users wants predictable responsiveness, and long battery life, despite dynamically changing resources. Modern OSes do not adequately tackle this problem; system-wide power goals do not consider the priorities of various applications, and can hurt the user experience. We present a resource adaptation system, developed in the Tessellation OS, that model and schedule resources for energy consumption, in order to automatically find low-energy and high-performance resource configurations for realistic workloads. Our results show that in a two app scenario with differing priorities, our system automatically finds a resource allocation that meets both performance requirements or (when power saving is more important) reduces system power by 7 W and continues to meet the high priority application’s performance target.
Perceptual Cue Weighting Is Influenced by the Listener's Gender and Subjective Evaluations of the Speaker: The Case of English Stop Voicing

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were assigned to one of three prompt conditions (i.e., a visually male talker, a visually female talker, or audio-only) and rated the talker in terms of vocal (and facial, in the visual prompt conditions) gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance.
An Ounce of Prevention: “COPEing with Toddler Behaviour”

Dear Editor: Disruptive behaviour disorders are major mental health problems that are difficult to treat and costly in terms of suffering, violence, and damaged property. The most common reason for referral to children's mental health services involves disruptive behaviours, that are quite stable from toddlerhood. Intervention may be more effective with younger children, who tend to have less severe behaviour problems; however, there are no evidence-based interventions specifically targeting toddlers (1). Group-based parent training can be effective, cost-efficient, and accessible, so we developed COPEing With Toddler Behaviour to train groups of parents in effective parenting strategies for toddlers (aged 12 to 36 months), using an active learning model (that is, COPE Community Parent Education, 2) that has been used successfully with other age groups. In the development phase of this community-based education group, we focused on enlisting and retaining parents of at-risk toddlers, completing evaluations, identifying any negative impact of the groups, and developing the content in response to feedback. We advertised and offered three 3-session versions of COPEing With Toddler Behaviour in high-risk neighbourhoods. Poverty and associated factors such as poor housing and living in high-crime neighbourhoods have been identified as predictors of disruptive behaviour disorders. To help enlist and sustain group involvement, we provided snacks, childcare, and help with transportation. Each of the 3 weekly sessions were 2 hours in length, held at convenient locations, and led by experienced group facilitators. The groups filled up quickly, and we had a waiting list. Over 3 courses offered, 90 parents registered by telephone, and 48 parents (53%) completed at least 2 of the 3 sessions. All 48 parents completed a client satisfaction questionnaire and reported that they highly valued the course: 88% to 100% said that they learned something new, that they plan to use what they learned, and that they found the course helpful. One-third thought the course was too short. Of the 48 parents, 16 (that is, 62% of the 26 parents we reached by telephone to elicit agreement) completed pretest, posttest, and follow-up standardized parentreport measures (3). Results showed small to medium effect size decreases in difficult toddler behaviour, and dysfunctional parentchild interaction, and parental distress and a significant increase in knowledge of toddler parenting issues. …
Intergroup rhabdomyosarcoma study-IV: results for patients with nonmetastatic disease.

PURPOSE The study goal was to improve outcome in children with rhabdomyosarcoma by comparing risk-based regimens of surgery, radiotherapy (RT) and chemotherapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS Eight hundred eighty-three previously untreated eligible patients with nonmetastatic rhabdomyosarcoma entered the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study-IV (IRS-IV) (1991 to 1997) after surgery and were randomized treatment by primary tumor site, group (1 to 3), and stage (I to III). Failure-free survival (FFS) rates and survival were the end points used in comparisons between randomized groups and between patient subgroups treated on IRS-III and IRS-IV. Most patients were randomized to receive vincristine and dactinomycin (VA) and cyclophosphamide (VAC, n = 235), or VA and ifosfamide (VAI, n = 222), or vincristine, ifosfamide, and etoposide (VIE, n = 236). Patients with group 3 tumors were randomized to receive conventional RT (C-RT) versus hyperfractionated RT (HF-RT). RESULTS Overall 3-year FFS and survival were 77% and 86%, respectively. Three-year FFS rates with VAC, VAI, and VIE were 75%, 77%, and 77%, respectively (P =.42). No significant difference in outcome was noted with HF-RT versus C-RT (P =.85 and P =.90, respectively). Overall, patients with embryonal tumors benefited from intensive three-drug chemotherapy in IRS-IV (3-year FFS, 83%). The improvement was seen for patients with stage I or stage II/III, group 1/2 disease, many of whom received VA chemotherapy on IRS-III. Patients with stage 2/3, group 3 disease had similar outcomes on IRS-III and IRS-IV. Three-year FFS for the nonrandomized patient subsets was 75% with renal abnormalities; 81% for paratesticular, group 1 cases; and 91% for group 1/2 orbit or eyelid tumors. Patients with paratesticular primaries had poorer outcomes if they were more than 10 years old (3-year FFS, 63% v 90%). Myelosuppression occurred in most patients, but toxic deaths occurred in less than 1%. CONCLUSION VAC and VAI or VIE with surgery (with or without RT), are equally effective for patients with local or regional rhabdomyosarcoma and are more effective for embryonal tumors than therapies used previously. Younger patients with group 1 paratesticular embryonal tumors and all patients with group 1/2 orbit or eyelid tumors can usually be cured with VA chemotherapy along with postoperative RT for group 2 disease.
Rhinovirus infections: induction and modulation of airways inflammation in asthma

