Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infants Autonomic Cardio- Respiratory Responses to Nurturing Stroking Touch Delivered by the Mother or the Father

The building of physiological self-regulation during bonding is a crucial developmental process based on early cardio-respiratory maturation. The mother’s role as a facilitator of this physiological maturation has been evidenced and recognized in many respects. Research in fathers, however, remains sparse which may be due to the belief that bonding is a physiological behavior reserved for a mother’s maternal instinct. In the current study we compared the impact of paternal and maternal nurturing stroking touch on infants’ physiological self-regulation in terms of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). We compared the impact of a 3-min stroking period (STROKING) with a pre-baseline (PRE-STROKING) and post-baseline (POST-STROKING) of 25 mothers and 25 fathers (unrelated to one another) on their infants, aged 4–16 weeks. We registered infant electrocardiogram (ECG) and respiration to calculate infant RR-interval (RRI), respiration rate (fR) and (respiratory corrected) RSA (RSAcorr). Based on video-recordings, we analyzed the stroking speed. Infants’ RSAcorr significantly increased during and after stroking, no matter whether touch was delivered by fathers or mothers. This effect was mediated by both heart rate (HR) and respiration. However, respiratory mediation occurred later when delivered by fathers than by mothers. Both mothers’ and fathers’ stroking speed occurred within the optimal stimulation range of c-tactile (CT) afferents, a particular class of cutaneous unmyelinated, low-threshold mechano-sensitive nerves hypothesized to be involved in inter-personal bonding. The discussion builds on the idea to mitigate fathers’ doubts about their paternal capabilities and proposes a research agenda regarding the further examination of the role of nurturing touch and its underlying mechanisms within the development of infants’ physiological self-regulation. Finally, the importance of respiratory measurements in infant physiological research is emphasized.
Software Testing Practices in IT Industry of Pakistan

A software must do what it intends to do. The quality is core factor in IT Industry and in software products. The quality of the product is main concern of the producer and the main requirement of a customer. Software testing is the core activity of quality assurance and very important phase of software development life cycle. Quality of any system is known by testing that product. With the advancement of IT industry many new verification and validation technique are introduced over a time. New trends are well adopted in developed countries like USA, UK etc. But not as well in IT of developing countries like Pakistan. The need of this paper is due to a large number of outsourced projects and also multinational IT companies in Pakistan. Due to high demand of outsourced projects the software testing become an integral part of IT Industry of Pakistan. Our team has collected data about testing in IT Industry of Pakistan which will be benefit for the testers in IT Industry not just in Pakistan but worldwide. These results could be use by researchers to identify the strengths and weakness of testing in IT industry.
Analysis of model parallelism for distributed neural networks

We analyze the performance of model parallelism applied to the training of deep neural networks on clusters. For this study, we elaborate a parameterized analytical performance model that captures the main computational and communication stages in distributed model parallel training. This model is then leveraged to assess the impact on the performance of four representative convolutional neural networks (CNNs) when varying the node throughput in terms of operations per second and memory bandwidth, the number of nodes of the cluster, the bandwidth of the network links, and algorithmic parameters such as the dimension of the batch. As a second contribution of this paper, we discuss the need for specialized collective communication variants of the MPI_Allgather and MPI_Allreduce primitives where the number of "contributing" processes differs from the number of processes receiving a copy/part of the result during training. Furthermore, we analyze the effect that the actual implementation of the algorithms underlying the collective communication primitives exert on the performance of the distributed model parallel realization of the selected CNNs.
Persistent coarrays: integrating MPI storage windows in coarray fortran

The inherent integration of novel hardware and software components on HPC is expected to considerably aggravate the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) on scientific applications, while simultaneously increase the programming complexity of these clusters. In this work, we present the initial steps towards the integration of transparent resilience support inside Coarray Fortran. In particular, we propose persistent coarrays, an extension of OpenCoarrays that integrates MPI storage windows to leverage its transport layer and seamlessly map coarrays to files on storage. Preliminary results indicate that our approach provides clear benefits on representative workloads, while incurring in minimal source code changes.
The study about using VR with smart phones for road safety awareness and timing

This paper explores the road safety awareness for pedestrian in developing country especially for young adults when crossing a road in Malaysia. A Virtual Reality (VR) mobile game was designed and developed to train pedestrian on the correct and safe methods of crossing a road. The two primary aims of the game are to create the awareness of road safety and to improve the timing estimation of young pedestrian when crossing a road. This VR mobile game serves as a supplementary learning tool on road safety instead of replacing existing methods. Through our preliminary testing, we have found out that with the use of four scenarios in the Road Safe VR game, players are more immersed and familiar with the correct methods for crossing roads.
Water Flow Measurement for Swimmers using Artificial Food-grade Roe as Tracer Particles

