Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-Field MR Imaging Impairment, and Normal Aging, Using Alzheimer Disease, Mild Cognitive Assessment of the Virchow-Robin Spaces in

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: VRSs are the perivascular spaces surrounding the deep perforating arteries in the brain. Although VRS variations with age and disease pathologies have been reported previously, the radiologic characteristics of the VRS in relation to AD are poorly understood. This study investigated the prevalence, spatial distribution, and severity of the VRS in AD, MCI, and older adults who were CN. It also investigated the relationship of the VRS to white matter changes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Structural MR imaging data were acquired from 158 participants (AD (cid:1) 37, MCI (cid:1) 71, CN (cid:1) 50, mean age (cid:1) 74.97 (cid:2) 7.20 years) who had undergone T1WI at 3T. The severity of VRS in the white matter, basal ganglia, hippocampus, and brain stem structures was evaluated by using a semiquantitative scale, adapted from existing rating scales. A VRS total score summarizing the subscales was calculated to assess the whole-brain VRSs. RESULTS: VRSs were observed in multiple brain regions of all participants, typically presented as (cid:3) 2-mm well-margined symmetric round, oval-and linear-shaped hypointensities on T1WI. The VRS total score increased with leukoaraiosis, atrophy, and advanced age ( P (cid:3) . 001). Individuals with AD and MCI showed greater levels of VRS than control subjects. The VRS total score discriminated individuals with AD and those who were CN with an accuracy of 0.79 (95% CI, 0.69–0.89). CONCLUSIONS: VRSs are common in older adults and are more severe in AD and MCI than in CN. Whether increased VRSs can be reliably used to aid in AD diagnosis warrants further investigation. ABBREVIATIONS:
Black-Litterman Portfolio Optimization Using Gaussian Process Regression

—The Black-Litterman portfolios based on the predictions provided by Gaussian Process are constructed in this study. Besides the expert views generated by the Gaussian Process, an customized algorithm quantifying the confidence level of the given investor opinions is also designed, which can be inputted into the Black-Litterman framework to revise the posterior parameters estimations. Low-risk anomaly is observed from the numerical experiments through the grouping method base on stock β , demonstrating the potential irrationality for even giant companies and brands on the advanced market. Empirical analysis shows that Gaussian Process is able to model the low β stock effectively, while not feasible for stocks with high volatility. Thus, the proposed BLGPlo portfolio outperform the benchmarks in terms of cumulative excess return and Sharpe ratio. Moreover, the BLGPlo performance can be further improved by allocating higher confidence level for the Gaussian Process-derived investor opinions.
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Universal Scale of Intelligence -Estimated (USIE): Representing intelligence estimated from level of education

patient’s premorbid level. This is universally applicable, also in case of severe impairments. Moreover, the normative data of many neuropsychological tests are stratified by level of education, whereas only few tests can be corrected for (premorbid) IQ (Lezak et al., 2012). This has led to frequent use of “level of education” to represent a patient’s premorbid cognitive abilities in the diagnostic process.
Developing a sustainable food strategy for large organizations: The importance of context in shaping procurement and consumption practices

Organizations such as hospitals, educational institutions and workplaces feed thousands of people every day and are key intermediaries in the food system. They are in a position to significantly shape the production, processing and distribution of food as well as food-related practices of large groups. These activities have a significant impact on sustainable development, the global economy and health and wellbeing. Using a qualitative approach that draws on 21 interviews with key decision-makers based in 8 large national and multi-national organizations, this research examines the most important contextual factors that influence food provisioning across organizations. The study identifies opportunities and constraints for improving food sustainability that are likely to apply within and across different organizational contexts, and provides recommendations for implementing a sustainable food strategy. The findings provide interesting theoretical insights and have practical implications that are relevant for practitioners, business managers and sustainability consultants.
Cytokines in asthma

