Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Case study on effect of household task participation on home, community, and work opportunities for a youth with multiple disabilities.

OBJECTIVE This case study explored how household task engagement influenced participation in the home, community and work for a youth with multiple disabilities. PARTICIPANTS Participants were the first author's single father and her brother, who has spina bifida and intellectual disability. METHODS Researchers used a case study design with mixed methods. Quantitative repeated measures included the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM), the Children Helping Out: Responsibilities, Expectations, and Supports (CHORES), and the Arc's Self-determination Scale (SDS). Qualitative data was collected from interviews and observations and was analyzed using a constant comparison method. RESULTS Visual analysis revealed gains in self-determination and in performance and satisfaction on the COPM. At follow-up, the father reported his son did more self-care household tasks and was more independent with these tasks. Family-care household task performance declined and father reported relatively no change in assistance. Qualitative findings illuminated the strategies and the processes that evolved through collaboration amongst the youth, the therapist, and the father. CONCLUSIONS The son's competence with a daily household task increased positive perceptions of his capabilities that led to increased participation and independence in home, community, and work activities. Interventions addressing adaptations, development of self-determination skills, and parental education promoted these changes.
Real-Time PCR Assay for Detection and Differentiation of Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli from Clinical Samples

ABSTRACT Timely accurate diagnosis of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) infections is important. We evaluated a laboratory-developed real-time PCR (LD-PCR) assay targeting stx 1, stx 2, and rfbEO157 with 2,386 qualifying stool samples submitted to the microbiology laboratory of a tertiary care pediatric center between July 2011 and December 2013. Broth cultures of PCR-positive samples were tested for Shiga toxins by enzyme immunoassay (EIA) (ImmunoCard STAT! enterohemorrhagic E. coli [EHEC]; Meridian Bioscience) and cultured in attempts to recover both O157 and non-O157 STEC. E. coli O157 and non-O157 STEC were detected in 35 and 18 cases, respectively. Hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) occurred in 12 patients (10 infected with STEC O157, one infected with STEC O125ac, and one with PCR evidence of STEC but no resulting isolate). Among the 59 PCR-positive STEC specimens from 53 patients, only 29 (54.7%) of the associated specimens were toxin positive by EIA. LD-PCR differentiated STEC O157 from non-O157 using rfbEO157 , and LD-PCR results prompted successful recovery of E. coli O157 (n = 25) and non-O157 STEC (n = 8) isolates, although the primary cultures and toxin assays were frequently negative. A rapid “mega”-multiplex PCR (FilmArray gastrointestinal panel; BioFire Diagnostics) was used retrospectively, and results correlated with LD-PCR findings in 25 (89%) of the 28 sorbitol-MacConkey agar culture-negative STEC cases. These findings demonstrate that PCR is more sensitive than EIA and/or culture and distinguishes between O157 and non-O157 STEC in clinical samples and that E. coli O157:H7 remains the predominant cause of HUS in our institution. PCR is highly recommended for rapid diagnosis of pediatric STEC infections.
Patients Safety Culture: A Baseline Assessment Of Nurses' Perceptions In A Saudi Arabia Hospital

construct that is embedded in an organization and is relatively resistant to change (Denison, 1996; Guldenmund, 2000). Culture has been suggested as “a metaphor for understanding how organizations work and why they respond in particular ways to environmental influences” (Glendon & Stanton, p. 195). Organizational climate, on the other hand, is linked to situations and how they are experienced by workers; thus, climate may change more easily than culture (Denison, 1996). Differences exist between the research methodologies used to study organizational culture and climate. Because the two constructs arise from different research traditions, the goals of research in the two traditions vary (Denison, 1996; Guldenmund, 2000; Reichers & Schneider, 1990). As a result, methods of studying the two constructs differ, with a qualitative approach used to investigate culture and a quantitative one used to examine climate. Observation, interviews, ethnographic, and case studies are the methods of culture research, while crosssectional surveys are the norm in climate research. Culture investigations are concerned with providing thick, rich descriptions that promote understanding, while effectiveness is the issue in studies of organizational climate (Reichers & Schneider, 1990). Climate studies take a comparative approach, while culture investigations avoid comparison and take a postmodern tactic that emphasizes understanding social contexts. Climate, with its origins in the Lewinian social psychology and hence a positivist paradigm, employs questionnaires to directly assess member perceptions of organizational events but does not attempt to interpret the meaning of those events (Rentsch, 1990). However, now that organizational culture studies are using quantitative methods of survey data collection, the research is becoming virtually indistinguishable from climate studies. For example, Cooke & Rousseau (1988) used a quantitative approach to assess a specific aspect of organizational culture, the shared norms and
Evaluation of government's compaign to reduce risk of cot death

