Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calcium channel blockers for inhibiting preterm labour.

BACKGROUND Preterm birth is a major contributor to perinatal mortality and morbidity and affects approximately six to seven per cent of births in developed countries. Tocolytics are drugs used to suppress uterine contractions. The most widely tested tocolytics are betamimetics. Although they have been shown to delay delivery, betamimetics have not been shown to improve perinatal outcome, and they have a high frequency of unpleasant and even fatal maternal side effects. There is growing interest in calcium channel blockers as a potentially effective and well tolerated form of tocolysis. OBJECTIVES To assess the effects on maternal, fetal and neonatal outcomes of calcium channel blockers, administered as a tocolytic agent, to women in preterm labour. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group's specialised register of controlled trials (June 2002), the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (The Cochrane Library, Issue 2, 2002), MEDLINE (1965 to June 2002), EMBASE (1988 to June 2002), and Current Contents (1997 to June 2002). We also contacted recognised experts and cross referenced relevant material. SELECTION CRITERIA All published and unpublished randomised trials in which calcium channel blockers were used for tocolysis for women in labour between 20 and 36 weeks' gestation. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Standard methods of the Cochrane Collaboration and the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group were used. Evaluation of methodological quality and trial data extraction were undertaken independently by three authors. Additional information was sought to enable assessment of methodology and conduct of intention-to-treat analyses. Meta-analysis was conducted assessing the effects of calcium channel blockers compared with any other tocolytic agent. Results are presented using relative risk for categorical data and weighted mean difference for continuous data. MAIN RESULTS Twelve randomised controlled trials involving 1029 women were included. When compared with any other tocolytic agent (mainly betamimetics), calcium channel blockers reduced the number of women giving birth within seven days of receiving treatment (relative risk (RR) 0.76; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.60 to 0.97) and prior to 34 weeks' gestation (RR 0.83; 95% CI 0.69 to 0.99). Calcium channel blockers also reduced the requirement for women to have treatment ceased for adverse drug reaction (RR 0.14; 95% CI 0.05 to 0.36), the frequency of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome (RR 0.63; 95% CI 0.46 to 0.88), necrotising enterocolitis (RR 0.21; 95% CI 0.05 to 0.96), intraventricular haemorrhage (RR 0.59 95% CI 0.36 to 0.98) and neonatal jaundice (RR 0.73; 95% CI 0.57 to 0.93). REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS When tocolysis is indicated for women in preterm labour, calcium channel blockers are preferable to other tocolytic agents compared, mainly betamimetics. Further research should address the effects of different dosage regimens and formulations of calcium channel blockers on maternal and neonatal outcomes.
Managing asthma in pregnancy

Asthma is a common comorbidity during pregnancy and its prevalence is increasing in the community. Exacerbations are a major clinical problem during pregnancy with up to 45% of women needing to seek medical help, resulting in poor outcomes for mothers and their babies, including low birth weight and preterm delivery. The goals of effective asthma management in pregnancy are to maintain the best possible asthma control and prevent exacerbations. This is achieved by aiming to prevent day- and night-time symptoms, and maintain lung function and normal activity. In addition, maintaining fetal oxygenation is an important consideration in pregnancy. Guidelines recommend providing asthma advice and review prior to conception, and managing asthma actively during pregnancy, with regular 4-weekly review, provision of a written action plan, use of preventer medications as indicated for other adults with asthma, and management of comorbid conditions such as rhinitis. Improvements have been made in recent years in emergency department management of asthma in pregnancy, and multidisciplinary approaches are being proposed to optimise both asthma outcomes and perinatal outcomes. One strategy that has demonstrated success in reducing exacerbations in pregnancy is treatment adjustment using a marker of eosinophilic lung inflammation, the exhaled nitric oxide fraction (FeNO). The use of an algorithm that adjusted inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) according to FeNO and added long-acting β-agonists when symptoms remained uncontrolled resulted in fewer exacerbations, more women on ICS but at lower mean doses, and improved infant respiratory health at 12 months of age. Further evidence is needed to determine whether this strategy can also improve perinatal outcomes and be successfully translated into clinical practice. Key points Asthma is the most common chronic disease to affect pregnant women. Exacerbations occur in up to 45% of pregnant women with asthma. Asthma should be managed during pregnancy as for other adults. Treatment adjustment using a marker of airway inflammation reduces the exacerbation rate in pregnancy. Educational aims To identify the goals of and steps associated with effective asthma management in pregnancy. To understand the maternal and perinatal risks associated with asthma during pregnancy. To describe a management strategy that has been shown to reduce exacerbations in pregnant women with asthma. Guidelines for the management of asthma during pregnancy exist but are too rarely used in clinical practice http://ow.ly/U8Sq8
Bitumen Film Thicknesses and Confinement Ratios in Chip Seal Surfacings

