Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in Therapist Actions During a Novel Pediatric Physical Therapy Program: Successes and Challenges

Purpose: To monitor changes in time spent on pediatric physical therapy actions during a COPing With and CAring for Infants With Special Needs (COPCA) course. Methods: Data were collected before (T0), during, and after (T3) the course, which was attended by 15 Swiss physical therapists. Four treatment sessions of each therapist were video recorded and analyzed with the Groningen Observation Protocol 2.0, allowing for quantification of relative duration of therapeutic actions. Results: Between T0 and T3, time spent on caregiver coaching and hands-off approaches significantly increased. Conclusions: The shift from caregiver trainer to family coach and the increasing hands-off techniques represent successful changes in various domains of behavior. The moderate changes in hands-off approaches suggest that changing habits requires specific attention. The COPCA course will be adapted accordingly.
An Efficient ID-based Online/Offline Signature Scheme without Key Escrow

Recently, several identity-based signature schemes with Bilinear Pairing and Map-To-Point (MTP) functions have been introduced. However, identity-based cryptography (IBC) schemes suﬀer from the serious secure problem due to Key Escrow. In addition, both Bilinear Pairing and MTP function are time-consuming operations, and thus the cryptographic schemes based on these expensive operations have high computational burden. In this paper, we proposed an eﬃcient identity-based online/oﬄine signature scheme without using Bilinear Pairing and MTP function. Especially, the proposed scheme overcomes the key escrow problem, and achieves some good features. Furthermore, the securities of the proposed scheme were proven in the random oracle model with the hardness of elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP).
Photobiomodulation prevents DNA fragmentation of alveolar epithelial cells and alters the mRNA levels of caspase 3 and Bcl-2 genes in acute lung injury

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and acute lung injury (ALI) are defined as pulmonary inflammation that could occur from sepsis and lead to pulmonary permeability and alveolar edema making them life-threatening diseases. Photobiomodulation (PBM) properties have been widely described in the literature in several inflammatory diseases; although the mechanisms of action are not always clear, this could be a possible treatment for ARDS/ALI. Thus, the aim of this study was to evaluate the mRNA levels from caspase-3 and BCL-2 genes and DNA fragmentation in lung tissue from Wistar rats affected by ALI and subjected to photobiomodulation by exposure to a low power infrared laser (808 nm; 100 mW; 3.571 W cm^−2; four points per lung). Adult male Wistar rats were randomized into 6 groups ( n = 5, for each group): control, PBM10 (10 J cm^−2, 2 J and 2 seconds), PBM20 (20 J cm^−2, 5 J and 5 seconds), ALI, ALI + PBM10 and ALI + PBM20. ALI was induced by intraperitoneal Escherichia coli lipopolysaccharide injection. Lung samples were collected and divided for mRNA expression of caspase-3 and Bcl-2 and DNA fragmentation quantifications. Data show that caspase-3 mRNA levels are reduced and Bcl-2 mRNA levels increased in ALI after low power infrared laser exposure when compared to the non-exposed ALI group. DNA fragmentation increased in inflammatory infiltrate cells and reduced in alveolar cells. Our research shows that photobiomodulation can alter relative mRNA levels in genes involved in the apoptotic process and DNA fragmentation in inflammatory and alveolar cells after lipopolysaccharide-induced acute lung injury. Also, inflammatory cell apoptosis is part of the photobiomodulation effects induced by exposure to a low power infrared laser.
OMV-based vaccine formulations against Shiga toxin producing Escherichia coli strains are both protective in mice and immunogenic in calves

ABSTRACT Strains of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) can cause the severe Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS). Shiga toxins are protein toxins that bind and kill microvascular cells, damaging vital organs. No specific therapeutics or vaccines have been licensed for use in humans yet. The most common route of infection is by consumption of dairy or farm products contaminated with STEC. Domestic cattle colonized by STEC strains represent the main reservoir, and thus a source of contamination. Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMV) obtained after detergent treatment of gram-negative bacteria have been used over the past decades for producing many licensed vaccines. These nanoparticles are not only multi-antigenic in nature but also potent immunopotentiators and immunomodulators. Formulations based on chemical-inactivated OMV (OMVi) obtained from a virulent STEC strain (O157:H7 serotype) were found to protect against pathogenicity in a murine model and to be immunogenic in calves. These initial studies suggest that STEC-derived OMV has a potential for the formulation of both human and veterinary vaccines.
NISQ circuit compilers: search space structure and heuristics

Noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers are expected to execute quantum circuits of up to a few hundred qubits. The circuits have to satisfy certain constraints concerning the placement and interactions of the involved qubits. Hence, a compiler takes an input circuit not conforming to a NISQ architecture and transforms it to a conforming output circuit. NISQ hardware is faulty and insufficient to implement computational fault-tolerance, such that computation results will be faulty, too. Accordingly, compilers need to optimise the depth and the gate count of the compiled circuits, because these influence the aggregated computation result error. This work discusses the complexity of compilation with a particular focus on the search space structure. The presented analysis decomposes the compilation problem into three combinatorial subproblems for which heuristics can be determined. The search space structure is the result of analysing jointly the gate sequence of the input circuit and its influence on how qubits have to be mapped to a NISQ architecture. These findings support the development of future NISQ compilers.
End-to-End Measurements of Email Spoofing Attacks

Spear phishing has been a persistent threat to users and organizations, and yet email providers still face key challenges to authenticate incoming emails. As a result, attackers can apply spoofing techniques to impersonate a trusted entity to conduct highly deceptive phishing attacks. In this work, we study email spoofing to answer three key questions: (1) How do email providers detect and handle forged emails? (2) Under what conditions can forged emails penetrate the defense to reach user inbox? (3) Once the forged email gets in, how email providers warn users? Is the warning truly effective? We answer these questions by conducting an end-toend measurement on 35 popular email providers and examining user reactions to spoofing through a real-world spoofing/phishing test. Our key findings are three folds. First, we observe that most email providers have the necessary protocols to detect spoofing, but still allow forged emails to reach the user inbox (e.g., Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Gmail). Second, once a forged email gets in, most email providers have no warning for users, particularly for mobile email apps. Some providers (e.g., Gmail Inbox) even have misleading UIs that make the forged email look authentic. Third, a few email providers (9/35) have implemented visual security indicators on unverified emails. Our phishing experiment shows that security indicators have a positive impact on reducing risky user actions, but cannot eliminate the risk. Our study reveals a major miscommunication between email providers and endusers. Improvements at both ends (server-side protocols and UIs) are needed to bridge the gap.
The effect of recent competition between the native Anolis oculatus and the invasive A. cristatellus on display behavior

Invasive species are a global threat to biodiversity. Cases where the invasion has been tracked since its beginning are rare, however, such that the first interactions between invasive and native species remain poorly understood. Communication behavior is an integral part of species identity and is subject to selection. Consequently, resource use and direct interference competition between native and invasive species may drive its evolution. Here, we tested the role of interactions between the recently introduced invasive lizard Anolis cristatellus and the native Anolis oculatus on variation in behavior and communication in Calibishie (Dominica). From May to June 2016, we filmed 122 adult males of both species displaying in banana farms under two contexts (allopatry and sympatry). We then recorded (i) the proportion of time spent displaying and (ii) the relative frequency of dewlap vs. push-up displays. To control for habitat variation, we measured and compared the habitat characteristics (canopy openness and habitat openness) of 228 males in allopatry and sympatry. While the habitat characteristics and total display-time did not differ between the contexts for the two species, the proportion of display-time spent dewlapping by A. cristatellus decreased in sympatry. The display of A. oculatus did not differ between the contexts, however. Shifts in microhabitat use, predation pressure, or interspecific interference are potential factors which might explain the behavioral changes in display observed in A. cristatellus. This study highlights the role of behavioral traits as a first response of an invasive species to recent competition with a closely related native species.
Understanding Patch-Based Learning by Explaining Predictions

Deep networks are able to learn highly predictive models of video data. Due to video length, a common strategy is to train them on small video snippets. We apply the deep Taylor / LRP technique to understand the deep network's classification decisions, and identify a "border effect": a tendency of the classifier to look mainly at the bordering frames of the input. This effect relates to the step size used to build the video snippet, which we can then tune in order to improve the classifier's accuracy without retraining the model. To our knowledge, this is the the first work to apply the deep Taylor / LRP technique on any video analyzing neural network.
Development of cardiovascular and neurodevelopmental metrics as sublethal endpoints for the Fish embryo toxicity test

The fathead minnow fish embryo toxicity (FET) test has been proposed as a more humane alternative to current toxicity testing methods as younger organisms are thought to experience less distress during toxicant exposure. However, the FET test protocol does not include endpoints that allow for the prediction of sublethal adverse outcomes, limiting its utility relative to other test types. Researchers have proposed the development of sublethal endpoints for the FET test to increase its utility. The present study 1) developed methods for previously unmeasured sublethal metrics in fathead minnows (i.e., spontaneous contraction frequency and heart rate) and 2) investigated the responsiveness of several sublethal endpoints related to growth (wet wt, length, and growth‐related gene expression), neurodevelopment (spontaneous contraction frequency, eye size, and neurodevelopmental gene expression), and cardiovascular function and development (pericardial area, heart rate, and cardiovascular system–related gene expression) as additional FET test metrics using the model toxicant 3,4‐dichloroaniline. Of the growth, neurological, and cardiovascular endpoints measured, length, eye size, and pericardial area were found to be more responsive than the other endpoints evaluated. Future studies linking alterations in these endpoints to longer‐term adverse impacts are needed to fully evaluate the predictive power of these metrics in chemical and whole‐effluent toxicity testing. Environ Toxicol Chem 2018;37:2530–2541. © 2018 SETAC
IDeAS: automated design tool for hetero-chiral protein folds

