Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Whooping cough in Pakistan: Bordetella pertussis vs Bordetella parapertussis in 2005–2009

Abstract Pertussis, or whooping cough, is an acute respiratory disease mainly affecting infants and children and is caused by Bordetella pertussis and Bordetella parapertussis. The aim of this study was to investigate the share of Bordetella species from potential whooping cough cases during 2005–2009. Eight hundred and two samples from suspected pertussis cases were collected, mainly from 2 provinces of Pakistan. Bacterial culture, identification, DNA extraction and routinely used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methods using IS1001, IS1002 and IS481 were used to identify the Bordetella species. The results were unexpected, because all of the isolates collected from the different cities were identified as B. parapertussis (7.4%); B. pertussis was not isolated from any sample. However, PCR results indicated the presence of a small percentage (0.6%) of B. pertussis among the total cases studied. This study suggests that vaccines to protect against both B. pertussis and B. parapertussis should be considered.
Pulmonary Hypertensive Medical Therapy in Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension Before Pulmonary Thromboendarterectomy

Background— The currently recommended treatment for chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension is pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE). No convincing evidence for the use of pulmonary hypertensive medical therapy (PHT) exists in operable candidates. We sought to determine the prevalence of the use of PHT on referral for PTE and the effects on pre-PTE hemodynamics and post-PTE outcomes/hemodynamics. Methods and Results— We performed a retrospective analysis of chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension patients referred for PTE during 2005–2007. The prevalence of PHT was determined for all patients referred to our institution. Hemodynamic and outcomes analysis involved only those undergoing PTE. Data included baseline demographics, PHT medication(s), dosage, duration of therapy, and time to referral. Hemodynamic data were acquired from the time of diagnosis, the time of referral visit, and after PTE. Outcomes included intensive care unit, hospital, and ventilator days; bleeding and infection rates; incidence of reperfusion lung injury; and in-hospital mortality. The control group (n=244) was compared with the PHT group (n=111); subgroups included monotherapy with bosentan, sildenafil, or epoprostenol and combination therapy. The prevalence of PHT significantly increased from 19.9% in 2005 to 37% in 2007. There was minimal benefit of treatment with PHT on pre-PTE mean pulmonary artery pressure, but its use was associated with a significant delay in time to referral for PTE. Both groups experienced significant improvements in hemodynamic parameters after PTE. The 2 groups did not differ significantly in any post-PTE outcome. Similar results were obtained for each subgroup. Conclusions— Our results suggest that PHT use has minimal effect on pre-PTE hemodynamics and no effect on post-PTE outcomes/hemodynamics.
Evaluation method for automatic speech summarization

We have proposed an automatic speech summarization approach that extracts words from transcription results obtained by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. To numerically evaluate this approach, the automatic summarization results are compared with manual summarization generated by humans through word extraction. We have proposed three metrics, weighted word precision, word strings precision and summarization accuracy (SumACCY), based on a word network created by merging manual summarization results. In this paper, we propose a new metric for automatic summarization results, weighted summarization accuracy (WSumACCY). This accuracy is weighted by the posterior probability of the manual summaries in the network to give the reliability of each answer extracted from the network. We clarify the goal of each metric and use these metrics to provide automatic evaluation results of the summarized speech. To compare the performance of each evaluation metric, correlations between the evaluation results using these metrics and subjective evaluation by hand are measured. It is confirmed that WSumACCY is an effective and robust measure for automatic summarization.
A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Three Common Psychopathologies—ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression—and Indicators of Little-c Creativity

There is a long-standing controversy over the relationship between psychopathology and creativity. Yet there is a lack of evidence regarding the relationship between common psychopathologies and indicators of little-c, or every day, creativity among laypeople. To make sense of this connection, we conducted a meta-analysis using 89 studies to reveal the overall relationships between the most common psychopathologies and little-c creativity and uncover the source of variance in the relationships. The 89 studies involved 35,271 participants and the common psychopathologies: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and depression. Results indicated that the overall mean effect size was not different from zero (r = −.06, k = 261, 95% confidence interval [−.15, .02]) with substantial heterogeneity. Variability of effect sizes was examined by five moderators: assessment of psychopathology, assessment of creativity, age, gender, and intelligence of participants. Specifically, the moderator analyses showed that effect sizes varied by assessment of both psychopathology and creativity as well as level of intelligence.
The Use of Chemoprophylaxis after Floods to Reduce the Occurrence and Impact of Leptospirosis Outbreaks

