Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Agricultural Technology Adoption and Rural Poverty: Application of an Endogenous Switching Regression for Selected East African Countries

Achieving agricultural growth and development and thereby improving rural household welfare will require increased efforts to provide yield enhancing and natural resources conserving technologies. Agricultural research and technological improvements are therefore crucial to increase agricultural productivity and thereby reduce poverty. However evaluation of the impact of these technologies on rural household welfare have been very limited by lack of appropriate methods and most of previous research has therefore failed to move beyond estimating economic surplus and return to research investment. This paper evaluates the potential impact of adoption of modern agricultural technologies on rural household welfare measured by crop income and consumption expenditure in rural Ethiopia and Tanzania. The study utilizes cross-sectional farm household level data collected in 2007 from a randomly selected sample of 1313 households (700 in Ethiopia and 613 in Tanzania). We estimate the casual impact of technology adoption by utilizing endogenous switching regression and propensity score matching methods to assess results robustness. This helps us estimate the true welfare effect of technology adoption by controlling for the role of selection problem on production and adoption decisions. Our analysis reveals that adoption of improved agricultural technologies has a significant positive impact on crop income although the impact on consumption expenditure is mixed. This confirms the potential direct role of technology adoption on improving rural household welfare, as higher incomes from improved technology translate into lower income poverty.
Binding of glycosaminoglycan saccharides to hydroxyapatite surfaces: a density functional theory study

Density functional theory calculations implemented by the SIESTA code are used to study the interactions of the saccharides N-acetylgalactosamine (GalNAc) and glucuronic acid (GlcA) with the (0001) and () surfaces of the mineral hydroxyapatite (HAP). GalNAc and GlcA are the constituent monosaccharides of chondroitin, which is a glycosaminoglycan found in bone and cartilage, and whose interactions with HAP have been implicated as a controlling factor in the process of biomineralization. Geometry optimization calculations are used to identify low-energy adsorption structures of the monosaccharides on the HAP surfaces, and to calculate the corresponding adsorption energies. The calculations show that GalNAc interacts with HAP principally through its hydroxy and acetyl amine functional groups, and deprotonated GlcA interacts principally through its hydroxy and carboxylate functional groups. The mode and the strength of adsorption depend on the orientation of the saccharide with respect to the HAP surface, which has implications for the structural conformation of chondroitin chains in the presence of HAP. Both monosaccharides bind more strongly to the () surface than to the (0001) surface.
Static prediction of heap space usage for first-order functional programs

We show how to efficiently obtain linear a priori bounds on the heap space consumption of first-order functional programs.The analysis takes space reuse by explicit deallocation into account and also furnishes an upper bound on the heap usage in the presence of garbage collection. It covers a wide variety of examples including, for instance, the familiar sorting algorithms for lists, including quicksort.The analysis relies on a type system with resource annotations. Linear programming (LP) is used to automatically infer derivations in this enriched type system.We also show that integral solutions to the linear programs derived correspond to programs that can be evaluated without any operating system support for memory management. The particular integer linear programs arising in this way are shown to be feasibly solvable under mild assumptions.
Visual function in term infants with hypoxic-ischaemic insults: correlation with neurodevelopment at 2 years of age

AIMS To determine if there is any association between the findings of visual assessment performed at the age of 5 months and neurodevelopmental outcome at the age of 2 years in children who have sustained hypoxic-ischaemic insults. METHODS Twenty nine term infants with hypoxic–ischaemic encephalopathy and/or brain lesions on neonatal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were prospectively evaluated. At 5 months of age all the infants had their visual function assessed using the Atkinson Battery of Child Development for Examining Functional Vision, which includes the assessments of optokinetic nystagmus (OKN), acuity, visual fields, fixation shift and phase and orientation reversal visual evoked potentials. At 2 years of age the children had a structured neurological evaluation and a Griffiths developmental assessment. RESULTS There was good correlation between the extent of the early detected visual impairment and both neuromotor and global development. Children with more than three out of five abnormal visual tests at 5 months of age tended to have abnormal neurological examination results and abnormal developmental quotients. Children with three or fewer abnormalities tended to have developmental quotients in the normal range; the level of their performance, however, was still related to the number of visual tests passed. CONCLUSIONS Individual visual tests can provide important prognostic information. While abnormal OKN and acuity were always associated with abnormal outcome, normal results on visual evoked potentials and fixation shift tended to be associated with normal outcome.
Characterization of resistant hypertension: association between resistant hypertension, aldosterone, and persistent intravascular volume expansion.

