Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Candidate biochemical markers for screening of pre-eclampsia in early pregnancy

Abstract Pre-eclampsia (PE) and other hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) are a leading cause of adverse outcomes. Their pathophysiology remains elusive, hampering the development of efficient prevention. The onset of HDP and PE and the severity of their clinical manifestations are heterogeneous. The advent of preventive measures, such as low-dose aspirin that targets high-risk women, emphasizes the need of better prediction. Until recently, only environmental information and maternal risk factors were considered, with equivocal predictive value. No validated screening procedures were available to identify at-risk women despite the emergence of Doppler ultrasonography parameters for the uterine artery (e.g., pulsatility index and bilateral notching) and pathophysiological biochemical markers (e.g., angiogenesis, inflammation, and endothelial dysfunction). Owing to its heterogeneity and lack of specific, sensitive markers among those studied so far (>200), PE is unlikely to be detected early by a single predictive parameter. Systematic reviews have concluded that no single test fulfilling World Health Organization criteria for biomarker selection can diagnose/predict a disease. However, by combining antenatal risk factors, clinical parameters, as well as biophysical and biochemical markers into multivariate algorithms, the risk of PE can be estimated with performance levels that could reach clinical utility. Performance characteristics of selected algorithms will be presented and discussed with respect to transferability to different geographic and healthcare environments.
Where sociality and relatedness diverge: the genetic basis for hierarchical social organization in African elephants

Hierarchical properties characterize elephant fission–fusion social organization whereby stable groups of individuals coalesce into higher order groups or split in a predictable manner. This hierarchical complexity is rare among animals and, as such, an examination of the factors driving its emergence offers unique insight into the evolution of social behaviour. Investigation of the genetic basis for such social affiliation demonstrates that while the majority of core social groups (second-tier affiliates) are significantly related, this is not exclusively the case. As such, direct benefits received through membership of these groups appear to be salient to their formation and maintenance. Further analysis revealed that the majority of groups in the two higher social echelons (third and fourth tiers) are typically not significantly related. The majority of third-tier members are matrilocal, carrying the same mtDNA control region haplotype, while matrilocality among fourth-tier groups was slightly less than expected at random. Comparison of results to those from a less disturbed population suggests that human depredation, leading to social disruption, altered the genetic underpinning of social relations in the study population. These results suggest that inclusive fitness benefits may crystallize elephant hierarchical social structuring along genetic lines when populations are undisturbed. However, indirect benefits are not critical to the formation and maintenance of second-, third- or fourth-tier level bonds, indicating the importance of direct benefits in the emergence of complex, hierarchical social relations among elephants. Future directions and conservation implications are discussed.
Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory

Acknowledgements. Preface to the Second Edition. 1. Feminism and Theory. 2. Principles of Poststructuralism. 3. Feminist Poststructuralism and Psychoanalysis. 4. Language and Subjectivity. 5. Discourse, Power and Resistance. 6. Feminist Critical Practice. 7. Feminism and Postmodernism. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms in Community-Dwelling Elderly Persons with Cognitive Impairment and Dementia

Abstract Background: Our objective was to describe the frequency of behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) in community-dwelling elderly adults with cognitive impairment and to determine whether these symptoms and behaviours assemble into distinct, clinically relevant categories. Methods: BPSD were measured using the Dysfunctional Behaviour Rating Instrument (DBRI). Principal components analysis was used to detect effects in caregiver responses in the DBRI. Results: The DBRI was scored on 921 patients. The frequency of individual BPSD ranged from 20% (spouse not spouse) to 83% (repeating questions). The frequency of BPSD increased with decline in cognitive function. Behaviours sorted into five broad domains: Anger, Delusions/Paranoia, Withdrawn/Wandering, Agitation, and Repetitive Behaviours. Conclusions: BPSD are common in community-dwelling elderly persons with memory loss and may be aggregated into distinct, clinically relevant categories.
Stable Oligomeric Clusters of Gold Nanoparticles: Preparation, Size Distribution, Derivatization, and Physical and Biological Properties

