Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CAVE Size Matters: Effects of Screen Distance and Parallax on Distance Estimation in Large Immersive Display Setups

When walking within a CAVE-like system, accommodation distance, parallax, and angular resolution vary according to the distance between the user and the projection walls, which can alter spatial perception. As these systems get bigger, there is a need to assess the main factors influencing spatial perception in order to better design immersive projection systems and virtual reality applications. In this paper, we present two experiments that analyze distance perception when considering the distance toward the projection screens and parallax as main factors. Both experiments were conducted in a large immersive projection system with up to 10-meter interaction space. The first experiment showed that both the screen distance and parallax have a strong asymmetric effect on distance judgments. We observed increased underestimation for positive parallax conditions and slight distance overestimation for negative and zero parallax conditions. The second experiment further analyzed the factors contributing to these effects and confirmed the observed effects of the first experiment with a high-resolution projection setup providing twice the angular resolution and improved accommodative stimuli. In conclusion, our results suggest that space is the most important characteristic for distance perception, optimally requiring about 6- to 7-meter distance around the user, and virtual objects with high demands on accurate spatial perception should be displayed at zero or negative parallax.
Hypoxia-Inducible Factor (HIF) 1α Accumulation and HIF Target Gene Expression Are Impaired after Induction of Endotoxin Tolerance1

The oxygen-sensitive transcription factor hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) is known as the key regulator of hypoxia-induced gene expression. In addition to hypoxia, endotoxins such as bacterial LPS as well as proinflammatory cytokines have been shown to induce HIF-1, suggesting an integrative role for HIF-1 in conditions of hypoxia and inflammation. Cells can become tolerant to endotoxins by repetitive exposure to LPS. Herein, we studied the effect of endotoxin tolerance on HIF-1α accumulation and expression of HIF target genes in human monocytic cells and primary mouse peritoneal macrophages. Tolerant cells had reduced levels of HIF-1α under hypoxia, which was due to lowered levels of HIF-1α mRNA. HIF-1α expression is under control of NF-κB and increased DNA binding of the p52 subunit of NF-κB was found in tolerant cells. Knock down of p52 abolished the effects of endotoxin tolerance on HIF-1α expression, which suggest a negative regulatory role of p52 on HIF-1α transcription during endotoxin tolerance. Endotoxin tolerant cells showed diminished expression of the HIF target genes phosphoglycerate kinase 1 and adrenomedullin and reduced viability under hypoxic conditions, as well as a significantly reduced invasion. Peritoneal macrophages from endotoxin-tolerant mice made showed significantly reduced HIF-1α protein accumulation and subsequent HIF target gene expression. We conclude that endotoxin tolerance impairs HIF-1α induction which reduces the ability of monocytic cells to survive and function under hypoxic conditions.
Examination of the Item Structure of the Alberta Infant Motor Scale

Purpose The Alberta Infant Motor Scale (AIMS) is a screening tool for identifying delayed motor development from birth to 18 months of age. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric structure of the AIMS, including the hierarchical scale of items and the precision for measuring infant ability at different ages. Methods Ninety-seven infants with varying degrees of risk of developmental disability were recruited from three hospitals or from the community in the Chicago metropolitan area. Infants were tested on the AIMS at three, six, nine, and 12 months of age. The hierarchical structure and the range and distribution of item difficulty on the AIMS were analyzed using Rasch psychometric analysis. Results The Rasch analysis confirmed that items for each of the four testing positions (supine, prone, sitting, and standing) were arranged in increasing order of difficulty, but a ceiling effect was present. Gaps exist at six ability levels, indicating low precision of measurement for differentiating among infants after about nine months of age. Conclusions The AIMS shows a ceiling effect, measures infant ability best from three to nine months of age, and has few items available for discriminating among infants after they pass the controlled lowering through standing item. Clinical impressions should be drawn with caution at ages when the precision of measurement is low.
Immunolocalization of Substance P and NK‐1 Receptor in ADIPOSE Stem Cells

