bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Experiential features used by patients with schizophrenia to differentiate ‘voices’ from ordinary verbal thought
Authors: Hoffman R. E. , Varanko M. , Gilmore J. , Mishara A. L. 
Published: November 2007

BackgroundDetermining how patients distinguish auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) from their everyday thoughts may shed light on neurocognitive processes leading to these symptoms.MethodFifty patients reporting active AVHs (‘voices’) with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder were surveyed using a structured questionnaire. Data were collected to determine: (a) the degree to which patients distinguished voices from their own thoughts; (b) the degree to which their thoughts had verbal form; and (c) the experiential basis for identifying experiences as voices versus their own verbal thoughts. Six characteristics of acoustic/verbal images were considered: (1) non-self speaking voice, (2) loudness, (3) clarity, (4) verbal content, (5) repetition of verbal content, and (6) sense of control.ResultsFour subjects were eliminated from the analysis because they reported absent verbal thought or a total inability to differentiate their own verbal thoughts from voices. For the remaining 46 patients, verbal content and sense of control were rated as most salient in distinguishing voices from everyday thoughts. With regard to sensory/perceptual features, identification of speaking voice as non-self was more important in differentiating voices from thought than either loudness or clarity of sound images.ConclusionsMost patients with schizophrenia and persistent AVHs clearly distinguish these experiences from their everyday thoughts. An adequate mechanistic model of AVHs should account for distinctive content, recognizable non-self speaking voices, and diminished sense of control relative to ordinary thought. Loudness and clarity of sound images appear to be of secondary importance in demarcating these hallucination experiences.
Estimating disease prevalence using census data
Authors: CHOY M. , SWITZER P. , De MARTEL C. , PARSONNET J. 
Published: November 2007

SUMMARYWe describe a method of working on publicly available data to estimate disease prevalence in small geographic areas using Helicobacter pylori as a model infection. Using data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, risk parameters for H. pylori infection were obtained by logistic regression and validated by predicting 737·5 infections in an independent cohort with 736 observed infections. The prevalence of H. pylori infection in the San Francisco Bay Area was estimated with the probabilities obtained from a predictive logistic model, using risk parameters with individual-level 1990 U.S. Census data as input. Predicted H. pylori prevalence was also compared to gastric cancer incidence obtained from the Northern California Cancer Center and showed a positive correlation with gastric cancer incidence (P<0·001, R2=0·87), and no statistically significant association with other malignancies. By exclusively using publicly available data, these methods may be applied to selected conditions with strong demographic predictors.
Multilevel analysis of risk factors for Salmonella shedding in Ontario finishing pigs
Authors: POLJAK Z. , DEWEY C. E. , FRIENDSHIP R. M. , MARTIN S. W. , CHRISTENSEN J. 
Published: November 2007

SUMMARYThe objectives of this study were to identify factors associated with Salmonella status at the farm, pen, and pig level; explore the nature of variation in the association between the pen-level Salmonella status and pen-level covariates, and pig-level Salmonella status and pig- and pen-level covariates; and to identify the relative importance of factors operating at geographical, farm, and pen level for Salmonella shedding of pigs. For these purposes, samples from 799 pigs and 374 pens on 80 farms in Ontario in 2004 were collected and bacteriologically tested in a cross-sectional study. Census division was the least variable level, and farm the most variable level for shedding. Increased frequency of disinfection and washing with cold water were positively associated with Salmonella positivity, whereas liquid and mash feed and completely closed barns were sparing factors. After farm, pen was the second most variable level for shedding. However, no measured pen-level variables were associated with Salmonella status of pigs or pens. The shedding of Salmonella at the pig level tended to be associated with pig weight, and there was no random variation around this association. Results of this study suggest that a herd test based on bacteriological culture would probably have higher sensitivity if growing animals of lower weight were sampled instead of market weight animals, and this might be beneficial for Salmonella monitoring.
The GRM ‘beyond the walls’?
Authors: Barrachina Solange , Saint Martin Dominique 
Published: November 2007