Reducing dilute aqueous HAuCl4 with NaSCN under alkaline conditions produces 2–3 nm diameter yellow nanoparticles without the addition of extraneous capping agents. We here describe two very simple methods for producing highly stable oligomeric grape-like clusters (oligoclusters) of these small nanoparticles. The oligoclusters have well-controlled diameters ranging from ∼5 to ∼30 nm, depending mainly on the number of subunits in the cluster. Our first [“delay-time”] method controls the size of the oligoclusters by varying from seconds to hours the delay time between making the HAuCl4 alkaline and adding the reducing agent, NaSCN. Our second [“add-on”] method controls size by using yellow nanoparticles as seeds onto which varying amounts of gold derived from “hydroxylated gold”, Na+[Au(OH4–x)Clx]−, are added-on catalytically in the presence of NaSCN. Possible reaction mechanisms and a simple kinetic model fitting the data are discussed. The crude oligocluster preparations have narrow size distributions, and for most purposes do not require fractionation. The oligoclusters do not aggregate after ∼300-fold centrifugal-filter concentration, and at this high concentration are easily derivatized with a variety of thiol-containing reagents. This allows rare or expensive derivatizing reagents to be used economically. Unlike conventional glutathione-capped nanoparticles of comparable gold content, large oligoclusters derivatized with glutathione do not aggregate at high concentrations in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) or in the circulation when injected into mice. Mice receiving them intravenously show no visible signs of distress. Their sizes can be made small enough to allow their excretion in the urine or large enough to prevent them from crossing capillary basement membranes. They are directly visible in electron micrographs without enhancement, and can model the biological fate of protein-like macromolecules with controlled sizes and charges. The ease of derivatizing the oligoclusters makes them potentially useful for presenting pharmacological agents to different tissues while controlling escape of the reagents from the circulation.
A new 4G architecture providing multimode terminals always best connected services

In recent years, wireless communication technology has undergone a tremendous change. Various radio access technologies have been deployed all over the world. The 4G mobile system was proposed to integrate all of these radio access technologies into a common network called the open wireless architecture (OWA) platform. As one of the main features of a 4G mobile system, always best connected (ABC) services enable users to choose the best available access networks in a way that best suits their needs. A new architecture capable of supporting ABC service is proposed in this study. There are three parts to the proposed architecture. First, a novel access discovery mechanism that integrates service location protocol and location-based service is presented. Second, a new personalized network selection scheme is put forward. Users can select their personalized "best" network by changing weight factors and constraints in a single objective optimization problem. Third, a seamless handover mechanism based on Mobile IPv6 is proposed. The mechanism supports end-to-end quality of service. Through analysis, this architecture demonstrates that it has benefits not only for network operators, but also for users
Dignity in dementia: A personal view

I have Alzheimer’s disease. I write from my own personal experiences and about events that have happened to me. From the moment of diagnosis your dignity is vulnerable to being eroded, in small subtle ways and by blatant disregard. My first GP wrote me off, not giving me the dignity of answering questions, not proffering any advice. I have found he is not alone. Once, when my husband was taken to hospital as an emergency, I was coping better than he was, answering all the questions and giving the information required. When they wanted to admit him, he explained his reluctance (explaining about me and my illness). The doctor immediately started to refer to me as ‘a social problem’ and totally ignored me. I ceased to exist for him. It was demoralizing. Why do nurses treat you so offhandedly, discount your difficulties, and seem to enjoy making you feel foolish? I have had nurses who have taken my blood pressure without speaking or acknowledging me: all sly hidden ways of taking away my dignity. At home my dignity is more or less intact. My husband struggles to separate me from the person I was, but I did lose out in the dignity stakes when he let me go out without my teeth and my hair uncombed: he just didn’t see. Of my daughters, my youngest understands me most, and does her best to maintain my dignity. She does my ‘beauty’ treatments (I tell her it’s a lost cause but she cares). In other parts of my life dignity has taken a battering from people who will cross the road to avoid me, who refer to me as ‘that woman with Alzheimer’s’ and not my name, and who don’t look me in the face while talking to me: subtle things but heartbreaking. I have a little laugh when I remember one friend from church, who, after I had forgotten her name a couple of times, said, ‘give me the dignity of remembering my name’, before flouncing off. Did I offend the dignity of the occupants when I went into the gents instead of the ladies, after my eyes misread the symbol? I have become selective about who I reveal my condition to, because it changes attitudes. I’ve become very reluctant to put my dignity on the line. For me dignity is not being treated as if I know nothing. I still have my intelligence. I might process things more slowly, but I can still understand; so please talk to me not over me. Dignity is being able to have opinions and I have plenty of those. Dignity is being treated like any other woman. I still like the same things I used to – fashion, style, babies,
The Tyrosine Kinase c-Src Specifically Binds to the Active Integrin αIIbβ3 to Initiate Outside-in Signaling in Platelets*

