Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hazardous Substances Emergency Events in the Agriculture Industry and Related Services in Four Mid-Western States

Learning ObjectivesRecognize the seasonality and farming-related factors connected with uncontrolled release of hazardous substances in the agricultural setting.Recall the commonest agricultural threats and their clinical sequelae.Describe what protective measures presently are in common use, and those that could limit the injurious effects of exposure to hazardous agricultural substances. Analysis of Hazardous Substances Emergency Events Surveillance data reported from 14 participating states between 1993 and 1998 found that acute releases are seasonal. This seasonality was more prevalent in four Midwestern states during April–June and coincided with their planting season, suggesting an association of these releases with the agricultural industry. A more detailed analysis of events related to this industry in these states found that ammonia was the chemical most frequently released, and ammonia related events resulted in a significantly higher number of evacuations than all other events (OR = 10.7, [5.25–22.28]). A logistic regression model to identify risk factors for an event with victims found an increased risk for: (1) events with ammonia during April–June (adjusted OR = 3.57, [2.09–6.09]); (2) events in fixed-facilities during April–June (aOR = 3.74, [2.01–6.95]); and (3) events with multiple substances (aOR = 2.33, [1.05–5.17]). The most common causes for the events were equipment failure and operator error. Resulting injuries were mainly respiratory, ocular and traumatic, and included six deaths. Employing more stringent safety measures and educating employees and the public about the health hazards involved with agricultural chemicals may reduce injuries and help contain costs associated with the releases.
Are gifts and loans between households voluntary

Using village data from Tanzania, we test whether gifts and loans between households are voluntary while correcting for mis-reporting by the giving and receiving households. Two maintained assumptions underlie our analysis: answers to a question on who people would turn to for help are good proxies for willingness to link; and, conditional on regressors, the probability of reporting a gift or loan is independent between giving and receiving households. Building on these assumptions, we develop a new estimation methodology that corrects for response bias. Our testing strategy is based on the idea that, if lending and gift giving are voluntary, then both households should want to rely on each other for help. We find only weak evidence to support bilateral link formation. We do, however, find reasonably strong evidence to support unilateral link formation. Results suggest that if a household wishes to enter in a reciprocal relationship with someone who is sufficiently close socially and geographically, it can do so unilaterally.
Assessment of Newborn Screening Parent Education Materials

OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this study was to measure the readability and user-friendliness (clarity, complexity, organization, appearance, and cultural appropriateness of materials) of parent education brochures on newborn screening. METHODS. We studied English-language versions of the brochures that state newborn screening programs prepare and distribute. We obtained brochures from 48 states and Puerto Rico. We evaluated each brochure for readability with the Flesch reading ease formula. User-friendliness of the brochures was assessed with an instrument we created that contained 22 specific criteria grouped into 5 categories, ie, layout, illustrations, message, manageable information, and cultural appropriateness. RESULTS. Most current newborn screening brochures should be revised to make them more readable and user-friendly for parents. Ninety-two percent of brochures were written at a reading level that is higher than the average reading level of US adults (eighth-grade level). In most brochures, the essential information for parents was buried. Although all brochures were brief and focused on the newborn screening tests being performed, 81% needed improvement in getting to the point quickly and making it easy for parents to identify what they needed to know or to do. None of the brochures scored high in all 22 criteria on the user-friendliness checklist. CONCLUSIONS. Parent education materials about newborn screening should be revised to be easier to read and more user-friendly, by lowering the reading difficulty to eighth-grade level and focusing on issues such as layout, illustrations, message, information, and cultural appropriateness. It is important that state newborn screening programs and organizations work with parents to develop and to evaluate materials to ensure that they are user-friendly.
Merchant Model Applied to Precision Orthogonal Cutting of Pa66 Polyamide with and without Glass Fiber Reinforcing

Polyamide composites are widely employed in various fields of engineering, such as aircraft, automotive, robots, and machinery owing to their remarkable properties. Precision machining aims the production of advanced components with high-dimensional accuracy and acceptable surface integrity. This work presents a preliminary experimental study based on Merchant theory applied to precision radial turning of PA 66 polyamide with and without 30% glass fiber reinforcing. Distinct feed rate values were tested using uncoated carbide tool (grade K15) without chip breaker. The aim of this study is to evaluate the chip compression ratio (Rc), chip deformation (ε), friction angle (ρ), shear angle (Φ), normal stress (σ), and shear stress (τ). In general, similar results were obtained when comparing the results obtained using Merchant model with the experimental findings.
Prevalence of ‘Food Addiction' as Measured with the Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 in a Representative German Sample and Its Association with Sex, Age and Weight Categories

