Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical and Biochemical Characteristics of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome in Benghazi- Libya; A Retrospective study

Background: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine condition affecting women of reproductive age and characterized by chronic anovulation, hyperandrogenism, and polycystic ovaries. There are no published data on this syndrome in Libyan patients. Aims and objectives: To assess the frequency of clinical and biochemical features of PCOS in our patient population, and to compare this with data collected in other parts of the world. Subjects and methods: A retrospective analysis of patient records at the endocrine clinic in Benghazi was undertaken. Patient inclusion was according to Rotterdam ESHRE/ASRM criteria. Clinical features, associated diseases, family history, hormone levels, and ultrasonography results were analyzed. Results: The mean age of the 318 PCOS patients at presentation was 25.8 years (range 15-44 years), and the majority (67%) were 20-29 years old at presentation. Of all patients, 57% were obese (BMI ≤ 30), 93% had oligo-amenorrhea, 91% were hirsute, and 74% had ultrasound features of polycystic ovaries. Diabetes mellitus was diagnosed in 9% of all PCOS patients and hypertension in 4%. Total serum testosterone was elevated in 26% of the patients, and serum prolactin was elevated in 31%. Thyroid disease was noted among 5.3% of the patients, and a history of diabetes or hypertension among first-degree relatives was seen in (16%) and (8%) of the patients respectively. Conclusion: Chronic anovulation and hirsutism are the dominant features of PCOS in our patient population. More than half were obese, and the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension and thyroid disease in our patients seemed to be underestimated in comparison to other parts of the world.
Construction-A full-diversity lattices

Lattices from Construction A and non-binary codes are considered. These lattices are built from number fields as coset codes of the ring of integers O<sub>K</sub> modulo an ideal I. Diversity of a Construction-A lattice Λ on block-fading channels is guaranteed by the chain I<sup>m</sup> ⊂ Λ ⊂ O<sub>K</sub><sup>m</sup>. We study how the code alphabet size should be chosen in order to avoid error floors on the Gaussian channel due to the sublattice I<sup>m</sup>. Our aim is to get Construction-A lattices that are good for both Gaussian and block-fading channels.
Gravitational Radiation from Two‐Body Systems

Thanks to the new generation of gravitational wave detectors LIGO and VIRGO, the theory of general relativity will face new and important confrontations to observational data with unprecedented precision. Indeed the detection and analysis of the gravitational waves from compact binary star systems requires beforehand a very precise solution of the two‐body problem within general relativity. The approximation currently used to solve this problem is the post‐Newtonian one, and must be pushed to high order in order to describe with sufficient accuracy (given the sensitivity of the detectors) the inspiral phase of compact bodies, which immediately precedes their final merger. The resulting post‐Newtonian “templates” are currently known to 3.5PN order, and are used for searching and deciphering the gravitational wave signals in VIRGO and LIGO.
Selenium in Pig Nutrition and Reproduction: Boars and Semen Quality—A Review

Selenium plays an important role in boar nutrition via participating in selenoprotein synthesis. It seems likely that selenoproteins are central for antioxidant system regulation in the body. Se-dependent enzyme glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) is the most studied selenoprotein in swine production. However, roles of other selenoproteins in boar semen production and maintenance of semen quality also need to be studied. Boar semen is characterised by a high proportion of easily oxidized long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids and requires an effective antioxidant defense. The requirement of swine for selenium varies depending on many environmental and other conditions and, in general, is considered to be 0.15 to 0.30 mg/kg feed. It seems likely that reproducing sows and boars are especially sensitive to Se deficiency, and meeting their requirements is an important challenge for pig nutritionists. In fact, in many countries there are legal limits as to how much Se may be included into the diet and this restricts flexibility in terms of addressing the Se needs of the developing and reproducing swine. The analysis of data of various boar trials with different Se sources indicates that in some cases when background Se levels were low, there were advantages of Se dietary supplementation. It is necessary to take into account that only an optimal Se status of animals is associated with the best antioxidant protection and could have positive effects on boar semen production and its quality. However, in many cases, background Se levels were not determined and therefore, it is difficult to judge if the basic diets were deficient in Se. It can also be suggested that, because of higher efficacy of assimilation from the diet, and possibilities of building Se reserves in the body, organic selenium in the form of selenomethionine (SeMet) provided by a range of products, including Se-Yeast and SeMet preparations is an important source of Se to better meet the needs of modern pig genotypes in commercial conditions of intensive pig production.
Beacon- and Schema-Based Method for Recognizing Algorithms from Students’ Source Code.

