Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Candida rugosa in immunocompromised infection case reports, drug susceptibility, and review of the literature

Candida rugosa was isolated from two patients. One patient had acute leukemia and developed invasive disease due to this yeast on two occasions while granulocytopenic. Her infection was eventually cured after treatment with amphotericin B. In another immunocompromised patient, the yeast was isolated from the sputum in the presence of a pulmonary infiltrate, but there was no other evidence for a pathogenic role. Antifungal susceptibility testing of the first patient's isolate and three environmental isolates showed all four to be susceptible to amphotericin B, miconazole, and flucytosine, and only the patient isolate was resistant to ketoconazole. These results suggest possibilities for therapy in future encounters. It appears that C. rugosa, a common pathogen in cattle, can be pathogenic in humans under the appropriate circumstances.
Knowledge, implicit knowledge and metaknowledge in visual agnosia and pure alexia.

Residual or implicit knowledge has been observed in patients with object agnosia, optic aphasia and pure alexia. Previous investigators have considered implicit knowledge in these patients to be dissociated from awareness on the basis of intact semantic capabilities that are consistent with right hemisphere processing. The absence of explicit verbal identification is presumably dependent upon damaged left hemisphere systems. We describe a 72-year-old woman with a left occipital infarction, object agnosia and pure alexia who was unable to explicitly identify visual stimuli (objects and words), but was able to make reliable judgements of her residual knowledge on forced-choice matching tasks. While the patient could not consistently demonstrate awareness of knowledge prior to stimulus matching ('Do you know what this is? '), she was able to reliably demonstrate awareness of knowledge for response accuracy ('Are you sure? ') assessed after stimulus matching. Further, the extent of the patient's metaknowledge corresponded to her degree of preserved knowledge. We propose that this pattern of performance suggests limited or partial access to preserved semantic knowledge which, though degraded, is not 'non-conscious'.
Stochastic Computing for Reliable Memristive In-Memory Computation

In-Memory Computing (IMC) is a promising computing paradigm to accelerate Big Data applications. It reduces the data movement between memory and processing units, and provides massive parallelism. Memristive technology is one of the promising technologies for IMC. This emerging technology, however, is still in evolution, facing practical challenges. Memristive memories are prone to softerror while storing the data and during computations. The traditional binary encoding commonly used in memristive IMC is highly sensitive to soft-errors, which makes developing reliable memristive IMC more challenging. Stochastic Computing (SC) is a re-emerging computing paradigm that is highly robust against soft-errors as any bit flip leads to only a least significant bit error. In this work, we study SC as a solution to increase the reliability of memristive IMC. We investigate how and to what extent SC may address or improve the reliability issues of current memristive technology, and memristive IMC. We also evaluate the characteristics yielded by memristive stochastic IMC and compare them with those of the traditional reliability techniques.
On the Effects of Batch and Weight Normalization in Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are highly effective unsupervised learning frameworks that can generate very sharp data, even for data such as images with complex, highly multimodal distributions. However GANs are known to be very hard to train, suffering from problems such as mode collapse and disturbing visual artifacts. Batch normalization (BN) techniques have been introduced to address the training. Though BN accelerates the training in the beginning, our experiments show that the use of BN can be unstable and negatively impact the quality of the trained model. The evaluation of BN and numerous other recent schemes for improving GAN training is hindered by the lack of an effective objective quality measure for GAN models. To address these issues, we first introduce a weight normalization (WN) approach for GAN training that significantly improves the stability, efficiency and the quality of the generated samples. To allow a methodical evaluation, we introduce squared Euclidean reconstruction error on a test set as a new objective measure, to assess training performance in terms of speed, stability, and quality of generated samples. Our experiments with a standard DCGAN architecture on commonly used datasets (CelebA, LSUN bedroom, and CIFAR-10) indicate that training using WN is generally superior to BN for GANs, achieving 10% lower mean squared loss for reconstruction and significantly better qualitative results than BN. We further demonstrate the stability of WN on a 21-layer ResNet trained with the CelebA data set. The code for this paper is available at this https URL
Inductive Hashing on Manifolds ∗

