Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combining events and threads for scalable network services implementation and evaluation of monadic, application-level concurrency primitives

This paper proposes to combine two seemingly opposed programming models for building massively concurrent network services: the event-driven model and the multithreaded model. The result is a hybrid design that offers the best of both worlds--the ease of use and expressiveness of threads and the flexibility and performance of events. This paper shows how the hybrid model can be implemented entirely at the application level using concurrency monads in Haskell, which provides type-safe abstractions for both events and threads. This approach simplifies the development of massively concurrent software in a way that scales to real-world network services. The Haskell implementation supports exceptions, symmetrical multiprocessing, software transactional memory, asynchronous I/O mechanisms and application-level network protocol stacks. Experimental results demonstrate that this monad-based approach has good performance: the threads are extremely lightweight (scaling to ten million threads), and the I/O performance compares favorably to that of Linux NPTL. tens of thousands of simultaneous, mostly-idle client connections. Such massively-concurrent programs are difficult to implement, especially when other requirements, such as high performance and strong security, must also be met.
Effects of angular gain transformations between movement and visual feedback on coordination performance in unimanual circling

Tool actions are characterized by a transformation (of spatio-temporal and/or force-related characteristics) between movements and their resulting consequences in the environment. This transformation has to be taken into account, when planning and executing movements and its existence may affect performance. In the present study we investigated how angular gain transformations between movement and visual feedback during circling movements affect coordination performance. Participants coordinated the visual feedback (feedback dot) with a continuously circling stimulus (stimulus dot) on a computer screen in order to produce mirror symmetric trajectories of them. The movement angle was multiplied by a gain factor (0.5–2; nine levels) before it was presented on the screen. Thus, the angular gain transformations changed the spatio-temporal relationship between the movement and its feedback in visual space, and resulted in a non-constant mapping of movement to feedback positions. Coordination performance was best with gain = 1. With high gains the feedback dot was in lead of the stimulus dot, with small gains it lagged behind. Anchoring (reduced movement variability) occurred when the two trajectories were close to each other. Awareness of the transformation depended on the deviation of the gain from 1. In conclusion, the size of an angular gain transformation as well as its mere presence influence performance in a situation in which the mapping of movement positions to visual feedback positions is not constant. When designing machines or tools that involve transformations between movements and their external consequences, one should be aware that the mere presence of angular gains may result in performance decrements and that there can be flaws in the representation of the transformation.
Dynamics of a predator-prey system with prey subject to Allee effects and disease

In this article, we propose a general predator-prey system where prey is subject to Allee effects and disease with the following unique features: (i) Allee effects built in the reproduction process of prey where infected prey (I-class) has no contribution; (ii) Consuming infected prey would contribute less or negatively to the growth rate of predator (P-class) in comparison to the consumption of susceptible prey (S-class). We provide basic dynamical properties for this general model and perform the detailed analysis on a concrete model (SIP-Allee Model) as well as its corresponding model in the absence of Allee effects (SIP-no-Allee Model); we obtain the complete dynamics of both models: (a) SIP-Allee Model may have only one attractor (extinction of all species), two attractors (bi-stability either induced by small values of reproduction number of both disease and predator or induced by competition exclusion), or three attractors (tri-stability); (b) SIP-no-Allee Model may have either one attractor (only S-class survives or the persistence of S and I-class or the persistence of S and P-class) or two attractors (bi-stability with the persistence of S and I-class or the persistence of S and P-class). One of the most interesting findings is that neither models can support the coexistence of all three S, I, P-class. This is caused by the assumption (ii), whose biological implications are that I and P-class are at exploitative competition for S-class whereas I-class cannot be superior and P-class cannot gain significantly from its consumption of I-class. In addition, the comparison study between the dynamics of SIP-Allee Model and SIP-no-Allee Model lead to the following conclusions: 1) In the presence of Allee effects, species are prone to extinction and initial condition plays an important role on the surviving of prey as well as its corresponding predator; 2) In the presence of Allee effects, disease may be able to save prey from the predation-driven extinction and leads to the coexistence of S and I-class while predator can not save the disease-driven extinction. All these findings may have potential applications in conservation biology.
Antenatal receipt of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine does not exacerbate pregnancy-associated malaria despite the expansion of drug-resistant Plasmodium falciparum: clinical outcomes from the QuEERPAM study.

