LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Effect of a cash transfer programme for schooling on prevalence of HIV and herpes simplex type 2 in Malawi: a cluster randomised trial

BACKGROUND
Lack of education and an economic dependence on men are often suggested as important risk factors for HIV infection in women. We assessed the efficacy of a cash transfer programme to reduce the risk of sexually transmitted infections in young women.


METHODS
In this cluster randomised trial, never-married women aged 13-22 years were recruited from 176 enumeration areas in the Zomba district of Malawi and randomly assigned with computer-generated random numbers by enumeration area (1:1) to receive cash payments (intervention group) or nothing (control group). Intervention enumeration areas were further randomly assigned with computer-generated random numbers to conditional (school attendance required to receive payment) and unconditional (no requirements to receive payment) groups. Participants in both intervention groups were randomly assigned by a lottery to receive monthly payments ranging from US$1 to $5, while their parents were independently assigned with computer-generated random numbers to receive $4-10. Behavioural risk assessments were done at baseline and 12 months; serology was tested at 18 months. Participants were not masked to treatment status but counsellors doing the serologic testing were. The primary outcomes were prevalence of HIV and herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) at 18 months and were assessed by intention-to-treat analyses. The trial is registered, number NCT01333826.


FINDINGS
88 enumeration areas were assigned to receive the intervention and 88 as controls. For the 1289 individuals enrolled in school at baseline with complete interview and biomarker data, weighted HIV prevalence at 18 month follow-up was 1·2% (seven of 490 participants) in the combined intervention group versus 3·0% (17 of 799 participants) in the control group (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 0·36, 95% CI 0·14-0·91); weighted HSV-2 prevalence was 0·7% (five of 488 participants) versus 3·0% (27 of 796 participants; adjusted OR 0·24, 0·09-0·65). In the intervention group, we noted no difference between conditional versus unconditional intervention groups for weighted HIV prevalence (3/235 [1%] vs 4/255 [2%]) or weighted HSV-2 prevalence (4/233 [1%] vs 1/255 [<1%]). For individuals who had already dropped out of school at baseline, we detected no significant difference between intervention and control groups for weighted HIV prevalence (23/210 [10%] vs 17/207 [8%]) or weighted HSV-2 prevalence (17/211 [8%] vs 17/208 [8%]).


INTERPRETATION
Cash transfer programmes can reduce HIV and HSV-2 infections in adolescent schoolgirls in low-income settings. Structural interventions that do not directly target sexual behaviour change can be important components of HIV prevention strategies.


FUNDING
Global Development Network, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, National Bureau of Economic Research Africa Project, World Bank's Research Support Budget, and several World Bank trust funds (Gender Action Plan, Knowledge for Change Program, and Spanish Impact Evaluation fund).
Laser earlobe revision.

BACKGROUND
Earlobe tears and disfigurement often result from prolonged pierced earring use and trauma. They are a common cosmetic complaint for which surgical reconstruction has often been advocated.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
A series of 10 patients with earlobe tears or disfigurement treated using straight-line closure, carbon dioxide (CO2 ) laser ablation, or both are described. A succinct literature review of torn earlobe repair is provided.


RESULTS
Successful repair with excellent cosmesis of torn and disfigured earlobes was obtained after straight-line surgical closure, CO2 laser ablation, or both.


CONCLUSION
A minimally invasive earlobe repair technique that involves concomitant surgical closure and CO2 laser skin vaporization produces excellent cosmetic results for torn or disfigured earlobes.
Incidence and Predictors of New-Onset Atrial Fibrillation in Septic Shock Patients in a Medical ICU: Data from 7-Day Holter ECG Monitoring

PURPOSE
We investigated incidence, risk factors for new-onset atrial fibrillation (NAF), and prognostic impact during septic shock in medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients.


METHODS
Prospective, observational study in a university hospital. Consecutive patients from 03/2011 to 05/2013 with septic shock were eligible. Exclusion criteria were age <18 years, history of AF, transfer with prior septic shock. Included patients were equipped with long-duration (7 days) Holter ECG monitoring. NAF was defined as an AF episode lasting >30 seconds. Patient characteristics, infection criteria, cardiovascular parameters, severity of illness, support therapies were recorded.


RESULTS
Among 66 patients, 29(44%) developed NAF; 10 (34%) would not have been diagnosed without Holter ECG monitoring. NAF patients were older, with more markers of heart failure (troponin and NT-pro-BNP), lower left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), longer QRS duration and more nonsustained supra ventricular arrhythmias (<30s) on day 1 than patients who maintained sinus rhythm. By multivariate analysis, age (OR: 1.06; p = 0.01) and LVEF<45% (OR: 13.01, p = 0.03) were associated with NAF. NAF did not predict 28 or 90 day mortality.