Inspired by Theorem 27 of [3], we construct a Prototype Algorithm below. We use m balls to cover Y , thus obtain m disjoint nonempty subsets Y1, Y2, · · · , Ym such that for any > m(Y ), ∀j ∈ {1, · · · ,m},∃cj ∈ R, s.t. ∀y ∈ Yj , ‖cj − y‖ ≤ and ⋃m j=1 Yj = Y . We can see that each Yj naturally forms a cluster with the center cj and the index set Ij = {i|yi ∈ Yj}. Let αi = w(xq,xi) ∑n j=1 w(xq,xj) and Cj = ∑ i∈Ij αi. For each cluster index set Ij , j = 1, · · · ,m, we randomly draw `j = bmCj + 1c many indices from Ij proportional to their weight αi. That is, for μ ∈ {1, · · · , `j}, the μ-th randomly drawn index uj,μ, Pr(uj,μ = i) = αi Cj ,∀j ∈ {1, · · · ,m}.
Precambrian sedimentary environments : a modern approach to ancient depositional systems

Introduction (W. Altermann & P. Corcoran). Introductory Papers. 1. Actualistic Versus Non--Actualistic Conditions In The Precambrian Sedimentary Record: Reappraisal Of An Enduring Discussion (Donaldson, Eriksson And Altermann). 2. The Evolution Of Life And Its Impact On Sedimentation (Altermann). 3. The Significance Of Iron--Formation In The Precambrian Stratigraphic Record (Trendall). 4. The Isotopic Composition Of Precambrian Sulphides -- Seawater Chemistry And Biological Evolution (Strauss). 5. Decimetre--Thick Encrustations Of Calcite And Aragonite On The Sea--Floor And Implications For Neoarchaean And Neoproterozoic Ocean Chemistry (Sumner). Case Studies. 6. The 2.7 -- 2.63 Ga Indin Lake Supracrustal Belt: An Archaean Marginal Basin--Foredeep Succession Preserved In The Western Slave Province, Canada (Pehrsson). 7. Sedimentology Of A Tide-- And--Wave--Influenced High--Energy Archean Coastline: The Jackson Lake Formation, Slave Province, Canada (Mueller, Corcoran And Donaldson). 8. The Effects Of Weathering, Sorting And Source Composition In Archaean High--Relief Basins: Examples From The Slave Province, Northwest Territories, Canada (Corcoran And Mueller). 9. Stratigraphic Evolution Of Archaean Volcanic Rock--Dominated Rift Basins From The Whim Creek Belt, West Pilbara Craton, Western Australia (Pike And Cas). 10. Syn-- And Post--Eruptive Volcaniclastic Sedimentation In Late Archaean Subaqueous Depositional Systems Of The Black Flag Group, Eight Mile Dam, Kalgoorie, Western Australia (Hand Et Al). 11. Sedimentary Environment Of The Amphibolite--Grade Early Proterozoic Keiva And Kukas Basins (North--East Baltic Shield): Normative Mineral MINLITH Analysis (Rosen, Safronov And Abbyasov). 12. Two Meta--Sedimentary Basins In The Early Precambrian Granulites Of The Anabar Shield (Polar Siberia): Normative Mineral Compositions Calculated By The MINLITH Program And Basin Facies Interpretations (Zlobin, Rosen And Abbyasov). 13. Mixed Siliclastic--Carbonate Storm--Dominated Ramp In A Rejuvenated Palaeoproterozoic Intracratonic Basin: Upper Hurwitz Group, Nunavut, Canada (Aspler And Chiarenzelli). 14. Aspects Of Late Palaeoproterozoic Fluvial Style: The Uairen Formation, Roraima Supergroup, Venezuela (Long). 15. Volcanogenic And Sedimentary Rocks Within The Svecofennian Domain, Ylivieska, Western Finland -- An Example Of Palaeoproterozoic Intra--Arc Basin Fill (Strand). 16. Palaeoproterozoic Epeiric Sea Palaeoenvironments: The Silverton Formation (Pretoria Group, Transvaal Supergroup), South Africa (Eriksson Et Al). 17. Facies Sequence And Cryptic Imprint Of Sag Tectonics In The Late Proterozoic Sirbu Shale, Central India (Sarkar Et Al). 18. Sedimentation And Tectonic Setting Of Early Neoproterozoic Glacial Deposits In South--Eastern Brazil (Martins--Neto And Hercos). 19. New Evidence Of Glacial Abrasion Of The Late Proterozoic Unconformity Around Varangerfjorden, Northern Norway (Laajoki)
Quantitative Validation of a Model of Chlorinated Ethene Natural Attenuation

