Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quality of life and nutritional status in alcohol addicts and patients with chronic liver disease.

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to assess and compare the nutritional status and quality of life in chronic liver disease (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) patients and alcohol addicts. METHODS Patients with alcoholic liver disease (n=41), nonalcoholic liver disease (n=40), alcohol addicts (n=25) without liver disease and healthy controls (n=25) were randomly selected. Nutritional status was assessed using anthropometric measurements viz. skin fold thickness, arm muscle circumference and area. Biochemical estimations included liver function tests. Food intake was assessed using 48 hour recall and macro-nutrient intake was calculated. Quality of life was assessed using the SF-36 questionnaire. RESULTS The mean value of mid-arm muscle area was significantly lower in patients from the non-alcoholic liver disease group when compared with the other 2 groups (p= 0.0). Body fat store depletion was significantly lower in the alcohol addict group when set against the alcoholic liver disease and non-alcoholic liver disease groups (p= 0.0). The mean percentages of ideal calories (p= 0.0) and proteins (p= 0.0) were significantly higher in alcohol addicts but no significant differences in the mean percentage of fat intake (p= 0.1) was observed. The frequency of macro-nutrient deficiency was highest in the non-alcoholic liver disease group (p= 0.0). Ethanol consumption was not significantly different between alcohol addicts and patients suffering from alcoholic liver disease (p=0.06). Patients with liver disease (irrespective of aetiology) scored significantly lower on the quality of life scale when compared to alcohol addicts. CONCLUSIONS Malnutrition is more frequent and severe in patients suffering from chronic liver disease in comparison to alcohol addicts. The health status is significantly poorer in patients suffering from alcoholic liver disease. Alcohol does not seem to play a primary role in the pathogenesis of liver disease and malnutrition.
Reporting the 2014 World Cup: football first and social issues last

Abstract Delays and infrastructure problems appeared as key issues in numerous media reports on the preparations for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. This paper analyses to what extent the media coverage of this period helped to overshadow serious existent social issues, such as poverty and violence, and how this has meant the privilege of FIFA’s narratives over these issues. A frame analysis shows that while the FIFA is quoted as a major source of the news on the event, a stereotyped portrait of Brazil has been constantly offered. As far as as protests led by ordinary citizens and social movements have appeared as disruptors of the tournament’s safety. This case yet illustrates not only the priority given to commercial interests in the news, but the necessary debate around the media coverage of global events, in which the media are expected to side with international bodies, as local voices remain marginalized.
The Association between Cultural Orientation and Drinking Behaviors among University Students in Wuhan, China

Objectives This study examines the association between cultural orientation and drinking behaviors among university students. Cultural orientation is the measure of how the cultural values of individuals living in their own society are influenced by cultural values introduced from the outside. Methods In 2011, a cross-sectional survey collected data from 1279 university students from six universities in central China. Participants used a likert scale to rank a series of statements reflecting cultural values from the previously validated Chinese Cultural Orientation Scale and answered questions about their drinking behaviors and socio-demographic characteristics. Results Statistically significant differences in cultural orientation were observed for gender, hometown and type of university attendance. Traditional-oriented students were more likely to be occasional drinkers or nondrinkers, while marginal-oriented students, bicultural-oriented students and western-oriented students were more likely to be regular drinkers. Bicultural orientation (OR = 1.80, P<0.05) and marginal orientation (OR = 1.64, P<0.05) increased the likelihood of the student being regular drinking, compared to students with traditional orientations. Males (OR = 4.40, P<0.05) had a higher likelihood of regular drinking than females, graduate students (OR = 2.59, P<0.05) had a higher likelihood of regular drinking than undergraduates, students from urban areas (OR = 1.79, P<0.05) had a higher likelihood of regular drinking than those from towns/rural areas, and students attending key universities (OR = 0.48, P<0.05) had a lower likelihood of regular drinking than those attending general universities. Conclusions Cultural orientation influences drinking behaviors. Traditional cultural orientation was associated with less drinking while western cultural orientation, marginal cultural orientation and bicultural orientation were associated with more drinking. The role of gender, hometown and university attendance is partially moderated through the influence of cultural orientation. The relationship between a traditional cultural orientation and alcohol drinking suggests that traditional Chinese cultural values should be examined for their role in possibly reducing alcohol-related risks through education and policy initiatives.
Efficiency implications of open source commonality and reuse