BACKGROUND Resistant hypertension is a common clinical problem and greatly increases the risk of target organ damage. METHODS We evaluated the characteristics of 279 consecutive patients with resistant hypertension (uncontrolled despite the use of 3 antihypertensive agents) and 53 control subjects (with normotension or hypertension controlled by using <or=2 antihypertensive medications). Participants were prospectively examined for plasma aldosterone concentration, plasma renin activity, aldosterone to renin ratio, brain-type natriuretic peptide, atrial natriuretic peptide, and 24-hour urinary aldosterone (UAldo), cortisol, sodium, and potassium values while adhering to a routine diet. RESULTS Plasma aldosterone (P < .001), aldosterone to renin ratio (P < .001), 24-hour UAldo (P = .02), brain-type natriuretic peptide (P = .007), and atrial natriuretic peptide (P = .001) values were higher and plasma renin activity (P = .02) and serum potassium (P < .001) values were lower in patients with resistant hypertension vs controls. Of patients with resistant hypertension, men had significantly higher plasma aldosterone (P = .003), aldosterone to renin ratio (P = .02), 24-hour UAldo (P < .001), and urinary cortisol (P < .001) values than women. In univariate linear regression analysis, body mass index (P = .01), serum potassium (P < .001), urinary cortisol (P < .001), urinary sodium (P = .02), and urinary potassium (P < .001) values were correlated with 24-hour UAldo levels. Serum potassium (P = .001), urinary potassium (P < .001), and urinary sodium (P = .03) levels were predictors of 24-hour UAldo levels in multivariate modeling. CONCLUSIONS Aldosterone levels are higher and there is evidence of intravascular volume expansion (higher brain-type and atrial natriuretic peptide levels) in patients with resistant hypertension vs controls. These differences are most pronounced in men. A significant correlation between 24-hour urinary aldosterone levels and cortisol excretion suggests that a common stimulus, such as corticotropin, may underlie the aldosterone excess in patients with resistant hypertension.
Anti-quorum sensing potential of Adenanthera pavonina

Background: Quorum sensing (QS) in Pseudomonas aeruginosa plays a key role in virulence factor production, biofilm formation and antimicrobial resistance. Because of emerging antimicrobial resistance in P. aeruginosa, there is a need to find an alternate nonantibiotic agent for the control of infections caused by this organism. Objective: To evaluate anti-QS activity of Adenanthera pavonina L. , a medicinal plant used in traditional medicine. Materials and Methods: Preliminary screening for anti-QS activity of ethanol extract of A. pavonina was carried out using Chromobacterium violaceum CV026 biosensor strain and inhibition of QS-regulated violacein production was quantified using C. violaceum ATCC12472. Bioassay guided fractionation of ethanol extract resulted in ethyl acetate fraction (AEF) with strong anti-QS activity and AEF was evaluated for inhibition of QS-regulated pyocyanin production, proteolytic, elastolytic activity, swarming motility and biofilm formation in P. aeruginosaPAO1. Results: AEF, at 0.5 mg/ml, inhibited pyocyanin production completely and at 1 mg/ml of AEF, complete inhibition of proteolytic and elastolytic activities were observed. However, viability of P. aeruginosa PAO1 was not affected at the tested concentrations of AEF as observed by cell count. Swarming motility was inhibited at the concentration of 0.1 mg/ml of AEF. Thin layer chromatography and biosensor overlay of AEF showed violacein inhibition zone at Rf value 0.63. Conclusion: From the results of this study, it can be concluded that A. pavonina extracts can be used as effective anti-QS agents.
Hardness Results for Static Priority Real-Time Scheduling