BACKGROUND Antenatal intermittent preventive therapy with 2 doses of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP) is the mainstay of efforts in sub-Saharan Africa to prevent pregnancy-associated malaria (PAM). Recent studies report that drug resistance may cause IPTp-SP to exacerbate PAM morbidity, raising fears that current policies will cause harm as resistance spreads. METHODS We conducted a serial, cross-sectional analysis of the relationships between IPTp-SP receipt, SP-resistant Plasmodium falciparum, and PAM morbidity in delivering women during a period of 9 years at a single site in Malawi. PAM morbidity was assessed by parasite densities, placental histology, and birth outcomes. RESULTS The prevalence of parasites with highly SP-resistant haplotypes increased from 17% to 100% (P < .001), and the proportion of women receiving full IPTp (≥2 doses) increased from 25% to 82% (P < .001). Women who received full IPTp with SP had lower peripheral (P = .018) and placental (P < .001) parasite densities than women who received suboptimal IPTp (<2 doses). This effect was not significantly modified by the presence of highly SP-resistant haplotypes. After adjustment for covariates, the receipt of SP in the presence of SP-resistant P. falciparum did not exacerbate any parasitologic, histologic, or clinical measures of PAM morbidity. CONCLUSIONS In this longitudinal study of malaria at delivery, the receipt of SP as IPTp did not potentiate PAM morbidity despite the increasing prevalence and fixation of SP-resistant P. falciparum haplotypes. Even when there is substantial resistance, SP may be used in modified IPTp regimens as a component of comprehensive antenatal care.
Oral health promotion in children - the use of fluoride

Good dental health practices that begin in childhood are a crucial contributor to good overall health as the child ages and becomes an adult. Thereby, the maternal and child health nurse (MCHN), along with oral health promotion strategies, plays a large role in promoting these health practices for children under the age of five years. The use of fluoride and its effect on the developing tooth has been well researched; however, with increasing fluoridated products available in the market, the extent of its safety in children less than five years of age has gained a larger focus of more recent research. This review will look at the safety of fluoridated water, fluoridated toothpaste and fluoridated supplements in the use of children under five years of age, giving recommendations to health care professionals such as MCHNs for their use and promotion.
On maximizing the compound yield for 3D Wafer-to-Wafer stacked ICs

Three-Dimensional Stacked IC (3D-SIC) is an emerging technology that provides heterogeneous integration, higher performance, and lower power consumption compared to planar ICs. Fabricating these 3D-SICs using Wafer-to-Wafer (W2W) stacking has several advantages including: high throughput, thin wafer and small die handling, and high TSV density. However, W2W stacking suffers from low compound yield. This paper investigates various matching processes by using different wafer matching criteria in order to maximize the compound yield. It first establishes a framework covering different matching processes and wafer matching criteria for both replenished and non-replenished wafer repositories. Thereafter, a subset of the framework is analyzed. The simulation results show that the compound yield not only depends on the number of stacked dies, die yield, and repository size, but it also strongly depends on the used matching process and the wafer matching criteria. Moreover, by choosing an appropriate wafer matching scenario (e.g., wafer matching process, criterion etc.), the compound yield can be improved up to 13.4% relative to random W2W stacking.
The Mental Health of Adolescent Girls with Depressed Mothers: The Mediating Role of the Perception of Parental Styles