Background/Aims: To assess the prevalence and correlates of addictive-like eating behavior in Germany. Methods: The German version of the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) 2.0 was used to investigate, for the first time, the prevalence of ‘food addiction' in a representative sample aged 18-65 years (N = 1,034). Results: The prevalence of ‘food addiction' measured by the YFAS 2.0 was 7.9%. Individuals meeting criteria for ‘food addiction' had higher BMI and were younger than individuals not meeting the threshold. Underweight (15.0%) and obese (17.2%) individuals exhibited the highest prevalence rate of ‘food addiction'. Addictive-like eating was not associated with sex, education level, or place of residence. Conclusion: YFAS 2.0 ‘food addiction' was met by nearly 8% of the population. There is a non-linear relationship between addictive-like eating and BMI, with the highest prevalence among underweight and obese persons. These findings suggest that ‘food addiction' may be a contributor to overeating but may also reflect a distinct phenotype of problematic eating behavior not synonymous with obesity. Further, the elevated prevalence of YFAS 2.0 ‘food addiction' among underweight individuals may reflect an overlap with eating disorders and warrants attention in future research.
Unequal access and unmet need: neurotic disorders and the use of primary care services

Background. In this paper we use data from the National Survey of Psychiatric Morbidity to examine how many people with neurotic disorders receive professional evaluation, and how this is affected by clinical and sociodemographic differences. We hypothesized that psychiatric symptoms and attendant dysfunctions would both have an effect on contacting, and that key demographic variables would not. Method. The household component of the British National Surveys of Psychiatric Morbidity was based on a random sample of > 10000 subjects. Psychiatric symptoms and ICD-10 diagnosis were established by lay interviewers using the CIS-R. Social dysfunction was tapped by asking about difficulties in performing seven types of everyday activity. We examined symptom score, ADL deficit score and demographic variables in relation to contact with primary care physicians for psychiatric symptoms. Results. The major determinant of contacting a primary care physician was severity, mainly due to the level of psychiatric symptoms, but with an independent contribution from social dysfunction. There were also significant contributions from sex, marital status, age, employment status and whether the subject had a physical condition as well. Conclusions. The major influence on whether people seek the help of their family doctors for mental health problems is the severity of disorder. Although there are some social inequalities in access to family doctors, these are less important. The most salient finding from our study is that even people suffering from high levels of psychiatric symptoms very often do not have contact with professionals who might help them.
The Relationship between Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), Working Memory and Distraction – A Behavioral and Electrophysiological Approach

Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and dehydroepiandrosterone-sulphate (DHEAS) have been reported to have memory enhancement effects in humans. A neuro-stimulatory action and an anti-cortisol mechanism of action may contribute to that relation. In order to study DHEA, DHEAS and cortisol relations to working memory and distraction, we recorded the electroencephalogram of 23 young women performing a discrimination (no working memory load) or 1-back (working memory load) task in an audio-visual oddball paradigm. We measured salivary DHEA, DHEAS and cortisol both before each task and at 30 and 60 min. Under working memory load, a higher baseline cortisol/DHEA ratio was related to higher distraction as indexed by an enhanced novelty P3. This suggests that cortisol may lead to increased distraction whereas DHEA may hinder distraction by leading to less processing of the distractor. An increased DHEA production with consecutive cognitive tasks was found and higher DHEA responses attributed to working memory load were related to enhanced working memory processing as indexed by an enhanced visual P300. Overall, the results suggest that in women DHEA may oppose cortisol effects reducing distraction and that a higher DHEA response may enhance working memory at the electrophysiological level.
Quantifying the Impact of Financial Development on Economic Development

How important is …nancial development for economic development? A costly state veri…cation model of …nancial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match facts about the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the …rm-size distribution for the years 1974 and 2004. It is then used to study the international data, using cross-country interest-rate spreads and per-capita GDP. The analysis suggests a country like Uganda could increase its output by 140 to 180% if it could adopt the world’s best practice in the …nancial sector. Still, this amounts to only 34 to 40% of the gap between Uganda’s potential and actual output.
Mesh Denoising with (Geo)Metric Fidelity