In this paper, we present a method for recognizing algorithms from students' programming submissions coded in Java. The method is based on the concept of programming schemas and beacons. Schemas are high-level programming knowledge with detailed knowledge abstracted out, and beacons are statements that imply specific structures in a program. The method automatically searches for schemas from the given program and compares the extracted schemas with those from the knowledge base to recognize the algorithm-specific code for further processing. In the next step, several characteristics and beacons specific to the given algorithm are computed from the code. These characteristics and beacons are then used as the learning data and given to the C4.5 algorithm, which builds a classification tree that can be used to classify previously unseen implementations of algorithms. The method and its performance is demonstrated in the case of basic sorting algorithms and their variations implemented both in various learning resources, that is, textbooks and websites, (N = 209 programs) and in genuine student submissions in a first year data structures and algorithms course (N = 159). The empirical study conducted for evaluating the performance of the classification by leave-one-out cross-validation technique shows that the estimated true positive rate is 97.0%. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the idea of recognizing algorithms based on algorithm-specific programming schemas and beacons. The method can be used as white-box analysis to verify that students have implemented the required algorithm and to give feedback to students on their problematic implementations. We discuss the applications of the method from both teachers' and students' point of view.
Grieving College Students Use of Social Media

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of social media among grieving college students. A total of 508 students participated in a survey about their experiences with grieving a loss, the grief effects they experienced, and their use of social media. Approximately 79% of participants experienced a loss within their lifetime and reported having emotional, cognitive, and physical grief effects. Of these participants, 43% used social media to communicate their grief. Participants who reported emotional, cognitive, and physical grief effects were more likely to communicate their grief on social media. Furthermore, 108 open-ended comments about social media use were analyzed and categorized according to The Bereavement and Social Media Use Continuum. Findings indicate that 60% of participants reported using social media in a limited capacity followed by 39% of participants who used social media in a vast capacity. Implications and recommendations for future research are also provided.
Detection of Anti-Pentraxin-3 Autoantibodies in ANCA-Associated Vasculitis

Objectives Pentraxin 3 (PTX3), in common with myeloperoxidase and proteinase 3, is stored in human neutrophil granules and is expressed on apoptotic neutrophil surface. We therefore investigated the presence of anti-PTX3 autoantibodies (aAbs) in the sera of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) patients. Methods Presence of anti-PTX3 autoantibodies was analysed by a specific enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in sera from 150 patients with microscopic polyangiitis (MPA), granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA), and eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA), and in sera of 227 healthy subjects (HS), 40 systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients, and 25 giant cell arteritis patients (GCA). Using indirect immunofluorescence on fixed human neutrophils, we also analyzed the staining pattern associated with the presence of anti-PTX3 aAbs. Results Anti-PTX3 aAbs were detected in 56 of 150 (37.3%) of the AAV patients (versus 12 of 227 (5.3%) of HS, p<0.001) and, interestingly, in 7 of 14 MPO and PR3 ANCA negative AAV patients. Moreover, by indirect immunofluorescence on fixed neutrophils, anti-PTX3 aAbs gave rise to a specific cytoplasmic fluorescence pattern distinct from the classical cytoplasmic (c-ANCA), perinuclear (p-ANCA), and atypical (a-ANCA) pattern. Anti-PTX3 aAbs levels were higher in patients with active AAV as compared to patients with inactive disease. Conclusion Our work suggests that PTX3 is as a novel ANCA antigen. Anti-PTX3 aAbs appear thus as a promising novel biomarker in the diagnosis of AAV, including in patients without detectable MPO and PR3 ANCA.
Self-Organization of Anastral Spindles by Synergy of Dynamic Instability, Autocatalytic Microtubule Production, and a Spatial Signaling Gradient

Assembly of the mitotic spindle is a classic example of macromolecular self-organization. During spindle assembly, microtubules (MTs) accumulate around chromatin. In centrosomal spindles, centrosomes at the spindle poles are the dominating source of MT production. However, many systems assemble anastral spindles, i.e., spindles without centrosomes at the poles. How anastral spindles produce and maintain a high concentration of MTs in the absence of centrosome-catalyzed MT production is unknown. With a combined biochemistry-computer simulation approach, we show that the concerted activity of three components can efficiently concentrate microtubules (MTs) at chromatin: (1) an external stimulus in form of a RanGTP gradient centered on chromatin, (2) a feed-back loop where MTs induce production of new MTs, and (3) continuous re-organization of MT structures by dynamic instability. The mechanism proposed here can generate and maintain a dissipative MT super-structure within a RanGTP gradient.
Convergence and crossover Froese and Spier 2 Convergence and crossover : The permutation problem revisited

