Assessing temporal associations in recall: a new take on the strategy disruption account of the part-set cuing effect

Presentation of cues during recall impairs recall of non-cued items (part-set cuing effect). Assessment of retrieval strategies (i.e. temporal associations) within the part-set cuing paradigm can lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the poorer recall of non-cued items. Research has shown that randomly ordered cues lead to greater memory impairment than cues presented in the original order of the list. These findings support the strategy disruption account, which proposes that cues disrupt participants' original retrieval strategy. In the present study, I used the part-set cuing paradigm to investigate the nature of this disruption. While the results lent support to the strategy disruption account, they also provided a new perspective, which focuses specifically on the disruption in the use of temporal context during cued recall

Abstract Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs

Newspapers and blogs express opinion of news entities (people, places, things) while reporting on recent events. We present a system that assigns scores indicating positive or negative opinion to each distinct entity in the text corpus. Our system consists of a sentiment identification phase, which associates expressed opinions with each relevant entity, and a sentiment aggregation and scoring phase, which scores each entity relative to others in the same class. Finally, we evaluate the significance of our scoring techniques over large corpus of news and blogs. 1

Assessment of potential biomarkers of atherosclerosis in Indian patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus

Background & objectives: Various biological markers of subclinical atherosclerosis have been proposed to predict cardiovascular events in patients with diabetes mellitus (DM). However, there are only a few clinical studies assessing the role of invasive biomarkers [CD-36, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR-γ) and YKL-40] in Indian patients with type 2 DM (T2DM). Hence, the present study was conducted to assess protein levels and gene expression of CD-36, PPAR-γ and YKL-40 in patients with T2DM and compare that with hypertensive and healthy controls. Methods: All the participants were subjected to medical history, anthropometric measurements and biochemical and biomarker (ELISA and real-time polymerase chain reaction) estimations. The study groups consisted of patients with T2DM (>5 yr) with hypertension (n=55), patients with T2DM (<2 yr) without hypertension (n=28), hypertensive controls (n=31) and healthy controls (n=30). Results: Gene expressions of YKL-40 and CD36 were significantly higher in patients with T2DM (>5 yr) with hypertension compared to healthy controls (P=0.006). In addition, a significant increase in serum levels of sCD36, PPAR-γ and YKL-40 was observed in patients with T2DM (>5 yr) with hypertension compared to healthy controls (P< 0.05). Serum levels as well as gene expression of CD36 showed significant correlation with serum levels as well as gene expression of PPAR-γ (ρ=0.45 and ρ=0.51; P< 0.001), respectively. Interpretation & conclusions: CD36 and YKL-40 may be potential inflammatory biomarkers for early onset of atherosclerosis in patients with T2DM

Association of cardiovascular complications with circulating levels of tribbles 3 human homolog and matrix metalloproteinases in Indian type 2 diabetic patients, with or without hypertension

Aim and Objective: Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and Tribbles 3 (Trb3) human homologue have been reported to induce atherosclerosis. We wanted to evaluate the association of circulating levels of Trb3 human homologue and MMPs (MMP2 and MMP9), with possible cardiovascular complications in Indian type 2 diabetic patients (type 2 diabetes mellitus [T2DM]), with or without hypertension (HT). Materials and Methods: Serum from 144 individuals, classified as follows: Group A1= (DM + HT); T2DM> 5 years + HT (n = 55); Group A2 = DM; T2DM <2 years, (n = 28); Group B1 = HT; (n = 31) and Group B2 = HC; (n = 30) age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Anthropometric measurements, biochemical profiles of sugar and lipids were established using auto analyser. MMP2, MMP9, Trb3, oxidised low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and proinsulin were measured in the serum using ELISA. Results: Using Bonferroni correction, we found that MMP2 levels were increased in (DM + HT), when compared to individuals with DM and HT (P = 0.006 and 0.000). HT group had reduced levels of MMP2, as compared to HC, (P = 0.000). The Mann–Whitney U-test for MMP9 revealed that DM group had elevated levels of MMP9 compared to (DM + HT), HT and HC group, (P = 0.011, 0.000, and 0.001). (DM + HT) had elevated levels of MMP9 when compared to HT group, (P = 0.012).). Levels of MMP9 in HT were lower than the HC group, although not significant. Levels of Trb3 were found to be elevated in (DM + HT) when compared to DM, (P = 0.032). The levels of Trb3 were higher in the HT, when compared to HC group, although not statistically significant. Multiple linear regression model for Framingham Risk Score, weighted with post prandial blood sugar yielded R2 = 0.338; F = 7.602 (df = 9), P = 0.000. Trb3 (β = −0.179, P = 0.019); MMP2 (β =0.021, P = 0.787) and MMP9 (β = −0.03, P = 0.684). Conclusion: Trb3 is a useful marker for evaluating the association of cardiovascular risk in diabetic patients

Sentiment-Focused Web Crawling

Sentiments and opinions expressed in Web pages towards objects, entities, and products constitute an important portion of the textual content available in the Web. In the last decade, the analysis of such content has gained importance due to its high potential for monetization. Despite the vast interest in sentiment analysis, somewhat surprisingly, the discovery of sentimental or opinionated Web content is mostly ignored. This work aims to fill this gap and addresses the problem of quickly discovering and fetching the sentimental content present in the Web. To this end, we design a sentiment-focused Web crawling framework. In particular, we propose different sentiment-focused Web crawling strategies that prioritize discovered URLs based on their predicted sentiment scores. Through simulations, these strategies are shown to achieve considerable performance improvement over general-purpose Web crawling strategies in discovery of sentimental Web content