Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mathematical modelling of zika virus in Brazil

In this paper we study some deterministic mathematical models that seek to explain the expansion of zika virus, as a viral epidemic, using published data for Brazil. SIR type models are proposed and validated using the epidemic data found, considering several aspects in the spread of the disease. Finally, we confirmed that the crucial epidemic parameter such as $R_0$ is consistent with those previously reported in the literature for other areas. We also explored variations of the parameters within Brazil for different federal entities. We concluded that a parsimonious model that includes both human and vector populations best describe the epidemic parameters.
The Effect of Family-centered Care on Management of Blood Glucose Levels in Adolescents with Diabetes

Background Responsibility for diabetes management tasks must shift from caregivers to adolescents as adolescents grow older. Also, family-centered care is a way to provide efficient care for them at home. This study aimed to identify the effect of family-centered care on management of blood glucose levels in adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). Methods This is a Pre-experimental study with a pre- and post-test design. The participants consisted of forty adolescents with T1DM, aged between 10-14 years, with their caregivers who were selected through simple random sampling from Hamadan Diabetes Research Center in Iran in 2013. The sample was divided into four similar groups. Educational sessions were conducted for each group for 30 to 40 minutes. Data collection tools were “Supervisory Behaviors of Caregiver” (SBC), “Management Behaviors of adolescents” (MBA) questionnaires, and the “Blood Glucose Levels Record Sheet”. Data were analyzed using SPSS 19 and based on descriptive statistics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, paired t-test and Pearson coefficient. Results There was a significant difference between the subjects’ MBA and SBC mean scores before (110.17±26.6) and after (134.6±1.28) intervention in four domains: “blood glucose testing”, “insulin therapy”, “meal plan” and “physical activity” (P<0.001). There were significant differences between the mean levels of recorded blood glucose during a week before and after intervention and between the mean levels of Glycated Hemoglobin level (HbA1c) before (8.4±1.12) and three months after (7.78±1.2) it (P<0.001). Pearson coefficient showed a positive relationship between the supervisory behaviors of caregivers with management behaviors of adolescents before and after the intervention (P<0.001). Conclusion Empowering adolescents with T1DM and their caregivers in home-centered care could improve diabetic adolescents’ management of blood glucose levels and reduce their HbA1Clevels. Therefore, Family-centered care could provide for better regime adherence at home.
Resolution of a chronic viral infection after interleukin-10 receptor blockade

A defining characteristic of persistent viral infections is the loss and functional inactivation of antiviral effector T cells, which prevents viral clearance. Interleukin-10 (IL-10) suppresses cellular immune responses by modulating the function of T cells and antigen-presenting cells. In this paper, we report that IL-10 production is drastically increased in mice persistently infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. In vivo blockade of the IL-10 receptor (IL-10R) with a neutralizing antibody resulted in rapid resolution of the persistent infection. IL-10 secretion was diminished and interferon γ production by antiviral CD8+ T cells was enhanced. In persistently infected mice, CD8α+ dendritic cell (DC) numbers declined early after infection, whereas CD8α− DC numbers were not affected. CD8α− DCs supported IL-10 production and subsequent dampening of antiviral T cell responses. Therapeutic IL-10R blockade broke the cycle of IL-10–mediated immune suppression, preventing IL-10 priming by CD8α− DCs and enhancing antiviral responses and thereby resolving infection without causing immunopathology.
Joint Network based Attention for Action Recognition

By extracting spatial and temporal characteristics in one network, the two-stream ConvNets can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in action recognition. However, such a framework typically suffers from the separately processing of spatial and temporal information between the two standalone streams and is hard to capture long-term temporal dependence of an action. More importantly, it is incapable of finding the salient portions of an action, say, the frames that are the most discriminative to identify the action. To address these problems, a \textbf{j}oint \textbf{n}etwork based \textbf{a}ttention (JNA) is proposed in this study. We find that the fully-connected fusion, branch selection and spatial attention mechanism are totally infeasible for action recognition. Thus in our joint network, the spatial and temporal branches share some information during the training stage. We also introduce an attention mechanism on the temporal domain to capture the long-term dependence meanwhile finding the salient portions. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51. Experimental results show that our method can improve the action recognition performance significantly and achieves the state-of-the-art results on both datasets.
The Role of Cannabinoid Transmission in Emotional Memory Formation: Implications for Addiction and Schizophrenia

