Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Glutamine Supplementation on Oxidative Stress and Matrix Metalloproteinase 2 and 9 After Exhaustive Exercise

Background Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in plasma and skeletal muscles and an important fuel for immune system cells. It has beneficial anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties which may be considered as a potentially useful supplement for athletes. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of glutamine supplementation on oxidative stress and matrix metalloproteinase 2 and 9 after exhaustive exercise in young healthy males. Materials and methods In this study, 30 healthy males (supplement =15 and control=15) were randomly assigned into two groups. The supplement group received 0.3 g/kg BW of glutamine along with 25 gr of sugar dissolved in 250 cc water per day. The control group received 25 gr of sugar in 250 cc water per day. Fasting blood samples were taken at baseline and at the end of 14 days of intervention. The participants underwent exercise until experiencing full-body exhaustive fatigue for 16 ± 2.84 mins, and then fasting blood samples were taken. Serum levels of TAC, MDA, MMP2, MMP9, glutathione, and hs-CRP were measured. Results Serum levels of MDA and hs-CRP significantly decreased in the supplement group (p< 0.05). The serum level of TAC significantly increased in the supplement group (p< 0.05). Glutathione serum levels significantly increased after exhaustive exercise (p< 0.05). Serum levels of MMP2 and MMP9 remained unchanged. Conclusion Results of this study showed that, some biochemical factors are time-dependent and can increase or decrease over time, as well as, serum levels of hs-CRP and MDA decreased with glutamine supplementation along with the increase in the TAC serum levels, but this supplementation had no effect on serum levels of MMP2 and MMP9 in exhaustive exercise.
Quantifying Stratospheric Temperature Signals and Climate Imprints From Post‐2000 Volcanic Eruptions

Small volcanic eruptions and their effects have recently come into research focus. While large eruptions are known to strongly affect stratospheric temperature, the impacts of smaller eruptions are hard to quantify because their signals are masked by natural variability. Here, we quantify the temperature signals from small volcanic eruptions between 2002 and 2016 using new vertically resolved aerosol data and precise temperature observations from radio occultation. We find characteristic space‐time signals that can be associated with specific eruptions. In the lower stratosphere, robust warming signals are observed, while in the midstratosphere also cooling signals of some eruptions appear. We find that the volcanic contribution to the temperature trend is up to 20%, depending on latitude and altitude. We conclude that detailed knowledge of the vertical structure of volcanic temperature impacts is crucial for comprehensive trend analysis in order to separate natural from anthropogenic temperature changes.
Congenital Cystic Adenomatoid Malformation of the Lung Tipe II: Three Cases Report

Congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation (CCAM) is a rare congenital lung lesion. It may appear since birth (30–35%) with difficulty breathing or may have a late onset (60–65%) with recurring pulmonary infections or growth failure; in a small percentage of cases, the lesion can be completely asymptomatic. Fetal or post-natal surgery can be used as surgical treatment of these lesions. Postnatal surgery consists of a lobectomy, bilobectomy or pneumonectomy, based on the size of the lesion. The best age to undergo this surgery is around 2 years, but only if the injury is stable and the child has no complications. The study describes three cases of CCAM, observed at the Pediatric Surgery Section of the University of Siena. We analyzed those 3 cases whose approach was defined by the onset of symptoms, age and clinical condition of patients. In the first case the surgery was performed a few hours after birth due to the worsening of the clinical conditions; in the other two cases it was delayed because the patients were asymptomatic. The purpose of this study is to review the management of patients with CCAM in relation to clinical onset and the type of injury.
Increased Surgical Duration Associated With Prolonged Hospital Stay After Isolated Posterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