Abstract : Chlorinated ethenes are among the most prevalent groundwater contaminants at hazardous waste sites nationwide. In an attempt to manage the risks posed by these contaminants, while controlling costs, monitored natural attenuation (MNA) is being considered as a remediation strategy at many sites. MNA relies on naturally occurring physical, chemical, and biological processes in the subsurface to reduce the risk posed by the contamination. The implementation of MNA, however, requires a detailed understanding of these processes, and how they impact contamination at a particular site. One way to gain this understanding is through contaminant fate and transport modeling. In this study, a deterministic model that includes relevant fate and transport processes was applied to a chlorinated ethene-contaminated field site, at which spatial and temporal data had been collected. Parameters used for model input were obtained from the literature, experimental data, and by calibrating the model using concentration data from 1993. The model was then run in a predictive mode, and simulation results were compared to field data from 1999. Model performance was measured by comparison of observed and simulated concentration contour plots and evaluation of goodness-of-fit statistics. Over the six years the model was run in a predictive mode, the model was found to predict contaminant concentrations reasonably well for the three contaminants that were monitored.
Neuroscientist’s Embarrassment: Artificial Intelligence’s Opportunity

or brain size corrected for body size. For example, I collected ethograms from the mid-twentieth century ethology literature, and across mammals the number of behaviors in the repertoire strongly correlates with relative brain size (EQ), not with absolute brain size [Changizi 2003, 2007]. As Chittka and Niven suggest, bigger brains may possess ‘more of the same’ of what is found in small brains, and the qualitative enhancements that make some brains ‘smarter’ probably require the evolution of specialized circuits. But we really don’t know. The big embarrassment of neurobiology is that we’re frankly unsure why brain size increases so considerably with body size. Greater surface area of skin and muscle would suggest that somatomotor areas should disproportionately enlarge with body size, but the primary somatosensory area and primary motor area vary in size as expected for a ‘typical’ area [Changizi and Shimojo, 2005]. Although embarrassingly big brains are a thorn in the side to us neuroscientists, while chatting with the IBM representative it struck me that this phenomenon amounts to a fantastic opportunity for artificial intelligence. Implicit in the background assumptions of the SyNAPSE group is that they are aiming to physically construct a cat-sized brain, having already tried their hands at smaller mouse and rat brains. But why aim for a cat-sized brain? Cat-sized brains are for cat-sized bodies, and these artificial intelligence folk aren’t I recently met with a representative of the IBM ‘SyNAPSE’ group, an undertaking of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is aiming to build a cat brain – that is, to build an artificial brain that is broadly cat-like in its physical size, number of neurons and synapes, anatomical structure, and perhaps even its behavioral complexity. There are so many astounding difficulties in such an endeavor that good etiquette didn’t allow me to point them all out, and at any rate, my impression from the meeting was that many of the members of the project appreciate what they’re up against, and have realistic – and low – expectations. But there is one wrench I did pose to the IBM representative, a ‘positive’ wrench. Perhaps they have overestimated the difficulty of building a brain with cat-level behavioral complexity in one critical respect. To begin to understand why this might be, a place to start is the excellent recent review in Neuron by Lars Chittka and Jeremy Niven, titled ‘Are Bigger Brains Better? ’ [Chittka and Niven, 2009]. They cover a wealth of neurobiological knowledge from roundworms to mammals, and the short answer to the question of their title is . no, not much. The strongest driver of brain size is body size, not the behavioral complexity of the animal. Although there is some controversy (e.g. among primates [Deaner et al., 2007]), the best correlations with proxies for an animal’s intelligence tend to be measures of relative brain size, Published online: April 15, 2010
Newcastle Disease Virus as a Vaccine Vector for Development of Human and Veterinary Vaccines

