Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Postprandial hyperlipemia in pigs

The ability to induce postprandial hyperlipemia is essential for using certain animal species as models for short-term consequences of fat intake in humans. We present the results from two studies on postprandial hyperlipemia and triglyceride metabolism in young slaughter pigs using the proprietary lipid-containing product, IntralipidÂ®. In the first study we demonstrated that postprandial hyperlipemia in slaughter pigs was insignificant (p=0.16) when fed IntralipidÂ® in doses of 2 g fat/kg administered in two fractions: the first 1/3 11/2 hours after feeding, and the second 2/3 11/2 hours later. In the second study, induction of postprandial hyperlipemia was performed by administering IntralipidÂ® in single doses of 2 g fat/kg 51/2 hours after feeding, which resulted in the development of significant postprandial hyperlipemia (p<0.001). To assess the half-life (T1/2) of triglycerides in the circulation, IntralipidÂ® was administered intravenously in doses of 0.1 g fat/kg, which gave T1/2 (mean Â± std.)=13. 3Â±3.7 minutes. Furthermore, inhibiting the lipoprotein lipase by administering Triton WR-1339 intravenously in doses of 150 mg/kg exerted a significant inhibitory effect on the triglyceride catabolism in the circulation as determined by increments in peak value (p<0.05), increased area under the curve (iAUC) (p<0.01), and T1/2 (p<0.05). In conclusion, the slaughter pigs developed significant postprandial hyperlipemia when fed IntralipidÂ® in doses of 2 g fat/kg 51/2 hours after feeding, while it was difficult to induce significant postprandial hyperlipemia when the same amount of fat was administered in two fractions in close proximity to feeding. We hypothesize that the high activity of the endothelial lipases, determined by the T1/2, constitutes the physiological threshold counteracting the development of postprandial hyperlipemia in young slaughter pigs.
Early life relationships matter: Social position during early life predicts fitness among female spotted hyenas.

How social development in early life affects fitness remains poorly understood. Though there is growing evidence that early-life relationships can affect fitness, little research has investigated how social positions develop or whether there are particularly important periods for social position development in an animal's life history. In long-lived species in particular, understanding the lasting consequences of early-life social environments requires detailed, long-term datasets. Here we used a 25-year dataset to test whether social positions held during early development predicted adult fitness. Specifically, we quantified social position using three social network metrics: degree, strength, and betweenness. We determined the social position of each individual in three types of networks during each of three stages of ontogeny to test whether they predict annual reproductive success (ARS) or longevity among adult female spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta). The social positions occupied by juvenile hyenas did predict their fitness, but the effects of social position on fitness measures differed between stages of early development. Network metrics when individuals were young adults better predicted ARS, but network metrics for younger animals, particularly when youngsters were confined to the communal den, better predicted longevity than did metrics assessed during other stages of development. Our study shows how multiple types of social bonds formed during multiple stages of social development predict lifetime fitness outcomes. We suggest that social bonds formed during specific phases of development may be more important than others when considering fitness outcomes.
A Population Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Model of CKD-519

CKD-519 is a selective and potent cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibitor that is being developed for dyslipidemia. Even though CKD-519 has shown potent CETP inhibition, the exposure of CKD-519 was highly varied, depending on food and dose. For highly variable exposure drugs, it is crucial to use modeling and simulation to plan proper dose selection. This study aimed to develop population pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD) models of CKD-519 and to predict the proper dose of CKD-519 to achieve target levels for HDL-C and LDL-C using results from multiple dosing study of CKD-519 with a standard meal for two weeks in healthy subjects. The results showed that a 3-compartment with Erlang’s distribution, followed by the first-order absorption, adequately described CKD-519 PK, and the bioavailability, which decreased by dose and time was incorporated into the model (NONMEM version 7.3). After the PK model development, the CETP activity and cholesterol (HDL-C and LDL-C) levels were sequentially modeled using the turnover model, including the placebo effect. According to PK-PD simulation results, 200 to 400 mg of CKD-519 showing a 40% change in HDL-C and LDL-C from baselines was recommended for proof of concept studies in patients with dyslipidemia.
Birds of kerangas, converted lands, mixed dipterocarp and riparian forests in Central and East Kalimantan, Indonesia