Incorporating D amino acids in the protein design alphabet can in principle multiply the design space by many orders of magnitude. All native proteins are polymers composed of L chiral amino acids. Practically limitless in diversity over amino acid sequences, protein structure is limited in folds and thus shapes, principally due to the poly L stereochemistry of their backbone. To diversify shapes, we introduced both L- and D α-amino acids as design alphabets to explore the possibility of generating novel folds, varied in chemical as well as stereo-chemical sequence. Now, to have stereochemically-defined proteins tuned chemically, we present the Inverse Design and Automation Software, IDeAS. Retro-fitting side chains on a backbone with L and D stereochemistry, the software demonstrate functional fits over stereo-chemically diverse folds in a range of applications of interest in protein design.
Radiation Protection and Mitigation by Natural Antioxidants and Flavonoids: Implications to Radiotherapy and Radiation Disasters.

BACKGROUND Nowadays, ionizing radiations are used for various medical and terroristic aims. These purposes involve exposure to ionizing radiations. Hence, people are at risk for acute or late effects. Annually, millions of cancer patients undergo radiotherapy during their course of treatment. Also, some radiological or nuclear events in recent years pose a threat to people, hence the need for radiation mitigation strategies. Amifostine, the first FDA approved radioprotector, has shown some toxicities that limit its usage and efficiency. Due to these side effects, scientists have researched for other agents with less toxicity for better radioprotection and possible mitigation of the lethal effects of ionizing radiations after an accidental exposure. Flavonoids have shown promising results for radioprotection and can be administered in higher doses with less toxicity. Studies for mitigation of ionizing radiation-induced toxicities have concentrated on natural antioxidants. Detoxification of free radicals, management of inflammatory responses and attenuation of apoptosis signaling pathways in radiosensitive organs are the main mechanisms for radiation protection and mitigation with flavonoids and natural antioxidants. However, several studies have proposed that a combination in the form of some antioxidants may alleviate radiation toxicities more effectively in comparison to a single form of antioxidants. CONCLUSION In this review, we focus on recent findings about natural radioprotectors and mitigators which are clinically applicable for radiotherapy patients, as well as injured people in possible radiation accidents.
Active Memory Networks for Language Modeling

© 2018 International Speech Communication Association. All rights reserved. Making predictions of the following word given the back history of words may be challenging without meta-information such as the topic. Standard neural network language models have an implicit representation of the topic via the back history of words. In this work a more explicit form of topic representation is used via an attention mechanism. Though this makes use of the same information as the standard model, it allows parameters of the network to focus on different aspects of the task. The attention model provides a form of topic representation that is automatically learned from the data. Whereas the recurrent model deals with the (conditional) history representation. The combined model is expected to reduce the stress on the standard model to handle multiple aspects. Experiments were conducted on the Penn Tree Bank and BBC Multi-Genre Broadcast News (MGB) corpora, where the proposed approach outperforms standard forms of recurrent models in perplexity. Finally, N-best list rescoring for speech recognition in the MGB3 task shows word error rate improvements over comparable standard form of recurrent models.
"What Can't Data Be Used For?": Privacy Expectations about Smart TVs in the U.S.

—Smart TVs have rapidly become the most common smart appliance in typical households. In the U.S., most television sets on the market have advanced sensors not traditionally found on conventional TVs, such as a microphone for voice commands or a camera for photo or video input. These new sensors enable features that are convenient, but they may also introduce new privacy implications. We surveyed 591 U.S. Internet users about their current understanding and expectations about how smart TVs collect and use data. We found a wide range of assumptions and opinions among our respondents, and a good deal of uncertainty about what’s collected and how it is used. In addition, these assumptions and opinions varied between data types and sensors. One area where we found broad agreement was that it is unacceptable for the data to be repurposed or shared. But there was little understanding of the protections—or lack thereof—afforded by current laws and regulations to constrain such sharing. We hope that our ﬁndings will enhance end-user privacy by providing useful insights for smart TV manufacturers, regulators and lawmakers, and designers of privacy-enhancing technologies.
The AD8 (Dementia Screening Interview) is a valid and reliable screening scale not only for dementia but also for mild cognitive impairment in the Turkish geriatric outpatients