Abstract Maternal depression, its effects on mothers’ interactions with their children, and the different mechanisms of emotional and psychological disorders’ transaction to children have been surveyed for the last few decades of research. The aim of this research was to find the mediating role of the perception of parental styles between the maternal depression symptoms and the mental health of their daughters. The participants included 284 mothers and their daughters from 8 different schools chosen randomly. Mothers completed the Beck Depression Inventory-II and examined using differential diagnosis interview based on DSM-V while adolescents completed the Parenting Style Questionnaire and Symptom Check List 90-R. The results showed the mediating role of the perception of authoritative and authoritarian styles of parenting (p ≥ 0.0001). Also, depression symptoms in mothers could predict the perception of parental styles. Additionally, the perception of authoritative and authoritarian parenting could predict the mental health of adolescents.
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF A GENE EXPRESSION MICROARRAY EXPERIMENT WITH REPLICATION

Common ratio-based approaches for analyzing gene expression microarray data do not provide a framework for handling replication, although replication is clearly desirable for these noisy data. In contrast, replication fits naturally into analysis of variance (ANOVA) methods. We use ANOVA to analyze data from a microarray experiment to compare gene expression in drug-treated and control cells lines. We discuss issues that commonly arise in the analysis of microarray data, and present practical solutions to some common problems.
Mesulam's frontal lobe mystery re-examined.

PURPOSE Mesulam's (1986) mystery is that some patients with frontal lobe damage may show no cognitive impairment according to traditional office-based assessment procedures, yet nevertheless show marked cognitive handicap in everyday life. Mesulam suggested that "the office setting may introduce sufficient external structure to suppress some of these behavioral tendencies" (p. 322). We ask if it is indeed the office setting that is the problem, or whether it is that traditional assessments do not measure the full range of cognitive functions supported by prefrontal cortex. METHOD Neuropsychological case series study and review. RESULTS Traditional methods for assessing cognitive deficits following frontal lobe damage typically do not measure the full range of deficits that can occur. In particular, rostral prefrontal cortex supports functions which are not routinely assessed yet are crucial to competent everyday life performance. These include meta-memory functions (e.g. context and source memory), complex behavioural co-ordination (e.g. prospective memory and multitasking), and mentalizing. CONCLUSIONS New clinical assessment procedures are required urgently. These could be based, in principle, both on recent experimental findings from cognitive neuroscience, and observation of behaviour outside office settings. These procedures could then be administered in an office setting.
ACT-R: A Theory of Higher Level Cognition and Its Relation to Visual Attention

The ACT-R system is a general system for modeling a wide range of higher level cognitive processes. Recently, it has been embellished with a theory of how its higher level processes interact with a visual interface. This includes a theory of how visual attention can move across the screen, encoding information into a form that can be processed by ACT-R. This system is applied to modeling several classic phenomena in the literature that depend on the speed and selectivity with which visual attention can move across a visual display. ACT-R is capable of interacting with the same computer screens that subjects do and, as such, is well suited to provide a model for tasks involving human-computer interaction. In this article, we discuss a demonstration of ACT-R's application to menu selection and show that the ACT-R theory makes unique predictions, without estimating any parameters, about the time to search a menu. These predictions are confirmed.
In search of transfer following cued recall practice: The case of process-based biology concepts

