Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatio-temporal analysis of Chlamydia trachomatis in Newfoundland and Labrador and an exploratory analysis into employment traits as risk factors

Sexually transmitted infections are an important health concern in Canadian society due to their negative impact on sexual and reproductive health, as well as their social and fiscal ramifications. Chlamydia trachomatis is the most common reported sexually transmitted infection in Canada and has been consistently on the rise since 1997. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador routinely publishes case counts of infectious diseases, including chlamydia, but there is minimal examination into age, sex, the regional distributions of cases, the etiology of these infections, or what populations are most at risk. There is also little information on the role of migratory employment in infectious disease risk in Canada. The spatial and temporal distribution of chlamydia in Newfoundland and Labrador between 2007 and 2013 was examined, in addition to an exploration into migratory employment as a contributory cause. Case data were obtained from the Regional Health Authorities and population information from Statistics Canada. Differences in incidence rates for age, sex, and geography were evaluated over time. A linear increase in incidence occurred over the study period. Distinct areas of high incidence were observed and spatial clusters were identified in northern Labrador and St. John’s. Using the 2006 Census of Population and 2011 National Household Survey, associations between work-related commuting demographics and chlamydia incidence were found in the province. Understanding the distribution of chlamydia as well as the behaviours of migratory workers can help direct health policy to prevent chlamydial and other infections from occurring, and improve overall sexual health practices of Canadians.
Evaluation of the subtropical westerly jet and its effects on the projected summer rainfall over central Asia using multi‐CMIP5 models

Based on historical and RCP8.5 experiments, along with 25 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) models, we evaluate the skills of the CMIP5 models in simulating the subtropical westerly jet (SWJ) and its effect on the projected summer rainfall over central Asia (CA). The historical experiments show that 23 models can well simulate the changes in the position and strength of the SWJ. Further analysis finds that 21 models can capture the relationship between the SWJ position change and summer rainfall over the domain of 55–85°E and 35–50°N and 17 models can capture the relationship between the SWJ strength change and summer rainfall over the domain of 55–75°E and 45–55°N, where 15 models can capture the relationships between both SWJ strength and position change with summer rainfall. Based on the SWJ change among the 15 models, except for the HadGEM2‐CC model, the 500 hPa winds of the rest 14 models well match the summer rainfall over CA. So the 14 models are used to do next analysis. In the last 50 years of the 21st century, only the inmcm4 model presents the change in the SWJ strength, and the rest 13 models present the changes in the SWJ position. Among above 13 models, 10 models maintain the relationships between the SWJ position change and summer rainfall over the domain of 55–85°E and 35–50°N into the future. Under the background of global warming, the changes in the SWJ position are well related to the sea surface temperatures (SSTs) over the Indian Ocean in the future. The SST warming over the Indian Ocean results in the South Asian summer monsoon weakening, corresponding to an anomalous anticyclone over the low‐level troposphere of the monsoon regions; this situation results in an anomalous cyclone at the upper level of the troposphere of the northwestern flank of the monsoon heating regions due to Matsuno–Gill‐type responses, which favour the SWJ axis shifting further south. In addition, we also compare the current projected summer rainfall over CA from our selected models with other selected previous models using different methods. The ensemble results show that more summer rainfall occurring in most of Kazakhstan and Xinjiang Province of northwestern China is more likely in the future; in the rest of the countries of CA, there are uncertainties regarding future rainfall changes.
The genetic structure of the remnant populations of Centaurea horrida in Sardinia and associated islands.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The Mediterranean region is of prime importance to biodiversity at a global level, mainly due to the abundance of endemic plant species. However, information about these species is still scarce, especially at the genetic level. In this paper the first assessment is reported of the genetic structure of Centaurea horrida (Asteraceae), an endemic, sea-cliff-dwelling plant from Sardinia. METHODS The study was conducted on seven populations covering the entire natural range of the species by means of SSR (microsatellite) markers. KEY RESULTS A considerable amount of genetic variation was found (average H(e) = 0.603-0.854), together with a medium-high differentiation among populations, as estimated both by F(ST) (0.123) and R(ST) (0.158). Both Bayesian analysis and AMOVA were employed to detect genetic structuring in this species. The results suggest that the origins of the current populations of C. horrida lie in two gene pools. CONCLUSIONS Despite the restricted range, C. horrida displays high levels of genetic diversity, structured in such a way that three management units could be deemed viable for its conservation. The protected status of the species will probably suffice to prevent the impoverishment of its genetic resources.
Scanning Laser Polarimetry and Retinal Thickness Analysis before and after Laser in Situ Keratomileusis