Standard crossover operators are often omitted from simple genetic algorithms (GAs) used for optimizing artificial neural networks because of the traditional belief that they generally disrupt the distributed functionality of the evolving solutions. The notion that crossover will be especially disruptive when a genetic representation is used which has a many-to-one mapping between genotype and phenotype has become known as the ‘permutation problem’. In contrast, this paper argues that these problems do not normally appear in practical use of simple GAs because populations converge quickly and then continue to move through search space in this converged manner until a fitness optimum is found. After convergence all individuals are genetically similar, and moreover, distinct genetic permutations of the same phenotypic solution are unlikely to co-exist in the population. Genetic convergence thus minimizes the possibility for disruption caused by crossover. We have termed this the ‘convergence argument’. This claim is investigated experimentally on standard benchmark problems and the results provide empirical support.
Distinct Optical Chemistry of Dissolved Organic Matter in Urban Pond Ecosystems

Urbanization has the potential to dramatically alter the biogeochemistry of receiving freshwater ecosystems. We examined the optical chemistry of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in forty-five urban ponds across southern Ontario, Canada to examine whether optical characteristics in these relatively new ecosystems are distinct from other freshwater systems. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations ranged from 2 to 16 mg C L-1 across the ponds with an average value of 5.3 mg C L-1. Excitation-emission matrix (EEM) spectroscopy and parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) modelling showed urban pond DOM to be characterized by microbial-like and, less importantly, by terrestrial derived humic-like components. The relatively transparent, non-humic DOM in urban ponds was more similar to that found in open water, lake ecosystems than to rivers or wetlands. After irradiation equivalent to 1.7 days of natural solar radiation, DOC concentrations, on average, decreased by 38% and UV absorbance decreased by 25%. Irradiation decreased the relative abundances of terrestrial humic-like components and increased protein-like aspects of the DOM pool. These findings suggest that high internal production and/or prolonged exposure to sunlight exerts a distinct and significant influence on the chemistry of urban pond DOM, which likely reduces its chemical similarity with upstream sources. These properties of urban pond DOM may alter its biogeochemical role in these relatively novel aquatic ecosystems.
RIGIDITY OF CRITICAL CIRCLE MAPPINGS I

We prove that two C3 critical circle maps with the same rotation number in a special set ? are C1+α conjugate for some α>0 provided their successive renormalizations converge together at an exponential rate in the C0 sense. The set ? has full Lebesgue measure and contains all rotation numbers of bounded type. By contrast, we also give examples of C∞ critical circle maps with the same rotation number that are not C1+β conjugate for any β>0. The class of rotation numbers for which such examples exist contains Diophantine numbers.
Filtering and Ranking for Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is fast becoming a staple activity for public relations and communications staff, who have a growing mandate to track mentions of organisational entities, projects, or products in social media. However, this task is not trivial because: 1) the mentions may be found across a variety of social media and 2) the keywords used for detecting mentions are often ambiguous. We address here classification and ranking of search results collected from a range of social media. Experiments with a labelled corpus demonstrate system effectiveness in filtering out non-relevant results and gains in efficiency by improving result ranking, in both regards outperforming commonly-used alternatives. RESUME. La veille sur les media sociaux est aujourd’hui une activite commune parmi le personnel de relations publiques et de communication, qui doit surveiller autour d’entites, projets et produits. Cette tâche n’est pas facile car 1) l’information se trouve sur plusieurs media differents et 2) les mots cles necessaires sont souvent ambigus. Ce papier adresse la classification et le trie de resultats provenants de media sociaux. Les evaluations avec un corpus experimental prouve l’efficassite de la classification et aussi du gain en performance avec le trie. Les deux approches depassent les techniques conventionnelle.
A Model of Reference-Dependent Preferences

We develop a model that fleshes out, extends, and modifies existing models of reference dependent preferences and loss aversion while accommodating most of the evidence motivating these models. Our approach makes reference-dependent theory more broadly applicable by avoiding some of the ways that prevailing models if applied literally and without ancillary assumptions make variously weak and incorrect predictions. Our model combines the reference-dependent gain-loss utility with standard economic 'consumption utility' and clarifies the relationship between the two. Most importantly, we posit that a person's reference point is her recent expectations about outcomes (rather than the status quo), and assume that behavior accords to a personal equilibrium: The person maximizes utility given her rational expectations about outcomes, where these expectations depend on her own anticipated behavior. We apply our theory to consumer behavior, and emphasize that a consumer's willingness to pay for a good is endogenously determined by the market distribution of prices and how she expects to respond to these prices. Because a buyer's willingness to buy depends on whether she anticipates buying the good, for a range of market prices there are multiple personal equilibria. This multiplicity disappears when the consumer is sufficiently uncertain about the price she will face. Because paying more than she anticipated induces a sense of loss in the buyer, the lower the prices at which she expects to buy the lower will be her willingness to pay. In some situations, a known stochastic decrease in prices can even lower the quantity demanded.
Role of swi7H4 Mutant Allele of DNA Polymerase α in the DNA Damage Checkpoint Response