Substance P (SP) is a neuropeptide belonging to the thachykinin peptide family. SP, after binding to its receptor, the neurokinin 1 receptor (NK1R), controls several transcription factors such as NF‐κB, hypoxia inducible factor (HIF‐1α), c‐myc, c‐fos, c‐jun, and AP‐1. SP and NK1R have a widespread distribution in both the central and peripheral nervous systems. They are also present in cells not belonging to the nervous system (immune cells, placenta, etc.). SP is located in all body fluids, that is, blood, cerebrospinal fluid, etc., making it ubiquitous throughout the human body. SP and NK1R genes are expressed in the stem cell line TF‐1 and in primary stem cells derived from human placental cord blood. However, to our knowledge, the presence of SP and the NK1R receptor in adipose stem cells (ADSC) is unknown. We demonstrated by immunofluorescence the localization of SP and NK1R in human and rat ADSC. SP and NK1R are located in both the cytoplasm and the nucleus of these cells. The NK1R is higher in the nucleus than in the cytoplasm of ADSCs. By Western blot we demonstrated the presence of different isoforms of NK1R that have different subcellular locations in the ADSC. SP induces proliferation and mitogenesis through NK1R in ADSCs. These findings reported here for the first time suggest an important role for a SP/NK1R system, either as genetic and/or epigenetic factor, in both the cytoplasm and nucleus functions of the ADSCs. J. Cell. Biochem. 118: 4686–4696, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Saliva and Dental Pellicle-A Review

The acquired enamel pellicle is an organic film covering the surfaces of teeth. When this film was first discovered, it was thought to be of embryologic origin. Only in the middle of this century did it become clear that it was acquired after tooth eruption. Initially, the small amounts of material that could be obtained have virtually limited the investigation of pellicle proteins to amino acid analysis. Nevertheless, this technique revealed that the pellicle is mainly proteinaceous and is formed by selective adsorption of salivary proteins on tooth enamel. Later, immunologic techniques allowed for the identification of many salivary and fewer non-salivary proteins as constituents of pellicle. However, to this date, isolation and direct biochemical characterization of in vivo pellicle protein have not been possible, because only a few micrograms can be obtained from a single donor. Therefore, the composition and structure of the acquired enamel pellicle are still essentially unknown. Information on the functions of pellicle has been obtained mainly from in vitro experiments carried out with saliva-coated hydroxyapatite and enamel discs. It was found that pellicle protects enamel by reducing demineralization upon acid challenge. Improved pellicle harvesting procedures and analysis by state-of-the-art proteomics with mass spectroscopy approaches promise to make major inroads into the characterization of enamel pellicle.
Necessary and Sufficient Condition for the Continuity of all Causal Projections with Applications

This paper investigates projections onto the space of causal transfer functions. It gives a complete characterization of the set of functions for which these projections are bounded. This characterization is done in terms of the modulus of continuity of the functions. It is shown that the Riesz projector has the smallest operator norm among all causal projectors, and that the Riesz projector is bounded precisely for those functions for which the modulus of continuity is upper bounded by a regular majorant. Moreover, some consequences of these results for several applications are discussed
Impact of Sustained Use of a Multifaceted Computerized Quality Improvement Intervention for Cardiovascular Disease Management in Australian Primary Health Care