Purpose To evaluate changes in retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness after laserin situ keratomileusis (LASIK) using a scanning laser Polarimeter with fixed corneal compensation (GDx) and the retinal thickness analyzer (RIA). Methods Thirty-eight eyes of 19 healthy subjects (10 female and 9 male; mean age 37.0±8.8 years) underwent GDx and RTA measurements before and after LASIK. All subjects revealed mild to high myopia (mean spherical refraction: −4.0±2.75 D). Measurements using GDx were followed by RTA measurements after pupil dilation. All measurements were performed the day before LASIK and 1 week postoperatively. Results GDX revealed a decrease in nerve fiber layer thickness measurements after LASIK, but did not reach statistical significance (p>0.05). Using RTA, mean RNFL thickness (MRNFL) and RNFL cross sectional area decreased significantly after LASIK (p=0.03 and p=0.02, respectively). Conclusions Scanning laser polarimetry revealed a slight decrease in RNFL thickness measurements after LASIK. MRNFL and RNFL cross section were significantly lower after LASIK using RTA. The changes might be artifacts in a small group of myopic subjects.
Endothelial Arginase II: A Novel Target for the Treatment of Atherosclerosis

Oxidized low-density lipoproteins increase arginase activity and reciprocally decrease endothelial NO in human aortic endothelial cells. Here, we demonstrate that vascular endothelial arginase activity is increased in atherogenic-prone apolipoprotein E–null (ApoE−/−) and wild-type mice fed a high cholesterol diet. In ApoE−/− mice, selective arginase II inhibition or deletion of the arginase II gene (Arg II−/− mice) prevents high-cholesterol diet–dependent decreases in vascular NO production, decreases endothelial reactive oxygen species production, restores endothelial function, and prevents oxidized low-density lipoprotein–dependent increases in vascular stiffness. Furthermore, arginase inhibition significantly decreases plaque burden. These data indicate that arginase II plays a critical role in the pathophysiology of cholesterol-mediated endothelial dysfunction and represents a novel target for therapy in atherosclerosis.
The value of personalised risk information: a qualitative study of the perceptions of patients with prostate cancer

Objective To explore the experiences of patients with prostate cancer with risk information and their perceptions of the value of personalised risk information in treatment decisions. Design A qualitative study was conducted using focus groups. Semistructured interviews explored participants’ experiences with using risk information, and their perceptions of the potential value of personalised risk information produced by clinical prediction models. Participants English-speaking patients, ages 54–82, diagnosed with prostate cancer within the past 3 years, residing in rural and non-rural geographic locations in Maine (USA), and attending prostate cancer patient support groups. Setting 6 focus groups were conducted with 27 patients; separate groups were held for patients with low-risk, medium-risk and high-risk disease defined by National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines. Results Several participants reported receiving risk information that was imprecise rather than precise, qualitative rather than quantitative, indirect rather than direct and focused on biomarker values rather than clinical outcomes. Some participants felt that personalised risk information could be useful in helping them make better informed decisions, but expressed scepticism about its value. Many participants favoured decision-making strategies that were heuristic-based and intuitive rather than risk-based and deliberative, and perceived other forms of evidence—emotions, recommendations of trusted physicians, personal narratives—as more reliable and valuable in treatment decisions. Conclusions Patients with prostate cancer appear to have little experience using personalised risk information, may favour heuristic-based over risk-based decision-making strategies and may perceive personalised risk information as less valuable than other types of evidence. These decision-making approaches and perceptions represent potential barriers to the clinical use of personalised risk information. Overcoming these barriers will require providing patients with greater exposure to risk information, education about the nature and value of personalised risk information and training in deliberative decision-making strategies. More research is needed to confirm these findings and address these needs.
Calibration and Validation of CERES-Maize Model for Hybrid Maize under Variable Plant Densities and Nitrogen Levels in Southern Telangana Zone of Telangana State, India

