ARE SUSCEPTIBILITY to INFECTIVE ENDOCARDITIS and EFFECTIVENESS of ANTIBIOTIC PROPHYLAXIS LINKED to FLUCTUATIONS of the IMMUNE SYSTEM? A NOVEL HYPOTHESIS

Introduction: An amendment incorporated into the 2007 AHA and 2009 ESC guidelines on infective endocarditis led to a substantial restriction in indications for the administration of antibiotic prophylaxis. This may have resulted in a subsequent steady increase in the number of cases of infective endocarditis worldwide. Methods: It has been hypothesised that susceptibility to infective endocarditis, together with effectiveness of antibiotic prophylaxis, may be linked to fluctuations of the immune system. Throughout a person’s lifetime, individual susceptibility to infective endocarditis may vary in an identical situation of risk. As a consequence, a personalised targeted approach should be adopted when prescribing antibiotic prophylaxis to prevent onset of endocarditis, taking into account a series of factors including age, comorbidities, cortisol levels, and ethnicity. Children affected by bicuspid aortic valve and injection drug users are amongst the newly-emerging higher risk populations. Conclusion: This up-to-dated narrative review summarizes all the available scientific evidence concerning the variable influence of the immune system on susceptibility to infective endocarditis

Influence of infection on the distribution patterns of NIH-Chronic Prostatitis Symptom Index scores in patients with chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS)

Chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS) is a complex condition for which the etiological determinants are still poorly defined. To better characterize the diagnostic and therapeutic profile of patients, an algorithm known as UPOINT was created, addressing six major phenotypic domains of CP/CPPS, specifically the urinary (U), psycho-social (P), organ-specific (O), infection (I), neurological/systemic (N) and muscular tenderness (T) domains. An additional sexual dysfunction domain may be included in the UPOINT(S) system. The impact of the infection domain on the severity of CP/CPPS symptoms is a controversial issue, due to the contradictory results of different trials. The aim of the present retrospective study was to further analyze the extent to which a positive infection domain of UPOINTS may modify the pattern of CP/CPPS symptom scores, assessed with the National Institutes of Health-Chronic Prostatitis Symptom Index (NIH-CPSI). In a cohort of 935 patients that was divided on the basis of the presence or absence of prostatic infection, more severe clinical symptoms were shown by the patients with infection (median NIH total score: 24 versus 20 points in uninfected patients; P<0.001). Moreover, NIH-CPSI score distribution curves were shifted towards more severe symptoms in patients with a positive infection domain. Division of the patients into the six most prominent phenotypic clusters of UPOINTS revealed that the 'prostate infection-related sexual dysfunction' cluster, including the highest proportion of patients with evidence of infection (80%), scored the highest number of NIH-CPSI points among all the clusters. To assess the influence of the infection domain on the severity of patients' symptoms, all subjects with evidence of infection were withdrawn from the 'prostate infection-related sexual dysfunction' cluster. This modified cluster showed symptom scores significantly less severe than the original cluster, and the CPSI values became comparable to the scores of the five other clusters, which were virtually devoid of patients with evidence of infection. These results suggest that the presence of pathogens in the prostate gland may significantly affect the clinical presentation of patients affected by CP/CPPS, and that the infection domain may be a determinant of the severity of CP/CPPS symptoms in clusters of patients phenotyped with the UPOINTS system. This evidence may convey considerable therapeutic implications

Dictionary Attacks on Speaker Verification

In this paper, we propose dictionary attacks against speaker verification - a novel attack vector that aims to match a large fraction of speaker population by chance. We introduce a generic formulation of the attack that can be used with various speech representations and threat models. The attacker uses adversarial optimization to maximize raw similarity of speaker embeddings between a seed speech sample and a proxy population. The resulting master voice successfully matches a non-trivial fraction of people in an unknown population. Adversarial waveforms obtained with our approach can match on average 69% of females and 38% of males enrolled in the target system at a strict decision threshold calibrated to yield false alarm rate of 1%. By using the attack with a black-box voice cloning system, we obtain master voices that are effective in the most challenging conditions and transferable between speaker encoders. We also show that, combined with multiple attempts, this attack opens even more to serious issues on the security of these systems