Purpose Although often performed using a variety of reconstructive techniques and strategies, no clinically significant differences presently exist between the approaches available for isolated PCL reconstructions. Given the operatively challenging nature of these procedures, there lies a potentially increased risk of postoperative complications and healthcare expenditures. Our investigation sought to identify patient and surgical risk factors associated with prolonged hospital stays following isolated PCL reconstruction and determine the incidence of 30-day complications after PCL reconstruction using the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS-NSQIP) database. Method Patients undergoing isolated PCL reconstructions between 2005 and 2016 were identified in the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) database using Current Procedural Terminology codes. Baseline patient and operative characteristics were evaluated as possible risk factors for overnight hospital admissions following PCL reconstruction and analyzed using multivariate analyses. Results A total of 249 patients were identified. Multivariate analyses demonstrated that increased operative duration >120 mins (OR 5.04, CI 2.44–10.40; p <0.001) was associated with an increased risk of overnight hospital stay. Major complications occurred in 0.4% (N=1), and minor complications occurred in 0.8% (N=2) with overall complications occurring in 1.2% (N=3) of all patients. Wound dehiscence was the only major complication while superficial surgical site infection and deep vein thrombosis were the only minor complications. 34.1% (N=85) of patients required an overnight hospital stay postoperatively. Conclusion Surgical duration >120 mins carried an increased risk of overnight hospital stay after isolated PCL reconstructions. As there are presently minimal significant clinical differences between current PCL reconstruction techniques, improved surgeon familiarity and comfort with a single technique is recommended to decrease operative time and avoid prolonged hospital stays and healthcare expenditures. Level of evidence III, retrospective comparative study.
Gut Microbiota and the Alteration of Immune Balance in Skin Diseases: From Nutraceuticals to Fecal Transplantation

The P.N. E.I. (Psycho-Neuro-Endocrine-Immunology) approach is represented by the interdisciplinary concept of bidirectional cross-talk between the psycho-neuro-endocrine and immune systems, which can influence the immune response. The well-known Gut-Brain Axis and the Gut-Skin Axis can be merged in a bigger network- the Gut-Brain-Skin Axis, with complex regulation by cytokines, neuro-peptides, neuro-hormones and another messenger (signalling) molecules and maybe the most important modulator of the Gut-Brain-Skin Axis/ the gut microbiota. The role of gut bacterial homeostasis is very important, and the homeostatic imbalance of the immune response may be a relevant etiologic/pathophysiologic factor for extra-intestinal and intestinal inflammatory, allergic and autoimmune diseases. The Low Dose Cytokines Medicine (LDM) is an innovative therapeutic approach. It is based on the most advanced knowledge in molecular biology and low dose pharmacology with the primary outcome. The SKA (Sequential Kinetic Activation) technology, codified and standardised by GUNA S.p.a. -Italy- makes the low doses of signalling molecules able to be active even below the minimum dose classically considered as effective and the significative efficacy of orally administered low-dose signalling molecules is the most representative aspect of LDM. The Physiologic Nutraceuticals and the Low Dose Medicine are two of the most promising approaches for the treatment of skin diseases based on the rebalance of the immune response and the recovery of gut dysbiosis.
Real-World Visual And Clinical Outcomes For Patients With Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration Treated With Intravitreal Ranibizumab: An 8-Year Observational Cohort (AMD8)

Purpose: To report the long-term clinical outcomes for patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) who received anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) therapy as part of a standardised treatment protocol in a real-world setting. Patients and methods: This is a retrospective audit of all treatment-naïve patients with nAMD who commenced a pro re nata (PRN) treatment regimen of intravitreal Ranibizumab from January to December 2009 and completed 8 years of follow-up in one single-treatment centre. Electronic medical notes were reviewed to evaluate the outcome measures. Outcome measures included progression of visual acuity (VA), central retinal thickness (CRT) and treatment frequency. Results: 95 eyes from 86 patients had complete data for 8 years of follow-up. Baseline median CRT was 295µm [IQR 254 – 349] and improved to 209µm [IQR 182 – 254] in year 8 (p<0.001); baseline median VA was 61 ETDRS letters which increased to 70 letters post-loading however was reduced to 55 letters by year 8 (mean VA change from baseline was − 9.1 letters); 47.4% had stable or improved vision, 10.5% gained ≥ 15 letters and 33.7% had lost ≥ 15 letters. The highest visual gain was achieved after the initial loading-phase, with a subsequent steady decline, 26.3% (compared to baseline 33.4%) achieved driving vision standard. Median injection frequency was 6 (range 3 – 10) in year 1 and 3 injections (range 0 – 10) in year 8. 51.6% of eyes required at least one injection each year and only 34.7% required no injections in year 8. Conclusion: Our real-world nAMD treatment cohort using Ranibizumab PRN regimen achieved an encouraging almost 50% stable or improved VA at year 8 and total injections of 31.6 injections per patient over an 8-year period.
Which Is in Front of Chinese People, Past or Future? The Effect of Language and Culture on Temporal Gestures and Spatial Conceptions of Time