Background We evaluated a multifaceted, computerized quality improvement intervention for management of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in Australian primary health care. After completion of a cluster randomized controlled trial, the intervention was made available to both trial arms. Our objective was to assess intervention outcomes in the post‐trial period and any heterogeneity based on original intervention allocation. Methods and Results Data from 41 health services were analyzed. Outcomes were (1) proportion of eligible population with guideline‐recommended CVD risk factor measurements; and (2) the proportion at high CVD risk with current prescriptions for guideline‐recommended medications. Patient‐level analyses were conducted using generalized estimating equations to account for clustering and time effects and tests for heterogeneity were conducted to assess impact of original treatment allocation. Median follow‐up for 22 809 patients (mean age, 64.2 years; 42.5% men, 26.5% high CVD risk) was 17.9 months post‐trial and 35 months since trial inception. At the end of the post‐trial period there was no change in CVD risk factor screening overall when compared with the end of the trial period (64.7% versus 63.5%, P=0.17). For patients at high CVD risk, there were significant improvements in recommended prescriptions at end of the post‐trial period when compared with the end of the trial period (65.2% versus 56.0%, P<0.001). There was no heterogeneity of treatment effects on the outcomes based on original randomization allocation. Conclusions CVD risk screening improvements were not observed in the post‐trial period. Conversely, improvements in prescribing continued, suggesting that changes in provider and patient actions may take time when initiating medications. Clinical Trial Registration URL: http://www.anzctr. org.au. Unique identifier: 12611000478910.
A multidisciplinary approach in patients with femoral neck fracture on an osteoporotic basis.

INTRODUCTION Osteoporosis is a common affection characterized by a reduction of bone mass that affects mostly women after menopause. It currently leads to fractures, especially of the spine and hip thus enhancing the costs of medical care. There are many factors that contribute to its development, leading to various strategy lines to deal with it. AIM The present study aims at showing how a multidisciplinary, multifactorial approach can be effective in treating and preventing new osteoporotic fractures. MATERIAL AND METHODS The study included 17 patients that had replacement arthroplasty for femoral neck fractures. Bone tissue fragments were obtained from all of them and analyzed by pathology specialists. A dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry exam was also performed on each patient. In the end, the data was collected and processed by rehabilitation experts in order to establish proper therapy. RESULTS The hip fracture incidence was two times more frequent in women than in men, higher in the 71-80-year-old group. By analyzing the bone fragments atrophy could be seen, especially in the femoral neck as well as lamellae and osteon reduction and bone architecture alterations. CONCLUSIONS Surgical or pharmacological treatments alone are not sufficient for handling osteoporosis. Strategies such as preventing falls, a proper diet, treating associated conditions and a well-established exercise program need to be considered. Specialists from several areas such as pathology, orthopedics, endocrinology, internal medicine and rehabilitation should work together to design the best approach to deal with osteoporosis.
Public-private partnerships in health: time for evidence-based policies

In the past two decades, as with other European countries, the United Kingdom has experienced a number of profound changes in financing and institutional arrangements in its health systems, characterised by increased emphasis on mixed financing, with greater use of private funding, reduced reliance on hierarchies for decision-making in favour of flatter management arrangements, progressive expansion of markets and market-like mechanisms for resource allocation, and novel public-private relationships—loosely referred to as public-private partnerships. In practice, the scope and extent of these “partnerships” greatly vary in relation to financing and delivery of healthcare services. There is increased use of private funding for capital projects in the NHS, along with a growth of supplementary voluntary insurance and out-of-pocket payments by citizens. In service delivery, approaches to public-private partnerships have ranged from (i) privatisation of healthcare services previously managed by local or central government (involving the sale or transfer of assets—for example, primary care, pharmacies and dentists), (ii) outsourcing of publicly funded services from the private sector (for example, diagnostic services, elective surgery and management support contracted out to private sector providers), (iii) creation of hybrid organisations (such as private financing and management of capital development projects and estates management while retaining public-sector service delivery), and (iv) transforming or “modernising” work practices in public organisations with the introduction of private-sector management practices (such as performance-related pay and business process re-engineering). Collectively, these structural changes in European health systems and the UK have introduced “quasi-markets” and competition, emphasised “value for money” and encouraged expansion of private-sector involvement in financing and delivery of healthcare services with the aim of boosting health system efficiency and enhancing citizens’ choice of healthcare providers.1 The desire to “reinvent the government”2 by downsizing the state to a set …
Resistance to Changes in Diet