Real-time systems are often modeled as a collection of tasks, describing the structure of the processor's workload. In the literature, task-models of different expressiveness have been developed, ranging from the traditional periodic task model to highly expressive graph-based models. For dynamic priority schedulers, it has been shown that the schedulability problem can be solved efficiently, even for graph-based models. However, the situation is less clear for the case of static priority schedulers. It has been believed that the problem can be solved in pseudo-polynomial time for the generalized multiframe model (GMF). The GMF model constitutes a compromise in expressiveness by allowing cycling through a static list of behaviors, but disallowing branching. Further, the problem complexity for more expressive models has been unknown so far. In this paper, we show that previous results claiming that a precise and efficient test exists are wrong, giving a counterexample. We prove that the schedulability problem for GMF models (and thus also all more expressive models) using static priority schedulers is in fact coNP-hard in the strong sense. Our result thus establishes the fundamental hardness of analyzing static priority real-time scheduling, in contrast to its dynamic priority counterpart of pseudo-polynomial complexity.
Estimation of the Prevalence of Inadequate and Excessive Iodine Intakes in School-Age Children from the Adjusted Distribution of Urinary Iodine Concentrations from Population Surveys.

BACKGROUND The urinary iodine concentration (UIC), a biomarker of iodine intake, is used to assess population iodine status by deriving the median UIC, but this does not quantify the percentage of individuals with habitually deficient or excess iodine intakes. Individuals with a UIC <100 μg/L or ≥300 μg/L are often incorrectly classified as having deficient or excess intakes, but this likely overestimates the true prevalence. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to estimate the prevalence of inadequate and excess iodine intake in children (aged 4-14 y) with the distribution of spot UIC from iodine surveys. METHODS With the use of data from national iodine studies (Kuwait, Oman, Thailand, and Qatar) and a regional study (China) in children (n = 6117) in which a repeat UIC was obtained in a subsample (n = 1060), we calculated daily iodine intake from spot UICs from the relation between body weight and 24-h urine volume and within-person variation by using the repeat UIC. We also estimated pooled external within-person proportion of total variances by region. We used within-person variance proportions to obtain the prevalence of inadequate or excess usual iodine intake by using the Estimated Average Requirement (EAR)/Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) cutoff method. RESULTS Median UICs in Kuwait, Oman, China, Thailand, and Qatar were 132, 192, 199, 262, and 333 μg/L, respectively. Internal within-person variance proportions ranged from 25.0% to 80.0%, and pooled regional external estimates ranged from 40.4% to 77.5%. The prevalence of inadequate and excess intakes as defined by the adjusted EAR/UL cutoff method was ∼45-99% lower than those defined by a spot UIC <100 μg/L or ≥300 μg/L (P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS Applying the EAR/UL cutoff method to iodine intakes from adjusted UIC distributions is a promising approach to estimate the number of individuals with deficient or excess iodine intakes.
Costs of chronic bronchitis and COPD: a 1-year follow-up study.

OBJECTIVE This study attempted to determine the total direct costs derived from the management of chronic bronchitis and COPD in an ambulatory setting through a prospective, 1-year, follow-up study. METHOD A total of 1,510 patients with chronic bronchitis and COPD were recruited from 268 general practices located throughout Spain. Patients were followed up for 1 year. All direct medical costs incurred by the cohort and related to their respiratory disease were quantified. Costs were calculated for patients with confirmed COPD according to the degree of severity of airflow obstruction. RESULTS The global mean direct yearly cost of chronic bronchitis and COPD was $1,876. The cost generated by patients with COPD was $1,760, but the cost of severe COPD ($2,911) was almost double that of mild COPD ($1,484). Hospitalization costs represented 43.8% of costs, drug acquisition costs were 40.8%, and clinic visits and diagnostic tests represented only 15.4% of costs. CONCLUSION This is the first prospective follow-up study on a large cohort of patients with chronic bronchitis and COPD aimed at quantifying direct medical costs under usual clinical practice in the community. Costs of chronic bronchitis and COPD were almost twofold those reported for asthma. Patterns of COPD management in the community differ from those recommended in guidelines. COPD represents a great health-care burden in developed countries, and aging of the population and continuing smoking habits predict that it will continue to do so in the future.
The relationship between the insertion/deletion polymorphism of the ACE gene and hypertension in Iranian patients with type 2 diabetes.