The airway inflammation underlying asthma is regulated by a network of mutually interacting cytokines. The exact functional role of each individual cytokine in the pathogenesis of the disease remains to be fully established. Type 2 T‐helper cells are currently considered to play a crucial role in this process. In vivo animal data suggest a sequential involvement of interleukin (IL)‐4 and IL‐5 in the induction of allergen-induced airway changes. The potential role of other type 2 T‐helper cell-like cytokines in asthma is increasingly being recognized. In particular, IL‐4 and -13 display a large degree of redundancy. Whereas IL‐4 seems to be crucial in the primary allergen sensitization process, IL-13 might be more important during secondary exposure to aerosolized allergen. Animal models also indicate that T‐cell-derived cytokine production, rather than eosinophil influx or immunoglobulin‐E synthesis, is causally related to altered airway behaviour. An important aspect when evaluating the functional role of cytokines in a complex disease such as asthma is the interaction with other cytokines in the microenvironment. Increased expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as tumour necrosis factor‐α can further enhance the inflammatory process, and is increasingly linked to disease severity. In addition, decreased expression of immunoregulatory cytokines, including interleukin-12, interleukin-18 or interferon gamma could also strengthen the type 2 T‐helper cell-driven inflammatory process.
Automatic animacy classification for Dutch

We present an automatic animacy classifier for Dutch that can determine the animacy status of nouns -- how alive the noun's referent is (human, inanimate, etc.). Animacy is a semantic property that has been shown to play a role in human sentence processing, felicity and grammaticality. Although animacy is not marked explicitly in Dutch, we expect knowledge about animacy to be helpful for parsing, translation and other NLP tasks. Only a few animacy classifiers and animacy- annotated corpora exist internationally. For Dutch, animacy information is only available in the Cornetto lexical-semantic database. We augment this lexical information with context information from the Dutch Lassy Large treebank, to create training data for an animacy classifier that uses a novel kind of context features. We use the k-nearest neighbour algorithm with distributional lexical features, e.g. how frequently the noun occurs as a subject of the verb `to think' in a corpus, to decide on the (pre-dominant) animacy class. The size of the Lassy Large corpus makes this possible, and the high level of detail these word association features provide, results in accurate Dutch-language animacy classification.
Collective Action by Contract: Prior Appropriation and the Development of Irrigation in the Western United States

We analyze the economic characteristics of prior-appropriation water rights adopted across the US West in the 19th century. Much of the region’s massive irrigation infrastructure was developed by private irrigators. We develop a model to show how prior appropriation facilitated investment by securing water against future claims and defining a property right to a specific amount of water that was the basis for contracting among numerous heterogeneous agents. We construct a data set of over 7,000 water rights in Colorado from 1852 to 2013, including location, date, size, infrastructure investment, irrigated acreage, and geographic characteristics to test the predictions of the model. We find that prior appropriation facilitated cooperation through contracting, increasing infrastructure investment, and promoting irrigated agriculture that contributed up to 16 percent of western states’ income by 1930. Areas with preexisting norms for supporting collective action exhibit smaller differences in investment based on formal contracts.
The VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey. VIII. Multiplicity properties of the O-type star population