Dietary changes can be difficult to effect both at an individual and at a population level, and even when changes do occur they are often far slower and less pronounced than might be expected. Three possible reason for this situation will be considered: the complexity of food choice and competing influences, attitudinal ambivalence and optimistic bias. Food choice is influenced by a large number of factors, not only health considerations, and therefore it is not surprising that interventions based primarily on health concerns have been ineffective. Another concern is that people do not always have clear-cut attitudes, but rather can be ambivalent about foods and about healthy eating, and this factor might impact on the translation of beliets and attitudes into behaviour. A third possible reason is optimistic bias, where individuals believe themselves to be at less risk from various hazards than is the average person. This effect has been demonstrated for nutritional risks, and this factor might lead people to take less note of health education messages. The stages-of-change model from health psychology has been proposed as a method for improving the effectiveness of behaviour change interventions. However, there are a number of problems in transferring such a model from smoking, where it was originally developed, to dietary behaviours, including the lack of clear-cut specific behaviours and behaviour change targets in the dietary field.
Depression in recently bereaved prepubertal children.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to ascertain depressive symptoms in recently bereaved prepubertal children and compare these symptoms with those of depressed prepubertal children. METHOD The subjects were 38 children who had recently experienced the death of one but not both of their parents. They had to meet strict inclusion criteria so that the effects of bereavement per se, rather than other significant stressors, could be assessed. The comparison group consisted of 38 hospitalized, depressed children individually matched to each bereaved subject for age, sex, and socioeconomic status. All of the children underwent systematic and comprehensive evaluation. They and their parents were independently evaluated by trained interviewers using the parent and child versions of the Diagnostic Interview for Children and Adolescents. Family histories and basic demographic information were also obtained. RESULTS The recently bereaved children endorsed many depressive symptoms. Thirty-seven percent of them met the DSM-III-R criteria for a major depressive episode. The depressed children, however, had more depressive symptoms on average than the bereaved children. The factors associated with increased depressive symptoms in the bereaved children were 1) the mother as the surviving parent, 2) preexisting untreated psychiatric disorder in the child, 3) family history of depression, and 4) high socioeconomic status. CONCLUSIONS A considerable number of the bereaved children developed the clinical symptoms of a major depressive episode immediately after the death of a parent. The relation of these symptoms to the subsequent course of grief and to major depressive disorder remains unknown and should be studied further.
Object manipulation in virtual environments: human bias, consistency and individual differences

This paper investigates human bias, consistency and individual differences when performing object manipulation in a virtual environment. Eight subjects were asked to manipulate a wooden cube to match a 3-D graphic target cube presented in 3 locations and 2 orientations. There were two visual conditions for the experiment: the subject performed the tasks with or without vision of the hand and the wooden cube. The constant errors of object translation and orientation suggested specific human biases. In terms of the variable errors, visual feedback appeared to be more critical for object transportation than object orientation. It was also found that individual differences were more pronounced in human bias than in consistency during object manipulation. These results suggest tolerance for human bias and variability should be accommodated in human-computer interface design.
Spinose ear tick, Otobius megnini, attached to the conjunctiva of a child's eye.

mia induced during murine infection. Exp. Parasitol. 41: 415-422. SMITHERS, S. 1967. The induction and nature of antibody responses to parasites. In Immunologic aspects of parasitic infections. Pan American Health Organization Scientific Publication No. 150, pp. 43-49. SUZUKI, T. , AND R. T. DAMIAN. 1981. Schistosoia induced during murine infection. Exp. Parmiasis mansoni in baboons IV. The development of antibodies to Schistosoma mansoni adult worm, egg, and cercarial antigens during acute and chronic infections. Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg. 30: 825-835. WARREN, K. , D. BORos, L. HANG, AND A. MAHOUD. 1975. The Schistosoma japonicum egg granuloma. Am. J. of Pathol. 80: 279-294.
Oblique Radial Glial Divisions in the Developing Mouse Neocortex Induce Self-Renewing Progenitors outside the Germinal Zone That Resemble Primate Outer Subventricular Zone Progenitors