Emerging evidence from both basic and clinical research demonstrates an important role for endocannabinoid (ECB) signaling in the processing of emotionally salient information, learning, and memory. Cannabinoid transmission within neural circuits involved in emotional processing has been shown to modulate the acquisition, recall, and extinction of emotionally salient memories and importantly, can strongly modulate the emotional salience of incoming sensory information. Two neural regions in particular, the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala (BLA), play important roles in emotional regulation and contain high levels of cannabinoid receptors. Furthermore, both regions show profound abnormalities in neuropsychiatric disorders such as addiction and schizophrenia. Considerable evidence has demonstrated that cannabinoid transmission functionally interacts with dopamine (DA), a neurotransmitter system that is of exceptional importance for both addictive behaviors and the neuropsychopathology of disorders like schizophrenia. Research in our laboratory has focused on how cannabinoid transmission both within and extrinsic to the mesolimbic DA system, including the BLA → mPFC circuitry, can modulate both rewarding and aversive emotional information. In this review, we will summarize clinical and basic neuroscience research demonstrating the importance of cannabinoid signaling within this neural circuitry. In particular, evidence will be reviewed emphasizing the importance of cannabinoid signaling within the BLA → mPFC circuitry in the context of emotional salience processing, memory formation and memory-related plasticity. We propose that aberrant states of hyper or hypoactive ECB signaling within the amygdala-prefrontal cortical circuit may lead to dysregulation of mesocorticolimbic DA transmission controlling the processing of emotionally salient information. These disturbances may in turn lead to emotional processing, learning, and memory abnormalities related to various neuropsychiatric disorders, including addiction and schizophrenia-related psychoses.
Arachidonic acid stimulates prostate cancer cell growth: critical role of 5-lipoxygenase.

Arachidonic acid (5,8,11,14-eicosatetraenoic acid), a member of the omega-6 poly-unsaturated fatty acids, was found to be an effective stimulator of human prostate cancer cell growth in vitro at micromolar concentrations. Selective blockade of the different metabolic pathways of arachidonic acid (e.g. ibuprofen for cyclooxygenase, SKF-525A for cytochrome P-450, baicalein and BHPP for 12-lipoxygenase, AA861 and MK886 for 5-lipoxygenase, etc.) revealed that the growth stimulatory effect of arachidonic acid is inhibited by the 5-lipoxygenase specific inhibitors, AA861 and MK886, but not by others. Addition of the eicosatetraenoid products of 5-lipoxygenase (5-HETEs) showed stimulation of prostate cancer cell growth similar to that of arachidonic acid, whereas the leukotrienes were ineffective. Moreover, the 5-series of eicosatetraenoids could reverse the growth inhibitory effect of MK886. Finally, prostate cancer cells fed with arachidonic acid showed a dramatic increase in the production of 5-HETEs which is effectively blocked by MK886. These experimental observations suggest that arachidonic acid needs to be metabolized through the 5-lipoxygenase pathway to produce 5-HETE series of eicosatetraenoids for its growth stimulatory effects on human prostate cancer cells.
Nominal term structure and term premia: evidence from Chile

ABSTRACT The downwards trend exhibited in Chile’s nominal term structure since 2003 has been a common pattern shared by other developed and developing economies. To understand the behaviour of the nominal yield curve in Chile, we rely on an affine dynamic term structure model which allows the term structure to decompose into the expected short-term interest rate (related to the monetary policy expectation) and the term premium. We show that most of the fall of long-term interest rates as well as its dynamics are related to the term premium rather than the expected short-term interest rate. Moreover, we find evidence that term premium is driven primarily by the US term premium and domestic nominal uncertainty derived from expected inflation.
A Comparative Study of Polar Code Constructions for the AWGN Channel

We present a comparative study of the performance of various polar code constructions in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. A polar code construction is any algorithm that selects $K$ best among $N$ possible polar bit-channels at the design signal-to-noise-ratio (design-SNR) in terms of bit error rate (BER). Optimal polar code construction is hard and therefore many suboptimal polar code constructions have been proposed at different computational complexities. Polar codes are also non-universal meaning the code changes significantly with the design-SNR. However, it is not known which construction algorithm at what design-SNR constructs the best polar codes. We first present a comprehensive survey of all the well-known polar code constructions along with their full implementations. We then propose a heuristic algorithm to find the best design-SNR for constructing best possible polar codes from a given construction algorithm. The proposed algorithm involves a search among several possible design-SNRs. We finally use our algorithm to perform a comparison of different construction algorithms using extensive simulations. We find that all polar code construction algorithms generate equally good polar codes in an AWGN channel, if the design-SNR is optimized.
Location of language in the cortex: a comparison between functional MR imaging and electrocortical stimulation.