CERES-Maizemodel (DSSAT v 4.5) was calibrated and validated for maize hybrid (cv Dekalb Super 900M) using experimental data obtained from different dates of sowing and nitrogen levels (7-July, 21-July, 6-August and 22 August in 2009 and 18 June, 02 July, 17 th July and 02 nd August in 2010 and 0 kg ha -1 control; 100 kg ha -1 ; 200 kg ha -1 ; 300 kg ha -1 and 400 kg ha -1 ) at Agricultural Research Institute, Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, India. Calibration analysis revealed that the model provided satisfactory estimates for the phenology, grain yield and total biomasswith RMSE of 0.87 days, 363 and 412 kg ha -1 , respectively. Calibrated model used for further validation with experimental data and found that,simulation of phenology and physiological maturity wasconsidered as excellent with NRMSE value being less than 10%. Whereas, simulation of LAI, number of grains per cob, grains m -2 , grain yield and stover yield was considered as good with simulation values ranging in between 10.1 to 20%. But the simulation of nitrogen content of biomass was poor as the simulation of total biomass was poor as the NRMSE value is more than 20.1%. So Validated CERES-Maize model can be used as a research tool under irrigated conditions up to 21 st July sowings to take strategic decision for improving maize production in different agro climatic zones of Telangana State.
On Automatically Generating Commit Messages via Summarization of Source Code Changes

Although version control systems allow developers to describe and explain the rationale behind code changes in commit messages, the state of practice indicates that most of the time such commit messages are either very short or even empty. In fact, in a recent study of 23K+ Java projects it has been found that only 10% of the messages are descriptive and over 66% of those messages contained fewer words as compared to a typical English sentence (i.e., 15-20 words). However, accurate and complete commit messages summarizing software changes are important to support a number of development and maintenance tasks. In this paper we present an approach, coined as Change Scribe, which is designed to generate commit messages automatically from change sets. Change Scribe generates natural language commit messages by taking into account commit stereotype, the type of changes (e.g., files rename, changes done only to property files), as well as the impact set of the underlying changes. We evaluated Change Scribe in a survey involving 23 developers in which the participants analyzed automatically generated commit messages from real changes and compared them with commit messages written by the original developers of six open source systems. The results demonstrate that automatically generated messages by Change Scribe are preferred in about 62% of the cases for large commits, and about 54% for small commits.
Linguistically Annotated BTG for Statistical Machine Translation

Bracketing Transduction Grammar (BTG) is a natural choice for effective integration of desired linguistic knowledge into statistical machine translation (SMT). In this paper, we propose a Linguistically Annotated BTG (LABTG) for SMT. It conveys linguistic knowledge of source-side syntax structures to BTG hierarchical structures through linguistic annotation. From the linguistically annotated data, we learn annotated BTG rules and train linguistically motivated phrase translation model and reordering model. We also present an annotation algorithm that captures syntactic information for BTG nodes. The experiments show that the LABTG approach significantly outperforms a baseline BTG-based system and a state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the NIST MT-05 Chinese-to-English translation task. Moreover, we empirically demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better translation selection and phrase reordering.
Attributes of an effective clinical teacher: a survey on students' and teachers' perceptions.

OBJECTIVE To identify the attributes of effective clinical teacher, using a self-filled survey questionnaire, that students and faculty value most, and to compare the opinion of student and faculty regarding the same. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional study. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY The Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH), Karachi from October 2006 to January 2007. SUBJECT AND METHODS Clinical faculty at AKUH and students in clinical years were included in this survey after taking their written informed consent. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire administered to all participants. Responses were compared. RESULTS A total of 119 students in clinical years (3, 4 and 5) and 89 faculties involved in clinical teaching responded to the questionnaire. The most important attributes in faculty's and students' perspective were knowledge, interest in teaching and clinical competency. In students and faculty perspective, the fourth and fifth attributes were good communication skills and being non-judgmental. CONCLUSION Students in clinical years and clinical teachers valued knowledge, interest in teaching and clinical competency as the most important attributes for an effective clinical teacher. There were various areas of agreement and disagreement between faculty and students about attributes of effective clinical teacher.
Soil and Water Conservation in Rainfed Vineyards with Common Sainfoin and Spontaneous Vegetation under Different Ground Conditions

Soil erosion seriously affects vineyards. In this study, the influence of two vegetation covers on topsoil moisture and the effect of different physiographic conditions on runoff and sediment yields were evaluated in a rainfed vineyard formed by four fields (NE Spain) during 15 months. One field had spontaneous vegetation in the inter-row areas, and three fields had a cover crop of common sainfoin. Moisture conditions were dry and stable in the vineyards’ rows, wet and very variable in the inter-row areas and wet and very stable in the corridors. Topsoil moisture in the areas with common sainfoin was much higher than in the rows (62–70%), whereas this difference was lower with spontaneous vegetation (40%). Two runoff and sediment traps (STs) were installed in two ephemeral gullies, and 26 time-integrated surveys (TIS) were done. The mean runoff yields were 9.8 and 13.5 L TIS−1 in ST2 and ST3. Rainfall depth (12 mm) and erosivity (5.2 MJ mm ha−1 h−1) thresholds for runoff initiation were assessed. The mean turbidity was 333 (ST2) and 19 (ST3) g L−1. Changes in the canopy covers (grapevines and vegetation covers), topography and rainfall parameters explained the runoff and sediment dynamics.
The Content and Dimensionality of Communication Styles