In December 1991 the Department of Health's “Back to Sleep” campaign advised that babies should not sleep on their front, be exposed to cigarette smoke, or be overheated.1 Since then cot deaths have halved, from 912 in 1991 to 456 in 1992.2 This has been attributed to the campaign,3 with little evidence that child care practice has in fact changed. This study compared the way mothers cared for their infants before and after the campaign. Questionnaires were sent to two randomly selected groups of 450 mothers of normal term babies born in Cambridge, Huntingdon, or Bury St Edmunds. The first group gave birth at least eight months before the campaign. The second group gave birth after the campaign and received the questionnaire when their baby was six months old. Tog values were calculated using …
The Down-Regulation of Cathepsin G in THP-1 Monocytes after Infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis Is Associated with Increased Intracellular Survival of Bacilli

ABSTRACT Cathepsin G (CatG) is a serine protease found in the azurophilic granules of monocytes that is known to have antimicrobial properties, but its role in Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is unknown. We found that M. tuberculosis infection of human THP-1 monocytic cells induced the down-regulation of CatG mRNA expression, as demonstrated by gene array analysis and reverse transcription-PCR. This was associated with a concomitant decrease in CatG protein and enzymatic activity. In contrast, the expression of lysosomal cathepsins B and D was up-regulated in infected cells. This effect was also observed when THP-1 cells were induced to differentiate into adherent macrophages by exposure to bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS). In agreement with this, CatG expression was null in adherent macrophages isolated from bronchoalveolar lavages and normal blood. We wanted to determine if the down-regulation of CatG would be relevant to M. tuberculosis infection. First, we found that addition of CatG to THP-1 cells prior to infection resulted in decreased bacillary viability, presumably due to extracellular killing of bacilli. However, pretreatment of cells with LPS, which decreases intracellular CatG expression, resulted in increased bacillary viability. Second, we found that CatG cationic peptides killed M. tuberculosis bacilli and were five- to sevenfold more bactericidal than full-length CatG. These observations suggest that M. tuberculosis infection of human monocytic cells results in a “cathepsin switch” with down-regulation of CatG rendering M. tuberculosis bacilli more viable. Therefore, the down-regulation of CatG in macrophages is advantageous to M. tuberculosis bacilli and possibly is an important mechanism by which M. tuberculosis is able to evade the host immune defenses.
Detecting Crowd Features in Video Sequences

We propose a new methodology to detect social aspects of crowds in video sequences based on pedestrian features, which are obtained through image processing/computer vision techniques. The main idea is to apply and extend the concepts of Fundamental Diagram (FD) with more features, such as grouping and collectivity. Using crowd features we identify the crowd type and the main characteristics. In addition, we also investigated two further results: the visual assessment of people in real video sequences in order to detect crowd characteristics, and the usage of our method to detect similarity of crowds in videos.
Coarsening process of coherent β′ precipitates in Fe–10 wt-%Ni–15 wt-%Al and Fe–10 wt-%Ni–15 wt-%Al–1 wt-%Cu alloys