We present the results of bird surveys conducted in 2000 and 2006 at 13 sites in the interior lowlands and foothills (<400 m asl) of Central and East Kalimantan, Indonesia. The study area spans c.170 km east-west between the middle and upper reaches of the Barito and Mahakam Rivers, and more than 100 km north-south from the foothills of the Muller Range. Habitats surveyed include mixed dipterocarp forest, heath forest (kerangas), riparian forest and converted lands on a variety of substrates. A total of 226 species was recorded, including five Vulnerable species (Crestless Fireback Lophura erythrophthalma, Large Green Pigeon Treron capellei, Lesser Adjutant Leptoptilos javanicus, Hook-billed Bulbul Setornis criniger and Bornean Wren Babbler Ptilocichla leucogrammica) and 59 Near Threatened species. Habitat, land use and soil quality varied widely across the study area. The north-west section of the study area boasts large tracts of intact, continuous-canopy dipterocarp and heath forest and is likely to support viable populations of a variety of rare and threatened species. The influence of logging disturbance is briefly discussed, and the bird communities of dipterocarp and heath forests are broadly compared.
Learning to Identify Follow-Up Questions in Conversational Question Answering

Despite recent progress in conversational question answering, most prior work does not focus on follow-up questions. Practical conversational question answering systems often receive follow-up questions in an ongoing conversation, and it is crucial for a system to be able to determine whether a question is a follow-up question of the current conversation, for more effective answer finding subsequently. In this paper, we introduce a new follow-up question identification task. We propose a three-way attentive pooling network that determines the suitability of a follow-up question by capturing pair-wise interactions between the associated passage, the conversation history, and a candidate follow-up question. It enables the model to capture topic continuity and topic shift while scoring a particular candidate follow-up question. Experiments show that our proposed three-way attentive pooling network outperforms all baseline systems by significant margins.
VASCULAR SMOOTH MUSCLE CELLS OF THE SYNTHETIC/ACTIVATED PHENOTYPE

i CO-AUTHOURSHIP.ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.iii DEDICATION.v TABLE OF CONTENTS.vi LIST OF TABLES.ix LIST OF FIGURES.x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.xii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION.1 1.1 Second Messenger Systems.1 1.2 cAMP and Downstream Targets.2 1.3 Cyclic Nucleotide Phosphodiesterases (PDEs). 4 1.4 Compartmentation of Cyclic Nucleotide Signaling.6 1.5 Phosphodiesterase 1C (PDE1C). 9 1.6 PDEs and Cardiovascular Disease.13 1.7 Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells and Phenotype Modulation.14 1.8 PDEs in Contractile/Quiescent VSMCs.16 1.9 PDEs in Synthetic/Activated VSMCs.17 1.10 Role for PDE1C in the Synthetic/Activated VSMC.19 RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS AND OBJECTIVES.24
Toxicity of Bacillus thuringiensis var. Kurstaki to the Painted Lady Butterfly, Vanessa cardui

Bacillus thuringiensis var. Kurstaki (BT) is a Gram-positive, sporulating, rod-shaped bacterium that is widely used as a microbial insecticide against a variety of lepidoptera targets, especially the Gypsy Moth, Lymantra dispar (Johnson et al. 1995). BT was first detected in 1902 in dying larvae of the Silkworm, Bombyx mori, and first used as an insecticide against lepidoptera in 1938 (Worthing et al. 1987). Microbial insecticides have long been thought to be a more effective and specific control of forest defoliators such as the Gypsy Moth and Western Spruce Budworm, Choristoneura occidentalis Freeman, than chemical pesticides such as malathion that kill a wide spectrum of arthropods. In agricultural systems, many of the nontarget arthropods are readily killed by chemical pesticides, including ‘‘useful’’ arthropods that prey upon harmful or target insect pests. Most students are aware of the injurious effects on nontarget organisms of the use of pesticides such as DDT to control insect pests. Man-made pesticides such as DDT were nearly responsible for the demise of many of our top food chain avian predators, including the eagle and osprey. It was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that first brought this to the attention of the American public. Since that time scientists have developed new insecticides that are more specific for controlling insect pests. The use of bacteria such
Wireless Sensor Networks Fault-Tolerance Based on Graph Domination with Parallel Scatter Search