BACKGROUND Observations on the association between the ACE gene polymorphism and hypertension have been inconsistent, which might be due to ethnic and geographical variations. Moreover, the relationship between insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorphism and hypertension in the diabetic population has not been sufficiently studied. The aim of this study was to evaluate for the first time the possible association between I/D polymorphism and hypertension in an Iranian diabetic adult population. METHODS A total of 82 consecutive patients with type 2 diabetes and hypertension (Group A) and 87 patients with type 2 diabetes but without hypertension (Group B) were included. Patients who had a history of hypertension before the onset of diabetes and those with findings suggesting secondary hypertension were excluded. The following variables were determined for each patient: age, sex, body mass index (BMI), diabetes duration and the drugs used, history of coronary artery disease and its complications, blood pressure (systolic and diastolic), fasting blood sugar (FBS), haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), total cholesterol (Chol), low-density lipoproteins (LDL), high-density lipoproteins (HDL), triglycerides (TG), plasma creatinine (Crt) and 24 h urine albumin excretion. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to detect the I/D alleles. Univariate (chi-squared and t-test) and multivariate (multivariate binary logistic regression with adjusted odds ratios) analyses were applied to determine the association between I/D polymorphism (with genotype II as reference) and hypertension. P<0.05 was considered statistically significant. RESULTS In univariate analysis, the groups were statistically similar in all variables except for diabetes duration (156.05+/-73.54 months in Group A vs 121.74+/-65.53 months in Group B; P=0.002), Crt (1.04+/-0.25 mg/dl in Group A vs 0.93+/-0.23 mg/dl in Group B; P=0.003), albuminuria (486.25+/-484.60 mg/d in Group A vs 316.50+/-459.56 mg/d in Group B; P=0.021) and the frequency of DD genotype (27 cases in Group A vs 11 cases in Group B; P=0.026). Multivariate logistic regression (using age, sex and BMI as clinically significant variables and diabetes duration, Crt, albuminuria and genotype as statistically significant variables) was then used to determine independent associations and adjusted odds ratios (OR). The DD genotype was the strongest independent predictor of hypertension [P=0.029, OR=3.122, 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.127-8.647], followed by log (albuminuria) (P=0.042, OR=1.183, 95% CI=1.006-1.391). Considering albuminuria as a categorical variable did not change the results significantly. CONCLUSION The DD polymorphism in the ACE gene is independently associated with hypertension in the diabetic population.
Low detoxification capacity in the ileal pouch mucosa of patients with ulcerative colitis

Background: An ileal pouch‐anal anastomosis has become the most widely accepted procedure for surgical treatment of patients with ulcerative colitis (UC). The primary function of the ileum within the pouch changes from absorption to storage. Malignancies have been described in the pouch mucosa. The detoxifying glutathione S‐transferase (GST) enzymes are involved in the mucosal protection against toxins and carcinogens. Levels of GSTs are much higher in the ileum as compared with the colon. The adaptation of the ileal pouch mucosa into a more colon‐like phenotype possibly influences the activity and levels of GST. This study compares the detoxification capacity of GST of the afferent ileal limb mucosa with the ileal pouch mucosa of patients with UC. Methods: Biopsies from normal‐appearing mucosa from the ileal pouch and the ileal afferent limb were obtained from 18 patients with UC. GST isoforms were quantified by immunoblotting. GST activity was measured spectrophotometrically, and glutathione and cysteine levels were determined by high‐performance liquid chromatography. Results: The GST activity and GSTA1+A2 levels were significantly lower in the pouch compared with the afferent ileal limb of patients with UC, whereas the GSTP1 levels were higher in the pouch. No differences were observed in the levels of GSTM1, GSTT1, glutathione, or cysteine. Conclusions: The lower GST detoxification activity in the pouch mucosa of patients with UC may result in higher levels of toxins and carcinogens and thus partly contribute to the risk of developing malignancies in the pouch.
Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

