Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling Relations among Coparenting Quality, Autism-Specific Parenting Self-Efficacy, and Parenting Stress in Mothers and Fathers of Children with ASD

SYNOPSIS Objective. Coparenting quality has been linked to both parenting stress and parenting self-efficacy in families of typically developing children, but little is known about relations between these factors in families where there is a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study employed structural equation modeling to explore relations among coparenting quality, autism-specific parenting self-efficacy, and parenting stress in mothers and fathers of children with an ASD. Design. A cohort of biological mothers (n = 80) and fathers (n = 72) who were caring for their young child (age < 13) with a diagnosed ASD self-completed validated surveys assessing parenting stress, coparenting quality, and autism-specific parenting self-efficacy. Results. Both mothers and fathers reported high and similar levels of parenting stress which shared predictive relations with both coparenting quality and autism-specific parenting self-efficacy. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that the relations between perceptions of autism-specific parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress were mediated by coparenting quality. Conclusion. Coparenting quality shares an important relation with parenting stress in both mothers and fathers of children with an ASD, and enhanced perceptions of autism-specific parenting self-efficacy are unlikely to influence parenting stress when parents experience poor quality coparenting.
A divide et impera strategy for automatic classification of retinal vessels into arteries and veins

The first pathologic alterations of the retina are seen in the vessel network. These modifications affect very differently arteries and veins, and the appearance and entity of the modification differ as the retinopathy becomes milder or more severe. In order to develop an automatic procedure for the diagnosis and grading of retinopathy, it is necessary to be able to discriminate arteries from veins. The problem is complicated by the similarity in the descriptive features of these two structures and by the contrast and luminosity variability of the retina. We developed a new algorithm for classifying the vessels, which exploits the peculiarities of retinal images. By applying a divide et impera approach that partitioned a concentric zone around the optic disc into quadrants, we were able to perform a more robust local classification analysis. The results obtained by the proposed technique were compared with those provided by a manual classification on a validation set of 443 vessels and reached an overall classification error of 12%, which reduces to 7% if only the diagnostically important retinal vessels are considered.
Using the Hand to Choreograph Instruction: On the Functional Role of Gesture in Definition Talk

This article examines the coordination of speech and gesture in teachers' definition talk, that is, vocabulary explanations addressed to language learners. By analyzing one ESL teacher's spoken definitions, the study demonstrates in the details of the unfolding talk how a teacher crafts and choreographs his definitions moment by moment, while attending to the student's linguistic needs. The study draws upon McNeill's (1999/1992) notion of gesture-speech co-expressiveness, McNeill and Levy's (1993) idea of gestural cohesion, and Kendon's (2000) notion of turn contextualization through gesture. The study identifies three major functional roles of gesture: reinforcing the meaning of verbal utterances; disambiguating the meaning oflexical items; and establishing gestural cohesion across turns at talk. Through the fine-grained analysis of five excerpts, this study contributes to our understanding of the interactional and informational aspects of gesture in second language teaching. The article discusses implications for the study of gesture in general, and the role of gesticulations in providing comprehensible input to second language learners in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
PREVALENCE OF ACUTE MALNUTRITION IN PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN IN A RURAL AREA OF NORTHERN SUDAN.

OBJECTIVES To determine the prevalence of acute malnutrition in pre-school children in Karma Albald village, Northern Sudan. DESIGN Prospective observational study. SETTING Four kindergartens in Karma Albald village, Northern Sudan. SUBJECTS Pre-school children attending kindergartens in Karma Albald village (n = 163). RESULTS Using the World Health Organization case definitions and weight-for-height growth chart, wasting was observed in 29 of 163 children (17.8%); nine children had severe wasting. Socio-economic data showed that 70 children (43%) were from large families (families with four or more children) and 40 were from 'poor' families; 21 fathers and 12 mothers had poor literacy. All of the risk factors associated with malnutrition that were studied (that is, economic status, family size, order of the child in the family, and other socio-economic indicators) did not reach statistical significance. CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of malnutrition was high in this cohort. Effective interventions are needed to tackle this major child health problem.
The Effect of Metacognitive Listening Strategy Training on EFL Learners’ Listening Sub-skills Performance

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of metacognitive listening strategy instruction on the listening sub-skills performance of the Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners at the Foreign Language Center, Imam Ali University. The current study has been conducted with 64 participants. They were assigned into two groups randomly, an experimental group (n: 32) and a control group (n: 32). To determine the listening comprehension ability of the participants, a listening comprehension pretest based on the listening sub-skills was administered to the participants before the experiment. Then, the experimental group received an eight-week treatment on metacognitive listening strategies. After the treatment phase, a posttest was given to the participants in both the experimental and control group. The results of the independent t-test showed that there is a statistically significant difference (3.29>2; df = 62) between the posttest scores of the experimental group and the control group. Metacognitive strategy training promoted students’ listening comprehension remarkably; therefore, it should be integrated into the listening instruction programs to help language learners become more effective listeners.
Breakthrough Technologies Cosecretion of Protease Inhibitor Stabilizes Antibodies Produced by Plant Roots 1