Context. The Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud is our closest view of a starburst region and is the ideal environment to investigate important questions regarding the formation, evolution and final fate of the most massive stars. Aims. We analyze the multiplicity properties of the massive O-type star population observed through multi-epoch spectroscopy in the framework of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey. With 360 O-type stars, this is the largest homogeneous sample of massive stars analyzed to date. Methods. We use multi-epoch spectroscopy and variability analysis to identify spectroscopic binaries. We also use a Monte-Carlo method to correct for observational biases. By modeling simultaneously the observed binary fraction, the distributions of the amplitudes of the radial velocity variations and the distribution of the time scales of these variations, we constrain the intrinsic current binary fraction and period and mass-ratio distributions. Results. We observe a spectroscopic binary fraction of 0.35 ± 0.03, which corresponds to the fraction of objects displaying statistically significant radial velocity variations with an amplitude of at least 20 km s-1. We compute the intrinsic binary fraction to be 0.51 ± 0.04. We adopt power-laws to describe the intrinsic period and mass-ratio distributions: f(log 10P/d) ~ (log 10P/d)π (with log 10P/d in the range 0.15−3.5) and f(q) ~ qκ with 0.1 ≤ q = M2/M1 ≤ 1.0. The power-law indexes that best reproduce the observed quantities are π = −0.45 ± 0.30 and κ = −1.0 ± 0.4. The period distribution that we obtain thus favours shorter period systems compared to an Opik law (π = 0). The mass ratio distribution is slightly skewed towards low mass ratio systems but remains incompatible with a random sampling of a classical mass function (κ = −2.35). The binary fraction seems mostly uniform across the field of view and independent of the spectral types and luminosity classes. The binary fraction in the outer region of the field of view (r > 7.8′, i.e. ≈117 pc) and among the O9.7 I/II objects are however significantly lower than expected from statistical fluctuations. The observed and intrinsic binary fractions are also lower for the faintest objects in our sample (Ks > 15.5 mag), which results from observational effects and the fact that our O star sample is not magnitude-limited but is defined by a spectral-type cutoff. We also conclude that magnitude-limited investigations are biased towards larger binary fractions. Conclusions. Using the multiplicity properties of the O stars in the Tarantula region and simple evolutionary considerations, we estimate that over 50% of the current O star population will exchange mass with its companion within a binary system. This shows that binary interaction is greatly affecting the evolution and fate of massive stars, and must be taken into account to correctly interpret unresolved populations of massive stars.
Bacterial endometritis: a focus on biofilms

Treatment of chronic bacterial endometritis with antimicrobials is often unsuccessful. Bacteria have developed multiple mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance, including the production of biofilm. Biofilms are an extracellular matrix produced by a community of bacteria that provide antimicrobial resistance through prevention of antibiotic diffusion into the community of bacteria, a decrease in the metabolism of bacteria that increase their resistance to antimicrobial agents, and ultimately cultivate a population of ‘persister cells’ that are multi-drug resistant. Additionally biofilms prevent recognition of the infection by the host immune system by altering the movement and function of white blood cells, and preventing antibodies from binding to bacteria. Treatment with buffered chelators or hydrogen peroxide is unable to routinely disrupt in vitro preformed biofilms.
Self-reported and physiological reactions to the third BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 (booster) vaccine dose 2 Running title: Reactions to the third Pfizer COVID-19 (booster) vaccine

Background : The rapid rise in hospitalizations associated with the Delta-driven COVID- 16 19 resurgence, and the imminent risk of hospital overcrowding, led the Israeli government 17 to initialize a national third (booster) COVID-19 vaccination campaign in early August 18 2021, offering the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine to individuals who received their second 19 dose over five months ago. However, the safety of the third (booster) dose has not been 20 fully established yet. Objective : Evaluate the short-term, self-reported and physiological reactions to the third BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 (booster) vaccine dose. 23 Design : A prospective observational study, in which participants are equipped with a 24 smartwatch and fill in a daily questionnaire via a dedicated mobile application for a period 25 of 21 days, starting seven days before the vaccination. 26 Setting : An Israel-wide third (booster) vaccination campaign. Participants : A group of 1,609 (18+ years of age) recipients of at least one dose of the 28 BNT162b2 vaccine between December 20, 2020, and September 15, 2021, out of a larger 29 cohort of 2,912 prospective study participants. 1,344 of the participants were recipients of 30 the third vaccine dose. Measurements : Daily self-reported questionnaires regarding local and systemic reactions, mood level, stress level, sport duration, and sleep quality. Heart rate, heart rate variability 33 and blood oxygen saturation level were continuously measured by Garmin Vivosmart 4 smartwatches. Results : The extent of systemic reactions reported following the third (booster) dose 36 administration is similar to that reported following the second dose (p-value=0.305) and reuse
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) ` 3,5-bisphosphate production has pleiotropic effects on various membrane trafficking routes in Arabidopsis