Recent research has shown that specific areas of the human brain are activated by speech from the time of birth. However, it is currently unknown whether newborns' brains also encode and remember the sounds of words when processing speech. The present study investigates the type of information that newborns retain when they hear words and the brain structures that support word-sound recognition. Forty-four healthy newborns were tested with the functional near-infrared spectroscopy method to establish their ability to memorize the sound of a word and distinguish it from a phonetically similar one, 2 min after encoding. Right frontal regions—comparable to those activated in adults during retrieval of verbal material—showed a characteristic neural signature of recognition when newborns listened to a test word that had the same vowel of a previously heard word. In contrast, a characteristic novelty response was found when a test word had different vowels than the familiar word, despite having the same consonants. These results indicate that the information carried by vowels is better recognized by newborns than the information carried by consonants. Moreover, these data suggest that right frontal areas may support the recognition of speech sequences from the very first stages of language acquisition.
Relationship among prevalence of patients with Itai-itai disease, prevalence of abnormal urinary findings, and cadmium concentrations in rice of individual hamlets in the Jinzu River basin, Toyama prefecture of Japan

This study investigated the associations among prevalence of patients with Itai-itai disease, and prevalence of abnormal urinary findings and cadmium (Cd) concentrations in rice in individual hamlets of the Jinzu River basin. From the 13,183 participants of the 1967 and 1968 health examinations, we selected 3,094 subjects as the target population who had resided in the current hamlet for a total of 30 years or longer and aged ⩾ 50 years, and in the hamlet both the Cd concentration in rice and prevalence of patients with Itai-itai disease were known. When the inhabitants were divided into four groups according to the Cd concentration in rice or prevalence of abnormal urinary findings, significant relationships among three factors (Cd concentration in rice, prevalence of abnormal urinary findings and prevalence of patients with Itai-itai disease) were demonstrated clearly using the Cochran – Armitage test. Correlation coefficients among the three factors in 55 hamlets showed that the prevalence of the patients with Itai-itai disease increased according to increases in the mean Cd concentration in rice and increasing prevalence of urinary findings. This study demonstrated that Itai-itai disease is induced by exposure to environmental Cd and that renal dysfunction plays an important role in its development.
The alcohol paradox: light-to-moderate alcohol consumption, cognitive function, and brain volume.

BACKGROUND Studies of older persons show consumption of light-to-moderate amounts of alcohol is positively associated with cognitive function and, separately, is negatively associated with total brain volume (TBV). This is paradoxical as generally, cognitive function is positively associated with TBV. We examined the relationships of TBV, global cognitive function (GCF), and alcohol consumption in a population-based cohort of 3,363 men and women (b. 1907-1935) participating in the Age Gene/Environment Susceptibility-Reykjavik Study (2002-2006) and who were free of dementia or mild cognitive impairment METHODS Drinking status (never, former, and current) and current amount of alcohol consumed were assessed by questionnaire. GCF is a composite score derived from a battery of cognitive tests. TBV, standardized to head size, is estimated quantitatively from brain magnetic resonance imaging. RESULTS Among women and not men, adjusting for demographic and cardiovascular risk factors, current drinkers had significantly higher GCF scores than abstainers and former drinkers (p < .0001); and GCF was associated with amount consumed. TBV was not associated with drinking status or amount consumed in men or women. GCF and TBV did significantly differ in their associations across alcohol categories (p interaction < .001). Within categories of alcohol intake, GCF and TBV were positively associated. CONCLUSIONS The difference in associations of alcohol intake to brain structure and function suggests there may be unmeasured factors that contribute to maintaining better GCF relative to TBV. However, at higher levels of reasonable alcohol consumption, there may be factors leading to reduced brain volume.