A plant-based system for continuous production of monoclonal antibodies based on the secretion of immunoglobulin complexes from plant roots into a hydroponic medium (rhizosecretion) was engineered to produce high levels of singlechain and full-size immunoglobulins. Replacing the original signal peptides of monoclonal antibodies with a plant-derived calreticulin signal increased the levels of antibody yield 2-fold. Cosecretion of Bowman-Birk Ser protease inhibitor reduced degradation of the immunoglobulin complexes in the default secretion pathway and further increased antibody production to 36.4 mg/g root dry weight per day for single-chain IgG1 and 21.8 mg/g root dry weight per day for full-size IgG4 antibodies. These results suggest that constitutive cosecretion of a protease inhibitor combined with the use of the plant signal peptide and the antibiotic marker-free transformation system offers a novel strategy to achieve high yields of complex therapeutic proteins secreted from plant roots.
Myositis Ossificans Mimicking Sarcoma, the Importance of Diagnostic Imaging – Case Report

Summary Background Myositis ossificans is localized inflammatory process affecting skeletal muscles. Very rarely it can affect one of the neck muscles and present as a neck tumor, it can be misdiagnosed as the clinical, radiological and histological examinations can mimic a sarcoma. Case Report We report a 29 year old female patient with neck tumor suspected to be a sarcoma who underwent full diagnostics imaging and open bipsy with histopatological examination, afterwards surgical excision was performed. Conclusions The aim of this study was to present the differential diagnosis based on diagnostics imaging between MO and malignant tumors, such as parosteal sarcoma, synovial sarcoma and malignant fibrous histiocytoma.
Weighted Transmedia Relevance Feedback for Image Retrieval and Auto-annotation

Currently large scale multimodal image databases have become widely available, for example via photo sharing sites where images come along with textual descriptions and keyword annotations. Most existing work on image retrieval and image auto-annotation has considered uni-modal techniques, either focusing on query-by-example systems or query-by-text systems for image retrieval, and mono modal classification for image auto-annotation. However recent state-of-the-art multimodal image retrieval and image auto-annotation systems combine different uni-modal models using late-fusion techniques. In addition, significant advances have been made by using pseudo-relevance feedback techniques, as well as using transmedia relevance models that swap modalities in the query expansion step of pseudo-relevance methods. While these techniques are promising it is not trivial to set the parameters that control the late fusion and pseudo/cross relevance models. In this paper, we therefore propose approaches to learn these parameters from a labeled training set: queries with relevant and non-relevant documents, or images with relevant and non-relevant keywords. Three additional contributions are the introduction of (i) two new parameterizations of transmedia and pseudo-relevance models, (ii) correction parameters for inter-query variations in the distribution of retrieval scores for both relevant and non-relevant documents, and (iii) the extension of TagProp, a nearest neighbor based image annotation method to exploit transmedia relevance feedback. We evaluate our models using public benchmark data sets for image retrieval and annotation. Using the data set of the ImageClef 2008 Photo Retrieval task, our retrieval experiments show that our learned models lead to significant improvements of retrieval performance over the current state-of-the-art. In our experiments on image annotation we use the COREL and IAPR data sets, and also here we observe annotation accuracies that improve over the current state-of-the-art results on these data sets.
Does luminance‐contrast contribute to a saliency map for overt visual attention?

In natural environments, humans select a subset of visual stimuli by directing their gaze to locations attended. In previous studies it has been found that at fixation points luminance‐contrast is higher than average. This led to the hypothesis that luminance‐contrast makes a major contribution to a saliency map of visual overt attention, consistent with a computation of stimulus saliency in early visual cortical areas. We re‐evaluate this hypothesis by using natural and modified natural images to uncover the causal effects of luminance‐contrast to human overt visual attention and: (i) we confirm that when viewing natural images, contrasts are elevated at fixation points. This, however, only holds for low spatial frequencies and in a limited temporal window after stimulus onset; (ii) however, despite this correlation between overt attention and luminance‐contrast, moderate modifications of contrast in natural images do not measurably affect the selection of fixation points. Furthermore, strong local reductions of luminance‐contrast do not repel but attract fixation; (iii) neither contrast nor contrast modification is correlated to fixation duration; and (iv), even the moderate contrast modifications used fall into the physiologically relevant range, and subjects are well able to detect them in a forced choice paradigm. In summary, no causal contribution of luminance‐contrast to a saliency map of human overt attention is detectable. In conjunction with recent results on the relation of contrast sensitivity of neuronal activity to the level in the visual cortical hierarchy, the present study provides evidence that, for natural scenes, saliency is computed not early but late during processing.
Adaptação da Social Physique Anxiety Scale(SPAS) ao contexto brasileiro