AbstractThe technological changes of the twentieth century obliged research institutes to rethink their role in society. A place for invention and reflection, and a centre for the preservation of our musical heritage, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales must open its doors from now on and increase its collaboration with other bodies in an enlarged form: an extended ‘group’, extramural, which shares its tools and thoughts with others.
Developmental Effects of Multiple Looks in Speech Sound Discrimination
Authors: Holt Rachael Frush , Carney Arlene Earley 
Published: November 2007

PurposeThe change/no-change procedure (J. E. Sussman & A. E. Carney, 1989), which assesses speech discrimination, has been used under the assumption that the number of stimulus presentations does not influence performance. Motivated by the tenets of the multiple looks hypothesis (N. F. Viemeister & G. H. Wakefield, 1991), work by R. F. Holt and A. E. Carney (2005) called this assumption into question (at least for adults): Nonsense syllable discrimination improved with more stimulus presentations. This study investigates the nature of developmental differences and the effects of multiple stimulus presentations in the change/no-change procedure.MethodThirty normal-hearing children, ages 4.0–5.9 years, were tested on 3 consonant–vowel contrasts at various signal-to-noise ratios using combinations of 2 and 4 standard and comparison stimulus repetitions.ResultsAlthough performance fell below that which is predicted by the multiple looks hypothesis in most conditions, discrimination was enhanced with more stimulus repetitions for 1 speech contrast. The relative influence of standard and comparison stimulus repetitions varied across the speech contrasts in a manner different from that of adults.ConclusionDespite providing no additional sensory information, multiple stimulus repetitions enhanced children’s discrimination of 1 set of nonsense syllables. The results have implications for models of developmental speech perception and assessing speech discrimination in children.
Training Japanese Listeners to Perceive American English Vowels: Influence of Training Sets
Authors: Nishi Kanae , Kewley-Port Diane 
Published: November 2007

Purpose
Studies on speech perception training have shown that adult 2nd language learners can learn to perceive non-native consonant contrasts through laboratory training. However, research on perception training for non-native vowels is still scarce, and none of the previous vowel studies trained more than 5 vowels. In the present study, the influence of training set sizes was investigated by training native Japanese listeners to identify American English (AE) vowels.

Method
Twelve Japanese learners of English were trained 9 days either on 9 AE monophthongs (fullset training group) or on the 3 more difficult vowels (subset training group). Five listeners served as controls and received no training. Performance of listeners was assessed before and after training as well as 3 months after training was completed.

Results
Results indicated that (a) fullset training using 9 vowels in the stimulus set improved average identification by 25%; (b) listeners in both training groups generalized improvement to untrained words and tokens spoken by novel speakers; and (c) both groups maintained improvement after 3 months. However, the subset group never improved on untrained vowels.

Conclusions
Training protocols for learning non-native vowels should present a full set of vowels and should not focus only on the more difficult vowels.
Use of Speaker Intent and Grammatical Cues in Fast-Mapping by Adolescents With Down Syndrome
Authors: McDuffie Andrea S. , Sindberg Heidi A. , Hesketh Linda J. , Chapman Robin S. 
Published: November 2007

