LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of medicine availability measurements at health facilities: evidence from Service Provision Assessment surveys in five sub-Saharan African countries

BACKGROUND
With growing emphasis on health systems strengthening in global health, various health facility assessment methods have been used increasingly to measure medicine and commodity availability. However, few studies have systematically compared estimates of availability based on different definitions. The objective of this study was to compare estimates of medicine availability based on different definitions.


METHODS
A secondary data analysis was conducted using data from the Service Provision Assessment (SPA)--a nationally representative sample survey of health facilities--conducted in five countries: Kenya SPA 2010, Namibia SPA 2009, Rwanda SPA 2007, Tanzania SPA 2006, and Uganda SPA 2007. For 32 medicines, percent of facilities having the medicine were estimated using five definitions: four for current availability and one for six-month period availability. 'Observed availability of at least one valid unit' was used as a reference definition, and ratios between the reference and each of the other four estimates were calculated. Summary statistics of the ratios among the 32 medicines were calculated by country. The ratios were compared further between public and non-public facilities within each country.


RESULTS
Across five countries, compared to current observed availability of at least one valid unit, 'reported availability without observation' was on average 6% higher (ranging from 3% in Rwanda to 8% in Namibia), 'observed availability where all units were valid' was 11% lower (ranging from 2% in Tanzania to 19% in Uganda), and 'six-month period availability' was 14% lower (ranging from 5% in Namibia to 25% in Uganda).


CONCLUSIONS
Medicine availability estimates vary substantially across definitions, and need to be interpreted with careful consideration of the methods used.
Efficient PAPR Reduction in OFDM Systems Based on a Companding Technique

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has become the most widely adopted technology in wireless communication systems. OFDM is limited mainly by its high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). A uniformly distributed nonlinear companding scheme efficiently reduces PAPR with a low Bit Error Rate (BER). However, the uniformly distributed companding scheme cannot perform variably to satisfy the different performance requirements for the systems. Therefore, this work proposes a novel scheme that transforms the OFDM signals into a trapezium distribution. The uniformly distributed companding scheme is a special case of the proposed scheme. The general formulas of the proposed scheme are derived and the trade-off between PAPR reduction and BER performance is achieved by setting the value of a parameter. Then, the simulation results show the PAPR reduction and the BER over the AWGN and multipath channels, indicating that the proposed scheme provides a favorable trade-off between the PAPR reduction and the BER.
The natural course of traumatic triangular fibrocartilage complex tears in distal radial fractures: a 13-15 year follow-up of arthroscopically diagnosed but untreated injuries.

PURPOSE
To evaluate the long-term results of a prospective, longitudinal case series of untreated, traumatic triangular fibrocartilage complex (TFCC) tears found in displaced distal radial fractures.


METHODS
Between 1995 and 1997, 51 patients (24 men, 27 women; age, 20-57 y) with a displaced distal radius fracture had wrist arthroscopy to identify associated injuries. Forty-three patients had complete or partial tears of the TFCC, which were not treated. All patients were contacted in 2010, 13-15 years after the injury. One patient had had a TFCC reattachment due to painful distal radioulnar joint instability and was excluded. Thirty-eight patients returned for a radiographic and clinical follow-up that recorded strength, distal radioulnar joint laxity, range of motion, pain scale score, and subjective and objective outcome scores.


RESULTS
After 13-15 years, 17/38 patients were lax in the distal radioulnar joint. The mean grip strength was worse in the patients with a lax distal radioulnar joint (83%, SD 15 of the contralateral side vs 103%, SD 33). The median Gartland and Werley score was 5 (good; range, 0-15) in the lax group compared to 1 (excellent; range, 0-9) in the non-lax group, and the median Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder, and Hand scores were 14 (range, 0-59) and 5 (range, 0-70) respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
In this 13-15 year, prospective, longitudinal outcome study of the natural course of TFCC tears associated with distal radius fracture, only 1 patient had been operated on for painful instability since the injury. The subjective and objective results did not provide evidence that a TFCC injury would influence the long-term outcome. However, trends were found and, by speculation, the low number of patients in the series and the risk for a type II error could be the cause of absent statistically significance. Larger, preferably prospective, randomized studies are needed to find out whether a more aggressive treatment is beneficial.