Este trabalho apresenta uma adaptacao ao contexto brasileiro da Social Physique Anxiety Scale (SPAS). 309 estudantes universitarios responderam a SPAS em situacao de sala de aula, alem de um conjunto de questoes socio-demograficas, sendo a maioria mulheres (57%) e com idades compreendidas entre 17 e 56 anos (Media = 25,47; DP = 7,86). Os principais resultados discutem as validacoes da SPAS em tres modelos (tres fatores, dois fatores e unifatorial) e a analise da magnitude dos niveis de ansiedade fisica social (AFS) em funcao das variaveis socio-demograficas. Foi encontrado que a estrutura unifatorial se apresenta como a mais adequada em detrimento das demais e que as mulheres possuem indices mais elevados de AFS.
Comprehensive Analysis of the Factor H Binding Capabilities of Borrelia Species Associated with Lyme Disease: Delineation of Two Distinct Classes of Factor H Binding Proteins

ABSTRACT Some Lyme disease spirochete isolates can bind complement regulatory protein factor H (fH), a process that may allow evasion of complement-mediated killing. Here we demonstrate significant differences in the fH binding capabilities of species of the Borreliaburgdorferi sensu lato complex. The percentages of B. burgdorferi, B. afzelii, and B. garinii bacteria that bound fH in either enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays or affinity ligand binding immunoblot assays were 100, 83, and 29%, respectively. The fH binding protein profiles were examined and found to exhibit variability among isolates and to form two distinct classes. Differences in fH binding ability may contribute to the differences in pathogenesis and clinical course observed upon infection with different species of the B. burgdorferi sensu lato complex.
Utilisation of dental services in Tanzania before and after the introduction of cost-sharing.

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of cost-sharing, introduced in July 1994, on the utilisation of dental services in Tanzania. METHODS The study compared dental attendance, demand for dental services and treatment pattern of patients in 17 out of 20 regions of mainland Tanzania in 1993 and 1995, a year before and after the introduction of user fees. OUTCOMES MEASURES Dental attendance and demand for treatment. RESULTS Results revealed a 33.2 per cent overall reduction in dental attendance but no effect on either the demand for treatment or treatment pattern. The exceptions were increases in referral cases by 14.5 times and prosthetic work by 3.9 times, and a reduction in surgical cases by 18.8 per cent. CONCLUSIONS In order to improve attendance and decrease referrals it is necessary to enforce the first line of oral primary health care to meet the simple treatment demands. Furthermore, the revenue generated by cost-sharing should be used to improve services.
Ileal Transposition Controls Diabetes as Well as Modified Duodenal Jejunal Bypass With Better Lipid Lowering in a Nonobese Rat Model of Type II Diabetes by Increasing GLP-1

Objective:Modified duodenal jejunal bypass (MDJB) and ileal transposition (IT) were compared as surgeries for glucose control. Initial conclusions might be formed with respect to the possibility of (1) whether duodenal exclusion is essential for the control of diabetes and (2) application as a low morbid procedure. Summary Background Data:IT, MDJB, sham-IT, and sham-MDJB procedures were performed on 10- to 12-week-old Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rats, nonobese animals who spontaneously develop type 2 diabetes. Rats were observed for 24 weeks after surgery. Glucose, insulin, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), glucose tolerance, insulin sensitivity, cholesterol, triglycerides, and free fatty acid levels were measured. Results:MDJB and IT rats, when compared with sham-operated rats, showed reduced blood-glucose levels (P < 0.001); but IT- and MDJB did not differ from one another (P < 0.05). Compared with sham-operated rats, IT- and MDJB rats showed increased GLP-1 secretion (P < 0.01), with a more rapid and higher secretion in IT operated than in MDJB rats (P < 0.05). After 6 months, sham-operated rats weighed more than IT or MDJB rats (P < 0.01), but the weights of IT- and MDJB rats were similar to one another (P > 0.05). In terms of both operative time (P < 0.001) and postoperative recovery time (P < 0.001), MDJB took longer than did IT. Conclusion:In nonobese spontaneously diabetic rats, IT is equivalent to MDJB in terms of glucose control and weight secondary to significant increases of GLP-1. IT is faster to perform and yields a shorter recovery period than does MDJB.
Average Corotation of Line Segments Near a Point and Vortex Identification