Record-breaking and devastating rainfall events have occurred in the past decade. Rain and floods are considered the main risk factors for leptospirosis and several outbreaks have been reported following extreme weather events. In such situations, one possible intervention to prevent leptospirosis cases in high-risk groups is the use of chemoprophylaxis. However, not enough evidence of its effect is available. The objectives of this study were to review the literature on the current practices of chemoprophylaxis for leptospirosis and to explore, using a mathematical model, how various chemoprophylaxis scenarios may affect the progression of a leptospirosis outbreak. Twenty-six peer-reviewed publications were selected (10 quantitative studies, two systematic reviews and 14 articles of other types). Oral doxycycline was the most used antibiotic for chemoprophylaxis of leptospirosis. Post-exposure prophylaxis was assessed in four studies following a natural disaster. Although evidence of the effectiveness of post-exposure prophylaxis is inconsistent, the direction of association supported a protective effect for morbidity and mortality. The theoretical model showed how the assumed benefit of chemoprophylaxis was influenced by the time and rate of administration. Future models should consider the heterogeneity of affected communities, improved estimates of the effect of chemoprophylaxis on leptospirosis infection and disease, as well as potential detrimental impacts. Additional research is critical to provide clear evidence-based recommendations for leptospirosis control during an outbreak. The results of this study suggest that chemoprophylaxis may provide some protection in reducing the number of leptospirosis cases after a high-risk exposure; however, the effective benefit may depend on a variety of factors such as the timing and coverage of prophylaxis. The information summarized can be used to support decision-making during a high-risk event.
Structural Change and Post-Socialist Stratification: Labor Market Transitions in Contemporary Russia

In Russia, market transition has led to sweeping structural changes: a long recession, growth of the private sector, expansion of certain branches of the economy and contraction of others, a decrease in average firm size, and regional differentiation in economic performance. These structural changes had important consequences for stratification through their effects on individual labor market outcomes. Analyses of nine types of individual labor market transitions in Russia using 1991–1997 work-history data show that structural location has strong effects. Human capital and membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union also influence labor market prospects, but not in ways consistent with general theories about how market transition affects stratification processes. Structural change plays a key role in determining the impact of market reforms on stratification. But market transition produces variable patterns of structural change in different countries and in different regions within a single country. The structural perspective demonstrates why market transition has variable consequences for stratification: Different prior conditions and reform policies produce different patterns of structural change.
Preference Judgments and Choice: Is the Prominence Effect Due to Information Integration or Information Evaluation?

Several studies have shown that preference is not necessarily synonymous with choice. In particular, the most preferred object from a set of objects presented in a non-choice context is not necessarily chosen when the same objects are options in a choice situation (Lichtenstein & Slovic, 1971, 1973; Tversky, Sattah, & Slovic, 1988) . Our research on the choice-preference discrepancy replicates these findings and thus bears some resemblance to the study by Tversky, Sattah, and Slovic (1988). Two competing explanations are tested.
Complementary and alternative therapy (CAT) use and highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART): current evidence in the literature, 2000-2009.

AIM AND OBJECTIVE To determine current evidence about the use of complementary and alternative medicine in the context of highly active antiretroviral therapy. The following objectives included identifying the risks and benefits of using complementary and alternative medicine when living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and taking such medications. BACKGROUND In Canada and the USA, HIV/AIDS service organisations recognise that people affected or infected by HIV are increasingly choosing to use complementary and alternative medicine to cope with this disease. These same organisations advocate for increased access to complementary and alternative medicine and more information about the safe use of complementary and alternative medicine to make informed decisions. Based on the increased integral use of complementary and alternative medicine and conventional medicine in Canada and the USA, the literature review was limited to these two countries. DESIGN Systematic review. METHOD Available full-text abstracts published in English from 2000-2009 were retrieved by electronic searches of selected databases, including the websites of Health Canada and American National Center for Complementary and Alternate Medicine (NCCAM). Forty studies were examined and were categorised by referring to the NCCAM (2007) four types of complementary and alternative medicine. RESULTS Insufficient evidence exists to support the use of a particular complementary and alternate therapy to enhance the management of HIV disease. CONCLUSION Decisions about using complementary and alternative medicine in conjunction with highly active antiretroviral therapy are often poorly informed. Safety risks and potential drug interactions are frequently ignored as people who use highly active antiretroviral therapy prefer to focus on the physical and mental benefits of using selected complementary and alternate therapies to promote their quality of life. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE As life expectancy increases, from the use of highly active antiretroviral therapy, it is important for health professionals like nurses to be knowledgeable about the prevention, assessment and treatment of HIV symptoms and treatment side effects. Given the increased trend of using complementary and alternative medicine by the general population, it is also important to understand the appropriate use of complementary and alternative medicine for symptom management in HIV/AIDS care.
The use of E-commerce amongst thirty-four Australian SMEs: An experiment or a strategic business tool?