Viral vaccine vectors have shown to be effective in inducing a robust immune response against the vaccine antigen. Newcastle disease virus (NDV), an avian paramyxovirus, is a promising vaccine vector against human and veterinary pathogens. Avirulent NDV strains LaSota and B1 have long track records of safety and efficacy. Therefore, use of these strains as vaccine vectors is highly safe in avian and non-avian species. NDV replicates efficiently in the respiratory track of the host and induces strong local and systemic immune responses against the foreign antigen. As a vaccine vector, NDV can accommodate foreign sequences with a good degree of stability and as a RNA virus, there is limited possibility for recombination with host cell DNA. Using NDV as a vaccine vector in humans offers several advantages over other viral vaccine vectors. NDV is safe in humans due to host range restriction and there is no pre-existing antibody to NDV in the human population. NDV is antigenically distinct from common human pathogens. NDV replicates to high titer in a cell line acceptable for human vaccine development. Therefore, NDV is an attractive vaccine vector for human pathogens for which vaccines are currently not available. NDV is also an attractive vaccine vector for animal pathogens.
Measuring e-Commerce in Net-Enabled Organizations: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Clear and precise metrics are essential for evaluating phenomena such as e-commerce (? Net? -enablement) and the organizational use of networks and the Internet for commercial activities. Researchers require them for theory building and testing; practitioners require them for improving organizational processes. But for IS professionals to engage in the serious creation of metrics, it is critical to recognize:(1) that the phenomenon of net-enablement is an enduring change, probably led in the future by 'brick-cum-click'firms, (2) that some new and old measures need to be differentially applied, and (3) that the papers in this special issue are not the end of metrics creation, but just the beginning.
Bipolar scissor division of tongue‐tie under tubeless anesthesia

INTRODUCTION Children with tongue-tie are frequently referred to the otolaryngologist. The usual reasons for consultation are associated mechanical problems, speech difficulties, parental concern about the tongue’s appearance and, occasionally, suckling problems in infants. Tongue-tie has been accurately defined by Wallace1 as “a condition in which the tip of the tongue cannot be protruded beyond the lower incisor teeth because of a short frenulum linguae. ” It may vary in degree from a very mild form in which the tongue is bound only by a thin mucous membrane and an intermediate form, in which both the frenulum and the underlying fibers of the genioglossus muscle are fibrosed, to the rare variety termed “ankyloglossia” in which the tongue is completely fused to the floor of the mouth. ”:’ Data in the literature suggest that the incidence of tongue-tie ranges from 0.03% in newborns to 0.4% in 4to 5-year-old children presenting to a speech disorders clinic.4 A When indicated, tongue-ties are usually divided with the patient under general endotracheal anesthesia and with the use of scissors followed by hemostasis with sutures or diathermy. We introduce a method for tongue-tie division using scissors that cut and induce bipolar coagulation at the same time. The procedure is performed with the patient under tubeless anesthesia because of the complete hemostasis obtained when using these scissors. MATERIALS AND METHODS General anesthesia is induced using intravenous propofol in a dose of 2.5 mgkg. A McKesson Dental Prop (Wright Health Group, Dundee, Scotland, UK) is used to hold the mouth open, and the tongue is grasped with a surgical swab or toothed forceps. The frenulum is divided with PowerStar Bipolar Scissors (Ethicon, Inc., Somerville, NJ ) using a slow cutting movement and the simultaneous current application of 25 W (Fig. 1). The cutting stops short of the genioglossus muscle, which is not divided. Usually, only one snip is required and no bleeding occurs. A face mask supplying 100% oxygen is applied until the child is awake (Fig. 2). “he child is discharged later, when able to eat.
Prevalence and antimicrobial susceptibility of bacterial isolates from subclinical mastitis in dairy farms in Kosovo