ABSTRACT A method for the direct measurement of the thickness of bitumen films between stone chips in a chip seal surface is reported. A range of simulated single layer seals were constructed with bitumen application rates of 0.77 to 2.07 lm−2 and chip (5.24 mm ALD) application rates of 143 to 275 m2m−3. Median film thicknesses ranged from 4.6 to 10.2 mm measured in a direction parallel to the surface and 1.6 to 3.6 mm normal to the surface. The assumption was made that the bitumen films between stones could be approximated as cylinders with the confinement ratios defined as, cylinder diameter/length. Median ratios ranged from 0.12 to 0.50 and 1.78 to 4.38 for orientations parallel and normal to the surface respectively. The distribution of values ranged to over 40. Tensile failure strength of bitumen films were both found to be highly sensitive to confinement ratio over the range of values observed in the seals.
CD8+ T cell cytotoxicity mediates pathology in the skin by inflammasome activation and IL-1β production

Deregulated CD8+ T cell cytotoxicity plays a central role in enhancing disease severity in several conditions. However, we have little understanding of the mechanisms by which immunopathology develops as a consequence of cytotoxicity. Using murine models of inflammation induced by the protozoan parasite leishmania, and data obtained from patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis, we uncovered a previously unrecognized role for NLRP3 inflammasome activation and IL-1β release as a detrimental consequence of CD8+ T cell-mediated cytotoxicity, ultimately resulting in chronic inflammation. Critically, pharmacological blockade of NLRP3 or IL-1β significantly ameliorated the CD8+ T cell-driven immunopathology in leishmania-infected mice. Confirming the relevance of these findings to human leishmaniasis, blockade of the NLRP3 inflammasome in skin biopsies from leishmania-infected patients prevented IL-1β release. Thus, these studies link CD8+ T cell cytotoxicity with inflammasome activation and reveal novel avenues of treatment for cutaneous leishmaniasis, as well as other of diseases where CD8+ T cell-mediated cytotoxicity induces pathology.
Learning foreign labels from a foreign speaker: the role of (limited) exposure to a second language.

Three- and four-year-olds (N = 144) were introduced to novel labels by an English speaker and a foreign speaker (of Nordish, a made-up language), and were asked to endorse one of the speaker's labels. Monolingual English-speaking children were compared to bilingual children and English-speaking children who were regularly exposed to a language other than English. All children tended to endorse the English speaker's labels when asked 'What do you call this? ', but when asked 'What do you call this in Nordish? ', children with exposure to a second language were more likely to endorse the foreign label than monolingual and bilingual children. The findings suggest that, at this age, exposure to, but not necessarily immersion in, more than one language may promote the ability to learn foreign words from a foreign speaker.
An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Dialogue Strategy Selection in a Spoken Dialogue System for Email

This paper describes a novel method by which a spoken dialogue system can learn to choose an optimal dialogue strategy from its experience interacting with human users. The method is based on a combination of reinforcement learning and performance modeling of spoken dialogue systems. The reinforcement learning component applies Q-learning (Watkins, 1989), while the performance modeling component applies the PARADISE evaluation framework (Walker et al., 1997) to learn the performance function (reward) used in reinforcement learning. We illustrate the method with a spoken dialogue system named elvis (EmaiL Voice Interactive System), that supports access to email over the phone. We conduct a set of experiments for training an optimal dialogue strategy on a corpus of 219 dialogues in which human users interact with elvis over the phone. We then test that strategy on a corpus of 18 dialogues. We show that elvis can learn to optimize its strategy selection for agent initiative, for reading messages, and for summarizing email folders.
Serum and Salivary IgE, IgA, and IgG4 Antibodies to Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus and Its Major Allergens, Der p1 and Der p2, in Allergic and Nonallergic Children

Allergic rhinitis (AR) is a public health problem with high prevalence worldwide. We evaluated levels of specific IgE, IgA, and IgG4 antibodies to the Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus (Dpt) house dust mite and to its major allergens (Der p1 and Der p2) in serum and saliva samples from allergic and nonallergic children. A total of 86 children were analyzed, from which 72 had AR and 14 were nonallergic healthy children. Serum IgE and serum/salivary IgG4 levels to Dpt, Der p1, and Der p2 were higher in allergic children whereas serum/salivary IgA levels to all allergens were higher in nonallergic children. IgE levels positively correlated with IgG4 and IgA to all allergens in allergic children, while IgA levels negatively correlated with IgG4 to Dpt and Der p1 in nonallergic children. In conclusion, mite-specific IgA antibodies predominate in the serum and saliva of nonallergic children whereas mite-specific IgE and IgG4 are prevalent in allergic children. The presence of specific IgA appears to have a key role for the healthy immune response to mucosal allergens. Also, specific IgA measurements in serum and/or saliva may be useful for monitoring activation of tolerance-inducing mechanisms during allergen specific immunotherapeutic procedures, especially sublingual immunotherapy.
Autonomic responses and pain perception in Alzheimer’s disease