In wireless sensor/ad hoc networks, all wireless nodes frequently flood the network channel by transmitting control messages causing “broadcast storm problem”. Thus, inspired by the physical backbone in wired networks, a Virtual Backbone (VB) in wireless sensor/ad hoc networks can help achieve efficient broadcasting. A well-known and well-researched approach for constructing virtual backbone is solving the Connected Dominating Set (CDS) problem. Furthermore, minimizing the size of the CDS is a significant research issue. We propose a new parallel scatter search algorithm with elite and featured cores for constructing a wireless sensor/ad hoc network virtual backbones based on finding minimum connected dominating sets of wireless nodes. Also, we addressed the problem of VB node/nodes failure by either deploying a previously computed VBs provided by the main pSSEF algorithm that does not contain the failed node/nodes, or by using our proposed FT-pSSEF algorithm repairing the broken VBs. Finally, as nodes in a VB incur extra load of communication and computation, this leads to faster power consumption compared to other nodes in the network. Consequently, we propose the virtual backbone scheduling algorithm SC-pSSEF which aims to find multiple VBs using the VBs provided by the pSSEF algorithm and switch between them periodically to prolong the network life time.
The Automatic Detection of Cognition Using EEG and Facial Expressions

Detecting cognitive profiles is critical to efficient adaptive learning systems that automatically adjust the content delivered depending on the learner’s cognitive states and skills. This study explores electroencephalography (EEG) and facial expressions as physiological monitoring tools to build models that detect two cognitive states, namely, engagement and instantaneous attention, and three cognitive skills, namely, focused attention, planning, and shifting. First, while wearing a 14-channel EEG Headset and being videotaped, data has been collected from 127 subjects taking two scientifically validated cognitive assessments. Second, labeling was performed based on the scores obtained from the used tools. Third, different shallow and deep models were experimented in the two modalities of EEG and facial expressions. Finally, the best performing models for the analyzed states are determined. According to the used performance measure, which is the f-beta score with beta = 2, the best obtained results for engagement, instantaneous attention, and focused attention are EEG-based models with 0.86, 0.82, and 0.63 scores, respectively. As for planning and shifting, the best performing models are facial expressions-based models with 0.78 and 0.81, respectively. The obtained results show that EEG and facial expressions contain important and different cues and features about the analyzed cognitive states, and hence, can be used to automatically and non-intrusively detect them.
Synchronous Double-channel Recurrent Network for Aspect-Opinion Pair Extraction

Opinion entity extraction is a fundamental task in fine-grained opinion mining. Related studies generally extract aspects and/or opinion expressions without recognizing the relations between them. However, the relations are crucial for downstream tasks, including sentiment classification, opinion summarization, etc. In this paper, we explore Aspect-Opinion Pair Extraction (AOPE) task, which aims at extracting aspects and opinion expressions in pairs. To deal with this task, we propose Synchronous Double-channel Recurrent Network (SDRN) mainly consisting of an opinion entity extraction unit, a relation detection unit, and a synchronization unit. The opinion entity extraction unit and the relation detection unit are developed as two channels to extract opinion entities and relations simultaneously. Furthermore, within the synchronization unit, we design Entity Synchronization Mechanism (ESM) and Relation Synchronization Mechanism (RSM) to enhance the mutual benefit on the above two channels. To verify the performance of SDRN, we manually build three datasets based on SemEval 2014 and 2015 benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDRN achieves state-of-the-art performances.
Angular limit for coronal joint deformity correction using intramedullary guidance in total knee arthroplasty. A pilot study