Abstract The temporal‐focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space–time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space–time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co‐speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back (besides future‐in‐front/past‐at‐back) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back space–time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space–time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space–time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space–time mappings, but a cross‐cultural comparison of space–time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal‐focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space–time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space–time mappings and the relationship between language and thought.
Visual and Refractive Long-Term Outcomes Following Standard Cross-Linking in Progressive Keratoconus Management

Purpose To analyze the effectiveness and stability of the refractive, topographic and visual outcomes of the standard cross-linking (SCXL) in keratoconus (KC) management. Patients and methods This study was designed as a retrospective non-comparative study that included 28 KC patients (n=49 eyes) who performed SCXL as a single procedure to treat KC and completed five-year follow-up period. The topographic, refractive and visual data were recorded preoperatively and at 12, 24, 36 and 60 months postoperatively. Results Forty eyes (81.6%) showed achieved postoperative spherical equivalent (SE) refraction better than the attempted refraction. Ten eyes (20.4%) improved by <1 D, 23 eyes (46.9%) improved from 1 D to <2 D and 7 eyes (14.3%) improved by ≥2 D. Both uncorrected distant visual acuity (UDVA) and corrected distant visual acuity (CDVA) showed statistically significant improvement from preoperative 1.34±0.29 (mean±SD) and 0.74±0.23 LogMAR to postoperative 0.99±0.32 and 0.50±0.22 LogMAR (P<0.0001) respectively. Both Kmax and SE refraction showed statistically significant and stable improvement from preoperative 51.95±1.90 and −7.90±3.14 D to postoperative 50.19±1.96 and −6.35±2.49 D (P<0.0001) respectively. Two eyes (4%) showed KC progression at the end of 5th follow-up year. Conclusion SCXL had good effectiveness and stability that halted KC progression over 5-year follow-up period. It had also unexpected improvement in the KC refractive components mainly the spherical and SE components.
Hotel Scribe: Generating High Variation Hotel Descriptions

This paper describes the implementation of the Hotel Scribe system. A commercial Natural Language Generation (NLG) system which generates descriptions of hotels from accommodation metadata with a high level of content and linguistic variation in English. It has been deployed live by *Anonymised Company Name* for the purpose of improving coverage of accommodation descriptions and for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In this paper, we describe the motivation for building this system, the challenges faced when dealing with limited metadata, and the implementation used to generate the highly variate accommodation descriptions. Additionally, we evaluate the uniqueness of the texts generated by our system against comparable human written accommodation description texts.
Privacy-Aware Text Rewriting

Biased decisions made by automatic systems have led to growing concerns in research communities. Recent work from the NLP community focuses on building systems that make fair decisions based on text. Instead of relying on unknown decision systems or human decision-makers, we argue that a better way to protect data providers is to remove the trails of sensitive information before publishing the data. In light of this, we propose a new privacy-aware text rewriting task and explore two privacy-aware back-translation methods for the task, based on adversarial training and approximate fairness risk. Our extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with varying demographical attributes show that our methods are effective in obfuscating sensitive attributes. We have also observed that the fairness risk method retains better semantics and fluency, while the adversarial training method tends to leak less sensitive information.
Anomaly Detection Using SVM as Classifier and Decision Tree for Optimizing Feature Vectors

With the advancement and development of computer network technologies, the way for intruders has become smoother; therefore, to detect threats and attacks, the importance of intrusion detection systems (IDS) as one of the key elements of security is increasing. One of the challenges of intrusion detection systems is managing a large amount of network traﬃc features. Removing unnecessary features is a solution to this problem. Using machine learning methods is one of the best ways to design an intrusion detection system. Focusing on this issue, in this paper, we propose a hybrid intrusion detection system using the decision tree and support vector machine (SVM) approaches. In our method, the feature selection is initially done by the C5.0 decision tree pruning, and then the features with the least predictor importance value are removed. After removing each feature, the least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) is applied. The set of features having the highest surface area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve for LS-SVM are considered as ﬁnal features. The experimental results on two KDD Cup 99 and UNSW-NB15 data sets show that the proposed approach improves true positive and false positive criteria and accuracy compared to the best prior work.
A Planning Strategy For Dialogue Management in Healthcare