Phosphoinositides play an important role in various membrane trafﬁcking events in eukaryotes. One of them, however, phosphatidylinositol 3,5-bisphosphate [PI(3,5)P 2 ], has not been studied widely in plants. Using a combination of ﬂuorescent reporter proteins and the PI(3,5)P 2 -speciﬁc inhibitor YM202636, here we demonstrated that in Arabidopsis thaliana , PI(3,5)P 2 affects various membrane trafﬁcking events, mostly in the post-Golgi routes. We found that YM201636 treatment effectively reduced PI(3,5)P 2 concentration not only in the wild type but also in FAB1A -overexpressing Arabidopsis plants. In particular, reduced PI(3,5)P 2 levels caused abnormal membrane dynamics of plasma membrane proteins, AUX1 and BOR1, with different trafﬁcking patterns. Secretion and morphological characteristics of late endosomes and vacuoles were also affected by the decreased PI(3,5)P 2 production. These pleiotropic defects in the post-Golgi trafﬁcking events were caused by the inhibition of PI(3,5)P 2 production. This effect is probably mediated by the inhibition of maturation of FAB1-positive late endosomes, thereby impairing late endo-some function. In conclusion, our results imply that in Arabidopsis, late endosomes are involved in multiple post-Golgi membrane trafﬁcking routes including not only vacuolar trafﬁcking and endocytosis but also secretion.
Securing America's Passenger Rail Systems

This report discusses the need for passenger rail security in the United States - both for rail transit systems and passenger railroads, such as Amtrak - and possible security measures that can be taken to increase passenger rail security. It examines cost effective strategies for managing and mitigating the risk of terrorist attacks to rail passengers. The report addresses the reduction of vulnerabilities and also how to limit consequences of attacks.
Filamentous iron-silica deposits from modern and ancient hydrothermal sites

Numerous sam.Fles of iron oxide/silica material from sites on the East Pacific Rise, Juan de Fuca,/Explorer Ridges, and other areas are porous and consist of branching filaments of iron oxide and amorphous silica (opal A). A simiIar flamentous microtexture characterizes cherts associated with terrestrial sulfides of oceanic origin. Observation of zonation within these deposits and consideration of conditions necessary for the precipitation of iron oxide and opal A lead us to propose that filamentous structures existed on the seafloor prior to mineral deposition. The presence of organic matter and identifiable filamentous bacteria in one sample suggest hat the iron and silica were deposited in association with filamentous microorganisms. These observations are discussed in light of recent reports of bacterial biocatalysis of mineral precipitation at submarine hydrothermal sites.
Polyamine metabolism and activation of lipid signalling pathways in Arabidopsis

Lipidomic analyses through LC, GC, and ESI-MS/MS can detect numerous lipid species based on head group and fatty acid compositions but usually miss the minor phospholipids involved in cell signalling because of their low chemical abundancy. Due to their high turnover, these signaling lipids are, however, readily picked up by labeling plant material with 32 P-orthophosphate and subsequent analysis of the lipid extracts by thin layer chromatography. Here, protocols are described for suspension-cultured tobacco BY-2 cells, young Arabidopsis seedlings, Vicia faba roots, and Arabidopsis leaf disks, which can easily be modified for other plant species and tissues.
Open-Ocean Convection in the Labrador and Greenland Seas: Plume Scales and Interannual Variability

