Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of statins on high-risk atherosclerotic plaque associated with low endothelial shear stress

Purpose of review Low endothelial shear stress (ESS) plays an important role in the progression and severity of atherosclerotic lesions. As 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) appear to stabilize plaque, it would be valuable to understand how statins affect the nature of lesions in the proatherogenic and proinflammatory environment of low ESS and the effect of statins on that atherosclerotic process. The purpose of this review is to summarize the relationship among low ESS, high-risk plaque and statins. Recent findings Low ESS is a critically important determinant of plaque development and progression to high-risk plaques with large necrotic lipid core, intensive inflammation and thin fibrous cap. In addition to the proatherogenic phenotypic switching in areas of low ESS, local LDL cholesterol concentrations are also increased in areas of low ESS, which exacerbates the local atherogenic process. In experimental models, statins appear to reduce the inflammation in lesions associated with low ESS and reduce the atherosclerotic phenotype even in these high-risk prone vascular areas. Summary The relationship between low ESS and statins has not been fully investigated, but the available data underscore the vasculoprotective effect of statins. Understanding the mechanisms whereby statins reduce the atherogenic and inflammatory phenotype resulting from a low ESS environment would provide new insights to design strategies to prevent regional formation of high-risk, inflamed plaques likely to rupture and cause an adverse clinical event.
A new method for treatment of brucellosis.

In the continued search for more effective methods for the treatment of brucellosis, we have had occasion to use a new method which has yielded exceedingly gratifying results. In the past sulfonamides have been found to exert a mild suppressive effect on the course of this infection but have been in no way curative. Likewise, streptomycin was found to have some degree of activity against Brucella. Combinations of chemotherapeutic and antibiotic agents, namely, the combination of sulfadiazine and streptomycin, were found by Pulaski and Amspacher 1 and also by Eisele and McCullough, 2 as well as other investigators, to be considerably more effective than either agent alone. However, therapeutic failures at times occurred when this method was used. In addition, the well established toxic effects of streptomycin and sulfadiazine made this method in some respects undesirable. The introduction of chloramphenicol (chloromycetin®) and aureomycin was followed by some reports to
Significance of Increasing n-3 PUFA Content in Pork on Human Health

Evidence for the health-promoting effects of food rich in n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA) is reviewed. Pork is an important meat source for humans. According to a report by the US Department of Agriculture (http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics), the pork consumption worldwide in 2011 was about 79.3 million tons, much higher than that of beef (48.2 million tons). Pork also contains high levels of unsaturated fatty acids relative to ruminant meats (Enser, M., Hallett, K., Hewett, B., Fursey, G. A. J. and Wood, J. D. (1996). Fatty acid content and composition of English beef, lamb, and pork at retail. Meat Sci. 44:443–458). The available literature indicates that the levels of eicosatetraenoic and docosahexaenoic in pork may be increased by fish-derived or linseed products, the extent of which being dependent on the nature of the supplementation. Transgenic pigs and plants show promise with high content of n-3 PUFA and low ratio of n-6/n-3 fatty acids in their tissues. The approaches mentioned for decreasing n-6/n-3 ratios have both advantages and disadvantages. Selected articles are critically reviewed and summarized.
The population dynamics of antimicrobial chemotherapy

We present and analyze a series of mathematical models for the emergence of resistance during antibiotic treatment of an infected host. The models consider the population dynamics of antibiotic-sensitive and -resistant bacteria during the course of treatment and addresses the following problems: (i) the probability of obtaining a resistant mutant during the course of treatment as a function of antibiotic exposure; (ii) the conditions under which high, infrequent doses of an antibiotic are predicted to succeed in preventing the emergence of resistance; (iii) the conditions for the success of multiple drug treatment in suppressing the emergence of resistance and the relationship between antibiotic synergism and suppression of resistance; and (iv) the conditions under which nonadherence to the prescribed treatment regimen is predicted to result in treatment failure due to resistance. We analyze the predictions of the model for interpreting and extrapolating existing experimental studies of treatment efficacy and for optimizing treatment protocols to prevent the emergence of resistance.
Hepatitis B Vaccines; Efficacy and Necessity ofBooster Immunizations

Most hepatitis B (HB) vaccines are based on recombinant major S protein produced and purified from yeast. To decrease the number of vaccinations, several combination vaccines have been developed, and are commonly used for infant [1-3]. These include HB combined with diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, and inactivated poliovirus vaccine (DTaP–IPV–HB vaccine); combined hepatitis A and HB vaccine; and combined HB-Hemophilus influenza type b (Hib)-conjugated vaccine. HB vaccine is recommended for all infants, all children aged < 19 years who were not previously vaccinated, hemodialysis patients, susceptible sexual partners of HB surface antigen (HBsAg)positive individuals, healthcare professionals, patients with HIV, men who have sex with men, and intravenous drug users. In 2013, HB vaccination was recommended for all healthcare professionals [4].
Effect of facial colors on humanoids in emotion recognition using speech