We analysed the effects of electrical noxious stimulation on the autonomic nervous system of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients who were assessed by means of the Mini Mental State Examination test (MMSE). To do this, we used electrical stimuli at two different intensities: just above pain threshold and twice pain threshold. We recorded heart rate and systolic blood pressure by using conventional electrocardiography and finger photo‐plethysmography. When a pain stimulus just above threshold was delivered, AD patients were found to have blunted autonomic responses compared to controls of the same age. Similarly, prestimulus expectation produced a less pronounced increase of the responses in AD patients compared to the controls. However, when the painful stimulus was increased to twice the pain threshold, the systolic blood pressure increase of AD patients did not differ from the controls, whereas heart rate increase was still slightly diminished. By contrast, pain perception was similar in the two groups when the stimulus was at pain threshold, whereas it was blunted in AD patients when the stimulus was twice the pain threshold. These findings show that in AD mild noxious stimulation produces blunted autonomic responses and normal pain perception, whereas strong noxious stimulation produces quasi‐normal autonomic responses and blunted pain perception. These results indicate that AD patients have an increased threshold for both autonomic activation and pain tolerance.
Reasons for Substance Use: A Comparative Study of Alcohol Use in Tribals and Non-tribals

Background: Consumption of alcohol has been attributed to different reasons by consumers. Attitude and knowledge about the substance and addiction can be influenced by the cultural background of the individual. The tribal population, where alcohol intake is culturally accepted, can have different beliefs and attributes causing one to take alcohol. This study attempts to examine the reasons for alcohol intake and the belief about addiction and their effect on the severity of addiction in people with a different ethnic background. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted at a Psychiatric institute with a cross-sectional design. The study population included patients hailing from the Jharkhand state, twenty each, belonging to tribal and non-tribal communities. Patients fulfilling the ICD 10 diagnostic criteria of mental and behavioral disorders due to the alcohol dependence syndrome, with active dependence, were taken, excluding those having any comorbidity or complications. The subjects were assessed with specially designed Sociodemographic-Clinical Performa, modified version of Reasons for Substance Use scale, Addiction Belief scale, and the Alcohol Dependence scale. Statistical Analysis and Results: A significantly high number of tribals cited reasons associated with social enhancement and coping with distressing emotions rather than individual enhancement, as a reason for consuming alcohol. Addiction was severe in those consuming alcohol to cope with distressing emotions. Belief in the free-will model was noted to be stronger across the cultures, without any correlation with the reason for intake. This cross-sectional study design, which was based on patients, cannot be easily generalized to the community. Conlusion: Societal acceptance and pressure as well as high emotional problems appears to be the major etiology leading to higher prevalce of substance depedence in tribals. Primary prevention should be planned to fit the needs of the ethnics.
Effective IS Security: An Empirical Study

Information security has not been a high priority for most managers. Many permit their installations to be either lightly protected or wholly unprotected, apparently willing to risk major losses from computer abuse. This study, based on the criminological theory of general deterrence, investigates whether a management decision to invest in IS security results in more effective control of computer abuse. Data gathered through a survey of 1,211 randomly selected organizations indicates that security countermeasures that include deterrent administrative procedures and preventive security software will result in significantly lower computer abuse. Knowledge about these relationships is useful for making key decisions about the security function.
[Anatomic and pathologic spectrum of pituitary infundibulum lesions].

OBJECTIVE The pathologic spectrum of pituitary infundibulum disease is diverse. We reviewed 65 infundibular lesions in 44 adult and 21 pediatric patients, and summarized their imaging features and clinical presentation. CONCLUSION The spectrum of pathology involving the pituitary infundibulum is broad yet distinct from other pathology in the sella and parasellar region. Pituitary stalk lesions can be grouped into three categories: congenital and developmental, inflammatory and infectious, and neoplastic. Knowledge of the imaging appearance of diseases specific to adults and to children is important for accurate diagnosis and treatment.
Mutual Information Optimally Local Private Discrete Distribution Estimation