This paper analyzes the reuse choices made by open source developers and relates them to cost efficiency. We make a distinction between the commonality among applications and the actual reuse of code. The former represents the similarity between the requirements of different applications and, consequently, the functionalities that they provide. The latter represents the actual reuse of code. No application can be maintained for ever. A fundamental reason for the need for periodical replacement of code is the exponential growth of costs with the number of maintenance interventions. Intuitively, this is due to the increasing complexity of software that grows in both size and coupling among different modules. The paper measures commonality, reuse and development costs of 26 open-source projects for a total of 171 application versions. Results show that reuse choices in open-source contexts are not cost efficient. Developers tend to reuse code from the most recent version of applications, even if their requirements are closer to previous versions. Furthermore, the latest version of an application is always the one that has incurred the highest number of maintenance interventions. Accordingly, the development cost per new line of code is found to grow with reuse.
Autophagy regulates cytoplasmic remodeling during cell reprogramming in a zebrafish model of muscle regeneration

ABSTRACT Cell identity involves both selective gene activity and specialization of cytoplasmic architecture and protein machinery. Similarly, reprogramming differentiated cells requires both genetic program alterations and remodeling of the cellular architecture. While changes in genetic and epigenetic programs have been well documented in dedifferentiating cells, the pathways responsible for remodeling the cellular architecture and eliminating specialized protein complexes are not as well understood. Here, we utilize a zebrafish model of adult muscle regeneration to study cytoplasmic remodeling during cell dedifferentiation. We describe activation of autophagy early in the regenerative response to muscle injury, while blocking autophagy using chloroquine or Atg5 and Becn1 knockdown reduced the rate of regeneration with accumulation of sarcomeric and nuclear debris. We further identify Casp3/caspase 3 as a candidate mediator of cellular reprogramming and Fgf signaling as an important activator of autophagy in dedifferentiating myocytes. We conclude that autophagy plays a critical role in cell reprogramming by regulating cytoplasmic remodeling, facilitating the transition to a less differentiated cell identity.
Functional connectivity with the hippocampus during successful memory formation

Although it is well established that the hippocampus is critical for episodic memory, little is known about how the hippocampus interacts with cortical regions during successful memory formation. Here, we used event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify areas that exhibited differential functional connectivity with the hippocampus during processing of novel objects that were subsequently remembered or forgotten on a postscan test. Functional connectivity with the hippocampus was enhanced during successful, as compared with unsuccessful, memory formation, in a distributed network of limbic cortical areas—including perirhinal, orbitofrontal, and retrosplenial/posterior cingulate cortex—that are anatomically connected with the hippocampal formation. Increased connectivity was also observed in lateral temporal, medial parietal, and medial occipital cortex. These findings demonstrate that successful memory formation is associated with transient increases in cortico‐hippocampal interaction. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A parametrix approach for some degenerate stable driven SDEs

We consider a stable driven degenerate stochastic differential equation, whose coefficients satisfy a kind of weak Hormander condition. Under mild smoothness assumptions we prove the uniqueness of the martingale problem for the associated generator under some dimension constraints. Also, when the driving noise is scalar and tempered, we establish density bounds reflecting the multi-scale behavior of the process.
A modified generalized extremal optimization algorithm for the quay crane scheduling problem with interference constraints

The quay crane scheduling problem (QCSP) determines the handling sequence of tasks at ship bays by a set of cranes assigned to a container vessel such that the vessel's service time is minimized. A number of heuristics or meta-heuristics have been proposed to obtain the near-optimal solutions to overcome the NP-hardness of the problem. In this article, the idea of generalized extremal optimization (GEO) is adapted to solve the QCSP with respect to various interference constraints. The resulting GEO is termed the modified GEO. A randomized searching method for neighbouring task-to-QC assignments to an incumbent task-to-QC assignment is developed in executing the modified GEO. In addition, a unidirectional search decoding scheme is employed to transform a task-to-QC assignment to an active quay crane schedule. The effectiveness of the developed GEO is tested on a suite of benchmark problems introduced by K.H. Kim and Y.M. Park in 2004 (European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 156, No. 3). Compared with other well-known existing approaches, the experiment results show that the proposed modified GEO is capable of obtaining the optimal or near-optimal solution in a reasonable time, especially for large-sized problems.
Factors Associated With Care Burden and Quality of Life Among Caregivers of the Mentally Ill in Chinese Society