Appl Cognit Psychol. 2019;1–17. Summary Previous work has demonstrated that cued recall of a term from a fact yields learning that does not transfer, relative to a restudy control, to recall of another term from the same fact. Here we report six experiments in which a series of manipulations during the initial study and training phases of learning, hypothesized to increase transfer for process‐based biology concepts, were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, fill‐ in‐the‐blank questions combined with immediate or delayed and repeated correct answer feedback improved learning but not transfer. In Experiments 3 and 4, practice questions that involved recalling process steps, understanding ordinal relationships, or making inferences did not improve transfer. Positive transfer was produced, however, in Experiments 5 and 6 via retrieval–verification–scoring, a new method in which difficult fill‐in‐the‐blank questions were combined with extensive feedback processing. We discuss implications for transfer in both theoretical and applied contexts.
Gray Matter Alterations in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder, and Social Anxiety Disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and social anxiety disorder (SAD) all bear the core symptom of anxiety and are separately classified in the new DSM-5 system. The aim of the present study is to obtain evidence for neuroanatomical difference for these disorders. We applied voxel-based morphometry (VBM) with Diffeomorphic Anatomical Registration Through Exponentiated Lie to compare gray matter volume (GMV) in magnetic resonance images obtained for 30 patients with PTSD, 29 patients with OCD, 20 patients with SAD, and 30 healthy controls. GMV across all four groups differed in left hypothalamus and left inferior parietal lobule and post hoc analyses revealed that this difference is primarily due to reduced GMV in the PTSD group relative to the other groups. Further analysis revealed that the PTSD group also showed reduced GMV in frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and cerebellum compared to the OCD group, and reduced GMV in frontal lobes bilaterally compared to SAD group. A significant negative correlation with anxiety symptoms is observed for GMV in left hypothalamus in three disorder groups. We have thus found evidence for brain structure differences that in future could provide biomarkers to potentially support classification of these disorders using MRI.
Model Checking a Lazy Concurrent List-Based Set Algorithm

Concurrent objects are notoriously difficult to design correctly, and high performance algorithms that make little or no use of locks even more so. In this paper, we present a formal verification of a lazy concurrent list-based set using model checking techniques. The algorithm supports insertion, removal, and membership testing of a list entry under optimistic locking scheme. The algorithm has nonfixed linearization points and is highly non-trivial. We have proved that the algorithm satisfies linearizability, by showing a trace refinement relation from the concrete implementation to its abstract specification. These models are specified in CSP# and verified automatically using our home grown model checker PAT.
Hospital Switching and Duplicate Tests : Can Health Information Exchange Reduce Redundant Testing ?

Recent healthcare reform has pointed out the excessive amount of redundancies and waste in US healthcare spending, in which duplicate testing is one contributing factor. In this research, we investigate the sources of waste in terms of duplication of radiology imaging tests when information sharing across providers are fragmented and patients may switch from one hospital to another throughout their treatment processes. We hypothesize that switching hospitals will result in increased duplicate procedures due to lack of visibility into patient medical history. In our econometric approach, we utilize a comprehensive dataset of 39,600+ Congestive Heart Failure patient visits across outpatient clinics of 68 hospitals in North Texas from 2005 to 2012. We simultaneously estimate the hospital switching and duplicate testing models using two-step maximum likelihood estimation. Our results suggest that hospital switching is significantly associated with greater levels of test duplication. We also show that the rate of duplication of patients with private insurance is higher than that of Medicare patients. Our results support the need to implement health information exchanges to share patient medical data across hospitals as one avenue to reduce the incidence of test duplication and the overall cost of healthcare.
Neuroprotective Activity of Asparagus racemosus Linn. Against Ethanol-Induced Cognitive Impairment and Oxidative Stress in Rats Brain:Auspicious for Controlling the Risk of Alzheimer′s Disease