PURPOSE To determine the accuracy of functional MR imaging in locating language areas for planning surgical resection. METHODS Intraoperative photographs were digitized and overlaid on functional MR language maps. The sensitivity and specificity of functional MR imaging for identifying language areas were determined for five different language tasks by comparing functional MR areas of language activation with results of electrocortical stimulation. A match was considered to occur if an activated area contacted overlapped, or surrounded a language tag. The borders of the activation areas were extended by 1 and 2 cm to determine whether the number of matches changed. Language and nonlanguage tag matches were tabulated separately. RESULTS Sensitivity/specificity for all patients and all language tasks ranged from 81%/53% for areas that touched to 92%/0% for areas separated by 2 cm. Individual language tasks were not as sensitive as a battery of language tasks combined. Location of language areas varied among subjects for a given task and among tasks for a given subject. CONCLUSION Functional MR imaging should be considered a useful presurgical planning tool for mapping cortical language areas, because it is sensitive, it provides increased time for planning before surgery, and it is noninvasive.
A New Algorithm for the Alignment of Phonetic Sequences

Alignment of phonetic sequences is a necessary step in many applications in computational phonology. After discussing various approaches to phonetic alignment, I present a new algorithm that combines a number of techniques developed for sequence comparison with a scoring scheme for computing phonetic similarity on the basis of multivalued features. The algorithm performs better on cognate alignment, in terms of accuracy and efficiency, than other algorithms reported in the literature.
Stratified Sampling Voxel Classification for Segmentation of Intraretinal and Subretinal Fluid in Longitudinal Clinical OCT Data

Automated three-dimensional retinal fluid (named symptomatic exudate-associated derangements, SEAD) segmentation in 3D OCT volumes is of high interest in the improved management of neovascular Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). SEAD segmentation plays an important role in the treatment of neovascular AMD, but accurate segmentation is challenging because of the large diversity of SEAD size, location, and shape. Here a novel voxel classification based approach using a layer-dependent stratified sampling strategy was developed to address the class imbalance problem in SEAD detection. The method was validated on a set of 30 longitudinal 3D OCT scans from 10 patients who underwent anti-VEGF treatment. Two retinal specialists manually delineated all intraretinal and subretinal fluid. Leave-one-patient-out evaluation resulted in a true positive rate and true negative rate of 96% and 0.16% respectively. This method showed promise for image guided therapy of neovascular AMD treatment.
Effectiveness of an Evidence‐Based Practice Nurse Mentor Training Program

BACKGROUND Multiple reasons are cited for why nurses do not incorporate evidence into clinical practice, including lack of knowledge and skills, training, time, and organizational support. AIMS To investigate the effectiveness of a mentor training program on mentors' perceptions of knowledge, attitude, skill, and confidence levels, and organizational readiness related to evidence-based practice (EBP) and research utilization; and to investigate the effectiveness of creating a formalized structure to enculturate EBP in order to prepare nurses to incorporate EBP into clinical practice on nurses' perceptions of knowledge, attitude, skill levels, barriers, nursing leadership, and organizational support related to EBP and research utilization. METHODS A two-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental, interventional design was used. A convenience sample of 66 mentors and 367 nurses working at a five hospital integrated healthcare system located in the Southeastern United States participated. FINDINGS Nurse mentors' knowledge, attitude, skill level, and organizational readiness related to EBP, t = -8.64, p < . 001, and confidence, t = -6.36, p < . 001, improved after training. Nurses' knowledge, attitude, and skill level related to EBP, t = -19.12, p < . 001, and barriers to research utilization, t = 20.86, p < . 001, EBP work environment t = -20.18, p < . 001, and EBP nurse leadership, t = -16.50, p < . 001, improved after a formalized structure was implemented. LINKING EVIDENCE TO ACTION EBP mentors are effective in educating and supporting nurses in evidence-based care. Leaders should use a multifaceted approach to build and sustain EBP, including developing a critical mass of EBP mentors to work with point of care staff.
Validity and sensitivity of a pen computer battery of performance tests