PurposeThe authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker’s pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that action verbs would be harder to fast-map than nouns.MethodTwenty participants with DS, aged 12–18 years, and 19 TD participants, aged 3–6 years, were matched on syntax comprehension and engaged in 4 fast-mapping tasks. Both comprehension and production of novel words were assessed for each task. Through use of hierarchical regression models, hearing, cognition, and working memory were considered as predictors of total comprehension and production performance for each group.ResultsBoth groups used speaker intent in fast-mapping labels to object referents but performed more poorly on fast-mapping verbs. Neither group appeared to use grammatical cues to disambiguate the intended referent. Syntax comprehension was replicated as a predictor of fast-mapping comprehension for the DS group. Syntax comprehension and chronological age were replicated as predictors of TD fast-mapping.ConclusionParticipants with DS had better recall for the object or action seen most recently during speaker intent tasks. They had better recall for the object presented first and the action presented last during grammatical cue tasks. Response patterns may have depended on the structure of specific task paradigms. Verb acquisition may be facilitated when either the action or label is familiar.
RReportGenerator: automatic reports from routine statistical analysis using R
Authors: Raffelsberger Wolfgang , Krause Yannick , Moulinier Luc , Kieffer David , Morand Anne-Laure , Brino Laurent , Poch Olivier 
Published: November 2007

Abstract
Summary: With the establishment of high-throughput (HT) screening methods there is an increasing need for automatic analysis methods. Here we present RReportGenerator, a user-friendly portal for automatic routine analysis using the statistical platform R and Bioconductor. RReportGenerator is designed to analyze data using predefined analysis scenarios via a graphical user interface (GUI). A report in pdf format combining text, figures and tables is automatically generated and results may be exported. To demonstrate suitable analysis tasks we provide direct web access to a collection of analysis scenarios for summarizing data from transfected cell arrays (TCA), segmentation of CGH data, and microarray quality control and normalization.
Availability: RReportGenerator, a user manual and a collection of analysis scenarios are available under a GNU public license on http://www-bio3d-igbmc.u-strasbg.fr/~wraff
Contact: wolfgang.raffelsberger@igbmc.u-strasbg.fr
Probabilistic path ranking based on adjacent pairwise coexpression for metabolic transcripts analysis
Authors: Takigawa Ichigaku , Mamitsuka Hiroshi 
Published: November 2007

Abstract
Motivation: Pathway knowledge in public databases enables us to examine how individual metabolites are connected via chemical reactions and what genes are implicated in those processes. For two given (sets of) compounds, the number of possible paths between them in a metabolic network can be intractably large. It would be informative to rank these paths in order to differentiate between them.
Results: Focusing on adjacent pairwise coexpression, we developed an algorithm which, for a specified k, efficiently outputs the top k paths based on a probabilistic scoring mechanism, using a given metabolic network and microarray datasets. Our idea of using adjacent pairwise coexpression is supported by recent studies that local coregulation is predominant in metabolism. We first evaluated this idea by examining to what extent highly correlated gene pairs are adjacent and how often they are consecutive in a metabolic network. We then applied our algorithm to two examples of path ranking: the paths from glucose to pyruvate in the entire metabolic network of yeast and the paths from phenylalanine to sinapyl alcohol in monolignols pathways of arabidopsis under several different microarray conditions, to confirm and discuss the performance analysis of our method.
Contact: takigawa@kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Prediction of both conserved and nonconserved microRNA targets in animals
Authors: Wang Xiaowei , El Naqa Issam M. 
Published: November 2007

Abstract
Motivation: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in many diverse biological processes and they may potentially regulate the functions of thousands of genes. However, one major issue in miRNA studies is the lack of bioinformatics programs to accurately predict miRNA targets. Animal miRNAs have limited sequence complementarity to their gene targets, which makes it challenging to build target prediction models with high specificity.
Results: Here we present a new miRNA target prediction program based on support vector machines (SVMs) and a large microarray training dataset. By systematically analyzing public microarray data, we have identified statistically significant features that are important to target downregulation. Heterogeneous prediction features have been non-linearly integrated in an SVM machine learning framework for the training of our target prediction model, MirTarget2. About half of the predicted miRNA target sites in human are not conserved in other organisms. Our prediction algorithm has been validated with independent experimental data for its improved performance on predicting a large number of miRNA down-regulated gene targets.
Availability: All the predicted targets were imported into an online database miRDB, which is freely accessible at http://mirdb.org.
Contact: xwang@radonc.wustl.edu
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
French district nurses’ opinions towards euthanasia, involvement in end-of-life care and nurse–patient relationship: a national phone survey: Table 1
Authors: Bendiane MK , Galinier A , Favre R , Ribiere C , Lapiana J-M , Obadia Y , Peretti-Watel P 
Published: November 2007