An easy-to-interpret kinematic quantity measuring the average corotation of material line segments near a point is introduced and applied to vortex identification. At a given point, the vector of average corotation of line segments is defined as the average of the instantaneous local rigid-body rotation over “all planar cross sections” passing through the examined point. The vortex-identification method based on average corotation is a one-parameter, region-type local method sensitive to the axial stretching rate as well as to the inner configuration of the velocity gradient tensor. The method is derived from a well-defined interpretation of the local flow kinematics to determine the “plane of swirling” and is also applicable to compressible and variable-density flows. Practical application to direct numerical simulation datasets includes a hairpin vortex of boundary-layer transition, the reconnection process of two Burgers vortices, a flow around an inclined flat plate, and a flow around a revolving inse.
Protection against hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury in rats by oral pretreatment with quercetin.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the possible protection provided by oral quercetin pretreatment against hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury in rats. METHODS The quercetin (0.13 mmol/kg) was orally administrated in 50 min prior to hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury. Ascorbic acid was also similarly administered. The hepatic content of quercetin was assayed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Plasma glutamic pyruvic transaminase (GPT), glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase (GOT) activities and malondialdehyde (MDA) concentration were measured as markers of hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury. Meanwhile, hepatic content of glutathione (GSH), activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) and xanthine oxidase (XO), total antioxidant capacity (TAOC), contents of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and MDA, DNA fragmentation were also determined. RESULTS Hepatic content of quercetin after intragastric administration of quercetin was increased significantly. The increases in plasma GPT, GOT activities and MDA concentration after hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury were reduced significantly by pretreatment with quercetin. Hepatic content of GSH and activities of SOD, GSH-Px and TAOC were restored remarkably while the ROS and MDA contents were significantly diminished by quercetin pretreatment after ischemia-reperfusion injury. However, quercetin pretreatment did not reduce significantly hepatic XO activity and DNA fragmentation. Ascorbic acid pretreatment had also protective effects against hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury by restoring hepatic content of GSH, TAOC and diminishing ROS and MDA formation and DNA fragmentation. CONCLUSION It is indicated that quercetin can protect the liver against ischemia-reperfusion injury after oral pretreatment and the underlying mechanism is associated with improved hepatic antioxidant capacity.
Evaluation of Different Methods to Retrieve the Hemispherical Downwelling Irradiance in the Thermal Infrared Region for Field Measurements

The thermal infrared hemispherical downwelling irradiance (HDI) emitted by the atmosphere and surrounding elements contributes through reflection to the signal measured over an observed surface by remote sensing. This irradiance must be estimated in order to obtain accurate values of land-surface temperature (LST). There are some fast methods to measure the HDI with a single measurement pointing to the sky at a specified viewing direction, but these methods require completely cloud-free or cloudy skies, and they do not account for the radiative contribution of surrounding elements. Another method is the use of a diffuse reflectance panel (usually, a rough gold-coated surface) with near-Lambertian behavior. This method considers the radiative contribution of surrounding elements and can be used under any sky condition. A third possibility is the use of atmospheric profiles and a radiative transfer code (RTC) in order to simulate the atmospheric signal and to calculate the HDI by integration. This study compares the HDI estimations with these approaches, using measurements made on four different days with a completely clear sky and two days with a partially cloudy sky. The measurements were made with a four-channel CIMEL Electronique radiometer working in the 8-14-μm spectral range. The HDI was also estimated by means of National Centers for Environmental Prediction atmospheric profiles introduced in the MODTRAN RTC. Additionally, the measurements were made at two different places with very different environments to quantify the effect of the contributing surroundings. Results showed that, for a clear-sky day with a minimal contribution of the surroundings, all methods differed from each other between 5% and 11%, depending on the spectral range, and any of them could be used to estimate HDI in these conditions. However, in the case of making surface measurements in an area with significant surrounding elements (buildings, trees, etc.), HDI values retrieved from the panel present an increase of +3 W·m-2·μm-1 compared with the other methods; this increase, if ignored, implies to make an error in LST ranging from +0.5 °C to +1.5 °C, depending on the spectral range and on surface emissivity and temperature. Comparison under heterogeneous skies with changing cloud coverage showed also large differences between the use of panel and the other methods, reaching a maximum difference of +4.6 W·m-2·μm-1, which implies to make an error on LST of +2.2 °C. In these cases, the use of the diffuse reflectance panel is proposed, since it is the unique way to capture the contribution of the surroundings and also to adequately measure HDI for sky changing conditions.