The purpose of This work is to measure the effect of facial colors on a humanoid robot in emotion recognition. Several people were asked to evaluate the effect on emotion of the robot by ignoring or including facial colors together with natural speech or machine generated speech. A multimodal expression system used for the evaluation consisted of two subsystems-a facial expression subsystem having the ability of expressing three facial colors based on color psychology, that is, yellow (expressing joy), red (anger) and blue (sadness), and a speech mimicking subsystem that resynthesizes emotional speech made by a human based on prosody extraction of pitch, loudness and tempo. Our experiments show that the emotion recognition rate increases by 25% and the certainty of recognition improves when using these facial colors.
Wikification and Beyond: The Challenges of Entity and Concept Grounding

Contextual disambiguation and grounding of concepts and entities in natural language are essential to progress in many natural language understanding tasks and fundamental to many applications. Wikification aims at automatically identifying concept mentions in text and linking them to referents in a knowledge base (KB) (e.g., Wikipedia). Consider the sentence, "The Times report on Blumenthal (D) has the potential to fundamentally reshape the contest in the Nutmeg State. ". A Wikifier should identify the key entities and concepts and map them to an encyclopedic resource (e.g., “D” refers to Democratic Party, and “the Nutmeg State” refers to Connecticut. Wikification benefits end-users and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. Readers can better comprehend Wikified documents as information about related topics is readily accessible. For systems, a Wikified document elucidates concepts and entities by grounding them in an encyclopedic resource or an ontology. Wikification output has improved NLP down-stream tasks, including coreference resolution, user interest discovery , recommendation and search. This task has received increased attention in recent years from the NLP and Data Mining communities, partly fostered by the U.S. NIST Text Analysis Conference Knowledge Base Population (KBP) track, and several versions of it has been studied. These include Wikifying all concept mentions in a single text document; Wikifying a cluster of co-referential named entity mentions that appear across documents (Entity Linking), and Wikifying a whole document to a single concept. Other works relate this task to coreference resolution within and across documents and in the context of multiple text genres. 2 Content Overview
Different Mid-Term Prognostic Predictors of Major Adverse Events in Diabetic and Nondiabetic Peripheral Artery Disease Presenting With Critical Limb Ischemia

We compared midterm prognostic predictors of peripheral artery disease (PAD) with or without diabetes mellitus (DM) presenting with critical lower limb ischemia (CLI). A total of 172 patients with PAD (109 DM; 63 non-DM) were enrolled. The major adverse events (MAEs) were death or amputation. The diabetic group had a higher MAE rate (39% vs 22%, P = .042) with a mean follow-up duration of 30 ± 19 months. In a multivariate binary logistic regression analysis, revascularization (odds ratio = 0.289, P = .006) and higher serum cholesterol (odds ratio=0.988, P = .027) predicted a lower MAE rate in the DM group. In contrast, the presence of severe chronic kidney disease (stage 4 or 5, odds ratio = 5.238, P = .025) was a positive predictor of MAEs in the nondiabetic group. In conclusion, the prognostic predictors of MAE in diabetic and nondiabetic patients with PAD and CLI were different.
A Good Son Is Sad if He Hears the Name of His Father: The Tabooing of Names in China as a Way of Implementing Social Values

This dissertation deals with the tabooing of names in China, or bihui 避諱. The names of sovereigns, ancestors, officials, teachers, etc. were taboo, meaning that it was prohibited to pronounce or record them. This custom had an enormous impact on Chinese culture and serious consequences for the daily lives of many Chinese, as well as for Chinese historiography.
Self-Expressiveness as Consumers' Motivation to Share Online Video Advertisements in Jakarta

This study is a replication study of Self-Enhancement as a Motivation for Sharing Online Advertising by David G. Taylor, David Strutton, and Kenneth Thompson 2012. This study involves two different types of advertisement; one for low involvement product mineral water and one of high involvement product mobile phone service provider. The result of this study shows that product category involvement increases consumer self-expressiveness. The regression output provides indication that there is a direct positive linear relationship between product category involvement and self-expressiveness. The findings of this study would be beneficial for managers in advertising industry especially in online advertising industry. It provides the marketing manager with helpful information to formulate online advertisement that aims to go viral by maximizing the use of digital media. It helps the marketer to better understand the consumer motives behind their decision to share advertisement. This could be useful in designing the appropriate promotion strategy.
Enhancement of osteopontin expression in HepG2 cells by epidermal growth factor via phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase signaling pathway.