Working with noisy meshes and aiming at providing high-fidelity 3D object models without tampering the metric quality of the acquisitions, we propose a mesh denoising technique that, through a normal-diffusion process guided by a curvature saliency map, is able to preserve and emphasize the natural object features, concurrently allowing the introduction of a bound on the maximum distance from the original model. Moreover, both the position of the mesh vertices and the edge orientations are optimized through a tailored geometric-aliasing correction. Thanks to an efficiently parallelized procedure, we are able to process even large models almost instantly with a parameter configuration that does not depend on the scale of the object. An essential survey on mesh denoising is also presented which is functional to the definition of a common framework where to set up our solutions and the related technical and experimental comparisons. The proposed results prove the effectiveness of our method, especially on the challenging target application profiles. Where competing techniques tend to inappropriately recover sharp edges while deforming the surrounding geometry or, on the contrary, to oversmooth shallow features, our method protects and enhances the natural object features and effectively reduces scanning noise on the smooth parts, while guaranteeing the prescribed metric-fidelity to the input model.
DNA sequence and RFLP data reflect geographical spread and relationships of Amylostereum areolatum and its insect vectors

The white rot fungus, Amylostereum areolatum (Basidiomycetes), is best known for its symbiotic relationship with various siricid wood wasp species. In this study, the relationship between isolates of A. areolatum associated with two wood wasp species, Sirex noctilio and S. juvencus, are considered to identify possible intraspecific groups. Isolates from the northern (native) and southern (exotic) hemispheres are included to determine patterns of geographical spread and origin of introductions into the southern hemisphere. The phylogenetic relationships of these isolates to authentic isolates of A. chailletii, A. laevigatum and A. ferreum were also investigated. Sequence and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analyses of the variable nuc‐IGS‐rDNA region provided markers to distinguish intraspecific groups within A. areolatum. Isolates of A. areolatum associated with S. noctilio and S. juvencus contained four heterogenic sequences in the DNA region analysed. These sequences occurred in one of five combinations in each isolate. Some of these sequences were unique to isolates of A. areolatum from either wasp species, while others were present in both groups. This shows the ancient and specialized evolutionary relationship that exists between these insects and fungi. Isolates from the southern hemisphere all share the same sequence group. This supports previous hypotheses that S. noctilio has spread between countries and continents of this region. At the interspecific level, the IGS‐rDNA sequence analysis showed that A. ferreum and A. laevigatum are closely related to each other, and they in turn are related to A. chailletii. Amylostereum areolatum was the most distinctly defined species in the genus. This can be attributed to the obligate relationship between A. areolatum and its insect vectors. Polymerase chain reaction‐RFLP analysis was also shown to be an effective tool to distinguish between the different species of Amylostereum.
Time course of changes in endurance capacity: a 1-yr training study.

PURPOSE To investigate the magnitude and the time course of changes in endurance capacity during the first year of an aerobic endurance training program with constant HR prescription. METHODS Eighteen previously untrained subjects (7 males and 11 females, 42 +/- 5 yr, BMI of 24.3 +/- 2.5 kg x m(-2), and maximal oxygen uptake (VO(2max)) of 37.7 +/- 4.6 mL x min(-1) x kg(-1)) completed a 12-month jogging/walking program on 3 d x wk(-1) 45 min per session with a constant HR prescription of 60% HR reserve. Exhaustive treadmill tests were conducted before the intervention and after 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of training. In addition, submaximal tests on an indoor running track were performed every 4 wk. RESULTS After 12 months, VO(2max) had increased by 0.36 +/- 0.33 L x min(-1) (median [interquartile range]: 16% [9%-20%], P < 0.001). After 3, 6, and 9 months, 52%, 65%, and 79% of this increase were reached, respectively. Resting HR decreased by a total of 9 +/- 6 min(-1) (P<0.001). Of this change, 47% and 102% had occurred after 3 and 6 months, respectively. Submaximal exercise HR during the treadmill tests decreased by 11 +/- 7 min(-1) (P < 0.001) on average. After 3 and 6 months of training, 93% and 101% of this change were observed, respectively. The running track tests revealed that submaximal exercise HR did not change significantly after the ninth week of training. CONCLUSIONS Beginners in recreational endurance exercise are advised to increase their training stimulus after 6 months of training to maintain training effectiveness because no further significant changes in endurance capacity were observed thereafter. When planning future endurance training studies in untrained subjects, it should be taken into account that submaximal exercise HR might reflect endurance changes during the first week only, whereas VO(2max) remains responsive after several months.
Web usage mining using artificial ant colony clustering and linear genetic programming