Consider statistical learning (e.g. discrete distribution estimation) with local $\epsilon$-differential privacy, which preserves each data provider's privacy locally, we aim to optimize statistical data utility under the privacy constraints. Specifically, we study maximizing mutual information between a provider's data and its private view, and give the exact mutual information bound along with an attainable mechanism: $k$-subset mechanism as results. The mutual information optimal mechanism randomly outputs a size $k$ subset of the original data domain with delicate probability assignment, where $k$ varies with the privacy level $\epsilon$ and the data domain size $d$. After analysing the limitations of existing local private mechanisms from mutual information perspective, we propose an efficient implementation of the $k$-subset mechanism for discrete distribution estimation, and show its optimality guarantees over existing approaches.
Foundations of Cryptography

The idea of a "digital signature" first appeared in Diffie and Hellman’s seminal paper, "New Directions in Cryptography" [DH76]. They propose that each user U publishes a "public key", while keeping secret a "secret key". User U’s signature for a message m is a valueσ depending onm and his public and secret keys such thatU can generateσ and anyone can verify the validity of σ using U’s public key. However, while knowing U’s public key is sufficient to allow one to validate U’s signatures, it does not allow one to efficiently forgeU’s signatures.
Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging for the Classification of Focal Liver Lesions as Benign or Malignant.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS To assess the role of diffusion weighted imaging sequence (DWI), routinely used in hepatic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the differentiation of focal liver lesions (FLLs) as benign or malignant. METHOD 99 FLLs assessed by liver MRI in 80 patients were included in the present study. All lesions were retrospectively analyzed by two experienced radiologists, independent from each other, who were not aware of the previous results obtained by using different imaging techniques. All included FLLs had a final histological diagnosis or a final diagnosis based on consensus reading by two experienced radiologists and follow-up at 6 months. The FLLs signal was qualitatively appreciated on the b-800 sequences and on the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map. The ADC value of each FLL was measured and the ADC ratio between the ADC value of the assessed FLL and that of the surrounding liver parenchyma were calculated. RESULTS The mean ADC value for benign FLLs as assessed by the two independent readers was 1.78 x 10¯³ and 1.72 x 10¯³, respectively. The mean ADC value for malignant FLLs was 0.92 x 10¯³ for the first reader and 0.95 x 10¯³ for the second reader. The mean ADC ratio for benign FLLs was 1.91 and 1.85 for the two readers and for malignant FLLs was 0.91 and 0.94, respectively. Using an ADC value lower than 1.024 x 10¯³ offers a specificity of 100% and a sensitivity of 62.5% for the diagnosis of malignant FLLs. The ADC value is an indicator which is less prone to interobserver variability (correlation of 0.919→1). The ADC ratio has, as the analysis of the ROC curve shows, the best predictive value for differentiation between benign and malignant FLLs. Analysis of the signal intensity on the DWI b-800 image alone is of no significance in differentiating benign from malignant FLLs (p>0.05). CONCLUSIONS The ADC value and the ADC ratio assessed on liver DWI are useful diagnostic tools in the differential diagnosis of benign vs. malignant FLLs. Quantitative methods such as calculating the ADC value or ADC ratio have better diagnostic value than the qualitative techniques.
Evaluating link-based recommendations for Wikipedia

Literature recommender systems support users in filtering the vast and increasing number of documents in digital libraries and on the Web. For academic literature, research has proven the ability of citation-based document similarity measures, such as Co-Citation (CoCit), or Co-Citation Proximity Analysis (CPA) to improve recommendation quality. In this paper, we report on the first large-scale investigation of the performance of the CPA approach in generating literature recommendations for Wikipedia, which is fundamentally different from the academic literature domain. We analyze links instead of citations to generate article recommendations. We evaluate CPA, CoCit, and the Apache Lucene MoreLikeThis (MLT) function, which represents a traditional text-based similarity measure. We use two datasets of 779,716 and 2.57 million Wikipedia articles, the Big Data processing framework Apache Flink, and a ten-node computing cluster. To enable our large-scale evaluation, we derive two quasi-gold standards from the links in Wikipedia's “See also” sections and a comprehensive Wikipedia clickstream dataset. Our results show that the citation-based measures CPA and CoCit have complementary strengths compared to the text-based MLT measure. While MLT performs well in identifying narrowly similar articles that share similar words and structure, the citation-based measures are better able to identify topically related information, such as information on the city of a certain university or other technical universities in the region. The CPA approach, which consistently outperformed CoCit, is better suited for identifying a broader spectrum of related articles, as well as popular articles that typically exhibit a higher quality. Additional benefits of the CPA approach are its lower runtime requirements and its language-independence that allows for a cross-language retrieval of articles. We present a manual analysis of exemplary articles to demonstrate and discuss our findings. The raw data and source code of our study, together with a manual on how to use them, are openly available at: https://github.com/wikimedia/citolytics.