Radial glia cells function as neural stem cells in the developing brain and generate self-renewing and differentiating daughter cells by asymmetric cell divisions. During these divisions, the apical process or basal process of the elongated epithelial structure is asymmetrically partitioned into daughter cells, depending on developmental contexts. However, in mammalian neurogenesis, the relationship between these subcellular structures and self-renewability is largely unknown. We induced oblique cleavages of radial glia cells to split the apical and basal processes into two daughters, and investigated the fate and morphology of the daughters in slice cultures. We observed that the more basal daughter cell that inherits the basal process self-renews outside of the ventricular zone (VZ), while the more apical daughter cell differentiates. These self-renewing progenitors, termed “outer VZ progenitors,” retain the basal but not the apical process, as recently reported for the outer subventricular zone (OSVZ) progenitors in primates (Fietz et al., 2010; Hansen et al., 2010); to self-renew, they require clonal Notch signaling between sibling cells. We also found a small endogenous population of outer VZ progenitors in the mouse embryonic neocortex, consistent with a low frequency of oblique radial glia divisions. Our results describe the general role of the basal process in the self-renewal of neural progenitors and implicate the loss of the apical junctions during oblique divisions as a possible mechanism for generating OSVZ progenitors. We propose that mouse outer VZ progenitors, induced by oblique cleavages, provide a model to study both progenitor self-renewal and OSVZ progenitors.
PHOTONIC STRUCTURES BASED ON SLOT WAVEGUIDES FOR NANOSENSORS: STATE OF THE ART AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

This review presents the state-of-the-art of Bio-Chemical nanosensors based on silicon Photonics. SOI (Silicon on Insulator) technology offers a number of guiding structures such as slot, rib, strip and silicon wire waveguides. We discuss many sensing principles employed in optical detection, such as absorbance, reflectance, fluorescence, chemiluminescence, bioluminescence and refractive index (RI) measurement. The integration of ultra high sensitive photonic waveguides in interferometer architectures (e.g. Mach Zehnder interferometer) and resonant architectures (e.g. ring resonator, Fabry Perot cavity), allow the detection of ultra low traces of chemical/biochemical analytes and gases. Sensing performance of photonic nanosensors based on silicon Photonics are very attractive, exhibiting ultra high sensitivity and low limit of detection (i.e. pg/mL, pmol/L). Intensive research in this field is motivated by broad applications of photonic sensors in healthcare, environmental monitoring, homeland security, food industry, pharmaceuticals, which require sensitive and rapid analytical tools.
L'étude de l'influence du contexte sur la poursuite oculaire

La poursuite est un mouvement oculaire qui permet de suivre un objet qui se deplace de maniere lente et continue dans notre environnement. Les recherches ont demontre que ce mouvement est sous-tendu par la contribution simultanee de signaux lies a l'image de la cible et du contexte visuel sur la retine, de signaux extra retiniens refletant l'implication de mecanismes cognitifs et de la copie d'efference, ainsi que de la mise en jeu de processus d'inhibition et de suppression de certains signaux lies au contexte visuel. Cette combinaison dynamique permet au systeme de s'adapter et de maintenir le mouvement de poursuite dans une grande variete de contextes. Si la presence et la selection d'un signal de mouvement dans l'environnement est consideree comme une condition sine qua none au declenchement et au maintien de la poursuite, certaines observations depuis les annees 70 nuancent ce postulat. Afin d'approfondir la comprehension des mecanismes sous-jacent au maintien de la poursuite apres disparition du signal de mouvement et de questionner la nature des signaux sensoriels conduisant a la generation de poursuite, mon travail de these a porte sur l'etude de l'influence de deux contextes specifiques. Ces deux contextes, l'un visuel l'autre auditif, partagent la propriete d'etre correles au mouvement oculaire genere par l'individu. De fait, ces contextes fournissent un signal nouveau porteur d'une information sur le mouvement en cours. Dans differentes configurations de visibilite de la cible, nous avons etudies l'influence de ces contextes sur le maintien de la poursuite, et sur la generation volontaire de mouvements oculaires lisses et continus.