Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seroepidemiology of cytomegalovirus infection during pregnancy in Gonabad, east of Iran: a cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is the most common cause of congenital infection, with increased morbidity and mortality at birth. The risk of intrauterine infection largely depends on the time of maternal infection during pregnancy. Currently, no national screening test for CMV infection is available during pregnancy in Iran. The aim of this study was to determine the seroprevalence of CMV infection in pregnant women in the east region of Iran. METHODS In this descriptive study, conducted from February to April 2011, 240 serum samples were collected from pregnant women in the third trimester to measure CMV-specific immunoglobulin G (CMV-IgG) and CMV-specific immunoglobulin M (CMV-IgM) markers using ELISA test. IgG avidity test was used for all patients whom were positive CMV-IgM and positive CMV-IgG to distinguish primary and recurrent CMV infection. All positive CMV-IgM of pregnant women were monitored until birth. RESULTS The majority of women (72.1%) were positive CMV-IgG in pregnancy. The rate of positive CMV-IgM, primary and recurrent infection was 2.5%, 0.83%, and 1.67% respectively. There was significant relation between history of abortion (P = 0.013) and residential place (P = 0.017) with IgG seropositive rate. Two subjects with positive CMV-IgM were faced with preterm labor and low birth weight. CONCLUSION The findings of our study indicated high prevalence rate of CMV seropositivity in this part of eastern region of Iran. A national screening of CMV-IgM serological is suggested for pregnant women who are at risk of CMV infection.
Readings on the Development of Children

This collection of 35 readings spans the breadth of contemporary scientific thinking on the developing child. lt provides a forum through which readers can encounter acknowledged leaders in the field discussing their work observing children, conducting experiments, and devising theories, The selections, each of which is introduced by the editors, range from classic papers and book excerpts to recently published research reports and literature reviews. Each theoretical selection was chosen for its power to convey important and provocative statements by experts in a compelling way. The research selections offer fresh insights into the process of collecting evidence, interpreting findings, and drawing conclusions. Topics include today's most crucial and controversial issues, such as child abuse, the effects of divorce, and developmental variations in different cultural groups.
Social robots: A meeting point between science and fiction

Els robots industrials i els androides de la ciencia-ficcio, tan diferents fins ara, comencen a confluir gracies al rapid desenvolupament de la robotica social. Atesa la creixent necessitat de ma d’obra en el sector assistencial i de serveis, s’estan dissenyant robots que puguin interaccionar amb les persones, ja sigui atenent a discapacitats i gent gran, fent de recepcionistes o dependents en centres comercials, i adhuc actuant de mestres de reforc o mainaderes. En aquest context, proliferen les iniciatives per facilitar la inspiracio mutua entre tecnociencia i humanitats. Questions etiques com la influencia de les mainaderes robotiques sobre el psiquisme infantil, abans tractades en obres literaries, son ara debatudes en forums cientifics.
Influence of Microenvironment pH, Humidity, and Temperature on the Stability of Polymorphic and Amorphous Forms of Clopidogrel Bisulfate

The effect of microenvironment pH, humidity, and temperature was evaluated on the stability of polymorphic and amorphous forms of clopidogrel bisulfate, when present alone or in combinations. Oxalic acid and sodium carbonate were used as solid stressors to create acidic and alkaline pH, respectively. The samples without and with stressors were subjected for 3 months to (1) 0% RH, 25% RH, 75% RH, and 85% RH at 40°C and also to (2) 60°C, 80°C, and 100°C at 0% RH. In case of solid samples without stressors, the mixture of polymorphic and amorphous forms showed more degradation than the individual forms above critical relative humidity (85% RH). Similar higher degradation was observed between 75% RH and 85% RH in case of acid-stressed samples. In alkaline microenvironment, all the samples showed identical decomposition attributed to conversion of bisulfate salt to free base. Thermal studies indicated that polymorphic forms of clopidogrel bisulfate and also its glassy amorphous form were highly resistant to temperature, whereas the rubbery state of the drug degraded significantly at temperatures of ≥80°C.
Clinical profile of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and the role of imaging in its diagnosis in patients with presumed idiopathic intracranial hypertension