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of subclinical mastitis in dairy cows in Kosovo and the antimicrobial susceptibility of isolated bacteria. Six hundred and twenty four milk samples from individual quarters of 156 lactating cows were tested using California Mastitis Test (CMT) and the positive samples were further analysed using conventional methods for isolation of main mastitis causing agents and finally identified using biochemical tests. The overall prevalence of subclinical mastitis was 25.6%. Twenty one mastitis positive cows belonged to Holstein Friesian breed, 11 to Simmental and 8 were crossbred. Regarding age susceptibility, 13 cows resulting positive in the CMT test were 2–5 years of age and the other 27: 6–9 years of age. A total of 112 bacterial isolates were recovered. The most prevalent species were Staphylococcus aureus (28.6%) followed by coagulase negative staphylococci (21.4%), E. coli (13.4%), Streptococcus agalactiae (14.3%), Streptococcus dysgalactiae (3.6%), Streptococcus uberis (6.2%), Corynebacterium spp. (8%), and Bacillus spp. (4.5%). The isolates were subjected to antimicrobial susceptibility test using the disc diffusion method. In vitro tests of bacterial isolates revealed higher sensitivity to amoxycillin/clavulanic acid, oxytetracycline, trimethoprim and gentamicin. The lowest susceptibility was shown to penicillin and streptomycin except for Corynebacterium spp. and Bacillus spp.
The Genomic Ancestry of Individuals from Different Geographical Regions of Brazil Is More Uniform Than Expected

Based on pre-DNA racial/color methodology, clinical and pharmacological trials have traditionally considered the different geographical regions of Brazil as being very heterogeneous. We wished to ascertain how such diversity of regional color categories correlated with ancestry. Using a panel of 40 validated ancestry-informative insertion-deletion DNA polymorphisms we estimated individually the European, African and Amerindian ancestry components of 934 self-categorized White, Brown or Black Brazilians from the four most populous regions of the Country. We unraveled great ancestral diversity between and within the different regions. Especially, color categories in the northern part of Brazil diverged significantly in their ancestry proportions from their counterparts in the southern part of the Country, indicating that diverse regional semantics were being used in the self-classification as White, Brown or Black. To circumvent these regional subjective differences in color perception, we estimated the general ancestry proportions of each of the four regions in a form independent of color considerations. For that, we multiplied the proportions of a given ancestry in a given color category by the official census information about the proportion of that color category in the specific region, to arrive at a “total ancestry” estimate. Once such a calculation was performed, there emerged a much higher level of uniformity than previously expected. In all regions studied, the European ancestry was predominant, with proportions ranging from 60.6% in the Northeast to 77.7% in the South. We propose that the immigration of six million Europeans to Brazil in the 19th and 20th centuries - a phenomenon described and intended as the “whitening of Brazil” - is in large part responsible for dissipating previous ancestry dissimilarities that reflected region-specific population histories. These findings, of both clinical and sociological importance for Brazil, should also be relevant to other countries with ancestrally admixed populations.
Alignment of 1000 Genomes Project reads to reference assembly GRCh38

Abstract The 1000 Genomes Project produced more than 100 trillion basepairs of short read sequence from more than 2600 samples in 26 populations over a period of five years. In its final phase, the project released over 85 million genotyped and phased variants on human reference genome assembly GRCh37. An updated reference assembly, GRCh38, was released in late 2013, but there was insufficient time for the final phase of the project analysis to change to the new assembly. Although it is possible to lift the coordinates of the 1000 Genomes Project variants to the new assembly, this is a potentially error-prone process as coordinate remapping is most appropriate only for non-repetitive regions of the genome and those that did not see significant change between the two assemblies. It will also miss variants in any region that was newly added to GRCh38. Thus, to produce the highest quality variants and genotypes on GRCh38, the best strategy is to realign the reads and recall the variants based on the new alignment. As the first step of variant calling for the 1000 Genomes Project data, we have finished remapping all of the 1000 Genomes sequence reads to GRCh38 with alternative scaffold–aware BWA-MEM. The resulting alignments are available as CRAM, a reference-based sequence compression format. The data have been released on our FTP site and are also available from European Nucleotide Archive to facilitate researchers discovering variants on the primary sequences and alternative contigs of GRCh38.