Objectives:To assess French district nurses’ opinions towards euthanasia and to study factors associated with these opinions, with emphasis on attitudes towards terminal patients.Design and setting:An anonymous telephone survey carried out in 2005 among a national random sample of French district nurses.Participants:District nurses currently delivering home care who have at least 1 year of professional experience. Of 803 district nurses contacted, 602 agreed to participate (response rate 75%).Main outcome measures:Opinion towards the legalisation of euthanasia (on a five-point Likert scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”), attitudes towards terminal patients (discussing end-of-life issues with them, considering they should be told their prognosis, valuing the role of advance directives and surrogates).Results:Overall, 65% of the 602 nurses favoured legalising euthanasia. Regarding associated factors, this proportion was higher among those who discuss end-of-life issues with terminal patients (70%), who consider competent patients should always be told their prognosis (81%) and who value the role of advance directives and surrogates in end-of-life decision-making for incompetent patients (68% and 77% respectively). Women and older nurses were less likely to favour legalising euthanasia, as were those who believed in a god who masters their destiny.Conclusions:French nurses are more in favour of legalising euthanasia than French physicians; these two populations contrast greatly in the factors associated with this support. Further research is needed to investigate how and to what extent such attitudes may affect nursing practice and emotional well-being in the specific context of end-of-life home care.
The effect of pre-test carbohydrate ingestion on the anaerobic threshold, as determined by the lactate-minimum test
Authors: Rotstein Arie , Dotan Raffy , Zigel Levana , Greenberg Tally , Benyamini Yael , Falk Bareket 
Published: November 2007

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of pre-test carbohydrate (CHO) ingestion on anaerobic-threshold assessment using the lactate-minimum test (LMT). Fifteen competitive male distance runners capable of running 10 km in 33.5–43 min were used as subjects. LMT was performed following CHO (2 × 300 mL, 7% solution) or comparable placebo (Pl) ingestion, in a double-blind, randomized order. The LMT consisted of two high-intensity 1 min treadmill runs (17–21 km·h–1), followed by an 8 min recovery period. Subsequently, subjects performed 5 min running stages, incremented by 0.6 km·h–1 and separated by 1 min blood-sampling intervals. Tests were terminated after 3 consecutive increases in blood-lactate concentration ([La]) had been observed. Finger-tip capillary blood was sampled for [La] and blood-glucose determination 30 min before the test’s onset, during the recovery phase following the 2 high-intensity runs, and following each of the subsequent 5 min stages. Heart rate (HR) and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were recorded after each stage. The lactate-minimum speed (LMS) was determined from the individual [La]–velocity plots and was considered reflective of the anaerobic threshold. Pre-test CHO ingestion had no effect on LMS (13.19 ± 1.12 km·h–1 vs. 13.17 ± 1.08 km·h–1 in CHO and Pl, respectively), nor on [La] and glucose concentration at that speed, or on HR and RPE responses. Pre-test CHO ingestion therefore does not affect LMS or the LMT-estimated anaerobic threshold.
Ethnic differences in adiposity and body composition: the First Nations bone health study
Authors: Leslie William D. , Weiler Hope A. , Nyomba B.L. Grégoire 
Published: November 2007