CONCLUSIONS
NAF is common, especially in older patients, and is associated with low ejection fraction. We did not find NAF to be independently associated with higher mortality.
The Social Impact of Globalization in the Developing Countries

The Social Impact of Globalization in the Developing Countries In this paper an ex-post measurable definition of globalization has been used, namely increasing trade openness and FDI. A general result is that the optimistic HeckscherOhlin/Stolper-Samuelson predictions do not apply, that is neither employment creation nor the decrease in within-country inequality are automatically assured by increasing trade and FDI. The other main findings of the paper are that: 1) the employment effect can be very diverse in different areas of the world, giving raise to concentration and marginalisation phenomena; 2) increasing trade and FDI do not emerge as the main culprits of increasing within-country income inequality in DCs, although some evidence emerges that import of capital goods may imply an increase in inequality via skill-biased technological change; 3)increasing trade seems to foster economic growth and absolute poverty alleviation, although some important counter-examples emerge. JEL Classification: F02, O1
Fault detection in industrial processes using canonical variate analysis and dynamic principal component analysis

Ž . Principal component analysis PCA is a well-known data dimensionality technique that has been used to detect faults Ž . during the operation of industrial processes. Dynamic principal component analysis DPCA and canonical variate analysis Ž . CVA are data dimensionality techniques which take into account serial correlations, but their effectiveness in detecting faults in industrial processes has not been extensively tested. In this paper, scorerstate and residual space PCA, DPCA, and CVA are applied to the Tennessee Eastman process simulator, which was designed to simulate a wide variety of faults occurring in a chemical plant based on a facility at Eastman Chemical. This appears to be the first application of residual space CVA statistics for detecting faults in a large-scale process. Statistics quantifying variations in the residual space were usually more sensitive but less robust to the faults than the statistics quantifying the variations in the score or state space. The statistics exhibiting a small missed detection rate tended to exhibit small detection delays and vice versa. A residual-based CVA statistic proposed in this paper gave the best overall sensitivity and promptness, but the initially proposed threshold for the statistic lacked robustness. This motivated increasing the threshold to achieve a specified missed detection rate. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
A pediatric perspective on the unique vulnerability and resilience of the embryo and the child to environmental toxicants: the importance of rigorous research concerning age and agent.

There is realistic concern about the impact of environmental influences on the health of human populations. First, exposure to environmental agents continues despite successes in reducing exposures to known toxicants such as lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and tobacco smoke. Second, there has been increasing concern about the cause of autism and other neurodevelopmental problems and hypotheses that environmental influences may play a role in the prevalence of these and other such childhood and adult conditions as asthma and obesity. Third, many other conditions are directly or indirectly related to environmental influences and are preventable, such as injuries, untoward consequences of alcohol, suicide, drug addiction, and gun-related deaths. There have been numerous publications since the 1970s of symposia, proceedings, monographs, and articles dealing with the increased susceptibility of the embryo, infant, and child to environmental toxicants,1–17 reflecting a greater level of concern about embryonic and childhood exposures. Indeed, great deal of attention has been paid to the vulnerability of the embryo and the fetus to environmental chemicals, drugs, and physical agents. In fact, the publication edited by Miller1 was primarily devoted to exposures to the embryo and the fetus. Because the embryo and the child are growing and their tissues and organs are differentiating, deleterious effects may occur at lower exposures to some chemicals, drugs, and physical agents and produce more severe effects than those seen in adults. In fact, some effects may not occur in adults. Thus, maximal permissible exposures (MPEs) for some environmental chemicals should be lower for the embryo and the child. It is important to note that children and adolescents have better recuperative capacities than adults for many toxic agents, and, similarly, appropriate drug dosages may be lower or higher on a mg/kg or surface area basis in children than in adults to attain effective therapeutic blood levels or to avoid toxicity. In addition, effects produced by drugs, chemicals, and physical agents are not always deleterious or always irreversible. This means that for some exposures, the young can recover from some effects more rapidly and completely than adults (Table 1). If the exposure does result in irreversible effects by exceeding the threshold exposure, then the impact on a developing organism can be more severe than in the adult. Much of the discussion and publications that deal with the vulnerability of the developing embryo, infant, child, and adolescent to environmental agents have focused on particular environmental toxicants or agents, summarizing the spectrum of pathology that results from exposures to these agents. There is nothing wrong with this approach from the toxicologist’s point of view, because it is obvious that the developing child and adolescent can be more severely or differently affected by some environmental toxicants.
Bypassing Passkey Authentication in Bluetooth Low Energy

Since the attack runs on the Security Manager layer , it can reuse a lot of the existing network stack that is already in place for this approach. This namely concerns every thing bellow HCI [1]. Actually, the whole procedure starting with the authentication bypass and continuing to data in jection (which would be a regular communication any wa ) can be done using a general Bluetooth 4.0 Smart Ready USB dongle via HCI commands.
Visual acuity results in school-aged children and adults: Lea Symbols chart versus Bailey-Lovie chart.