There is renewed interest in the role of respiratory virus infections in the pathogenesis of asthma and in the development of exacerbations in pre‐existing disease. This is due to the availability of new molecular and experimental tools. Circumstantial evidence points towards a potentially causative role as well as to possibly protective effects of certain respiratory viruses in the cause of allergic asthma during early childhood. In addition, it now has become clear that exacerbations of asthma, in children as well as adults, are mostly associated with respiratory virus infections, with a predominant role of the common cold virus: rhinovirus. Careful human in vitro and in vivo experiments have shown that rhinovirus can potentially stimulate bronchial epithelial cells to produce pro‐inflammatory chemokines and cytokines, may activate cholinergic‐ or noncholinergic nerves, increase epithelial‐derived nitric oxide synthesis, upregulate local ICAM‐1 expression, and can lead to nonspecific T‐cell responses and/or virus‐specific T‐cell proliferation. Experimental rhinovirus infections in patients with asthma demonstrate features of exacerbation, such as lower airway symptoms, variable airways obstruction, and bronchial hyperresponsiveness, the latter being associated with eosinophil counts and eosinophilic cationic protein levels in induced sputum. This suggests that multiple cellular pathways can be involved in rhinovirus‐induced asthma exacerbations. It is still unknown whether these mechanisms are a distinguishing characteristic of asthma. Because of the limited effects of inhaled steroids during asthma exacerbations, new therapeutic interventions need to be developed based on the increasing pathophysiological knowledge about the role of viruses in asthma.
Existential perspectives and cognitive behavioral therapy

Classical CBT has its limitation related especially to existential questions, such as meaning of life, acceptance of unchangeable aspects, me aning of values, transcendence, significance of experiences, and heading into the future. The method is a speculative review. It is a th eoretical article, with discussion of concepts and possibilities for integration, rather than an analysis. The review includes arguments and deductions from relevant authors’ monographs of the second and third wave in CBT movement and the key relevant information from important existential psychotherapy authors monographs. Additional literature review was performed using the National Library of Medicine PubMed database, Scopus and Web of Science of relevant articles up to July 2011. Databases were searched for articles containing the combinations of keywords: cognitive behavioral therapy, existential therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, schema therapy, mindfulness, narrative, therapeutical strategies, experiential methods. We discuss conceptual aspects related both to existential psychotherapy and CBT, and recognize overlaps and differences. Both existential psychotherapy and CBT strongly accent the central role of the subjective meaning, phenomenology, rationality, training of coping skills, the importance of immediate emotional experience in assisting clients to accept all aspects of experience, as more important than exploration of the unconscious,. In addition, the existential psychotherapy more emphasizes transcendence of the man, responsibility, acceptance, and the motivation of the man to achieve the subjective sense of life. An integration of existential views to the CBT approach could notably enrich the treatment of the clients. Many approaches deriving from existential psychotherapy could supplement pragmatic CBT approaches with philosophical extension.
Complexity-Constrained Feature Selection for Classification

Continuous monitoring of audio-visual context on mobile devices requires algorithms with gentle demands on computational resources. Existing feature selection strategies for classification do not account for the complexity associated with feature extraction. We present a complexity-constrained feature selection algorithm that is independent of the classifier architecture and demonstrate that it leads to superior feature sets if the allowed computational complexity is limited.
Epidemiology of invasive and other pneumococcal disease in children in England and Wales 1996–1998

The results of enhanced national surveillance of pneumococcal disease in children <15y of age in England and Wales are reported for the period 1996–1998. Of the 1985 cases of laboratory‐confirmed invasive disease (annual incidence 6.6 per 100000 overall and 39.7 per 100000 in infants <1 y of age), 485 (24%) were meningitis (annual incidence of 1.6 per 100000 overall and 15.7 per 100000 in infants <1 y of age). Fifty‐nine deaths in children with invasive disease were identified‐3% of the total reports. Thirty‐one different serogroups/types were identified, with organisms in the 7‐valent conjugate vaccine responsible for 69% of the infections in children <5 y of age; this rose to 77% and 82%, respectively, for the 9‐and 11‐valent vaccines. Resistance to penicillin varied from 2.3% to 6.2% in different years, but erythromycin resistance remained constant at 17%. The vast majority of resistant isolates were in vaccine serotype/groups. Computerized hospital admission records for all children <15 y of age with a discharge diagnosis code indicating probable pneumococcal disease were also analysed for 1997. The annual incidence for cases with a code specifically mentioning S. pneumoniae was 9.9 per 100000 compared with 71.2 per 100000 for lobar pneumonia; the mean duration of stay for both was < 1 wk. The incidence of admission for pneumococcal meningitis (1.9 overall and 19.6 for infants < 1 y of age) was similar to that derived from laboratory reports and resulted in an average duration of stay of 2 wk.
Sleep variety: physiology, psychology and epidemiology