Diplomacy of Health as a Sharp Power Tool: a Year of Pandemic

В работе автор рассуждает о формировании новой реальности, вызванной пандемией в 2020 г. В результате переформатирования геополитического контекста происходит изменение роли и значимости дипломатии здоровья и sharp power государств.In this work, the author discusses the formation of a new reality caused by the pandemic in 2020. As a result of the reformatting of the geopolitical context, the role and importance of health diplomacy and sharp power of states are changing

Evolutionary Clustering of Apprentices' Self- Regulated Learning Behavior in Learning Journals

Learning journals are increasingly used in vocational education to foster self-regulated learning and reflective learning practices. However, for many apprentices, documenting working experiences is a difficult task. In this article, we profile apprentices' learning behavior in an online learning journal. Based on a pedagogical framework, we propose a novel multistep clustering pipeline that integrates different learning dimensions into a combined profile. Specifically, the profiles are described in terms of effort, consistency, regularity, help-seeking behavior, and quality of the written entries. Our results on two populations of chef apprentices (183 apprentices) interacting with an online learning journal (over 121K entries) show that our pipeline captures changes in learning patterns over time and yields interpretable profiles that can be related to academic performance. The obtained profiles can be used as a basis for personalized interventions, with the ultimate goal of improving the apprentices' learning experience

Intensity interferometry of single x-ray pulses from a synchrotron storage ring

We report on measurements of second-order intensity correlations at the high brilliance storage ring PETRA III using a prototype of the newly developed Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector (AGIPD). The detector recorded individual synchrotron radiation pulses with an x-ray photon energy of 14.4 keV and repetition rate of about 5 MHz. The second-order intensity correlation function was measured simultaneously at different spatial separations that allowed to determine the transverse coherence length at these x-ray energies. The measured values are in a good agreement with theoretical simulations based on the Gaussian Schell-model.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 42 reference

AveroBot: An audio-visual dataset for people re-identification and verification in human-robot interaction

Intelligent technologies have pervaded our daily life, making it easier for people to complete their activities. One emerging application is involving the use of robots for assisting people in various tasks (e.g., visiting a museum). In this context, it is crucial to enable robots to correctly identify people. Existing robots often use facial information to establish the identity of a person of interest. But, the face alone may not offer enough relevant information due to variations in pose, illumination, resolution and recording distance. Other biometric modalities like the voice can improve the recognition performance in these conditions. However, the existing datasets in robotic scenarios usually do not include the audio cue and tend to suffer from one or more limitations: most of them are acquired under controlled conditions, limited in number of identities or samples per user, collected by the same recording device, and/or not freely available. In this paper, we propose AveRobot, an audio-visual dataset of 111 participants vocalizing short sentences under robot assistance scenarios. The collection took place into a three-floor building through eight different cameras with built-in microphones. The performance for face and voice re-identification and verification was evaluated on this dataset with deep learning baselines, and compared against audio-visual datasets from diverse scenarios. The results showed that AveRobot is a challenging dataset for people re-identification and verification

Green composites of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) containing graphene nanoplatelets with desirable electrical conductivity and oxygen barrier properties

Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate), a green polymer originating from prokaryotic microbes, has been used to prepare composites with graphene nanoplatelets (GnP) at different concentrations. The films were fabricated by drop-casting and were hot-pressed at a temperature lower than their melting point to provide the molecular chains enough energy to reorientate while avoiding melting and degradation. It was found that hot-pressing increases crystallinity and improves mechanical properties. The Young’s modulus increased from 1.2 to 1.6 GPa for the poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (P(3HB)) films and from 0.5 to 2.2 GPa for the 15 wt % P(3HB)/GnP composites. Electrical resistivity decreases enormously with GnP concentration and hot-pressing, reaching 6 Ω sq–1 for the hot-pressed 30 wt % P(3HB)/GnP composite. Finally, the hot-pressed P(3HB) samples exhibit remarkable oxygen barrier properties, with oxygen permeability reaching 2800 mL μm m–2 day–1, which becomes 895 mL μm m–2 day–1 when 15% GnP is added to the biopolymer matrix, one of the lowest values known for biopolymers and biocomposites. We propose that these biocomposites are used for elastic packaging and electronics