Abstract The coarsening process of the NiAl ordered β′ precipitates was studied in the isothermally aged Fe–10 wt-%Ni–15 wt-%Al and Fe–10 wt-%Ni–15 wt-%Al–1 wt-%Cu alloys. The aging treatments at 750, 850 and 950°C caused the precipitation of the β′phase in a ferritic matrix. In general, the coarsening process of Cu containing alloy was slower with an activation energy of 248 kJ mol−1 compared to 194 kJ mol−1 for the other alloy. However, the coarsening kinetics for the former alloy was faster at 950°C. The precipitation hardening response was also better in the Cu containing alloy, with a slower overaging stage. The coarsening kinetics followed the behaviour predicted by the modified Lifshitz–Slyozov–Wagner theories for coarsening controlled by volume diffusion.
Designing Convolutional Neural Networks for Urban Scene Understanding

Semantic segmentation is one of the essential and fundamental problems in computer vision community. The task is particularly challenging when it comes to urban street scenes, where the object scales vary significantly. Recent advances in deep learning, especially deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have led to significant improvement over previous semantic segmentation systems. In this work, we show how to improve semantic understanding of urban street scenes by manipulating convolution-related operations that are better for practical use. First, we implement dense upsampling convolution (DUC) to generate pixel-level prediction, which is able to capture and decode more detailed information that is generally missing in bilinear upsampling. Second, we propose a hybrid dilated convolution (HDC) framework in the encoding phase. This framework 1) effectively enlarges the receptive fields of the network to aggregate global information; 2) alleviates what we call the gridding issue caused by the standard dilated convolution operation. We evaluate our approaches thoroughly on the Cityscapes dataset, and achieve a new state-of-art result of 80.1% mIOU in the test set. We also are state-of-the-art overall on the KITTI road estimation benchmark and the PASCAL VOC2012 segmentation task.
Antiproliferation of Hepatoma Cell and Progression of Cell Cycle as Affected by Isoflavone Extracts from Soybean Cake

The objectives of this study were to isolate various isoflavone fractions and extracts from soybean cake by preparative column chromatography and compare them with isoflavone standards with regards to inhibition of HepG2 cancer cell proliferation. Four fractions, including malonylglucoside, glucoside, acetylglucoside and aglycone, and two isoflavone extracts, ISO-1 and ISO-2, were collected for evaluation. MTT test results showed that most treatments were slightly protective against HepG2 cell growth at a low dose of isoflavone (5 and 10 μg/mL). However, at elevated concentration of isoflavone (20–50 μg/mL), both aglycone and acetylglucoside fractions as well as a mixture of isoflavone standards were the most effective in inhibition, demonstrating a possible synergistic phenomenon. Genistein showed a better retardation effect than daidzein. For cell cycle analysis, both aglycone and acetylglucoside fractions and a mixture of isoflavone standards exhibited a high G2/M ratio, correlating well with the result of MTT test. The presence of some other functional components in soybean cake like saponins and phenolic compounds may also play a vital role in inhibiting HepG2 cell growth.
A 50‐year retrospective review of three‐dimensional effects at cracks and sharp notches

This review is a brief survey of three-dimensional effects at cracks and sharp notches. The overall aim is to review developments over the past 50 years leading up to the current state of the art. The review is restricted to linear elastic, homogeneous, isotropic materials, with any yielding confined to a small region at a crack or notch tip. It is also restricted to static loading and to constant amplitude fatigue loading. An enormous amount of theoretical and experimental information relevant to three-dimensional effects has been published in the past five decades, so the review is, of necessity, highly selective. Theoretical topics covered are linear elastic fracture mechanics, including Volterra distorsioni, stress intensity factors, corner point singularities, crack front line tension, displacement analysis of cracks and notches, and through thickness distributions of stresses and stress intensity factors. Crack path topics covered are fatigue crack path constraints, determination of fatigue crack paths, oscillating crack fronts in thin sheets and the transition to slant crack propagation in thin sheets. Plane strain fracture toughness testing, including standards, is covered. Overall, it can be concluded that the existence of three-dimensional effects at cracks and sharp notches has been known for many years, but understanding has been limited, and for some situations still is. Understanding improved when the existence of corner point singularities and their implications became known. Increasingly powerful computers made it possible to investigate three-dimensional effects numerically in detail. Despite increased understanding, three-dimensional effects are sometimes ignored in situations where they may be important.
A Novel SVM based CSSFFS Feature Selection Algorithm for Detecting Breast Cancer