AIM Osteopontin (OPN) is a phosphorylated glycoprotein with diverse functions including cancer development, progression and metastasis. It is unclear how osteopontin is regulated in HepG2 cells. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of epidermal growth factor on the expression of osteopontin in HepG2 cells, and to explore the signal transduction pathway mediated this expression. METHODS Osteopontin expression was detected by RNAase protection assay and Western blot. Wortmannin, a specific inhibitor of PI3K, was used to see if PI3K signal transduction was involved in the induction of osteopontin gene expression. RESULTS HepG2 cells constitutively expressed low levels of osteopontin. Treatment with epidermal growth factor increased osteopontin mRNA and protein level in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Application of wortmannin caused a dramatic reduction of epidermal growth factor-induced osteopontin expression. CONCLUSION Osteopontin gene expression can be induced by treatment of HepG2 cells with epidermal growth factor. Epidermal growth factor may regulate osteopontin gene expression through PI3K signaling pathway. Several potential targets in the pathway can be manipulated to block the synthesis of osteopontin and inhibit liver cancer metastasis.
Reconhecimento de gestos manuais em tempo real utilizando dados de eletromiografia de superfície

The control of prostheses, orthoses and other mechanisms based on the electrical response of a specific region’s musculature represents the integrations between user and application. This work presents the results of three promising techniques for feature extraction, and its implementation as well, with the intention of identifying different gestures performed by the right hand based on surface electromyography signals from de forearm’s musculature. Those techniques analyze the data from two points of view: statistical analysis and autoregressive modeling. The statistical analysis utilizes the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract covariance information from the data and so classify according to the proposed positions. The autoregressive modeling utilized the Minimum Square Estimator in two approaches: batch processing (EMQ) and recursive processing (EMQR). The results found at simulation stage shows that modeling as an autoregressive process, in both approaches, has better performance than the statistical analysis. Also will be presented the results of the final implementation of the hardware using EMQ and EMQR wherein the technique with batch processing has approximately 95% of success rate. This work presents data extracted from the final implementation using a low-cost electromyography signal processing alternative, diverging from the works known in the literature which usually does the data collecting using commercial equipment and the results are found offline
Sex differences in the effect of HbA1c-deﬁned diabetes on a wide range of cardiovascular disease risk factors

Abstract Objective Sex differences in the association of HbA1c and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk remain controversial. We examined CVD risk profile in both HbA1c-defined diabetic and nondiabetic men and women. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of 7139 Chinese adults using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey 2009. Results HbA1c-defined nondiabetic men have a more favorable CVD risk profile than female counterparts. However, HbA1c-defined diabetic men have higher levels of triglyceride, low-density lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol, and triglyceride/high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol and lower levels of HDL-cholesterol, be more visceral obese as indicated by visceral adiposity index (VAI) and lipid accumulation product (LAP), and more insulin resistant as assessed by the triglycerides and glucose index (TyG) than HbA1c-defined diabetic women. Furthermore, HbA1c-defined diabetic men showed greater relative differences in ferritin than diabetic women when compared with their nondiabetic counterparts. Statistically signiﬁcant sex by HbA1c-defined diabetes status interactions were observed for triglyceride, LDL-cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, triglyceride/HDL cholesterol, VAI, LAP, TyG, and ferritin (all ps < 0.05). Consideration of VAI or homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance or both failed to eliminate the sex differences in the associations between diabetes and these CVD risk factors. Conclusions Men who progressed from HbA1c-defined nondiabetes to HbA1c-defined diabetes have greater metabolic deteriorations and put on more visceral adiposity than women. Key messages HbA1c-defined nondiabetic men have a more favorable CVD risk profile than female counterparts. Men have to undergo a greater metabolic deterioration to develop HbA1c-defined diabetes than do women. Men have to put on more visceral adiposity to develop HbA1c-defined diabetes than do women.
Strain Typing and Determination of Population Structure of Candida krusei by Multilocus Sequence Typing

ABSTRACT A multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme for Candida krusei was devised, based on sequencing of six gene fragments of the species. The existence of heterozygous results for each of the six fragments sequenced confirms that C. krusei is diploid for at least part of its genome. The C. krusei MLST scheme had a discriminatory index of 0.998, making this system ideal for strain typing of C. krusei clinical isolates. MLST data for 122 independent C. krusei isolates from a range of geographical sources were analyzed by eBURST, structure, and the unweighted-pair group method using average linkages to derive a population structure comprising four subtype strain clusters. There was no evidence of geographical associations with particular subtypes. Data for pairs of isolates from seven patients showed that each patient was colonized and/or infected with strain types that were indistinguishable by MLST. The C. krusei MLST database can be accessed online at http://pubmlst.org/ckrusei/ .
A Tale of Two “Cultures”: HIV Risk Narratives in South Africa