PURPOSE
To compare visual acuity results obtained using the Lea Symbols chart with visual acuity results obtained with the Bailey-Lovie chart in school-aged children and adults using a within-subjects comparison of monocular acuity results.


METHODS
Subjects were 62 individuals between 4.5 and 60 years of age, recruited from patients seen in five optometry clinics. Each subject had acuity of the right eye and the left eye tested with the Lea Symbols chart and the Bailey-Lovie chart, with order of testing varied across subjects. Outcome measures were monocular logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution (logMAR) visual acuity and inter-eye acuity difference in logMAR units for each test.


RESULTS
Correlation between acuity results obtained with the two charts was high. There was no difference in absolute inter-eye acuity difference measured with the two acuity charts. However, on average, Lea Symbols acuity scores were one logMAR line better than Bailey-Lovie acuity scores, and this difference increased with worse visual acuity.


CONCLUSIONS
The Lea Symbols chart provides a measure of inter-eye difference that is similar to that obtained with the Bailey-Lovie chart. However, the monocular acuity results obtained with the Lea Symbols chart differ from those obtained with the Bailey-Lovie chart, and the difference is dependent on the individual's absolute level of visual acuity.
Robust Ellipse Detection by Fitting Randomly Selected Edge Patches

In this paper, a method to detect multiple ellipses is presented. The technique is efficient and robust against incomplete ellipses due to partial occlusion, noise or missing edges and outliers. It is an iterative technique that finds and removes the best ellipse until no reasonable ellipse is found. At each run, the best ellipse is extracted from randomly selected edge patches, its fitness calculated and compared to a fitness threshold. RANSAC algorithm is applied as a sampling process together with the Direct Least Square fitting of ellipses (DLS) as the fitting algorithm. In our experiment, the method performs very well and is robust against noise and spurious edges on both synthetic and real-world image data. Keywords—Direct Least Square Fitting, Ellipse Detection, RANSAC
Hepatitis B vaccination in children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis.

OBJECTIVES
To evaluate the responsiveness of children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) to hepatitis B vaccination and to determine the most useful vaccination schedule.


METHODS
39 children with JIA were enrolled in the study; all were in remission and negative to serological testing for hepatitis B surface antigen (HbsAg). The control group consisted of 41 healthy children. There were two different vaccination schedules: group I was vaccinated at 0, 1, and 3 months; group II was vaccinated at 0, 1, and 6 months. Positive responsiveness to the vaccine was defined as an anti-hepatitis B antibody titre above 10 mIU/ml.


RESULTS
All the children except one with systemic JIA developed an antibody response. None of the JIA patients experienced a flare up or clinical deterioration related to the vaccination. The antibody levels in children with JIA were significantly lower than in the healthy controls. Comparison of the antibody levels between the two vaccination schedules showed no statistical difference in the controls; in the JIA subjects the group II schedule resulted in a trend to a greater response than the group I schedule (p<0.07). Vaccine responsiveness was not influenced by either methotrexate or prednisolone treatment.


CONCLUSIONS
Children with JIA had an adequate response to hepatitis B vaccination and the response was not affected by immunosuppressive treatment. A vaccination schedule at 0, 1, and 6 months seems to be preferable to 0, 1, and 3 months.
Toward Game Level Generation from Gameplay Videos

Algorithms that generate computer game content require game design knowledge. We present an approach to automatically learn game design knowledge for level design from gameplay videos. We further demonstrate how the acquired design knowledge can be used to generate sections of game levels. Our approach involves parsing video of people playing a game to detect the appearance of patterns of sprites and utilizing machine learning to build a probabilistic model of sprite placement. We show how rich game design information can be automatically parsed from gameplay videos and represented as a set of generative probabilistic models. We use Super Mario Bros. as a proof of concept. We evaluate our approach on a measure of playability and stylistic similarity to the original levels as represented in the gameplay videos.
Novel low-voltage low-power high-precision CCII± based on bulk-driven folded cascode OTA