Water flow is strongly related to swimming speed; thus, technologies for measuring the three-dimensional movement of water are highly desired in the water sports industry. However, existing fluid measurement methods are not suitable for use with humans because they introduce tiny plastic particles (known as tracer particles) that contain fluorescent ink, which is used to visualize water flow. A laser then irradiates the environment to make the particles brighter than the surroundings to track their movement with cameras. This method has potential adverse effects to humans, such as accidental swallowing of the particles and laser burns to the skin and eyes. In this research, we propose a human-friendly water flow measuring technology using tracer particles made of food-grade materials and a harmless light source. To visualize tracer particles, we give the particles an optical property, which makes them sufficiently brighter than the surroundings when placed between circularly polarized plates. We tested the proposed setup for water flow measurement in an actual swimming environment with swimmers. We observed that tracer particles moved in accordance with the water flow caused by a swimming stroke.
The Students' Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations to Engage with Digital Learning Games

A relevant literature review suggests that today's children are increasingly immersing themselves in ubiquitous technologies, including interactive media and digital games. Therefore, this research uses valid measures to investigate the primary school students' motivations toward playing educational games, at home and at school. The study was carried out amongst year-3 students in a small European state. The findings reported that there were strong correlations between the students' perceived usefulness of the educational games and their behavioral intention to use them for their learning. The results also indicated that there was no significant relationship between the perceived ease of gameplay and the children's enjoyment in engaging with the school's digital games. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other study in academia that has explored the children's technology acceptance, normative pressures and their intrinsic motivations to use digital learning games in the context of primary education. Therefore, this contribution opens future research avenues, as this study can be replicated in other contexts.
UNIFORM APPROXIMATION OF BAYES SOLUTIONS AND POSTERIORS: FREQUENTISTLY VALID BAYES INFERENCE

1 Research supported in p u t by the NSF Grant DMS 89-230-71. This work is a part of the Ph.D. dissertation of the first author at Purdue University. AMS 1991 Classifications: Primary 62F15, 62F10; Secondary 62F25.
Alpha Radioactivity

Ever since its discovery by Becquerel almost exactly 100 years ago, which was also the very first observation of a nuclear decay mode, α-decay has always been and is still being used as a probe for investigating nuclear structure. The attractive feature of α-decays is that the experimental observables such as decay energy or decay-width directly relate to nuclear structure parameters such as binding energy or spectroscopic (or hindrance) factor. Moreover, α-particles can be detected rather easily under favourable conditions, i.e. high efficiency, low background and good energy resolution. The resulting nuclear structure data concern: ground state decay energies and mass excess values; energies of isomeric and other excited levels; assignment of spin and of other nuclear structure properties to parent and daughter states; isotopic assignment based on parent-daughter relations, α X-ray coincidences or ß-value systematics.
Human Immune Responses and the Natural History of Neisseria gonorrhoeae Infection

The intimate relationship between humans and Neisseria gonorrhoeae infections span centuries, which is evidenced in case reports from studies dating back to the late 1700s and historical references that predate medical literature. N. gonorrhoeae is an exclusive human pathogen that infects the genital tract of both men and women as well as other mucosal surfaces including the oropharynx and rectum. In symptomatic infections, N. gonorrhoeae induces a robust inflammatory response at the site of infection. However, infections can also present asymptomatically complicating efforts to reduce transmission. N. gonorrhoeae infections have been effectively treated with antibiotics since their use was introduced in humans. Despite the existence of effective antibiotic treatments, N. gonorrhoeae remains one of the most common sexually transmitted pathogens and antibiotic resistant strains have arisen that limit treatment options. Development of a vaccine to prevent infection is considered a critical element of controlling this pathogen. The efforts to generate an effective gonococcal vaccine is limited by our poor understanding of the natural immunologic responses to infection. It is largely accepted that natural protective immunity to N. gonorrhoeae infections in humans does not occur or is very rare. Previous studies of the natural history of infection as well as some of the humoral and cellular immune responses to infection offer a window into the issues surrounding N. gonorrhoeae vaccine development. In this review, we summarize the current body of knowledge pertaining to human immune responses to gonococcal infections and the role of these responses in mediating protection from N. gonorrhoeae.
Closing the yield gap: can metabolomics be of help?