The purpose of this study was to compare patterns of adiposity and soft tissue composition in First Nations and white Canadian women. A population-based cross-sectional study was performed. A random age-stratified sample of 206 urban First Nations women and 177 white women was recruited. Soft tissue composition was analyzed with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) models were used to assess ethnicity in models that adjusted for body mass, body mass index (BMI), and socio-demographic factors. Obesity (BMI ≥ 30.0 kg/m2) was more common in First Nations women (48.1%) than in white women (36.2%, Fisher’s exact test p = 0.012). Mean trunk fat tissue mass fraction and total body fat mass fraction (as a percent of soft tissue) were greater in First Nations women than in white women (p < 0.0001). Trunk lean tissue was also greater in First Nations women (p = 0.027), but total body lean tissue was similar. The mean trunk adiposity index was strongly related to ethnicity (First Nations +0.5% ± 2.5% versus white –1.7% ± 2.6%, p < 0.0001). Preferential fat accumulation in the trunk of First Nations women persisted after adjustment for body mass, BMI, and other socio-demographic variables (p < 0.0001). First Nations women differ from white women in terms of fat and lean tissue mass and distribution. First Nations women had a preferential increase in trunk fat and this may contribute to high reported rates of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular events.
Effects of 22 °C muscle temperature on voluntary and evoked muscle properties during and after high-intensity exercise
Authors: Drinkwater Eric J. , Behm David G. 
Published: November 2007

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of 22 °C local muscle temperature of intact human plantar flexors performing fatiguing contractions on evoked and voluntary contractile properties before and after fatigue. Twelve subjects were tested on plantar flexor voluntary torque, percent muscle activation derived from twitch interpolation, integrated electromyographic (iEMG) activity, and evoked torque and temporal characteristics of maximal twitch and tetanic stimulations before fatigue and 1, 5, and 10 min after intermittent, high-intensity, isometric fatigue under both normothermic and hypothermic conditions. Hypothermic and normothermic changes between time points were analysed by repeated-measures analysis of variance. Normothermic fatigue induced small to large effects (Cohen’s d: 0.29–3.06) on voluntary and evoked contractile properties, whereas most effects of unfatigued hypothermia were limited to rate-dependent processes (Cohen’s d: 0.78–1.70). Most tetanic properties were potentiated 1 min after normothermic fatigue, but remained unchanged by hypothermic fatigue, resulting in significant differences between the two conditions. Soleus iEMG significantly declined 1 min after normothermic fatigue (–29%), but not after hypothermic fatigue. Twitch torque was potentiated by 29% one minute after fatigue while normothermic, but was potentiated by 46% while hypothermic; rate of twitch torque development and time to peak twitch were potentiated by 39% and 10% while normothermic, but 89% and 28% while hypothermic. Although voluntary contractile properties are generally impaired soon after normothermic fatigue, most were not after hypothermic fatigue. Furthermore, evoked contractile properties were generally higher 1 min after hypothermic fatigue. We conclude that the hypothermic condition slows the recovery of potentiated evoked contractile properties back to baseline values.
Glutamine and carbohydrate supplements reduce ammonemia increase during endurance field exercise
Authors: Carvalho-Peixoto Jacqueline , Alves Robson Cardilo , Cameron Luiz-Claudio 
Published: November 2007

Blood ammonia concentration increases during endurance exercise and has been proposed as a cause for both peripheral and central fatigue. We examined the impact of glutamine and (or) carbohydrate supplementation on ammonemia in high-level runners. Fifteen men in pre-competitive training ran 120 min (~34 km) outdoors on 4 occasions. On the first day, the 15 athletes ran without the use of supplements and blood samples were taken every 30 min. After that, each day for 4 d before the next 3 exercise trials, we supplemented the athletes’ normal diets in bolus with carbohydrate (1 g·kg–1·d–1), glutamine (70 mg·kg–1·d–1), or a combination of both in a double-blind study. Blood ammonia level was determined before the run and every 30 min during the run. During the control trial ammonia increased progressively to approximately 70% above rest concentration. Following supplementation, independent of treatment, ammonia was not different (p > 0.05) for the first 60 min, but for the second hour it was lower than in the control (p < 0.05). Supplementation in high-level, endurance athletes reduced the accumulation of blood ammonia during prolonged, strenuous exercise in a field situation.