This paper presents possible approaches to the design of a novel low-voltage, low-power, and highprecision current conveyor of the second generation (CCII7) based on the bulk-driven folded cascode operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) with extended input common-mode voltage range. This CCII7 utilizes bulk-driven differential pairs to obtain a nearly rail-to-rail input stage at a low supply voltage. The proposed conveyor operates at a low supply voltage of 7400 mV with a reduced power consumption of only 64 mW. A current-mode multifunction filter is presented as an application of the CCII7 . This filter provides five transfer functions simultaneously, namely low-pass, band-pass, highpass, notch, and all-pass. The filter has the following properties and advantages: it employs three bulkdriven current conveyors BD-CCII7 , three grounded resistors, and two grounded capacitors, which is suitable for integrated circuit implementation. Furthermore, the input signal is connected to the lowimpedance X terminal of the BD-CCII7 whereas the output signals are taken from the high-impedance output terminals Zþ and Z . Finally, the pole frequency and quality factor of the designed filter are tunable independent of each other. PSpice simulation results using the 0.18 mm CMOS technology are included to prove the results. & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Assessing usability evaluation methods on their effectiveness to elicit verbal comments from children subjects

An exploratory study is described looking at children's ability to provide verbal comments in usability evaluation sessions. Six evaluation methods were applied to test an interactive toy by children aged 6 and 7. The results show that most verbal comments were gathered during Active Intervention sessions, by asking children questions during tasks. Unexpectedly, the Co-Discovery sessions were less successful, because children did not collaborate very well. Children also provided useful comments in the Thinking Aloud, Retrospection, and Peer Tutoring sessions. They could reflect on their actions at the end of Retrospection sessions, and were able to teach other children how to interact with the toy in Peer Tutoring sessions.
Comparison of monophasic and biphasic shocks for transthoracic cardioversion of atrial fibrillation.

OBJECTIVE
To compare the efficacy of cardioversion in patients with atrial fibrillation between monophasic damped sine waveform and rectilinear biphasic waveform shocks at a high initial energy level and with a conventional paddle position.


DESIGN
Prospective randomised study.


PATIENTS AND SETTING
227 patients admitted for cardioversion of atrial fibrillation to a tertiary referral centre.


RESULTS
70% of 109 patients treated with an initial 200 J monophasic shock were cardioverted to sinus rhythm, compared with 80% of 118 patients treated with an initial 120 J biphasic shock (NS). After the second shock (360 J monophasic or 200 J biphasic), 90% of the patients were in sinus rhythm in both groups. The mean cumulative energy used for successful cardioversion was 306 J for monophasic shocks and 159 J for biphasic shocks (p < 0.001).


CONCLUSIONS
A protocol using monophasic waveform shocks in a 200-360 J sequence has the same efficacy (90%) as a protocol using rectilinear biphasic waveform shocks in a 120-200 J sequence. This equal efficacy is achieved with a significantly lower mean delivered energy level using the rectilinear biphasic shock waveform. The potential advantage of lower energy delivery for cardioversion of atrial fibrillation needs further study.
Space is the machine

artefacts, 65–67 built environments and, 67–69 object artefacts, 65–66 structuralism and, 66–67 See also Non–discursive technique Asymmetry, 88–89, 91 Asynchronous systems, 187 Autonomous architecture, 336–338
Coping with legacy system migration complexity

During the last three decades, a considerable amount of software has been developed based on obsolete technologies (such as using procedural languages). This type of systems has undergone severe code revisions during a long time period. As a consequence, the high level of entropy combined with imprecise documentation about the design and architecture make the maintenance more difficult, time consuming, and costly. On the other hand, these systems have important economical value; many of them are crucial to their owners (Bennett, 1995). For the high cost of lost former investment and business knowledge that embedded in those systems, in many cases, simply abandon legacy systems and re-develop new systems based on new technology is not the choice. Migrating legacy system toward new emerging technology is an appropriate solution. However, migrating legacy system towards new technology is a complex system engineering work. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reduce the migration complexity. We apply dynamic program analysis, software visualization, knowledge recovery, and divide-and-conquer techniques to cope with the complexity issue in legacy software migration project.
Smart metering and functionalities of smart meters in smart grid - a review

Reducing the power supply-demand gap and increasing reliability of power supply are the challenges of current energy management. Implementation of smart grid, smart meters and smart metering can be a possible solution for power demand reduction, efficient power supply management, and optimization of management resource usages. Smart meters include sophisticated measurement and calculation hardware, software, calibration and communication capabilities. For interoperability within a smart grid infrastructure, smart meters are designed to perform functions, and store and communicate data according to certain standards. In this work we discuss smart meter and various elements of smart metering, current state of the technologies related to smart grid, smart meter, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and meter data flow in smart grid. We also discuss standards related to smart meter, meter data format and data transmission, functions of smart meter, and functionalities of smart meters, currently deployed by utilities around the world.