The rapid e-commerce growth has made both business community and customers face a new situation. Due to intense competition on the one hand and the customer's option to choose from several alternatives, the business community has realized the necessity of intelligent marketing strategies and relationship management. Web usage mining attempts to discover useful knowledge from the secondary data obtained from the interactions of the users with the Web. Web usage mining has become very critical for effective Web site management, creating adaptive Web sites, business and support services, personalization, network traffic flow analysis and so on. The study of ant colonies behavior and their self-organizing capabilities is of interest to knowledge retrieval/management and decision support systems sciences, because it provides models of distributed adaptive organization, which are useful to solve difficult optimization, classification, and distributed control problems, among others [Ramos, V. et al. (2002), (2000)]. In this paper, we propose an ant clustering algorithm to discover Web usage patterns (data clusters) and a linear genetic programming approach to analyze the visitor trends. Empirical results clearly show that ant colony clustering performs well when compared to a self-organizing map (for clustering Web usage patterns) even though the performance accuracy is not that efficient when compared to evolutionary-fuzzy clustering (i-miner) [Abraham, A. (2003)] approach.
The Significance of Myriophyllum elatinoides for Swine Wastewater Treatment: Abundance and Community Structure of Ammonia-Oxidizing Microorganisms in Sediments

Myriophyllum elatinoides was reported to effectively treat wastewater by removing nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). However, little is known about the abundance and community structure of ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms associated with M. elatinoides purification systems. The objective of this research was to characterize the abundance and community structure of ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms in swine wastewater and determine the main nitrogen removal pathways. In this study, five different waters were treated by M. elatinoides in microcosms for one month. The five waters included tap water (Control), swine wastewater (SW), 50% diluted swine wastewater (50% SW), and two synthetic wastewaters: 200 mg NH4 +-N L−1 (200 NH4 +-N) and 400 mg NH4 +-N L−1 (400 NH4 +-N). The most dramatic changes were in NH4 +-N and total N (TN) concentrations, with average removal rates of 84% and 90%, respectively, in the treatments containing swine wastewater. On days 7, 14, and 28, the dissolved oxygen (DO) increased by 81.8%, 210.4% and 136.5%, respectively, compared with on day 0, in the swine wastewater. The results also showed that the bacterial amoA (AOB) copy numbers in the sediments of the treatments were significantly higher than those of archaeal amoA (AOA) copy numbers (p = 0.015). In addition, the high DO concentrations in swine wastewater responded well to the high abundance of AOB. The AOA and AOB community distributions were positively related with NO3 -N and were negatively related with DO in swine wastewater treatments. In summary, our experimental results suggested that the M. elatinoides purification system could improve the activity of ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms and consequently might contribute to the significant N removal from the swine wastewater.
Solving the Closest Vector Problem with respect to ℓp Norms

We present deterministic polynomially space bounded algorithms for the closest vector problem for all lp-norms, 1 < p < ∞, and all polyhedral norms, in particular for the l1norm and the l∞-norm. For all lp-norms with 1 < p < ∞ the running time of the algorithm is p · log 2 (r) O(1) n (2+o(1))n , where r is an upper bound on the size of the coefficients of the target vector and the lattice basis and n is the dimension of the vector space. For polyhedral norms, we obtain an algorithm with running time (slog 2 (r)) O(1) n (2+o(1))n , where r and n are defined as above and s is the number of constraints defining the polytope. In particular, for the l1-norm and the l∞-norm, we obtain a deterministic algorithm for the closest vector problem with running time log 2 (r) O(1) n (2+o(1))n . We achieve our results by introducing a new lattice problem, the lattice membership problem: For a given full-dimensional bounded convex set and a given lattice, the goal is to decide whether the convex set contains a lattice vector or not. The lattice membership problem is a generalization of the integer programming feasibility problem from polyhedra to bounded convex sets. In this paper, we describe a deterministic algorithm for the lattice membership problem, which is a generalization of Lenstra’s algorithm for integer programming. We also describe a polynomial time reduction from the closest vector problem to the lattice membership problem. This approach leads to a deterministic algorithm that solves the closest vector problem in polynomial space for all lp-norms, 1 < p < ∞, and all polyhedral norms.
Linguistic-based Evaluation Criteria to identify Statistical Machine Translation Errors

Machine translation evaluation methods are highly necessary in order to analyze the performance of translation systems. Up to now, the most traditional methods are the use of automatic measures such as BLEU or the quality perception performed by native human evaluations. In order to complement these traditional procedures, the current paper presents a new human evaluation based on the expert knowledge about the errors encountered at several linguistic levels: orthographic, morphological, lexical, semantic and syntactic. The results obtained in these experiments show that some linguistic errors could have more influence than other at the time of performing a perceptual evaluation.