Objectives: Few studies in Taiwan have looked into the burden of caregivers for the mentally ill and the influence of the burden on the quality of life among caregivers. The aim of this study is to explore the risk factors that may aggravate care burden and to assess the relationship between the caregivers’ burden and their quality of life. Method: Ninety caregivers of patients with mental illness, who were attending outpatient clinic services in Taipei City Psychiatric Centre, were assessed using a burden questionnaire and the brief questionnaire of the World Health Organization Quality of Life instrument (WHOQOL-BREF). Results: Burden scores were significantly correlated with the number of care hours the caregivers spent daily with the patient, irrespective of their age, gender, kinship and educational level. Caregivers of patients with different psychiatric illnesses had similar levels of burden. Higher burden scores were correlated with a lower quality of life and retained unique predictive variance in multiple regressions in all four domains of the WHOQOL-BREF. Conclusions: These findings indicate that care burden has a significant impact on caregivers’ quality of life. Daily care hours with the patient are the unique determinant of caregivers’ burden in Taiwan. Measures to reduce daily care hours should be considered.
Palmitic acid-rich diet suppresses glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) and induces endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in pancreatic islets in mice

Abstract The objective was to clarify whether dietary palmitic acid supplementation affects glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress pathway in pancreatic islets in mice. Eight-week-old male C57BL/6J mice were randomly divided into three treatment diet groups: control diet, palmitic acid-supplemented diet (PAL) and oleic acid-supplemented diet (OLE). After 2 weeks of treatment, intraperitoneal glucose tolerance test and intraperitoneal insulin tolerance test were performed. GSIS was assessed by pancreatic perfusion in situ with basal (100 mg/dL) glucose followed by a high (300 mg/dL) glucose concentration. We measured mRNA levels of ER stress markers such as C/EBP homologous protein (CHOP), immunoglobulin heavy-chain binding protein (BIP) and X-box binding protein (XBP)-1 using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analyses in isolated islets. Immunohistochemical staining was also performed. Mice fed PAL showed significantly decreased glucose tolerance (p < 0.05). In the perfusion study, GSIS was significantly suppressed in the PAL group (p < 0.05). Semi-quantitative RT-PCR revealed that islet CHOP, BIP, and XBP-1 mRNA expression were significantly increased in the PAL group (p < 0.05). TUNEL-positive β-cells were not detected in all groups. Dietary palmitic acid-supplementation for 2 weeks might suppress GSIS and induce ER stress in pancreatic islets in mice, in the early stage of lipotoxicity.
Comparing methods for deriving intensity scores for adjectives

We compare several different corpusbased and lexicon-based methods for the scalar ordering of adjectives. Among them, we examine for the first time a lowresource approach based on distinctivecollexeme analysis that just requires a small predefined set of adverbial modifiers. While previous work on adjective intensity mostly assumes one single scale for all adjectives, we group adjectives into different scales which is more faithful to human perception. We also apply the methods to both polar and non-polar adjectives, showing that not all methods are equally suitable for both types of adjectives.
Representativity, reliability, homogeneity and validity of Selwyn's computer attitude scale for 16-19 education?

This study examined the representativity, reliability, homogeneity and validity of Selwyn's computer attitude scale, 21 items of which were given in the Serbian language. The study used a sample of 113 ninth-grade Gymnasium (high-school) students and found that the translated instrument does successfully measure one underlying construct.
Blindness in the eastern Mediterranean countries

Blinding eye diseases remain a highly prevalent and serious health problem in many developing countries. The exact number of blind individuals is not known. It is estimated that there are 38 million people who have visual impairment and are at risk of becoming blind.12 The prevalence of blindness in developing countries is 10–40 times higher than in developed countries and close to three quarters of the world's blindness is either curable or preventable. The majority of blind people on earth reside in the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The World Health Organization (WHO) definition of blindness is a visual acuity of less than 3/60 (20/200, 0.05), and low vision is less than 6/18 (20/50, 0.3) in the better eye with the best correction.1 In the eastern Mediterranean countries2 (Table 1), there are several studies on the prevalence of blindness.3-14 Certain studies were community based prevalence surveys while others included reports on blindness from registries of schools for the blind. The prevalence of blindness in Lebanon is 0.6%8 and 1.5% in Saudi Arabia.12 The leading causes of blindness have been determined by information retrieved from registries for the blind in a number of countries. In general, data obtained from hospitals, social security records, or institutions for the blind may give us an idea about the causes of blindness but these sources suffer from certain limitations. Often excluded from consideration are remote populations, those who do not seek medical advice, unilateral blindness, older individuals, and preschool children. View this table: Table 1 Demography of eastern Mediterranean countries In countries in the eastern Mediterranean eye diseases have long been recognised as a major health problem. Table 2 shows the leading causes of blindness in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, a community based blindness survey was conducted to determine …
MULTIPLE STAR FORMATION TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INITIAL MASS FUNCTION