Besides being a mediator of initiation of DNA replication, DNA polymerase α plays a key role in chromosome maintenance. Swi7H4, a novel temperature sensitive mutant of DNA polymerase α was shown to be defective in transcriptional silencing at the mating type centromere and telomere loci. It is also required for the establishment of chromatin state that can recruit the components of the heterochromatin machinery at these regions. Recently the role of DNA polymerase α in the S-phase alkylation damage response in S. pombe has also been studied. Here we investigate whether defects generated by swi7H4, a mutant allele of DNA polymerase α can activate a checkpoint response. We show that swi7H4 exhibit conditional synthetic lethality with chk1 null mutant and the double mutant of swi7H4 with chk1 deletion aggravate the chromosome segregation defects. More importantly swi7H4 mutant cells delay the mitotic progression at non permissive temperature that is mediated by checkpoint protein kinase Chk1. In addition we show that, in the swi7H4 mutant background, cells accumulate DNA damage at non permissive temperature activating the checkpoint kinase protein Chk1. Further, we observed synthetic lethality between swi7H4 and a number of genes involved in DNA repair pathway at semi permissive temperature. We summarize that defects in swi7H4 mutant results in DNA damage that delay mitosis in a Chk1 dependent manner that also require the damage repair pathway for proper recovery.
Which Model to Forecast the Target Rate?

The relationship between inflation, unemployment and the Federal Reserve Target rate is not linear. This is clear when the Target rate reaches its lower bound but it is also the case more generally. We introduce the class of Discrete Choice Dynamic Term Structure [DCDTS] models where the latent policy indicator and the latent threshold points are stochastic. The resulting Target rate is discrete, non-linear and can be restricted to non-negative values. Empirically, we focus on the response of the Central Bank, the responses of bond yields and that of interest rate derivatives to inflation and employment growth news. We find significant non-linearities where, in contrast with latent factors or regime-switching models, sensitivity coefficients can be interpreted directly as functions of inflation and employment. The evidence is consistent with the Fed varying the weights given to each component of its dual mandate with varying economic conditions.
The mediator role of social phobia in the association between resiliency and job performance among nurses of Ali Ibn Abi Taleb hospital of Rafsanjan, Iran (2017)

Article Info Background: Due to its professional nature, nursing is a very difficult, stressful, and phobia-orienting occupation. Social phobia, after depression, is the most important mental problem in today's world, and it affects the quality of life of nurses. The present study was conducted to determine the mediator role of social phobia in the association between resiliency and job performance among nurses of Ali Ibn Abi Taleb hospital of Rafsanjan in 2017. Materials and Methods: The present study is a descriptive and an applied study. According to Cochran formula, 174 nurses were selected by random sampling method; three standardized questionnaires (resiliency, job performance and social phobia), all of which had acceptable validity and reliability, were used to collect required data. Structural equation modeling of minimum squares method, Smart PLS and SPSS (version 20) were used to analyze the data. Results: Results showed that resilience had a significant effect on job performance (p <0.05), however, the effect of social phobia on job performance was not significant. Therefore, social phobia does not mediate the association between resilience and job performance. Conclusion: Resilience could lead to a significant decrease in social phobia; on the other hand, it increases job performance. Therefore, it seems that strengthening different psychological aspects in nurses, such as flexibility and controlling social phobia, helps their lives in the workplace and increases job performance.
Rescue and Regrowth of Sensory Nerves Following Deafferentation by Neurotrophic Factors

ABSTRACT: Trauma and loss of cochlear inner hair cells causes a series of events that result first in the retraction of the peripheral processes of the auditory nerve, scar formation in the organ of Corti, and over the course of weeks to months (depending on the species) the loss of auditory nerve cell bodies (spiral ganglion cells). Neurotrophic factors play an important role in the mature nervous system as survival factors for maintenance and protection and also can play a role in regrowth. Studies in the cochlea now show that application of exogenous neurotrophic factors can enhance survival of spiral ganglion cells after deafness and induce regrowth of peripheral processes, perhaps by replacing lost endogenous factors. Combinations of factors may be most effective for achieving greatest survival and regrowth. Our studies find that brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and glial‐line‐derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) are very effective at enhancing spiral ganglion cell survival following deafness from ototoxic drugs or noise. It has also been found that BDNF plus fibroblast growth factor (FGF) is very effective at inducing process regrowth. Electrical stimulation also acts to enhance spiral ganglion cell survival, and the combination of electrical stimulation and neurotrophic factors could prove a most effective intervention.