Retrospective descriptive study reporting the rate of occurrence of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), highlighting the role of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance venography (MRV) in patients with presumed idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH). Study was conducted in the department of neuro-ophthalmology at a tertiary eye care center in South India. Data from 331 patients diagnosed with IIH from June 2005 to September 2007 was included. Inclusion criteria were: Elevated opening cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure of more than 200 mm of water on lumbar puncture, normal CSF biochemistry and microbiology, and normal neuroimaging as depicted by computed tomography(CT) scan. Exclusion criteria were: Space-occupying lesions, hydrocephalus, meningitis, intracranial pressure within normal range, abnormal CSF biochemistry and microbiology. The remaining patients were evaluated with MRI and MRV. CVST was present in 11.4% of patients who were presumed to have IIH (35/308). MRI alone identified 24 cases (68%) of CVST, while MRI used in combination with MRV revealed an additional 11 cases (32%). Risk factors associated with CVST were identified in nine out of 35 patients (26%). CVST may be misdiagnosed as IIH if prompt neuroimaging by MRI and MRV is not undertaken. Risk factors of CVST may not be apparent in all the cases and these patients are liable to be missed if CT scan alone is used for neuroimaging, hence MRI, combined with MRV should be undertaken to rule out CVST.
Assessing Grammatical Knowledge (with Special Reference to the Graded Grammaticality Judgment Paradigm)

This chapter briefly summarizes some of the most widely used experimental paradigms in the domain of grammatical development (elicited production, repetition, weird word order, priming, act-out, and preferential looking and pointing tasks) before focusing in more detail on a relatively new grammaticality judgment paradigm. This new paradigm allows children to provide graded acceptability judgments for sentences (e.g., *The magician disappeared the rabbit) and individual lexical forms of both familiar (e.g., unlock, *unsqueeze) and novel verbs (e.g., rifed and rofe as the past-tense form of rife). The paradigm is suitable for use with young children (M = 4:6 for the youngest group tested so far) and also with older children and adults (where it can be used to assess the relative unacceptability of errors that these speakers would not usually produce). The paradigm yields unambiguous numerical data that do not require scoring, recoding, or reliability checking, and that are suitable for most commonly used statistical analyses (e.g., ANOVA, regression). It is well suited to research questions for which competing theoretical accounts make quantitative predictions regarding the relative (un)acceptability of particular forms (including, for example, the retreat from argument structure overgeneralization and the English past-tense debate).
AUV observations of mixing in the tidal outflow from a Scottish sea loch

Freshwater outflows from estuarine systems carry nutrients, sediments, larvae and other materials into the coastal ocean where they mix into ambient ocean water. Loch Etive is one such estuary on the west coast of Scotland that is fed by a large rainfall catchment area, and from which the outflow is strongly modulated on a tidal basis. Freshwater leaves the loch on the ebbing tide in a pulse released into the coastal ocean as a thin layer, the leading edge of which develops into an undular bore or a train of internal solitary waves with strong mixing and associated entrainment. A Hydroid 600 m depth-rated AUV equipped with a forward-mounted microstructure sensing package has been used in conjunction with moored measurements to study the dynamics of thin freshwater layers that are regularly released into the coastal ocean. During observations conducted in winter 2009 and spring 2010 we observed turbulent bores and internal solitary waves in Ardmucknish Bay, near the entrance to Loch Etive. The passage of the bores and internal solitary waves of depression were associated with downward vertical movement of near-surface water and turbulent mixing that was enhanced above background by over 2 orders of magnitude.
Binding site discovery from nucleic acid sequences by discriminative learning of hidden Markov models

We present a discriminative learning method for pattern discovery of binding sites in nucleic acid sequences based on hidden Markov models. Sets of positive and negative example sequences are mined for sequence motifs whose occurrence frequency varies between the sets. The method offers several objective functions, but we concentrate on mutual information of condition and motif occurrence. We perform a systematic comparison of our method and numerous published motif-finding tools. Our method achieves the highest motif discovery performance, while being faster than most published methods. We present case studies of data from various technologies, including ChIP-Seq, RIP-Chip and PAR-CLIP, of embryonic stem cell transcription factors and of RNA-binding proteins, demonstrating practicality and utility of the method. For the alternative splicing factor RBM10, our analysis finds motifs known to be splicing-relevant. The motif discovery method is implemented in the free software package Discrover. It is applicable to genome- and transcriptome-scale data, makes use of available repeat experiments and aside from binary contrasts also more complex data configurations can be utilized.
Clustering Signed Networks with the Geometric Mean of Laplacians

Signed networks allow to model positive and negative relationships. We analyze existing extensions of spectral clustering to signed networks. It turns out that existing approaches do not recover the ground truth clustering in several situations where either the positive or the negative network structures contain no noise. Our analysis shows that these problems arise as existing approaches take some form of arithmetic mean of the Laplacians of the positive and negative part. As a solution we propose to use the geometric mean of the Laplacians of positive and negative part and show that it outperforms the existing approaches. While the geometric mean of matrices is computationally expensive, we show that eigenvectors of the geometric mean can be computed efficiently, leading to a numerical scheme for sparse matrices which is of independent interest.
Pharmacokinetics, oral bioavailability and metabolism of a novel isoquinolinone-based melatonin receptor agonist in rats