TYPE OF STUDY/LEVEL OF EVIDENCE
Diagnostic I.
Oxidative stress and inflammation in obesity after taurine supplementation: a double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

PURPOSE
Some researchers found decreased levels of plasma taurine in obese subjects and animals, and reduced expression of an important enzyme of taurine synthesis. These evidences, coupled with the metabolic imbalance of obesity and the possible anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects of taurine, highlighted the use of taurine as a supplement in obesity treatment. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether taurine supplementation, associated with nutritional counseling, modulates oxidative stress, inflammatory response, and glucose homeostasis in obese women.


METHODS
A randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study was conducted with 16 women with obesity diagnosis and 8 women in the normal weight range. The obese volunteers were matched by age and body mass index and randomly assigned to either the placebo (3 g/day starch flour) or taurine (3 g/day taurine) group. The study lasted 8 weeks, and the experimental protocol included nutritional assessment and determination of plasma sulfur amino acids, insulin, and adiponectin, serum glycemia, and markers of inflammatory response and oxidative stress.


RESULTS
Plasma taurine levels were significantly decreased (41%) in the obese volunteers. Both the placebo and taurine groups showed significant reduction in weight (3%), with no differences between groups. Different from placebo, taurine-supplemented group showed significant increase in plasma taurine (97%) and adiponectin (12%) and significant reduction in the inflammatory marker hs-C-reactive protein (29%) and in the lipid peroxidation marker thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) (20%).


CONCLUSIONS
Eight weeks of taurine supplementation associated with nutritional counseling is able to increase adiponectin levels and to decrease markers of inflammation (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein) and lipid peroxidation (TBARS) in obese women.
Patterns of hydraulic architecture and water relations of two tropical canopy trees with contrasting leaf phenologies: Ochroma pyramidale and Pseudobombax septenatum.

Many authors have attempted to explain the adaptive response of tropical plants to drought based on studies of water relations at the leaf level. Little attention has been given to the role of the xylem system in the control of plant water requirements. To evaluate this role, we studied the hydraulic architecture and water relations parameters of two tropical canopy trees with contrasting leaf phenologies: deciduous Pseudobombax septenatum (Jacq.) Dug and evergreen Ochroma pyramidale (Cav. ex lamb) Urban, both in the family Bombacaceae. The hydraulic architecture parameters studied include hydraulic conductivity, specific conductivity, leaf specific conductivity, and Huber value. Water relations parameters include leaf water potential, stem and leaf water storage capacitance, transpiration, stomatal conductance, and vulnerability of stems to cavitation and loss of hydraulic conductivity by embolisms. Compared to temperate trees, both species showed a pattern of highly vulnerable stems (50% loss of conductivity due to embolism at water potentials less than 1 MPa) with high leaf specific conductivities. The vulnerability of xylem to water-stress-induced embolism was remarkably similar for the two species but the leaf specific conductivity of petioles and leaf-bearing stems of the evergreen species, Ochroma (e.g., 9.08 and 11.4 x 10(-4) kg s(-1) m(-1) MPa(-1), respectively), were 3.4 and 2.3 times higher, respectively, than those of the deciduous species, Pseudobombax (e.g., 2.64 and 5.15 x 10(-4) kg s(-1) m(-1) MPa(-1), respectively). A runaway embolism model was used to test the ability of Ochroma and Pseudobombax stems to maintain elevated transpiration rates during the higher evaporative demand of the dry season. The percent loss of leaf area predicted by the runaway embolism model for stems of Pseudobombax ranged from 5 to 30%, not enough to explain the deciduous phenology of this tree species without analysis of root resistance or leaf and petiole vulnerability to embolism.
Dynamic Sampling Convolutional Neural Networks