Background: β3-bound c-Src initiates outside-in signaling in platelets. Results: After platelet stimulation, β3 binds to the c-Src SH3 domain at a site overlapping with its PPII helix binding site. Conclusion: The interaction of c-Src with β3 requires c-Src activation to vacate the PPII helix binding site. Significance: The mode of c-Src binding to β3 prevents c-Src-mediated signaling in circulating platelets. It is currently believed that inactive tyrosine kinase c-Src in platelets binds to the cytoplasmic tail of the β3 integrin subunit via its SH3 domain. Although a recent NMR study supports this contention, it is likely that such binding would be precluded in inactive c-Src because an auto-inhibitory linker physically occludes the β3 tail binding site. Accordingly, we have re-examined c-Src binding to β3 by immunoprecipitation as well as NMR spectroscopy. In unstimulated platelets, we detected little to no interaction between c-Src and β3. Following platelet activation, however, c-Src was co-immunoprecipitated with β3 in a time-dependent manner and underwent progressive activation as well. We then measured chemical shift perturbations in the 15N-labeled SH3 domain induced by the C-terminal β3 tail peptide NITYRGT and found that the peptide interacted with the SH3 domain RT-loop and surrounding residues. A control peptide whose last three residues where replaced with those of the β1 cytoplasmic tail induced only small chemical shift perturbations on the opposite face of the SH3 domain. Next, to mimic inactive c-Src, we found that the canonical polyproline peptide RPLPPLP prevented binding of the β3 peptide to the RT- loop. Under these conditions, the β3 peptide induced chemical shift perturbations similar to the negative control. We conclude that the primary interaction of c-Src with the β3 tail occurs in its activated state and at a site that overlaps with PPII binding site in its SH3 domain. Interactions of inactive c-Src with β3 are weak and insensitive to β3 tail mutations.
Habitat preference and the marine-speciation paradox

Marine organisms challenge the classical theories of local adaptation and speciation because their planktonic larvae have the potential to maintain high gene flow. The marine–speciation paradox is illustrated by contact zones between incipient species that are so large that allopatric divergence seems unlikely. For this reason any mechanism preventing sympatric larvae of two incipient species from coexisting in the same habitats can be a powerful promoter of speciation. The contact zone between two hybridizing taxa of mussel, Mytilus edulis and M. galloprovincialis, in Europe provides an excellent example. Although the zone itself extends over thousands of kilometres, the opportunities for interbreeding are considerably reduced by the small–scale mosaic structure of the zone, where local patches of each taxon alternate at scales of kilometres or less, in response to locally variable ecological factors. Habitat choice by settling larvae would be a less costly mechanism than post–settlement selection to maintain such a mosaic structure. Unfortunately the role of selective settlement has remained hypothetical because larvae could not be scored by classical genetic markers. PCR markers allowed us to study larvae and settlement in ecologically contrasting sites within the zone. We show that only a subset of the genotypes present in the plankton settle in some sites, and that the adults on these sites show the same genetic bias. Genetically based variation in pre–settlement processes therefore accounts for the ecological segregation observed, though it is not the only factor involved in limiting successful interbreeding. The present dataset also supports previous reports of partial spawning asynchrony.
Optimization of routing algorithm in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted increasing attention and deployment as a high-performance and low cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. Wireless mesh networks have emerged as a potential technology for next-generation wireless networking. WMNs have been widely accepted in the traditional application sectors of ad hoc networks because of their advantages over other wireless networks. With increasing demand for real-time services in the next generation wireless networks, quality-of-service (QoS) based routing offers significant challenges in WMNs. WMNs consist of mesh routers and mesh clients where fixed mesh routers form the multi-hop backbone of the network and it is assumed that each individual mesh client will follow the prescribed protocols. However, these mobile devices, owned by individual users, will likely do what is the most beneficial to their owners, i.e. act ‘selfishly’. Traffic routing plays a critical role in determining the performance of wireless mesh networks. Routing in any network has a great impact on the overall network performance, thus a routing protocol or an algorithm for WMNs should be carefully designed taking into account the specific characteristics of that network. In addition, in wireless networks, serious unfairness can occur between users if the issue is not addressed in the network protocols or algorithms. In this paper, we formulate the problem of routing as a network optimization problem, and present a general LP (linear programming) formulation for modeling the problem. We propose the optimized algorithm for known traffic demand and then explain the performance ratio for this. The routing algorithms derived from these formulations usually claim analytical properties such as optimal resource utilization and throughput fairness. Our simulation results demonstrate that our statistical problem formulation could effectively incorporate the traffic demand uncertainty in routing optimization, and its algorithm outperforms the algorithm which only considers the static traffic demand.
Antibacterial Silver