This article comments on: Melandri G, AbdElgawad H, Riewe D, Hageman JA, Asard H, Beemster GTS, Kadam N, Jagadish K, Altmann T, Ruyter-Spira1 C, Bouwmeester H. 2019. Biomarkers for grain yield stability in rice under drought stress. Journal of Experimental Botany 71, 669–683.
Characterisation of immunogenotypes of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

INTRODUCTION Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common aggressive type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma with variable clinical outcomes. The immunogenotypic features of this heterogeneous disease in Malaysia were not well characterized. MATERIALS & METHODS In total 141 local series of DLBCL cases from UKM Medical Centre were retrospectively studied. RESULTS Of these cases, we classified our patients into two subtypes: 32.7% (37/113) GCB and non-GCB 67.3% (76/113) by Hans algorithm and the results showed strong agreement with the results by Choi algorithm (κ = 0.828, P<0.001). Survival analysis indicated significant difference in between GCB and non-GCB subtypes (P=0.01), elevated serum LDH (P=0.016), age more than 60-year-old (P=0.021) and the presence of B symptoms (P=0.04). We observed 12% DLBCL cases were CD5 positive and 81.8% of them died of the disease (P=0.076). Analysis on the dual expression of MYC/BCL2 revealed that there is no significant difference in DE and non-DE groups (P=0.916). FISH study reported there were 9.22% (13/141) rearranged cases observed in our population at which highest frequency of BCL6 gene rearrangement (76.9%), followed by MYC (15.4%) and BCL2 (7.7%); no BCL10 and MALT-1 gene rearrangement found regardless of using TMAs or whole tissue samples. More cases of MYC protein overexpression observed compared to MYC translocation. CONCLUSION Relatively lower frequency of GCB tumours and low gene rearrangement rates were observed in Malaysian population. A national study is therefore warranted to know better the immunogenotypic characteristics of DLBCL in Malaysia and their implications on the survival.
Post-transcriptional negative feedback regulation of proteostasis through the Dis3 ribonuclease and its disruption by polyQ-expanded Huntingtin

Abstract When proteostasis is disrupted by stresses such as heat shock, the heat stress response will be stimulated, leading to up-regulation of molecular chaperones by transcriptional activation and mRNA stabilization for restoring proteostasis. Although the mechanisms for their transcriptional activation have been clearly defined, how chaperone mRNAs are stabilized remains largely unknown. Starting by exploring the coupling between the apparently unrelated RNA degradation and protein quality control (PQC) systems, we show that the Dis3 ribonuclease, catalytic subunit of the RNA exosome required for RNA degradation, suppresses PQC activity in unstressed cells by degrading mRNAs encoding the Hsp70 cofactors Sis1, Ydj1 and Fes1, as well as some other chaperones or PQC factors, thereby limiting their protein expression. Dis3 is stabilized through its binding to Sis1 and the Hsp70s Ssa1/2. Upon heat stress, loss of Sis1 and Ssa1/2 availability triggers Dis3 ubiquitination and degradation, leading to stabilization of those chaperone mRNAs originally targeted by Dis3. We further demonstrate that polyQ-expanded huntingtin delays Dis3 degradation during heat stress and thus hinders chaperone mRNA stabilization. Our findings not only reveal a post-transcriptional negative feedback loop for maintaining proteostasis, but also uncover a mechanism that contributes to the impaired heat stress response in Huntington's disease.
Classification of Decompensated Heart Failure From Clinical and Home Ballistocardiography

Objective: To improve home monitoring of heart failure patients so as to reduce emergency room visits and hospital readmissions. We aim to do this by analyzing the ballistocardiogram (BCG) to evaluate the clinical state of the patient. Methods: 1) High quality BCG signals were collected at home from HF patients after discharge. 2) The BCG recordings were preprocessed to exclude outliers and artifacts. 3) Parameters of the BCG that contain information about the cardiovascular system were extracted. These features were used for the task of classification of the BCG recording based on the status of HF. Results: The best AUC score for the task of classification obtained was 0.78 using slight variant of the leave one subject out validation method. Conclusion: This work demonstrates that high quality BCG signals can be collected in a home environment and used to detect the clinical state of HF patients. Significance: In future work, a clinician/caregiver can be introduced into the system so that appropriate interventions can be performed based on the clinical state monitored at home.
Short Communication Enhanced and Persistent Inhibition of Organic Cation Transporter 1 Activity by Preincubation of Cyclosporine A

Recent pharmacogenetic evidence indicates that hepatic organic cation transporter (OCT) 1 can serve as the locus of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) with significant pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic consequences. We examined the impact of preincubation on the extent of OCT1 inhibition in transfected human embryonic kidney 293 (HEK293) cells. Following 30-minute preincubation with an inhibitor, approximately 50-fold higher inhibition potency was observed for cyclosporine A (CsA) against OCT1-mediated uptake of metformin compared with coincubation, with IC 50 values of 0.43 6 0.12 and 21.6 6 4.5 m M, respectively. By comparison, only small shifts ( £ 2-fold) in preincubation IC 50 versus coincubation were observed for quinidine, pyrimethamine, ritonavir, and trimethoprim. The shift in CsA OCT1 IC 50 was substrate dependent since it ranged from > 1.2- to 50.2-fold using different experimental substrates. The inhibition potential of CsA toward OCT1 was confirmed by fenoterol hepatocyte uptake experiment. Furthermore, no shift in CsA IC 50 was observed with HEK293 cells transfected with OCT2 and organic anion transporter (OAT) 1 and OAT3. Short exposure (30 minutes) to 10 m M CsA produced long-lasting inhibition (at least 120 minutes) of the OCT1-mediated uptake of metformin in OCT1-HEK293 cells, which was likely attributable to the retention of CsA
Should GPs have direct access to imaging for headache? A qualitative study of patients’ views in the UK