Introduction: Post-operative misalignment of the lower limb mechanical axis following total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is thought to be associated with clinical failure. In a balanced knee, a neutral global mechanical axis following the use of intra-medullary (IM) guidance does not necessarily imply a horizontal TKA joint line. Using femoral and tibial axes separately would be more accurate in evaluating TKA alignment. Thus, the aim of the study is to define a pre-operative mechanical tibial and/or femoral angle threshold value for post-operative optimal alignment correction using IM guides. Methods: This single-center prospective continuous pilot study included 50 patients treated with a TKA for primitive osteoarthritis. Femoral and tibial cuts were performed using intramedullary (IM) guide. Three angles were calculated and analyzed pre and post-operatively on standing antero-posterior views using long-leg radiographs: femorotibial angle (FTA), mechanical femoral angle (MFA), and mechanical tibial angle (MTA). Statistical analysis was performed for the whole sample and for the three following FTA subgroups; normo-axial, varus and valgus. Results: The pre-operative MTA is the only parameter for which a threshold value was observed; when pre-operative MTA exceeded the value of 94°, an optimal correction might not be obtained post-operatively. Discussion: Our results suggest that the bony correction obtained via IM guiding depends exclusively on the primary deformation of the tibia. In cases of a varus of more than 94°, the IM guide was found to yield sub-optimal corrections. Thus, other solutions need to be investigated.
SynGAP isoforms differentially regulate synaptic plasticity and dendritic development

SynGAP is a synaptic Ras GTPase-activating protein (GAP) with four C-terminal splice variants: α1, α2, β, and γ. Although studies have implicated SYNGAP1 in several cognitive disorders, it is not clear which SynGAP isoforms contribute to disease. Here, we demonstrate that SynGAP isoforms exhibit unique spatiotemporal expression patterns and play distinct roles in neuronal and synaptic development in mouse neurons. SynGAP-α1, which undergoes liquid-liquid phase separation with PSD-95, is highly enriched in synapses and is required for LTP. In contrast, SynGAP-β, which does not bind PSD-95 PDZ domains, is less synaptically targeted and promotes dendritic arborization. A mutation in SynGAP-α1 that disrupts phase separation and synaptic targeting abolishes its ability to regulate plasticity and instead causes it to drive dendritic development like SynGAP-β. These results demonstrate that distinct intrinsic biochemical properties of SynGAP isoforms determine their function, and individual isoforms may differentially contribute to the pathogenesis of SYNGAP1-related cognitive disorders.
Investigating the effect of auxiliary objectives for the automated grading of learner English speech transcriptions

We address the task of automatically grading the language proficiency of spontaneous speech based on textual features from automatic speech recognition transcripts. Motivated by recent advances in multi-task learning, we develop neural networks trained in a multi-task fashion that learn to predict the proficiency level of non-native English speakers by taking advantage of inductive transfer between the main task (grading) and auxiliary prediction tasks: morpho-syntactic labeling, language modeling, and native language identification (L1). We encode the transcriptions with both bi-directional recurrent neural networks and with bi-directional representations from transformers, compare against a feature-rich baseline, and analyse performance at different proficiency levels and with transcriptions of varying error rates. Our best performance comes from a transformer encoder with L1 prediction as an auxiliary task. We discuss areas for improvement and potential applications for text-only speech scoring.
Unsupervised FAQ Retrieval with Question Generation and BERT

We focus on the task of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) retrieval. A given user query can be matched against the questions and/or the answers in the FAQ. We present a fully unsupervised method that exploits the FAQ pairs to train two BERT models. The two models match user queries to FAQ answers and questions, respectively. We alleviate the missing labeled data of the latter by automatically generating high-quality question paraphrases. We show that our model is on par and even outperforms supervised models on existing datasets.
Investigating Word-Class Distributions in Word Vector Spaces