The frequency and properties of multiple star systems offer powerful tests of star formation models. Multiplicity surveys over the past decade have shown that binary properties vary strongly with mass, but the functional forms and the interplay between frequency and semimajor axis remain largely unconstrained. We present the results of a large-scale survey of multiplicity at the bottom of the initial mass function in several nearby young associations, encompassing 78 very low mass members observed with Keck laser guide star adaptive optics. Our survey confirms the overall trend observed in the field for lower-mass binary systems to be less frequent and more compact, including a null detection for any substellar binary systems with separations wider than ∼7 AU. Combined with a Bayesian re-analysis of existing surveys, our results demonstrate that the binary frequency and binary separations decline smoothly between masses of 0.5 M☉ and 0.02 M☉, though we cannot distinguish the functional form of this decline due to a degeneracy between the total binary frequency and the mean binary separation. We also show that the mass ratio distribution becomes progressively more concentrated at q ∼ 1 for declining masses, though a small number of systems appear to have unusually wide separations and low-mass ratios for their mass. Finally, we compare our results to synthetic binary populations generated by smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations, noting the similarities and discussing possible explanations for the differences.
Multiview myocardial tracking in echocardiographic 2D sequences using shape and motion constrained level-set

Segmentation of the myocardium in echocardiographic images is an important task for the diagnosis of heart disease. This task is difficult due to the inherent problems of echographic images (i.e. low contrast, speckle noise, signal dropout, presence of shadows). In this article, we extend a level-set method recently proposed in [1] in order to track the whole myocardium in echocardiographic sequences. To this end, we formulate a new motion prior energy that constrains the zero-level of the implicit function to satisfy the optical flow hypothesis. The algorithm is then compared to experts references and to another method on a dataset of 12 sequences (more than 700 images) acquired in the four main echocardiographic views.
ijns . net Effects of triclabendazole and nitroxynil on EPG , hematological parameters and body weight against fascioliasis in goats at government goat development farm , Sylhet ,

The study was conducted to evaluate the effects of triclabendazole and nitroxynil against fascioliasis in goat for a period of 28 days on 20 black bengal goats. Among hundred goats, twenty were selected for this study which was suffering from liver fluke (Fasciola gigantica) infection and were marked by tagging. Twenty goats were randomly divided into four groups (A, B, C and D) where each group comprising of five goats. Group A were treated with tablet fasinex (triclabendazole, Novartis Ltd, Bangladesh) orally at the dose rate of 12 mgkg -1 body weight, group B were treated with acinex (triclabendazole, ACI Ltd, Bangladesh) orally at the dose rate of 12 mgkg -1 body weight and group C were treated with nitronex injection (nitroxynil, Renata Ltd, Bangladesh) subcutaneously at the dose rate of 10 mgkg -1 body weight. Goats of group D was kept as infected control group without giving any treatment. A significant (P<0.01) reduction of egg per gram (EPG) count was found on 7 th , 14 th , 21 st and 28 th days of treated goats of group A, B and C, respectively. The EPG count of control group were significantly (P<0.01) increased 7 day onwards up to experimental period. Reduction of mean EPG on 7 th , 14 th , 21 st and 28 th day after treatment in group A, B and C were 81.48%, 81.25% and 83.04%, respectively, whereas in control group the mean EPG were 22.43%. Of the hematological parameters, TEC, Hb and PCV values were lower on day 0 but turned to increase (p<0.01) on day 28 of the study. On the other hand, ESR and TLC were higher before treatment (day 0) but decreased significantly (p<0.01) on day 28.The body weight increased significantly (P<0.01) after treatments in group A, B and C respectively except untreated control. This result may indicate that three commercial anthelmintics contain triclabendazole and nitroxynil against fascioliasis in goat and nitroxynil have higher efficacies on egg per gram (EPG), hematological parameters and body weight against fascioliasis in goat. Additional detailed studies are required to prevent and control of fascioliasis in goats by using a routine prophylactic anthelmintics measurement.
Correction to “The Political Determinants of International Trade”

Efforts to replicate our study of the effects of politics on trade flows between the major powers have revealed that the computer program written to calculate the estimates produced errors in both the coefficients and the standard errors. Furthermore, these errors have some consequences for the results. In this brief corrigendum, we present corrected tables for our research note and a slightly modified interpretation of the results. Our study examined evidence to assess three arguments about how politics may affect trade. The first contends that positive political relations in a dyad result in higher levels of trade. This argument leads to two hypotheses: States in conflict will have a lower level of trade than those not in conflict, and trade will increase with the degree of common interests between a pair of states. The second argument concludes that democratic dyads will have a higher level of trade than other dyads. The third argument focuses on the security concerns of states and leads to the hypotheses that alliances will increase trade in a bipolar system but will have no effect in a multipolar system. We refer readers to the original article for a fuller statement of the logic of these arguments, their respective hypotheses, and a complete statement of our research design and operationalization of the variables (Morrow, Siverson, and Tabares 1998).