Objective We aimed to describe patients’ views of a new referral pathway of general practitioner (GP) direct access to MRI, versus imaging after referral to a specialist. Design This qualitative study involved 20 semistructured interviews. Twenty patients (10 from each pathway) were purposively recruited and interviewed to describe their attitudes. Setting A neurology headache clinic and neuroradiology services from the boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth in South London, UK. Participants Twenty patients were involved in this study. Results Over half of the participants felt relieved once they received their scan results, while some remained uncertain about the underlying cause of their symptoms. Some participants described a long wait to see a specialist. Others described a long wait time to receive scan results, especially from their GP. Spontaneous reduction in headache symptoms occurred for some participants and for others, normal imaging results allowed them to focus more on symptom management. Conclusion Relief was reported especially when scan results had been explained clearly and without too much delay. Those with continuing pain focused on how to get relief from symptoms. Patient experience might be improved with clearer information from GPs about how patients can access results, standard reporting procedures and closer liaison between neuroradiology and GPs.
Functional Characterization of an Interferon Gamma Receptor-Like Protein on Entamoeba histolytica

Entamoeba histolytica is an anaerobic parasitic protozoan and the causative agent of amoebiasis. E. histolytica expresses proteins that are structurally homologous to human proteins and uses them as virulence factors. We have previously shown that E. histolytica binds exogenous interferon gamma (IFN-γ) on its surface, and in this study, we explored whether exogenous IFN-γ could modulate parasite virulence. ABSTRACT Entamoeba histolytica is an anaerobic parasitic protozoan and the causative agent of amoebiasis. E. histolytica expresses proteins that are structurally homologous to human proteins and uses them as virulence factors. We have previously shown that E. histolytica binds exogenous interferon gamma (IFN-γ) on its surface, and in this study, we explored whether exogenous IFN-γ could modulate parasite virulence. We identified an IFN-γ receptor-like protein on the surface of E. histolytica trophozoites by using anti-IFN-γ receptor 1 (IFN-γR1) antibody and performing immunofluorescence, Western blot, protein sequencing, and in silico analyses. Coupling of human IFN-γ to the IFN-γ receptor-like protein on live E. histolytica trophozoites significantly upregulated the expression of E. histolytica cysteine protease A1 (EhCP-A1), EhCP-A2, EhCP-A4, EhCP-A5, amebapore A (APA), cyclooxygenase 1 (Cox-1), Gal-lectin (Hgl), and peroxiredoxin (Prx) in a time-dependent fashion. IFN-γ signaling via the IFN-γ receptor-like protein enhanced E. histolytica’s erythrophagocytosis of human red blood cells, which was abrogated by the STAT1 inhibitor fludarabine. Exogenous IFN-γ enhanced chemotaxis of E. histolytica, its killing of Caco-2 colonic and Hep G2 liver cells, and amebic liver abscess formation in hamsters. These results demonstrate that E. histolytica expresses a surface IFN-γ receptor-like protein that is functional and may play a role in disease pathogenesis and/or immune evasion.
Childhood obesity intervention studies: A narrative review and guide for investigators, authors, editors, reviewers, journalists, and readers to guard against exaggerated effectiveness claims

Being able to draw accurate conclusions from childhood obesity trials is important to make advances in reversing the obesity epidemic. However, obesity research sometimes is not conducted or reported to appropriate scientific standards. To constructively draw attention to this issue, we present 10 errors that are commonly committed, illustrate each error with examples from the childhood obesity literature, and follow with suggestions on how to avoid these errors. These errors are as follows: using self‐reported outcomes and teaching to the test; foregoing control groups and risking regression to the mean creating differences over time; changing the goal posts; ignoring clustering in studies that randomize groups of children; following the forking paths, subsetting, p‐hacking, and data dredging; basing conclusions on tests for significant differences from baseline; equating “no statistically significant difference” with “equally effective”; ignoring intervention study results in favor of observational analyses; using one‐sided testing for statistical significance; and stating that effects are clinically significant even though they are not statistically significant. We hope that compiling these errors in one article will serve as the beginning of a checklist to support fidelity in conducting, analyzing, and reporting childhood obesity research.