This paper presents an investigation on the distribution of word vectors belonging to a certain word class in a pre-trained word vector space. To this end, we made several assumptions about the distribution, modeled the distribution accordingly, and validated each assumption by comparing the goodness of each model. Specifically, we considered two types of word classes – the semantic class of direct objects of a verb and the semantic class in a thesaurus – and tried to build models that properly estimate how likely it is that a word in the vector space is a member of a given word class. Our results on selectional preference and WordNet datasets show that the centroid-based model will fail to achieve good enough performance, the geometry of the distribution and the existence of subgroups will have limited impact, and also the negative instances need to be considered for adequate modeling of the distribution. We further investigated the relationship between the scores calculated by each model and the degree of membership and found that discriminative learning-based models are best in finding the boundaries of a class, while models based on the offset between positive and negative instances perform best in determining the degree of membership.
A potential tool to mitigate the impacts of climate change to the caribbean leatherback sea turtle

It is now well understood that climate change has the potential to dramatically affect biodiversity, with effects on spatio‐temporal distribution patterns, trophic relationships and survivorship. In the marine turtles, sex is determined by incubation temperature, such that warming temperatures could lead to a higher production of female hatchlings. By measuring nest temperature, and using a model to relate the incubation temperature to sex ratio, we estimate that Caribbean Colombian leatherback sea turtles currently produce approximately 92% female hatchlings. We modelled the relationship between incubation, sand and air temperature, and under all future climate change scenarios (0.4–6.0 °C warming over the next 100 years), complete feminization could occur, as soon as the next decade. However, male producing refugia exist in the periphery of smaller nests (0.7 °C cooler at the bottom than at the centre), within beaches (0.3 °C cooler in the vegetation line and inter‐tidal zone) and between beaches (0.4 °C higher on dark beaches), and these natural refugia could be assigned preferential conservation status. However, there exists a need to develop strategies that may ameliorate deleterious effects of climate‐induced temperature changes in the future. We experimentally shaded clutches using screening material, and found that it was effective in reducing nest temperature, producing a higher proportion of male hatchlings, without compromising the fitness or hatching success. Artificial shade in hatcheries is a very useful and simple tool in years or periods of high environmental temperatures. Nevertheless, this is only an emergency response to the severe impacts that will eventually have to be reversed if we are to guarantee the stability of the populations.
La quitridiomicosis en los anfibios de México: una revisión

La quitridiomicosis es una enfermedad causada por el hongo patogeno Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), el cual afecta la piel de los anfibios y puede provocar la muerte. El declive de las poblaciones de anfibios como resultado del efecto de este patogeno se presento simultaneamente en varias partes del mundo a partir de la decada de 1980. En Mexico se identifico una oleada epidemica por Bd en la decada de 1970, la cual concuerda con el declive de poblaciones de salamandras (caudados) en el sur del pais. Nuestro trabajo presenta una revision sobre el estado actual del conocimiento de la quitridiomicosis como uno de los factores causales del declive de las poblaciones de anfibios a nivel mundial y se analiza la informacion recabada al momento sobre la presencia de este patogeno en Mexico. A la fecha, se ha registrado la infeccion en 50 especies de anfibios que se distribuyen, principalmente en las regiones montanosas del centro y sur del pais, y se ha determinado que las familias Hylidae y Plethodontidae son las mas afectadas. Diversos autores han propuesto que el cambio climatico global ha jugado un papel fundamental en la presencia y virulencia del genero Batrachochytrium, ya que el incremento de temperatura induce un desequilibrio en la relacion patogeno-hospedero provocando mayor virulencia de Bd y/o mayor susceptibilidad a la infeccion en los anfibios. Sobre este tema, analizamos las temperaturas registradas de 1964 a 1989 en las zonas donde el declive de caudados fue mas drastico. No se encontro una asociacion clara entre el declive de salamandras con la temperatura. Por otro lado, se determino que al igual que otros paises, el comercio internacional, la introduccion y desplazamiento de la "rana toro" Lithobates catesbeiana son importantes para la dispersion del patogeno