7-Methoxy-6-(3-methoxy-benzyloxy)-2-methylisoquinolin-1(2H)-one (named as IS0042) is a newly identified melatoninergic agonist which exhibits selectivity to the type 2 melatonin receptor. Here, we examined the in vitro and in vivo pharmacokinetics properties of IS0042 in rats. IS0042 was considerably lipophilic with a modest aqueous solubility of 27.3 µg/mL. It was stable in simulated gastrointestinal fluid, and readily penetrated across differentiated Caco-2 cell model of intestinal barrier, suggesting good oral absorption. IS0042 underwent metabolism in rat intestinal and liver microsomes with an in vitro half-life of 367.5 ± 36.6 and 17.5 ± 2.7 min, respectively. Metabolite identification suggested that the major biotransformation pathways included the cleavage of ether bond, hydroxylation and demethylation. The same metabolites were also present in blood circulation following oral administration, indicating a good correlation between in vitro and in vivo metabolism. The pharmacokinetics parameters of IS0042 were evaluated after intravenous administration (10 or 25 mg/kg) and oral administration (100 mg/kg) of the drug to rats. IS0042 showed moderate clearance (0.73–1.02 L/h/kg), large volume of distribution (1.76–3.16 L/kg) and long elimination half-life (3.11–6.04 h) after intravenous administration. The absolute oral bioavailability of IS0042 was relatively low (9.8–18.6%). Overall, these results provide important parameters for the further development of this novel class of melatoninergic ligands.
Commonalities for Numerical and Continuous Quantity Skills at Temporo-parietal Junction

How do our abilities to process number and other continuous quantities such as time and space relate to each other? Recent evidence suggests that these abilities share common magnitude processing and neural resources, although other findings also highlight the role of dimension-specific processes. To further characterize the relation between number, time, and space, we first examined them in a population with a developmental numerical dysfunction (developmental dyscalculia) and then assessed the extent to which these abilities correlated both behaviorally and anatomically in numerically normal participants. We found that (1) participants with dyscalculia showed preserved continuous quantity processing and (2) in numerically normal adults, numerical and continuous quantity abilities were at least partially dissociated both behaviorally and anatomically. Specifically, gray matter volume correlated with both measures of numerical and continuous quantity processing in the right TPJ; in contrast, individual differences in number proficiency were associated with gray matter volume in number-specific cortical regions in the right parietal lobe. Together, our new converging evidence of selective numerical impairment and of number-specific brain areas at least partially distinct from common magnitude areas suggests that the human brain is equipped with different ways of quantifying the outside world.
Poor self-rated health and its associations with somatisation in two Australian national surveys

Objectives It is hypothesised that across two national surveys poor self-rated health will be independently associated with somatisation and will result in high rates of service use after adjusting for established diagnoses. Design Two cross-sectional population-based surveys were conducted in 1997 and 2007. The use of both surveys allowed replication of results. Setting Australia. Participants The 1997 and 2007 National Surveys of Mental Health and Well-Being were based on stratified, multistage area probability samples of persons living in private dwellings in Australia. The 1997 survey included 10 641 respondents aged 18–75 years, a response rate of 78%. The 2007 survey included 8841 respondents aged 16–85 years, a response rate of 60%. Main outcome measures Self-rated health. Results Approximately 15% of the Australian population rated their health as fair or poor in both surveys. The independent relationship between self-rated health and somatisation was replicated across both surveys in multivariate analyses. Individuals with negative self-rated health were 4.1 times as likely to screen positive for health anxiety (OR 4.1, 95% CI 2.8 to 5.9) and 3.4 times as likely to be diagnosed with neurasthenia (OR 3.4, 95% CI 2.2 to 5.2), when compared with individuals who rated their health positively. Individuals with negative self-rated health were also more likely to use health services after controlling for demographics and mental and physical illness. Conclusions These results confirm both of the study hypotheses: (1) that negative self-rated health was powerfully and independently associated with somatisation and (2) that this relationship manifested itself in high rates of service use, even after adjusting for an extensive range of demographics and psychiatric and physical conditions.
Dynamics of MRSA carriage in the Dutch population