The use of e‐commerce and the Internet is increasing in acceptance for a wide range of businesses from large enterprises to small and micro businesses. While the literature on e‐business and e‐commerce is evolving, there is limited substantive research focused on the theory and practice of e‐business systems amongst small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper provides an insight into thirty‐four SMEs actively utilising e‐commerce. The paper also provides a theoretical contribution by developing a conceptual model of e‐commerce utilisation for SMEs within the Australian context, which depicts the relationship between the use of e‐commerce by SMEs, the degree of business transformation and the strategic significance of e‐commerce. Keywords: Case Study, Small Business, Electronic Commerce, Business Transformation
Hybrid Code Networks: practical and efficient end-to-end dialog control with supervised and reinforcement learning

End-to-end learning of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is an attractive solution for dialog systems; however, current techniques are data-intensive and require thousands of dialogs to learn simple behaviors. We introduce Hybrid Code Networks (HCNs), which combine an RNN with domain-specific knowledge encoded as software and system action templates. Compared to existing end-to-end approaches, HCNs considerably reduce the amount of training data required, while retaining the key benefit of inferring a latent representation of dialog state. In addition, HCNs can be optimized with supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or a mixture of both. HCNs attain state-of-the-art performance on the bAbI dialog dataset (Bordes and Weston, 2016), and outperform two commercially deployed customer-facing dialog systems at our company.
The Changes in Early Phase Insulin Secretion in Newly Diagnosed, Drug Naive Korean Prediabetes Subjects

Background There have been no systematic observations regarding changes in early phase insulin secretion among Korean prediabetes and early stage type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients. Methods We conducted 75-g oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTT) in 873 subjects with suspected abnormal glucose tolerance. All subjects were diagnosed as having normal glucose tolerance (NGT), prediabetes (preDM), or T2DM according to the OGTT results and the insulin secretory and insulin resistance indices of each subject were calculated. Additionally, we analyzed the changes in early phase insulin secretion according to changes in fasting (Glc0), post-prandial (Glc120) glucose and HbA1c (A1c) levels. Results As compared to subjects with NGT, the insulin secretory indices of the preDM and T2DM subjects progressively declined, and the insulin resistance indices were progressively aggravated. Early phase insulin secretion decreased rapidly according to the increments of Glc0, Glc120 and A1c, and these changes were most prominent in the NGT stage. Compared to the control group, the early phase insulin secretion levels of the preDM or T2DM subjects were less than 50% when Glc0 was over 100 mg/dL, Glc120 was over 145 mg/dL, and A1c was over 5.8%. Conclusion This study suggests that progressive beta cell dysfunction in Koreans may be initiated and rapidly aggravated during the period generally designated as 'normal. '
Use of Leu3a/3b for the accurate determination of CD4 subsets for measurement of intracellular cytokines.

BACKGROUND Identification of human T-helper cell subsets is possible by measurement of intracellular cytokines after coincubation of lymphocytes with phorbol myristate acetate (PMA), calcium ionophore, and brefeldin A for up to 20 h. However, exposure to PMA leads to internalization of membrane CD4 and to loss of resolution of the CD4+ cells. Detection of CD3+CD8- cells or preselection of CD4+ cells prior to stimulation is more cumbersome than direct measurement of CD4+ cells. We report the use of the Leu3a/Leu3b multiclone for the accurate determination of CD4 cells after PMA stimulation. METHODS Peripheral blood lymphocytes were isolated from healthy normal donors and the proportion of CD3+ / CD4+ T cells was determined by flow cytometry before and after incubation with PMA, calcium ionophore, and brefeldin A for 20 h using a variety of anti-CD4 monoclonal antibodies. RESULTS The Leu3a/3b multiclone reagent was the only anti-CD4 monoclonal antibody capable of resolving more than 98% of the initial CD4+ events after incubation with PMA. CONCLUSIONS The higher signal-to-noise ratio associated with Leu3a3b reagent, compared with other CD4-specific antibodies available, allows the direct and accurate identification of the CD4 subset even after PMA treatment of cells.
The geoarchaeology of a Holocene site on the Woolshed Embankment, Lake George, New South Wales