Observations at moored stations from the Labrador and Greenland Seas are analyzed under two major aspects: the interannual variability of convection and its relation to variability of the hydrographic, meteorological, and ice conditions, and the spatial and velocity scales of individual convective plumes compared to existing scaling arguments derived from numerical and laboratory experiments. The observations were carried out in the Labrador Sea between 1994 and 1999 and in the Greenland Sea between 1988 and 1995. The convection activity observed showed considerable interannual variability throughout the observational period, but no seesaw behavior correlated with the North Atlantic Oscillation index. In the Labrador Sea, the maximum depth of convection decreased from about 1800~m in 1995 to only 600~m in 1999. The water mass properties of the winter mixed layer shifted towards warmer and less saline conditions. A general warming of the upper 2000~m was observed. Evidence for convection activity in the Labrador Sea boundary current region could not be found. The measurements were analyzed for individual events of convective plumes. During periods of intense convection activity in the Labrador Sea, it was possible to directly measure the vertical heat flux. The observed velocity scales were found to be a function of the surface buoyancy flux and the mixed layer depth and not controlled by the Earth's rotation.
humans. MR diffusion imaging of cerebral infarction in

Purpose: MR diffusion imaging was performed to investigate changes in water diffusion in patients with cerebral infarction. Methods: Diffusion maps of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) were created to show local water mobility in the brain tissue in 15 patients. These ADC maps were compared with conventional T2-weighted images. Results: Distinct subregions with different water diffusions were detected, even when the infarcted area appeared homogeneous on a T2-weighted image. The results also show that stroke lesions of the same age can have very different water diffusions. A trend towards an increasing diffusion coefficient in a lesion during the first several days following an acute event was observed in a group of patients imaged at multiple timepoints. Conclusion: The measurement of diffusion coefficients in vivo now offers an opportunity for greater understanding of the biophysical changes that occur during the evolution of infarction in humans.
Prevalence of carbapenemases among Gram-negative bacteria in Tunisia: first report of KPC-2 producing Acinetobacter baumannii.

INTRODUCTION The rapid evolution of the antibacterial resistance problem worldwide, including the Mediterranean countries, constitutes a real threat to public health. This study aims to characterize carbapenemase encoding genes among Gram-negative bacteria collected from some Tunisian hospitals. METHODOLOGY Twenty-two clinical carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative bacteria were recovered, and identified by the matrix assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) method. Antibiotic resistance was tested by disk diffusion method on Muller-Hinton Agar. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for imipenem was revealed by the E-test method. Carbapenemase encoding genes were screened by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Genetic relatedness was performed by the pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) method. RESULTS Our isolates, identified as K. pneumoniae (n = 7), P. mirabilis (n = 1), A. baumannii (n = 13), and P. aeruginosa (n = 1), presented high MIC values for imipenem. Enterobacerales were resistant to carbapenems due to OXA-48 production. Only, four K. pneumoniae harbored the blaNDM-1 gene. VIM-2 production was detected in P. aeruginosa. However, OXA-23 production was observed in A. baumannii isolates, one of which co-produced the KPC-2 enzyme that was identified for the first time in Tunisia in this species. A high genetic diversity was demonstrated by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis in K. pneumoniae and A. baumannii after XbaI and ApaI digestion respectively. CONCLUSIONS Our findings highlight the spread of various unrelated clones of carbapenemase-producers in some Tunisian hospitals as well as the spread of several carbapenemase types.
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) URLs can facilitate machine learning classification of news stories across languages and contexts

Comparative scholars studying political news content at scale face the challenge of addressing multiple languages. While many train individual supervised machine learning classifiers for each language, this is a costly and time-consuming process. We propose that instead of relying on thematic labels generated by manual coding, researchers can use ‘distant’ labels created by cues in article URLs. Sections reflected in URLs (e.g., nytimes.com/politics/) can therefore help create training material for supervised machine learning classifiers. Using cues provided by news media organizations, such an approach allows for efficient political news identification at scale while facilitating implementation across languages. Using a dataset of approximately 870,000 URLs of news-related content from four countries (Italy, Germany, Netherlands, and Poland), we test this method by providing a comparison to ‘classical’ supervised machine learning and a multilingual BERT model, across four news topics. Our results suggest that the use of URL section cues to distantly annotate texts provides a cheap and easy-to-implement way of classifying large volumes of news texts that can save researchersmanyvaluableresourceswithouthavingtosacrificequality.