ABSTRACT Introduction: There is still a need for short, practical, and daily-appropriate scales to distinguish between normal cognitive aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or dementia for patients with memory complaints. This study aimed to determine validity and reliability of AD8 (Dementia Screening Interview) to detect both MCI and dementia in Turkish geriatric outpatients. Methods: Comprehensive geriatric assessment was performed in 334 patients, who attended with their informants to the geriatric outpatient clinic for memory complaints. In addition to the AD8, they were screened using Clinical Dementia Rating scale (CDR) and Mini-Mental State Examination. The diagnosis of dementia and MCI was made according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - fifth edition (DSM-5) criteria. Results: The mean age of the patients was 74.5±8.5. Of them, 156 were considered as non-cognitive impairment, 60 as MCI, and 118 as dementia. Cronbach's α value of the AD8 was 0.928. The total AD8 scores were found to be negatively correlated with the MMSE scores (r = −0.801), and positively correlated with CDR score (r = 0.879) (p < 0.001, for each). The area under the receiver-operating characteristics curve was 0.979 for cognitive impairment, and 0.999 for dementia. We found that AD8 can show dementia and MCI when the cut-off values are ≥5 and 3–4, respectively, with a sensitivity of 100% and 81.67% and specificity of 96.3% and 93.59%. Conclusion: AD8 is one of the fast, simple, and sensitive screening methods for detecting both minor and major cognitive impairments. With regard to these features, it can be used in older adults attending the primary care settings with memory complaints.
Towards Bias Detection in Online Text Corpora

Natural language textual corpora depending on their genre, often contain bias which reflect the point of view towards a subject of the original content creator. Even for sources like Wikipedia, a collaboratively created encyclopedia, which follows a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy, the pages therein are prone to such violations, this due to either: (i) Wikipedia contributors not being aware of NPOV policies or (ii) intentional push towards specific points of views. We present an approach for identifying bias words in online textual corpora using semantic relations of word vectors created through word2Vec. The bias word lists created by our approach help on identifying biased language in online texts.
Understanding perception of active noise control system through multichannel EEG analysis

In this Letter, a method is proposed to investigate the effect of noise with and without active noise control (ANC) on multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. The multichannel EEG signal is recorded during different listening conditions such as silent, music, noise, ANC with background noise and ANC with both background noise and music. The multiscale analysis of EEG signal of each channel is performed using the discrete wavelet transform. The multivariate multiscale matrices are formulated based on the sub-band signals of each EEG channel. The singular value decomposition is applied to the multivariate matrices of multichannel EEG at significant scales. The singular value features at significant scales and the extreme learning machine classifier with three different activation functions are used for classification of multichannel EEG signal. The experimental results demonstrate that, for ANC with noise and ANC with noise and music classes, the proposed method has sensitivity values of 75.831% (\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} }{}$p \lt 0.001$\end{document}p<0.001) and 99.31% (\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} }{}$p \lt 0.001$\end{document}p<0.001), respectively. The method has an accuracy value of 83.22% for the classification of EEG signal with music and ANC with music as stimuli. The important finding of this study is that by the introduction of ANC, music can be better perceived by the human brain.
Happiness and Inflammatory Responses to Acute Stress in People With Type 2 Diabetes

Abstract Background Positive psychological characteristics in people with type 2 diabetes (T2D) are associated with better health and longevity, and one plausible physiological mechanism involves lower markers of inflammation. Positive affect is related to lower basal inflammatory markers and smaller inflammatory responses to acute stress, but this association in people with T2D remains to be examined. Purpose To examine the relationship between happiness and inflammatory markers at baseline and in response to acute stress in people with T2D. Methods One hundred forty people with T2D took part in laboratory-based stress testing. We aggregated daily happiness ratings over 7 days before stress testing. During the laboratory session, participants underwent two mental stress tasks—the mirror tracing and the Stroop task. Blood was sampled at baseline and post-stress (up to 75 min post-stress) to detect plasma interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra), and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1). Associations between happiness and inflammatory markers and responses were analyzed using multivariable linear regressions. Results Greater daily happiness significantly predicted lower baseline and post-stress IL-6 concentrations, and lower baseline MCP-1, after adjusting for covariates. The association between happiness and reduced basal IL-6 maintained after further controlling for daily sadness. We did not find significant associations between daily happiness and inflammatory responses to acute stress. No associations were detected for IL-1Ra. Conclusions Happier individuals with T2D have lower inflammatory markers before and after acute stress, albeit independent of stress responsivity. Findings could provide a protective physiological pathway linking daily happiness with better health in people with T2D.