We present Dynamic Sampling Convolutional Neural Networks (DSCNN), where the position-specific kernels learn from not only the current position but also multiple sampled neighbour regions. During sampling, residual learning is introduced to ease training and an attention mechanism is applied to fuse features from different samples. And the kernels are further factorized to reduce parameters. The multiple sampling strategy enlarges the effective receptive fields significantly without requiring more parameters. While DSCNNs inherit the advantages of DFN [1], namely avoiding feature map blurring by position-specific kernels while keeping translation invariance, it also efficiently alleviates the overfitting issue caused by much more parameters than normal CNNs. Our model is efficient and can be trained end-to-end via standard backpropagation. We demonstrate the merits of our DSCNNs on both sparse and dense prediction tasks involving object detection and flow estimation. Our results show that DSCNNs enjoy stronger recognition abilities and achieve 81.7% in VOC2012 [2] detection dataset. Also, DSCNNs obtain much sharper responses in flow estimation on FlyingChairs dataset[3] compared to multiple FlowNet models’ baselines.
A novel flexible trust management system for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Security has been recognised as a key issue for the expansion of wireless sensor network applications. To defend against the wide set of security attacks, legacy security solutions are not applicable due to the very limited memory and processing resources of the sensor nodes as well as due to the reason that sensor networks are required to operate in an autonomous infrastructureless manner. Trust management schemes consist a powerful tool for the detection of unexpected node behaviours (either faulty or malicious). Once misbehaving nodes are detected, their neighbours can use these information to avoid cooperating with them either for data forwarding, data aggregation or any other cooperative function. We propose a novel trust management system based on both direct and indirect trust information, which allows for fast detection of a wide set of attacks, including those addressing the reputation exchange scheme, while energy awareness is also incorporated in our approach.
The Implementation of a Flipped Classroom in Foreign Language Teaching.

Alongside the rise of educational technology, many teachers have been taking gradual but innovative steps to redesign their teaching methods. For example, in flipped learning or a flipped classroom, students watch instructional videos outside the classroom and do assignments or engage in activities inside the classroom. Language teachers are one group of educators exploring the flipped classroom. In foreign language classes, such an approach may offer great benefits for both the teachers and students since classroom time can be applied to more interactive tasks. By extending classroom hours in this way, language teachers can focus on successfully addressing all subjects in the curriculum. The aim of this study is (a) to gain insights into the perceptions of prospective English language teachers at a state university in Turkey on flipped classrooms and (b) to introduce the implementation of a flipped classroom into an English language class. A total of 47 prospective English teachers participated in the study. Qualitative research design was used and data were collected via an open-ended question. Findings of the study indicated that pre-service English teachers had positive perceptions towards the use of the flipped classroom as an integral part of face-to-face courses. It can be concluded that flipped classroom was beneficial in terms of 4 categories based on the content analysis of the responses: learning at one’s own pace, advance student preparation, overcoming the limitations of class time, increasing the participation in the classroom. The study also provides recommendations towards LMS integration into courses in other English language teaching departments and for implementing flipped classrooms in language teaching.
The blue water footprint of electricity from hydropower

Hydropower accounts for about 16 % of the world’s electricity supply. It has been debated whether hydroelectric generation is merely an in-stream water user or whether it also consumes water. In this paper we provide scientific support for the argument that hydroelectric generation is in most cases a significant water consumer. The study assesses the blue water footprint of hydroelectricity – the water evaporated from manmade reservoirs to produce electric energy – for 35 selected sites. The aggregated blue water footprint of the selected hydropower plants is 90 Gm 3 yr−1, which is equivalent to 10 % of the blue water footprint of global crop production in the year 2000. The total blue water footprint of hydroelectric generation in the world must be considerably larger if one considers the fact that this study covers only 8 % of the global installed hydroelectric capacity. Hydroelectric generation is thus a significant water consumer. The average water footprint of the selected hydropower plants is 68 m 3 GJ−1. Great differences in water footprint among hydropower plants exist, due to differences in climate in the places where the plants are situated, but more importantly as a result of large differences in the area flooded per unit of installed hydroelectric capacity. We recommend that water footprint assessment is added as a component in evaluations of newly proposed hydropower plants as well as in the evaluation of existing hydroelectric dams, so that the consequences of the water footprint of hydroelectric generation on downstream environmental flows and other water users can be evaluated.
Self-aware Object Tracking in Multi-Camera Networks