One current area of research concerns the effects of long-term treatment of hypnotics on sleep and mood and the brain basis of these effects. Methippara and colleagues report that chronic treatment (2 weeks) of adult rats with eszopiclone increases survival of newborn hippocampal cells (Methippara et al., 2010). The treatment also enhanced non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and delta power, but only transiently so. The data point to two issues of current interest: (1) what are the long-term effects of hypnotics, besides their effects on sleep and (2) are these effects mediated by sleep or do they represent a pharmacological effect?
STUDY OF DATA MINING ALGORITHM IN CLOUD COMPUTING USING MAPREDUCE FRAMEWORK

Today’s Cloud computing technology has been emerged to manage large data sets efficiently and due to rapid growth of data, large scale data processing is becoming a major point of information technique. The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is designed for reliable storage of very large data sets and to stream those data sets at high bandwidth to user applications. In a large cluster, hundreds of servers both host directly attached storage and execute user application tasks. By distributing storage and computation across many servers, the resource can grow on demand while remaining economical at every size. MapReduce has been widely used for large-scale data analysis in the Cloud. Hadoop is an open source implementation of MapReduce which can achieve better performance with the allocation of more compute nodes from the cloud to speed up computation; however, this approach of “renting more nodes" isn’t cost effective in a pay-as-you-go environment.
Accelerated Baccalaureate Nursing Students Use of Emotional Intelligence in Nursing as “Caring for a Human Being”: A Mixed Methods Grounded Theory Study

Abstract Accelerated nursing students are ideal informants regarding abstract nursing concepts. How emotional intelligence (EI) is used in nursing remains a relatively elusive process that has yet to be empirically modeled. The purpose of this study was to generate a theoretical model that explains how EI is used in nursing by accelerated baccalaureate nursing students. Using a mixed methods grounded theory study design, theoretical sampling of EI scores directed sampling for individual interviews and focus groups. Caring for a human being emerged as the basic social process at the heart of which all other processes – Getting it; Being caring; The essence of professional nurse caring; Doing something to make someone feel better; and Dealing with difficulty – are interconnected. In addition to a theoretical explanation of the use of EI in nursing, this study corroborates findings from other qualitative studies in nursing and contributes a rich description of accelerated baccalaureate nursing students and an example of a mixed methods study design to the small but growing literature in these areas.
DNA hydrogels: New functional soft materials

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) hydrogel is a network of crosslinked DNA strands swollen in aqueous solutions. The crosslinks may be physical or chemical, such as the hydrogen bonds or ethylene glycol units, respectively, connecting the strands belonging to different double-helical DNA molecules. As DNA network strands in the hydrogels exhibit properties similar to those of the individual DNA molecules, such soft materials are a good candidate to make use of the characteris- tics of DNA such as coil-globule transition, biocompatibility, selective binding, and molecular recognition. Physical DNA hydrogels with an elastic modulus in the order of megapascals can be prepared by subjecting semidilute aqueous solutions of DNA to successive heating-cooling cycles between below and above the melting temperature of DNA. Chemical DNA hydro- gels can be prepared by connecting the amino groups on the nucleotide bases through covalent bonds to form a three- dimensional DNA network in aqueous solutions. In this article, we summarize the preparation strategies of DNA hydrogels with a wide range of tunable properties. V C 2011 Wiley Periodi- cals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 49: 551-556, 2011
Discrete Event Dynamic Programming with Simultaneous Events

This paper deals with an infinite-horizon discrete-event dynamic programming model with discounting, and with Borel state and action spaces. Instead of the usual n-stage contraction assumption (Denardo, E. V. 1967. Contraction mappings in the theory underlying dynamic programming. SIAM Rev. 9 165–177.), uniform over all admissible state-action pairs, we propose milder conditions, sufficient for regularity, and allowing any number of simultaneous events. This model permits one to treat properly a number of problems typically associated with continuous-time maintenance models (Haurie, A. , L'Ecuyer, P. 1982. A stochastic control approach to group preventive replacement in a multicomponent system. IEEE Trans. Automat. Control AC-27 387–393; Haurie, A. , L'Ecuyer, P. 1986. Approximation and bounds in discrete event dynamic programming. IEEE Trans. Automat. Control AC-31 227–235; L'Ecuyer, P. 1983. Processus de decision markoviens a etapes discretes: Application a des problemes de remplacement d'equipement. Ph.D.
First injection and current risk factors for HIV among new and long-term injection drug users

The purpose of this paper is to estimate HIV seroprevalence and to examine the injection and sexual risk behaviours of a cohort of active new heroin injectors who have initiated injection within the past four years and to compare their risk behaviours with those of long-term heroin injectors who initiated injection prior to January 1, 1985. A stratified network-based sample was used to recruit injection drug users (IDUs) from the streets of Miami-Dade, Florida. New IDUs displayed a significantly lower HIV seroprevalence than long-term injectors (13.3 versus 24.7%). Both new and long-term drug injectors exhibited a high level of current HIV risk behaviour. While new injectors were more likely than long-term injectors to practise safer injection behaviours at the initial injection episode, the current risk behaviours of new and long-term injectors are similar.