The antibacterial activity of silver has long been known and has found a variety of applications because its toxicity to human cells is considerably lower than to bacteria. The most widely documented uses are prophylactic treatment of burns and water disinfection. However, the mechanisms by which silver kills cells are not known. Information on resistance mechanisms is apparently contradictory and even the chemistry of Ag+ in such systems is poorly understood. Silver binds to many cellular components, with membrane components probably being more important than nucleic acids. It is difficult to know whether strong binding reflects toxicity or detoxification: some sensitive bacterial strains have been reported as accumulating more silver than the corresponding resistant strain, in others the reverse apparently occurs. In several cases resistance has been shown to be plasmid mediated. The plasmids are reported as difficult to transfer, and can also be difficult to maintain, as we too have found. Attempts to find biochemical differences between resistant and sensitive strains have met with limited success: differences are subtle, such as increased cell surface hydrophobicity in a resistant Escherichia coli. Some of the problems are due to defining conditions in which resistance can be observed. Silver(I) has been shown to bind to components of cell culture media, and the presence of chloride is necessary to demonstrate resistance. The form of silver used must also be considered. This is usually water soluble AgNO3, which readily precipitates as AgCl. The clinically preferred compound is the highly insoluble silver sulfadiazine, which does not cause hypochloraemia in burns. It has been suggested that resistant bacteria are those unable to bind Ag+ more tightly than does chloride. It may be that certain forms of insoluble silver are taken up by cells, as has been found for nickel. Under our experimental conditions, silver complexed by certain ligands is more cytotoxic than AgNO3, yet with related ligands is considerably less toxic. There is evidently a subtle interplay of solubility and stability which should reward further investigation.
Preconditioning for Hessian-Free Optimization

Recently Martens adapted the Hessian-free optimization method for the training of deep neural networks. One key aspect of this approach is that the Hessian is never computed explicitly, instead the Conjugate Gradient(CG) Algorithm is used to compute the new search direction by applying only matrix-vector products of the Hessian with arbitrary vectors. This can be done efficiently using a variant of the backpropagation algorithm. Recent algorithms use diagonal preconditioners to reduce the needed iterations of the CG algorithm. They are used because of their easy calculation and application. Unfortunately in later stages of the optimization these diagonal preconditioners are not as well suited for the inner iteration as they are for the optimization in the earlier stages. This is mostly due to an increased number of elements of the dense Hessian having the same order of magnitude near an optimum. We construct a sparse approximate inverse preconditioner (SPAI) that is used to accelerate the inner iteration especially in the later stages of the optimization. The quality of our preconditioner depends on a predefined sparsity pattern. We apply the knowledge of the pattern of the Gauss-Newton approximation of the Hessian to efficiently construct the needed pattern for our preconditioner which can then be computed efficiently fully in parallel using GPUs. This preconditioner is then applied to a deep auto-encoder test case using different update strategies.
Writeback-aware partitioning and replacement for last-level caches in phase change main memory systems

Phase-Change Memory (PCM) has emerged as a promising low-power main memory candidate to replace DRAM. The main problems of PCM are that writes are much slower and more power hungry than reads, write bandwidth is much lower than read bandwidth, and limited write endurance. Adding an extra layer of cache, which is logically the last-level cache (LLC), can mitigate the drawbacks of PCM. However, writebacks from the LLC might (a) overwhelm the limited PCM write bandwidth and stall the application, (b) shorten lifetime, and (c) increase energy consumption. Cache partitioning and replacement schemes are important to achieve high throughput for multi-core systems. However, we noted that no existing partitioning and replacement policy takes into account the writeback information. This paper proposes two writeback-aware schemes to manage the LLC for PCM main memory systems. Writeback-aware Cache Partitioning (WCP) is a runtime mechanism that partitions a shared LLC among multiple applications. Unlike past partitioning schemes, our scheme considers the reduction in cache misses as well as writebacks. Write Queue Balancing (WQB) replacement policy manages the cache partition of each application intelligently so that the writebacks are distributed evenly among PCM write queues. In this way, applications rarely stall due to unbalanced PCM write traffic among write queues. Our evaluation shows that WCP and WQB result in, on average, 21% improvement in throughput, 49% reduction in PCM writes, and 14% reduction in energy over a state-of-the-art cache partitioning scheme.
Average path length of binary decision diagrams

The traditional problem in binary decision diagrams (BDDs) has been to minimize the number of nodes since this reduces the memory needed to store the BDD. Recently, a new problem has emerged: minimizing the average path length (APL). APL is a measure of the time needed to evaluate the function by applying a sequence of variable values. It is of special significance when BDDs are used in simulation and design verification. A main result of this paper is that the APL for benchmark functions is typically much smaller than for random functions. That is, for the set of all functions, we show that the average APL is close to the maximum path length, whereas benchmark functions show a remarkably small APL. Surprisingly, however, typical functions do not achieve the absolute maximum APL. We show that the parity functions are unique in having that distinction. We show that the APL of a BDD can vary considerably with variable ordering. We derive the APL for various functions, including the AND, OR, threshold, Achilles' heel, and certain arithmetic functions. We show that the unate cascade functions uniquely achieve the absolute minimum APL.