Planning strategies aim to support an agent in achieving a specific goal. Similarly, dialogue-based strategies are thought for (i) equipping intelligent systems with data-acquisition capabilities, and (ii) supporting users by providing, for example, task orientation. In the digital health domain, the interactions between physicians and patients have the objective of classifying the patients current condition to, subsequently, give him/her new instructions. This work aims to develop a non-deterministic planning based approach for human-machine dialogue management in the health domain. The approach is divided in two parts: the first part focuses on slot-filling dialogues for acquiring information about the patient in order to classify him/her with respect to clusters. The second part concerns planning for the management of a task-oriented dialogue to give advice to patients with the intention of giving some guidance on the patient’s treatment. Both parts are supported by a knowledge-based back-end performing reasoning every time new data are provided by users. For demonstrating the complexity of this task, we provide a sample scenario based on the asthma domain showing how, even with few variables, the management of a whole conversation is challenging.
Memory models in symbolic execution: key ideas and new thoughts

Symbolic execution is a popular program analysis technique that allows seeking for bugs by reasoning over multiple alternative execution states at once. As the number of states to explore may grow exponentially, a symbolic executor may quickly run out of space. For instance, a memory access to a symbolic address may potentially reference the entire address space, leading to a combinatorial explosion of the possible resulting execution states. To cope with this issue, state‐of‐the‐art executors either concretize symbolic addresses that span memory intervals larger than some threshold or rely on advanced capabilities of modern satisfiability modulo theories solvers. Unfortunately, concretization may result in missing interesting execution states, for example, where a bug arises, while offloading the entire problem to constraint solvers can lead to very large query times. In this article, we first contribute to systematizing knowledge about memory models for symbolic execution, discussing how four mainstream symbolic executors deal with symbolic addresses. We then introduce MemSight, a new approach to symbolic memory that reduces the need for concretization: rather than mapping address instances to data as previous approaches do, our technique maps symbolic address expressions to data, maintaining the possible alternative states resulting from the memory referenced by a symbolic address in a compact, implicit form. Experiments on prominent programs show that MemSight, which we implemented in both Angr and Klee, enables the exploration of states that are unreachable for memory models that perform concretization and provides a performance level comparable with memory models relying on advanced solver theories.
Neural Conversation Model Controllable by Given Dialogue Act Based on Adversarial Learning and Label-aware Objective

Building a controllable neural conversation model (NCM) is an important task. In this paper, we focus on controlling the responses of NCMs by using dialogue act labels of responses as conditions. We introduce an adversarial learning framework for the task of generating conditional responses with a new objective to a discriminator, which explicitly distinguishes sentences by using labels. This change strongly encourages the generation of label-conditioned sentences. We compared the proposed method with some existing methods for generating conditional responses. The experimental results show that our proposed method has higher controllability for dialogue acts even though it has higher or comparable naturalness to existing methods.
Ozone production in dark discharge in oxygen

The apparatus and method of using the DC low current non-self-sustained discharge (dark discharge) in investigation of ozone synthesis is described. For the first time in the dark discharge in oxygen, the ozone production efficiency is measured systematically as a function of gas density and electric field strength, and compared with the corresponding theoretical and experimental results available in the literature. An agreement between the measured and calculated values is achieved in the range of E/N 140-800 Td. The advantages of using the dark discharge in ozone synthesis investigation are brought forth.
Speech rate in the expression of anger: a study with spontaneous speech material

The study of the acoustic expression of emotion is, in general, the analysis of whether prosodic variables such as intonation (F0), speech rate, pauses, rhythm, intensity and duration, are reliable clues for the characterization of the emotional states of the speaker. The present paper aims to verify whether an association exists in Brazilian Portuguese between the basic emotion of “ anger ” and the prosodic variable “ speech rate ” , as the literature often suggests there is for other languages. The corpus consisted of fragments of spontaneous speech recorded from a radio program. The fragments were selected on the basis of a perceptual test. For the production analysis, only excerpts that were identified by more than 75% of the participants of the perceptual test as associated to the categories “anger” and “neutral” were selected. The results demonstrated that, for the data that were used for the analysis, there is a general reduction in speech rate when utterances are associated with the emotion of “anger”, if compared to utterances spoken in a “neutral” mode by the same speaker, contrary to what literature often indicates for other languages.