This chapter discusses another example of self-aware and self-expressive systems: a multi-camera network for object tracking. It provides a detailed description of how the concepts of self-awareness and self-expression can be implemented in a real network of smart cameras. In contrast to traditional cameras, smart cameras are able to perform image analysis on-board and collaborate with other cameras in order to analyse the dynamic behaviour of objects in partly unknown environments. Self-aware and self-expressive smart cameras are even able to reason about their current state and to adapt their algorithms in response to changes in their environment and the network. Self-awareness and self-expression allow them to manage the trade-off among performance, flexibility, resources and reliability during runtime. Due to the uncertainties and dynamics in the network a fixed configuration of the cameras is infeasible. We adopt the concepts of self-awareness and self-expression for autonomous monitoring of the state and progress of each camera in the network and adapt its behaviour to changing conditions. In this chapter we focus on describing the building blocks for self-aware camera networks and demonstrate the key characteristics in a multi-camera object tracking application both in simulation and in a real camera network. The proposed application implements the goal sharing Lukas Esterle Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, e-mail: lukas.esterle@aau.at Jennifer Simonjan Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, e-mail: jennifer.simonjan@aau.at Georg Nebehay Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria, e-mail: gnebehay@gmail.com Roman Pflugfelder Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria, e-mail: roman.pflugfelder@ait.ac.at Gustavo Fernández Domı́nguez Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria, e-mail: gustavo.fernandez@ait.ac.at Bernhard Rinner Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, e-mail: bernhard.rinner@aau.at
Comparison of lidocaine, xylazine, and lidocaine-xylazine for caudal epidural analgesia in cattle.

OBJECTIVE
To directly compare the time to onset and duration of analgesia produced by a lidocaine/xylazine combination with that produced by lidocaine and xylazine administered alone in the caudal epidural space of dairy cattle. Design   Prospective randomized experimental study.


ANIMALS
Nine adult (> 4 years of age) dairy cows (520-613 kg).


METHODS
Caudal epidural analgesia was produced in all cows with 2% lidocaine (0.22 mg kg-1; 5.5 mL 500 kg-1), 10% xylazine (0.05 mg kg-1 diluted to 5.5 mL 500 kg-1 with sterile water), and 2% lidocaine/10% xylazine (0.22 mg kg-1/0.05 mg kg-1; total volume of 5.7 mL 500 kg-1), at no earlier than weekly intervals in a Latin square design. Time to onset, duration and cranial spread of analgesia were recorded, as were degree of sedation, ataxia and ptyalism.


RESULTS
No significant difference (p > 0.05) was noted for time (mean ± SEM) of onset of analgesia between lidocaine (4.8 ± 1.0 minutes) and the lidocaine/xylazine combination (5.1 ± 0.9 minutes) but onset of analgesia following xylazine was significantly longer (11.7 ± 1.0 minutes) than either of the other two treatments. Lidocaine/xylazine (302.8 ± 11.0 minutes) produced analgesia of significantly longer duration than that of xylazine (252.9 ± 18.9 minutes) and both the lidocaine/xylazine combination and xylazine alone produced analgesia of significantly longer duration than that produced by lidocaine (81.8 ± 11.8 minutes). In all cattle, xylazine, administered either alone or with lidocaine, induced mild to moderate sedation and ataxia and cutaneous analgesia from the coccyx to T13. Mild ataxia was also present in those cattle receiving lidocaine alone.