This study compared administration of performance tests and visual analogue scales (VAS) using a newly developed pen computer (PenC) battery with established tests using either pencil-and-paper (PP) or conventional computer. The performance of 47 subjects (23 male, age 18–45 years, weight 51–112 kg) was compared on the two systems after a dose of ethanol (0.8 g/kg up to a maximum of 60 g for males, 50 g for females) or placebo in a double-blind two-period randomized crossover study. Mean (SD) blood ethanol concentrations (breathalyser) were 94.5 mg/100 ml (21.9) at the start of the test battery (30 min post-drink) and 80.2 (13.0) at the end of the battery (75 min post-drink). Ethanol effects were found in all tests, with most outcome measures showing significant slowing or loss of accuracy. Results from the Rapid Visual Information Processing, Sentence Verification and Continuous Attention tasks show that the ethanol–placebo difference and the statistical significance of this difference are in close correspondence for the two modes of administration. The pen computer versions of these tasks may therefore be used as direct replacements for the previous versions. Digit–Symbol and maze tasks did not correspond so closely both showing differences in the speed-accuracy trade-off between the two modes. These tests, however, are sensitive to the effects of ethanol, and may be useful in their own right. Principal component analysis suggested that VAS may be grouped into two factors: (1) ‘functional integrity’, including measures of alertness and perceived proficiency, and (2) ‘mood’, including happiness and sociability. Factor 1 showed substantial effects of ethanol, while factor 2 was unchanged. There was close agreement between the results from PP and PenC for both factors as well as for the Sober-Drunk scale, which showed the expected effects of ethanol. Thus pen computer VAS perform in a similar way to the PP versions.
The porcine ovarian follicle: I. Selected chemical analysis of follicular fluid at different developmental stages.

Numerous parameters of the chemical composition of porcine follicular fluid, obtained at different stages of follicle development, were analyzed. The concentrations of electrolytes, glucose, uric acid, selected enzymes, lipids, amino acids, cyclic AMP, and steroid hormones were determined and compared with concentrations in serum. There were both quantitative and qualitative differences in the composition of follicular fluid and plasma. These differences are discussed with regard to follicular development.
Deep Neural Networks for News Recommendations

A fundamental role of news websites is to recommend articles that are interesting to read. The key challenge of news recommendation is to recommend newly published articles. Unlike other domains, outdated items are considered to be irrelevant in the news recommendation task. Another challenge is that the recommendation candidates are not seen in the training phase. In this paper, we introduce deep neural network models to overcome these challenges. we propose a modified session-based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model tailored to news recommendation as well as a history-based RNN model that spans the whole user's past histories. Finally, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to capture user preferences and to personalize recommendation results. Experimental results on real-world news dataset shows that our model outperforms competitive baselines.
Genetic Risk Factors in Male Infertility

The etiopathogenesis of testicular failure remains unknown in about half of the cases and is referred to as “idiopathic infertility”. “Idiopathic” testicular failure is of probable genetic origin since the number of genes involved in human spermatogenesis is likely thousands and only a small proportion of them have been identified and screened in infertile men. In parallel with studies aimed to identify mutations with a clear cause-effect relationship in spermatogenesis candidate genes, there is an increasing interest towards genetic susceptibility factors to male infertility. Despite many efforts, only a few clinically relevant polymorphisms have been identified. This is mainly related to the multifactorial nature of male infertility and to the inappropriate study design of the majority of the studies. The most promising polymorphisms are in genes involved in the endocrine regulation of spermatogenesis and on the Y chromosome, the “gr/gr” deletions. Polymorphisms are generally considered as co-factors. Their final effect on testis function and fertility is probably modulated by the genetic background of each individual and/or by the presence of certain environmental factors. In this review, recent findings concerning some of the most widely studied polymorphisms and male infertility will be discussed.
Does Diversity Inside Boardroom Matter On Performance

Research on corporate boards is part of the vast literature on corporate governance, which includes studies from a number of disciplines including strategic management, financial economics and organization theory. In those studies, scholars have focused largely on the issues of board structure and control over management behavior and strategic decision making. Taking the conclusion of the organizational demography literature as a motive power that demographically similar individuals develop comparable attitudes and a shared language as a result of common experiences and similar choices (Michel and Hambrick, 1992; Westphal and Zajac, 1995); many researchers study whether changes in board structure can influence corporate performance. This study, in the same stream, examines director heterogeneity in terms of dissimilarities of particular demographic attributes, and their effects, in a sample of firms. Specifically, we used data representing one hundred S&P 500 companies to examine their board of directors’ heterogeneity and the effects of board diversity on these firms’ social and financial performance.