There has been a tendency for many researchers and health professionals examining HIV transmission in South Africa to focus on explanations that specifically implicate culture as a primary vector affecting the prevalence of high-risk sexual behavior, such as multiple partners, unprotected sex, and dry sex. In contrast, the residents of Orange Farm, a former informal settlement south of Soweto, portray culture as seldom, if ever, motivating actions that are associated with HIV transmission or prevention in the community. Comparing and contrasting these differing conceptions, we comment critically on the use of ideas regarding culture in explanations addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
Green Cloud Computing Architecture with Efficient Resource Allocation System

Cloud computing provides utility-oriented IT services to millions of users throughout the world. It offers a very handy, pay-as-you-go model,that enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers which provides services to customers and host the Cloud applications consume huge amounts of electrical energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon emissions to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that is environment friendly and allows sustainable development. It can not only minimize operational costs but also reduce the environmental impact. In this paper, we define an architectural framework and principles for energy-efficient Green Cloud computing. Based on this architecture, we present our vision, open research challenges, and resource provisioning and task allocation for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. The proposed energy-aware green cloud computing architecture provides data center resources to client applications in a way that improves energy efficiency of the data center, while delivering the negotiated Quality of Service (QoS). In particular, in this paper we conduct a survey of research in energy-efficient computing and propose: (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and QoS expectations and power usage characteristics of the devices which can bring significant benefits to both resource providers and consumers. Keywords—Cloud; Cloud Computing ; Carbon Emission; Green Cloud Computing; Resource Allocation.
Herpes Zoster Vaccination: Controversies and Common Clinical Questions

Herpes zoster, clinically referred to as shingles, is an acute, cutaneous viral infection caused by reactivation of the varicella zoster virus, the same virus that causes chickenpox. The incidence of herpes zoster and its complications increase with decline in cell-mediated immunity, including age-associated decline. The most effective management strategy for herpes zoster is prevention of the disease through vaccination in those who are most vulnerable. Despite the demonstrated efficacy in reducing the incidence and severity of herpes zoster, the uptake of vaccine remains low. Here, we will discuss the controversies that surround the live herpes zoster vaccine and address the common clinical questions that arise. We will also discuss the new adjuvanted herpes zoster vaccine currently under investigation.
Retrieval‐induced forgetting in eyewitness memory: forgetting as a consequence of remembering

SUMMARY Recent psychological research on memory has demonstrated that the act of remembering can also prompt forgetting, or more specifically, the inhibition of particular items in memory (i.e. retrievalinduced forgetting). Extending this line of inquiry, this article reports the findings from two studies designed to establish whether retrieval-induced forgetting can occur for meaningful stimuli that could be experienced under eyewitness situations. In Study 1, participants were asked to recall previously presented household items that had ostensibly been stolen in burglaries, while in Study 2, participants were asked to recall descriptive details about two individuals suspected of making bogus money collections. Both studies provided unequivocal evidence that retrieval-induced forgetting can occur for such meaningful stimuli. Importantly, in each case it was demonstrated that the observed effects could not be attributed to output interference. This article considers the likely extent of the problem posed by retrieval-induced forgetting for eyewitness reliability and some of the practical and theoretical implications of this work. Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An Efficient Modified Apriori Algorithm for Mining Association Rules for Large Itemsets in Large Centralized Databases

The proposed algorithm is derived from the conventional Apriori approach with features added to improve data mining performance. These features are embedded in the encoding and decoding mechanisms. It has been confirmed by the experiment results that these features can indeed support effective and efficient mining of association rules in large centralized databases. The goal of the encoding mechanism is to reduce the I/O time for finding large itemsets, and to economize memory usage in a predictable manner. The decoding mechanism contributes to speed up the process of identifying different items in a transaction. The performance of three different decoding methods will be compared to demonstrate the potential gain delivered by any ingeniously devised decoding approach.
Biomechanical Aspects of Diabetic Foot Disease: Aetiology, Treatment, and Prevention

It has long been known that mechanical factors play a critical role in the aetiology of neuropathic foot ulcers. Many of the principles which have provided an understanding of the aetiology, treatment, and prevention of diabetic foot problems were established over 30 years ago by Dr Paul Brand. He developed his approach while treating plantar wounds in patients with Hansen's Disease, and he was the first to realize that these wounds were caused by mechanical stress unrecognized by the patient because of nerve damage. He was also the first to recognize that the 'diabetic' foot ulcer had the same aetiology. In the last 30 years, we have come to understand that biomechanical factors play an even greater role in almost all phases of diabetic foot disease than was at first thought. There is also a growing awareness that recent developments in instrumentation and methodology have provided the means by which empirical approaches to treatment can be placed on the kind of quantitative foundation that Brand and coworkers anticipated. In this paper we review the role of biomechanics in the aetiology, treatment, and prev.ention of foot problems in diabetes.