Increasing prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in countries that so far had successful control (such as the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries) is cause for concern. Recently, asymptomatic MRSA carriage has been identified as an important contributor to this increase. Mathematical modelling can help to interpret the contribution of this feature and to evaluate additional intervention measures. In this paper we investigate the contribution of asymptomatic MRSA carriers to the prevalence in the hospital and in the community and to the number of outbreaks of hospitalacquired MRSA. The dynamics of MRSA carriage in the Netherlands is characterised by a system of interference at detected high prevalence of MRSA in the hospital. These dynamics of MRSA carriage are modelled with a linear matrix model concerning a system of density regulation, i.e. a “flip-flop” system. Thereafter, intervention measures such as screening in and outgoing patients and HCW measures are investigated. Surprisingly, if hygiene measures are not performed well enough the prevalence of MRSA in the hospital and the community increase. This is in contrast with models found in the literature, which are claiming that hygiene measures are effective interventions. Screening all outgoing patients reduces the prevalence of MRSA in both the hospital and the community more than screening all incoming patients. Furthermore, we show that screening only a part of the population (the 65) when leaving the hospital is also effective to reduce the prevalence of MRSA in the hospital and in the community. Moreover, the age group of the elderly of 65 and older contribute 1.76 times more to the spread of MRSA than the non-elderly, because on average they stay longer in the hospital and they visit the hospital more frequently then younger individuals. We conclude that to reduce the prevalence of MRSA in the hospital and in the community one should start with screening outgoing elderly or patients who stay the longest in the hospital and who visit most frequently the hospital.
Depression in ALS in a large self-reporting cohort

Editors' Note: Commenting on “Standardized EEG interpretation accurately predicts prognosis after cardiac arrest,” Dr. Sethi shares his experience, suggesting that an organized background and the presence of sleep architecture on EEG correlate with a good outcome in comatose patients following cardiac arrest. Westhall et al., authors of the study, did not evaluate the prognostic value of these patterns in the present study, but plan to do so when they expand the study. They add that the occurrence of sleep transients in the early stage after resuscitation probably indicates a good prognosis, but considering the low prevalence in this acute setting, the …
An Investigation of Incongruency and Distraction Hypotheses: The Context of Dubbed TV Commercials

The current study seeks to understand the effectiveness of commercials that are basically nation-wide commercials dubbed in the regional languages, while not changing any part of the visual: thus they are â€˜nationalâ€™ with their visuals and regional with their sound track. Here incongruency and distraction hypotheses are investigated through two experiments. A social message against the use of cell-phones is used with students as target audience. [IIMA WP NO. 2008-08-03].
Combinatorial Framework for Similarity Search

We present an overview of combinatorial framework for similarity search. An algorithm is combinatorial if only direct comparisons between two pairwise similarity values are allowed. Namely, the input dataset is represented by a comparison oracle that given any three points X,Y,Z answers whether Y or Z is closer to X. We assume that the similarity order of the dataset satisfies the four variations of the following disorder inequality: if X is the A'th most similar object to Y and Y is the B'th most similar object to Z, then X is among the D(A+B) most similar objects to Z, where D is a relatively small disorder constant. Combinatorial algorithms for nearest neighbor search have two important advantages: (1) they do not map similarity values to artificial distance values and do not use triangle inequality for the latter, and (2) they work for arbitrarily complicated data representations and similarity functions. Ranwalk, the first known combinatorial solution for nearest neighbors, is randomized, exact, zero-error algorithm with query time that is logarithmic in number of objects. But Ranwalk preprocessing time is quadratic. Later on, another solution, called combinatorial nets, was discovered. It is deterministic and exact algorithm with almost linear time and space complexity of preprocessing, and near-logarithmic time complexity of search. Combinatorial nets also have a number of side applications. For near-duplicate detection they lead to the first known deterministic algorithm that requires just near-linear time + time proportional to the size of output. For any dataset with small disorder combinatorial nets can be used to construct a visibility graph: the one in which greedy routing deterministically converges to the nearest neighbor of a target in logarithmic number of steps. The later result is the first known work-around for Navarro's impossibility of generalizing Delaunay graphs.
Asymptotic tracking for state-constrained monotone systems

This paper addresses tracking control of nonlinear discrete-time monotone systems subject to input and state constraints. Forcing saturation on a previously designed controller may, in general, lead to destabilization or, at least, result in constraint violation and performance losses. Hereby it is shown that for a certain class of nonlinear monotone systems it is possible to design a static nonlinear output feedback which, saturated among suitable state-dependent bounds, is able to guarantee constraint satisfaction and asymptotic tracking of piecewise constant references, with a moderate on-line computational burden.