Background: Medicinal plants are superior gift of nature to human lives to support disease free healthy life. Neurodegenerative diseases especially Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects the central nervous system causing progressive degeneration of neurons, which affect cognitive function. The plant Asparagus racemosus (AR) Linn. has been used traditionally by Ayurvedic practitioners for nervous disorders. In this consequence, the intention of this study was to evaluate the neuroprotective effects of ethanolic extract of Asparagus racemosus (EEAR) Linn. roots in ethanol-induced cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in rats brain. Methods: The learning and memory enhancing activity of EEAR roots extract were investigated in Swiss albino male rats for 21 days and its effects on learning and memory were examined using various behavioral studies such as elevated plus maze (EPM) test, passive avoidance (PA) test, morris water maze (MWM) test, novel object recognition (NOR) test and biochemical studies such as lipid peroxidation (TBARS) contents and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity. Results: In the EPM test, administration of EEAR (i.e., 100 and 200 mg/kg b.w.) significantly (P<0.05, P<0.01) decreased retention transfer latency (RTL) on 21st day with respect to the disease control group. EEAR at 200 mg/kg b.w. markedly (P<0.05, P<0.01) increased the retention latency (RL) on 11th and 21st day compared to disease control group for PA test. In the NOR test administration of EEAR (i.e., 200 mg/kg b.w.) considerably (P<0.05) increased DI of rats on 21st day with respect to disease control group. Both doses of EEAR (i.e., 100 and 200 mg/kg b.w.) markedly (P<0.05, P<0.01) decreased escape latency (EL) and highest dose of EEAR (i.e., 200 mg/kg b.w.) noticeably (P<0.05, P<0.001) increased time spent in the target quadrant (TSTQ) on successive days for acquisition trial of MWM test. In case of probe trial administration of EEAR (i.e., 200 mg/kg b.w.) considerably (P<0.05, P<0.01) increased TSTQ and TSA (time spent in the annuli) of rats as compared to that of disease control group. EEAR administration (i.e., 100 and 200 mg/kg b.w.) significantly (P<0.01) decreased the TBARS level in the brain tissue of rats with respect to disease control group. The lowest and highest dose of EEAR (i.e., 100 and 200 mg/kg b.w.) significantly (P<0.05, P<0.01) decreases the AChE activity in the brain tissue of rats as compared to disease control group. Conclusion: The existing study displays that EEAR roots possesses an outstanding source for natural nootropic and confirming the traditional uses of this plant which could be industrialized for enhancing learning and memory impairment associated with neurodegenerative disorders particularly AD.
First-line eradication rates comparing two shortened non-bismuth quadruple regimens against Helicobacter pylori: an open-label, randomized, multicentre clinical trial.

OBJECTIVES Helicobacter pylori eradication remains a challenge. Non-bismuth-based quadruple regimens (NBQR) have shown high eradication rates (ER) elsewhere that need to be locally confirmed. The objective of this study was to compare the first-line ER of a hybrid therapy (20 mg of omeprazole twice daily and 1 g of amoxicillin twice daily for 10 days, adding 500 mg of clarithromycin twice daily and 500 mg of metronidazole every 8 h for the last 5 days; OA-OACM) with that of a 10 day concomitant regimen consisting of taking all four drugs twice daily every day (including 500 mg of metronidazole every 12 h; OACM). A 10 day arm with standard triple therapy (OAC; 20 mg of omeprazole/12 h, 1 g of amoxicillin/12 h and 500 mg of clarithromycin/12 h) was included. PATIENTS AND METHODS Three hundred consecutive patients were randomized (1: 2: 2) into one of the three following regimens: (i) OAC (60); (ii) OA-OACM (120); and (iii) OACM (120). Eradication was generally confirmed by a [(13)C]urea breath test at least 4 weeks after the end of treatment. Adverse events and compliance were assessed. EudraCT: 2011-006258-99. RESULTS ITT cure rates were: OAC, 70.0% (42/60) (95% CI: 58.3-81.7); OA-OACM, 90.8% (109/120) (95% CI: 85.6-96.0); and OACM, 90.0% (107/119) (95% CI: 84.6-95.4). PP rates were: OAC, 72.4% (42/58) (95% CI: 60.8-84.1); OA-OACM, 93.9% (108/115) (95% CI: 89.5-98.3); and OACM, 90.3% (102/113) (95% CI: 84.8-95.8). Both NBQR significantly improved ER compared with OAC (P < 0.01), but no differences were seen between them. Mean compliance was elevated [98.0% (SD = 9.8)] with no differences between groups. There were more adverse events in the quadruple arms (OACM, 65.8%; OA-OACM, 68.6%; OAC, 46.6%; P < 0.05), but no significant differences between groups in terms of severity were seen. CONCLUSIONS Hybrid and concomitant regimens show good ER against H. pylori infection with an acceptable safety profile. They clearly displace OAC as first-line regimen in our area.