In this paper a feature selection algorithm CSSFFS (Constrained search sequential floating forward search) based on SVM is proposed for detecting breast cancer. It is a greedy algorithm with search strategy of constrained search. The aim of this algorithm is to achieve a feature subset with minimal BER (Balanced error rate). This is a hybrid algorithm with the combination of filters and wrappers. Feature ranking with SVM acts as filters for removing irrelevant features. Then SFFS acts as wrapper which further removes the redundant features yielding the optimal subset of features. WDBC dataset from UCI machine learning depository is used for the experiment. The experiments are conducted in WEKA. After feature selection the accuracy and BER for WDBC dataset is 98.2425 and 0.0226 respectively with 15 features. General Terms Pattern Recognition, Machine learning, Algorithms.
Rule-Based Network Service Provisioning

Due to the unprecedented development of networks, manual network service provisioning is becoming increasingly risky, error-prone, expensive, and time-consuming. To solve this problem,rule-based methods can provide adequate leverage for automating various network management tasks. This paper presents a rule-based solution for automated network service provisioning. The proposed approach captures configuration data interdependencies using high-level, service-specific, user-configurable rules. We focus on the service validation task, which is illustrated by means of a case study. Based on numerical results, we analyse the influence of the network-level complexity factors and rule descriptive features on the rule efficiency. This analysis shows the operators how to increase rule efficiency while keeping the rules simple and the rule set compact. We present a technique that allows operators to increase the error coverage, and we show that high error coverage scales well when the complexity of networks and services increases. We reassess the correlation function between specific rule efficiency and rule complexity metrics found in previous work, and show that this correlation function holds for various sizes, types, and complexities of networks and services.
Polarimetric Radar Estimators Based on a Constrained Gamma Drop Size Distribution Model

Abstract Raindrop size distribution (DSD) retrieval from remote radar measurements or from in situ disdrometer measurements is an important area of research. If the shape (μ) and slope (Λ) of a three-parameter gamma distribution n(D) = N0Dμ exp(−ΛD) are related to one another, as recent disdrometer measurements suggest, the gamma DSD model is simplified to a two-parameter DSD, that is, a constrained gamma DSD. An empirical relation between the μ and Λ was derived using moments estimated from video-disdrometer measurements. Here, the effects of DSD truncation on a μ and Λ relation were analyzed. It was shown that characteristic size and variance of size of a constrained gamma DSD depend only on the shape parameter μ. Assuming that a constrained gamma DSD is valid, S-band polarimetric radar–based estimators for rain rate, median volume diameter, specific propagation phase, attenuation, and differential attenuation were derived. The radar-based estimators were used to obtain the spatial distribution of DSD p.
Online dimension reduction of synchrophasor data

Wide Area Monitoring (WAM) of power systems is achievable with the help of a large amount of time-stamped synchrophasor data generated by PMUs. On the other hand, massive data from PMUs has also brought challenges to store, analyze and transmit results without causing a bottleneck in the available information processing infrastructure. In addition to the amount of data, the dimensionality of synchrophasor data is bound to increase with more PMUs coming into operation. In order to enable real time surveillance of the grid, high-speed synchrophasor data has to be processed before a new set of data arrives for processing. Machine learning techniques which are being studied for power systems may suffer from the “curse of dimensionality” thus, detrimentally affecting their performance. In this paper, we introduce an online technique to reduce dimensionality of synchrophasor data on the fly. This method will extract correlations between synchrophasor measurements such as voltage, current, frequency etc. and represent it with their principal components without the loss of too much information. The proposed method can be used as a pre-processor before storing or transmission of synchrophasor data where trends are more important than exact data.
Investigating Two-, Three-, and Four-Factor Structures of the Korean PCL-R in Serious Offenders