Abstract An extensive scatter of stone artefacts recorded as Site WE-1 on the Woolshed Embankment at the northern end of Lake George in southern NSW has been examined in the light of recent information on the lake’s history. Optical dates show that the core of the embankment formed between ~22,000 and 15,000 ya. Archaeological materials have survived in the overlying deposits, though they have been affected to a degree by repeated cultivation. These archaeological assemblages are now able to be interpreted in the light of a reconstruction (by Fitzsimmons and Barrows [2010]) of the Holocene lake history. The site was used during the mid- to late Holocene, initially during the penultimate high lake stand between 6000 and 2400 ya. The artefact assemblage has been inundated periodically by high lake levels, and potentially mixed by wave action. A silcrete- and backed artefact-rich and bipolar artefact-poor assemblage on part of the site was replaced across the whole site by one that had lower proportions of silcrete and backed artefacts and higher proportions of bipolar artefacts, a pattern similar to that observed in other sites in southeast Australia.
Real-Word Spelling Correction using Google Web 1T 3-grams

We present a method for detecting and correcting multiple real-word spelling errors using the Google Web IT 3-gram data set and a normalized and modified version of the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) string matching algorithm. Our method is focused mainly on how to improve the detection recall (the fraction of errors correctly detected) and the correction recall (the fraction of errors correctly amended), while keeping the respective precisions (the fraction of detections or amendments that are correct) as high as possible. Evaluation results on a standard data set show that our method outperforms two other methods on the same task.
GGAS: Global GPU address spaces for efficient communication in heterogeneous clusters

Modern GPUs are powerful high-core-count processors, which are no longer used solely for graphics applications, but are also employed to accelerate computationally intensive general-purpose tasks. For utmost performance, GPUs are distributed throughout the cluster to process parallel programs. In fact, many recent high-performance systems in the TOP500 list are heterogeneous architectures. Despite being highly effective processing units, GPUs on different hosts are incapable of communicating without assistance from a CPU. As a result, communication between distributed GPUs suffers from unnecessary overhead, introduced by switching control flow from GPUs to CPUs and vice versa. Most communication libraries even require intermediate copies from GPU memory to host memory. This overhead in particular penalizes small data movements and synchronization operations, reduces efficiency and limits scalability. In this work we introduce global address spaces to facilitate direct communication between distributed GPUs without CPU involvement. Avoiding context switches and unnecessary copying dramatically reduces communication overhead. We evaluate our approach using a variety of workloads including low-level latency and bandwidth benchmarks, basic synchronization primitives like barriers, and a stencil computation as an example application. We see performance benefits of up to 2× for basic benchmarks and up to 1.67× for stencil computations.
Detection of influenza virus using peroxidase-mimic of gold nanoparticles.

A modified enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) with nanomaterials is an effective and powerful method to amplify the signal and reduce the cost of detecting and measuring trace biomarkers or proteins. In this study, an ultra-sensitive colorimetric immunoassay was designed, and its ability to detect influenza viruses using positively charged gold nanoparticles ((+)Au NPs) was assessed as a possible role for peroxidase-mimic inorganic enzymes. This method detected influenza virus A (H1N1) with a linear range up to 10 pg mL(-1) and clinically isolated influenza virus A (H3N2) up to 10 plaque forming units (PFU) mL(-1) , where its sensitivity improved to 500-fold higher than that of commercial virus kits. The sensitivity of this proposed method was not declined even though in complex biological media in compared to conventional ELISA. These results revealed that the (+)AuNP-based colorimetric immunoassay could be suitable for lab-on-a-chip device and open new opportunities for clinical protein diagnostics. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2016;113: 2298-2303. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Epidemiology of concurrent headache and sleep problems in Denmark

Aims There are no previous epidemiologic studies on concurrent headache and sleep problems (HSP). This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the prevalence of HSP in Denmark, broadly characterize those with HSP, and examine associations between HSP and socioeconomic/lifestyle factors. Methods A total of 129,150 randomly selected individuals were invited to participate in the Danish National Health Survey 2010. Respondents were asked about headache, sleep problems, depression and anxiety in the last two weeks, health-related lifestyle and quality of life (SF-12). Socioeconomic data were retrieved from national registers. Prevalence proportions were adjusted for stratified sampling and non-response. Regression analyses examined associations between HSP and socioeconomic/lifestyle factors. Results Of 68,518 respondents, 16.3% reported only headache, 21.1% only sleep problems, and 18.1% HSP with 2.6% being severely affected. Prevalence was higher among women and the middle-aged. Severe HSP was associated with low socioeconomic position, non-Western ethnicity, unhealthy lifestyle, high stress and anxiety/depression. Those with HSP had substantially reduced quality of life; more so than those having only headache or only sleep problems. Conclusions HSP is a highly prevalent condition. Lifestyle modification, stress reduction, and screening for concurrent depression and anxiety may play important roles in management. The high prevalence of HSP suggests a common pathophysiological mechanism.