CONCLUSION
The combination of xylazine and lidocaine produces analgesia of quicker onset and longer duration than xylazine administered alone and of longer duration than lidocaine administered alone.


CLINICAL RELEVANCE
Utilizing this combination, long-duration obstetrical and surgical procedures could commence relatively soon after epidural injection and could be completed without re-administration of anesthetic agents.
Interrogative suggestibility, compliance and false confessions among prisoners and their relationship with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms.

BACKGROUND
Interrogative suggestibility and compliance are important psychological vulnerabilities during interrogation. The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship of suggestibility and compliance with childhood and current symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Compliance has not been studied previously in relation to ADHD. A further aim was to investigate the relationship between ADHD and the reporting of having made a false confession to the police.


METHOD
The participants were 90 male prisoners, all of whom had completed the Gudjonsson Suggestibility and Compliance Scales (GSS and GCS) within 10 days of admission to the prison. Childhood ADHD symptoms were screened by the Wender Utah Rating Scale (WURS) and current adult symptoms by the DSM-IV Checklist criteria for ADHD.


RESULTS
Half of the prisoners (50%) were found on screening to meet criteria for ADHD in childhood and, of those, over half (60%) were either fully symptomatic or in partial remission of their symptoms. ADHD symptoms were found to be significantly associated with compliance, but not with suggestibility. The relationship with compliance was stronger (effect size) in relation to current than childhood symptoms. The ADHD symptomatic groups were significantly more likely to claim that they had made a false confession to the police in the past.


CONCLUSIONS
The findings raise important questions about the potential vulnerability of adults with ADHD symptoms in terms of their ability to cope with interrogation.
Eco-epidemiological analysis of dengue infection during an outbreak of dengue fever, India

This study was designed to find out a relationship of dengue infection with climatic factors such as rainfall, temperature and relative humidity during the dengue fever epidemic in the year 2003. Blood samples were collected from 1550 patients experiencing a febrile illness clinically consistent with dengue infection. Serological confirmation of Dengue Infection was done using Dengue Duo IgM and IgG Rapid Strip test (Pan Bio, Australia), which detected dengue-specific antibodies. Monthly data of total rainfall, temperature and relative humidity for the year 2003 was obtained from Meteorological Department of Delhi, New Delhi and retrospectively analyzed. Out of 1550 suspected cases, 893 cases (57.36%) were confirmed as serologically positive. The difference between numbers of serologically positive cases during different months was significant (p < 0.05). Larger proportions of serologically positive cases were observed among adults. Outbreak coincided mainly with the post monsoon period of subnormal rainfall. The difference between serologically positive cases as compared to serologically negative ones in post monsoon period was significantly higher (p < 0.001). The difference in the rainfall and temperature between three seasonal periods was significant (p < 0.05). This prospective study highlighted rain, temperature and relative humidity as the major and important climatic factors, which could alone or collectively be responsible for an outbreak. More studies in this regard could further reveal the correlation between the climatic changes and dengue outbreaks, which would help in making the strategies and plans to forecast any outbreak in future well in advance.
Talent Management : Effect on Organizational Performance

Talent management is a new concept but difficult phenomenon to measure. The impact of talent management on organizational performance is a problem especially where only strategic staffs is treated as talents of the firm. The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of talent management on organizational performance. The questionnaire was used as the survey method of collecting primary data for the study. Correlation coefficient, tstudent distribution and the descriptive analyses were the methods used to analyze the data gathered. The analyses revealed that talent management has positive impact on the organizational overall performance. It also revealed that talent management scheme has impact on the performance of the multinational and the national firm but the small and medium scale firms have not been gaining from this new technique within the Nigerian business environment. The study therefore recommends that talent management scheme should be used for all categories of staff within the firm that have special talent and that firms should separate between their talent management scheme and the total human recourses management style of the firm.