There is no published work on different factor structures of the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R) for Korean offenders. The current study compared the two-, three-, and four-factor structures of the Korean version of the PCL-R. A total of 451 adult male serious offenders were included. The results suggested that both three- and four-factor models offered the best overall fit to the data. To gain better insight into the construct and predictive validities of the Korean version of the PCL-R, we recommend further analysis of the three- and four-factor models with recidivism and inmates’ implicit aggression levels.
The prrF-Encoded Small Regulatory RNAs Are Required for Iron Homeostasis and Virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that requires iron to cause infection, but it also must regulate the uptake of iron to avoid iron toxicity. The iron-responsive PrrF1 and PrrF2 small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) are part of P. aeruginosa's iron regulatory network and affect the expression of at least 50 genes encoding iron-containing proteins. The genes encoding the PrrF1 and PrrF2 sRNAs are encoded in tandem in P. aeruginosa, allowing for the expression of a distinct, heme-responsive sRNA named PrrH that appears to regulate genes involved in heme metabolism. Using a combination of growth, mass spectrometry, and gene expression analysis, we showed that the ΔprrF1,2 mutant, which lacks expression of the PrrF and PrrH sRNAs, is defective for both iron and heme homeostasis. We also identified phuS, encoding a heme binding protein involved in heme acquisition, and vreR, encoding a previously identified regulator of P. aeruginosa virulence genes, as novel targets of prrF-mediated heme regulation. Finally, we showed that the prrF locus encoding the PrrF and PrrH sRNAs is required for P. aeruginosa virulence in a murine model of acute lung infection. Moreover, we showed that inoculation with a ΔprrF1,2 deletion mutant protects against future challenge with wild-type P. aeruginosa. Combined, these data demonstrate that the prrF-encoded sRNAs are critical regulators of P. aeruginosa virulence.
Azoxystrobin Induces Apoptosis of Human Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma KYSE-150 Cells through Triggering of the Mitochondrial Pathway

Recent studies indicate that mitochondrial pathways of apoptosis are potential chemotherapeutic target for the treatment of esophageal cancer. Azoxystrobin (AZOX), a methoxyacrylate derived from the naturally occurring strobilurins, is a known fungicide acting as a ubiquinol oxidation (Qo) inhibitor of mitochondrial respiratory complex III. In this study, the effects of AZOX on human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma KYSE-150 cells were examined and the underlying mechanisms were investigated. AZOX exhibited inhibitory effects on the proliferation of KYSE-150 cells with inhibitory concentration 50% (IC50) of 2.42 μg/ml by 48 h treatment. Flow cytometry assessment revealed that the inhibitory effect of AZOX on KYSE-150 cell proliferation occurred with cell cycle arrest at S phase and increased cell apoptosis in time-dependent and dose-dependent manners. Cleaved poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP), caspase-3 and caspase-9 were increased significantly by AZOX. It is worth noted that the Bcl-2/Bax ratios were decreased because of the down-regulated Bcl-2 and up-regulated Bax expression level. Meanwhile, the cytochrome c release was increased by AZOX in KYSE-150 cells. AZOX-induced cytochrome c expression and caspase-3 activation was significantly blocked by Bax Channel Blocker. Intragastric administration of AZOX effectively decreased the tumor size generated by subcutaneous inoculation of KYSE-150 cells in nude mice. Consistently, decreased Bcl-2 expression, increased cytochrome c and PARP level, and activated caspase-3 and caspase-9 were observed in the tumor samples. These results indicate that AZOX can effectively induce esophageal cancer cell apoptosis through the mitochondrial pathways of apoptosis, suggesting AZOX or its derivatives may be developed as potential chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of esophageal cancer.