A multiphase lexical study was conducted to uncover the key dimensions of communication styles. In the first two phases, adjectives and verbs were selected on the basis of their ability to describe communication styles. In the third phase, a study was conducted using 441 respondents who provided self-ratings on 744 adjectives and 837 verbs. Adjectives and verbs were submitted to principal components analysis, followed by orthogonal Procrustes rotation to establish within-sample replicability, which provided evidence of four to seven main communication style dimensions. The seven communication style dimensions form the acronym PRESENT, for preciseness, reflectiveness, expressiveness, supportiveness, emotionality, niceness, and threateningness. As expected, scales based on the seven dimensions were meaningfully related to the interpersonal but not the intrapersonal scales from the Communication Style Scale. The results are discussed in light of existing communication style scales, the interpersonal circumplex, and personality structure.
Understanding intention to continuously share information on weblogs

Purpose – Weblogs, or blogs, have been a significant new development in recent years. Many businesses have begun using blogs to stimulate discussions, garner ideas, and provide further visibility. Thus, blog usage as well as individual motives behind continued usage is an important area of research. This research aims to examine behavioral motivations underlying individual intention to keep using blogs.Design/methodology/approach – Based on social cognitive theory and related technology adoption literature, this study considered knowledge self‐efficacy, subjective norms, feedback, and personal outcome expectations as the determinants of continuing to share information on blogs. The proposed model was empirically evaluated using randomized survey data collected from 155 users of a popular web site in Taiwan (WRETCH blog). Findings – The results revealed that although both self‐efficacy and personal outcome expectations affected directly the intention of sharing information on blogs, personal outcome expecta.
Statistical methods for delay fault coverage analysis

We have developed new statistical techniques for delay fault analysis. True value simulation is performed using a multi-value logic system describing signal states of two consecutive vectors. Signal statistics are used to estimate transition probabilities and observabilities. These allow us to estimate detection probabilities and the coverage for transition faults. For path delay faults, recognizing that the total number of possible paths can be exponential in circuit size, we devise an implicit random path sampling procedure to obtain a linear-time estimate of the coverage for all faults. We further derive a longest path theorem to estimate coverages with respect to longest paths through primary inputs and a selected set of fanout branches. Coverages are estimated for a minimal set of longest paths such that each signal lead is included in at least one target path whose propagation delay is no less than the delay of any path containing the lead. The fault coverage estimates closely agree with those obtained from delay fault simulation while giving a significant speedup.
Resting muscle sympathetic nerve activity and peak oxygen uptake in heart failure and normal subjects.

AIMS Exercise intolerance and increased efferent vasoconstrictor traffic to muscle are two characteristics of heart failure that have not been explicitly linked. We tested the hypothesis that peak oxygen consumption is inversely related to resting muscle sympathetic nerve activity in heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS We recorded peroneal muscle sympathetic nerve activity in 17 treated heart failure patients (16 men,1 woman; mean ejection fraction of 26. 0+/-3.2% (SE)) and 17 age-matched healthy subjects (16 men, 1 woman). Oxygen consumption was measured during cycle ergometry to maximal effort. In heart failure and normal subjects, mean peak oxygen consumption was 20.6+/-1.7 vs 32.2+/-2.6 ml x kg-1 x min-1(P<0.0001) and mean muscle sympathetic activity was 49.3+/-2.8 vs 33.0+/-3.3 bursts x min-1(P<.0007) respectively. When age was accounted for by multiple regression analysis, there was a significant relationship between peak oxygen consumption and burst frequency in heart failure (P<0.02) but not in healthy subjects. The percent of predicted peak oxygen consumption achieved (based on age, sex and body size) was inversely related to muscle sympathetic nerve burst frequency in heart failure (r=-0.71, P<0.0014) but not in normal subjects (r=-0. 44, P<0.08;P<0.0001 for this comparison). CONCLUSION Reduced exercise capacity in heart failure is related to increased efferent sympathetic traffic to calf muscle. These observations are consistent with the concept of a peripheral neurogenic limit to exercise in heart failure.