Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence and clinical impact of recreational drug consumption in people living with HIV on treatment: a cross-sectional study

Objectives Drug interactions, poor adherence to medication and high-risk sexual behaviour may occur in individuals with HIV using recreational drugs. Thus, we aimed to assess the prevalence of recreational drugs use and to explore its clinical impact in HIV patients on treatment. Methods Observational, cross sectional, study conducted in a 700 bed university hospital, Barcelona, Spain. A total of 208 adults living with HIV on treatment were included. A questionnaire was administered by clinical pharmacists, including evaluation of sociodemographic variables, past 12-month drug consumption, adherence to antiretrovirals (Simplified Medication Adherence Questionnaire) and high-risk sexual behaviour (condomless sex/multiple partners). Additional data were obtained from clinical records. Recreational drug-antiretroviral interactions were checked in reference databases. Prevalence was calculated for 5% precision and 95% CI. Crude and adjusted binary logistic regressions were performed to identify associations between recreational drug use and adherence problems, and between recreational drug use and high-risk sexual behaviour. Results From the overall sample, 92 participants (44.2%) consumed recreational drugs over the past 1 year. Of these, 44 (48.8%) had used different types of recreational drugs in this period. We detected 11 recreational substances, including sildenafil and nitrites. The most consumed drugs were: cannabis (68.5%), cocaine (45.5%), nitrites (31.5%), sildenafil (28.3) and ecstasy (19.6%). Relevant interactions occurred in 46 (50%) of the individuals consuming drugs. Recreational drug consumption was found to be related to adherence problems with antiretrovirals (OR: 2.51 (95% CI 1.32 to 4.77) p=0.005) and high-risk sexual behaviour (OR: 2.81 (95% CI 1.47 to 5.39) p=0.002). Conclusions Recreational drugs are frequently used by HIV patients on treatment. Classical drugs and new substances consumed in sexual context are usual. Recreational drug consumption interferes with several clinical outcomes, including potentially relevant interactions between drugs and antiretrovirals, adherence problems and high-risk sexual behaviour. Thus, there is the urgent need of implementing patient-centred care involving recreational drug consumption.
Genetic Analysis of Fusarium Head Blight Resistance in CIMMYT Bread Wheat Line C615 Using Traditional and Conditional QTL Mapping

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a destructive wheat disease present throughout the world, and host resistance is an effective and economical strategy used to control FHB. Lack of adequate resistance resource is still a main bottleneck for FHB genetics and wheat breeding research. The synthetic-derived bread wheat line C615, which does not carry the Fhb1 gene, is a promising source of FHB resistance for breeding. A population of 198 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) produced by crossing C615 with the susceptible cultivar Yangmai 13 was evaluated for FHB response using point and spray inoculations. As the disease phenotype is frequently complicated by other agronomic traits, we used both traditional and multivariate conditional QTL mapping approaches to investigate the genetic relationships (at the individual QTL level) between FHB resistance and plant height (PH), spike compactness (SC), and days to flowering (FD). A linkage map was constructed from 3,901 polymorphic SNP markers, which covered 2,549.2 cM. Traditional and conditional QTL mapping analyses found 13 and 22 QTL for FHB, respectively; 10 were identified by both methods. Among these 10, three QTL from C615 were detected in multiple years; these QTL were located on chromosomes 2AL, 2DS, and 2DL. Conditional QTL mapping analysis indicated that, at the QTL level, SC strongly influenced FHB in point inoculation; whereas PH and SC contributed more to FHB than did FD in spray inoculation. The three stable QTL (QFhbs-jaas.2AL, QFhbp-jaas.2DS, and QFhbp-jaas.2DL) for FHB were partly affected by or were independent of the three agronomic traits. The QTL detected in this study improve our understanding of the genetic relationships between FHB response and related traits at the QTL level and provide useful information for marker-assisted selection for the improvement of FHB resistance in breeding.
Efficacy of Three Citrus Oil Formulations Against Solenopsis invicta Buren (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), the Red Imported Fire Ant 1,2

Experiments were conducted in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas to assess efficacy of raw citrus peel extract (orange oil) and a commercial citrus oil formulation for control of Solenopsis invicta Buren, the red imported fire ant. A recipe containing orange oil (equal parts orange oil, cattlemen's molasses, and compost tea at 47 mL L �1 water), orange oil premixed with water to form an emulsion, and the commercial product all resulted in 80% or greater control when applied in 3.8 L of water as a mound drench. In most trials, the level of activity in mounds receiving citrus oil alternatives was statistically comparable with conventional diazinon formulations. Citrus oil alone presented mixing problems prior to application; some possible solutions are discussed. Citrus oil formulations and commercial products appear to be viable alternatives for people who do not wish to apply conventional insecti- cides against S. invicta.
Are There Any Differences in Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction Between Future Preschool and Primary School Teachers?

ABSTRACT The main aim of this study was to examine personality traits and life satisfaction of future preschool and primary school teachers and to examine if there are differences between these two groups of students. The study was conducted on a sample of 290 students of the University of Rijeka attending Early and Preschool Education and Teacher Education programs. Significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and personality traits were found: extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience. Neuroticism was significantly decreased in both groups of participants. Differences in these two groups of students are not significant in life satisfaction and personality traits except in conscientiousness, which is significantly higher among future primary school teachers as opposed to future preschool teachers. Given the significant correlation of age and the year of study with personality traits, the established findings are discussed in terms of the varying length of the study programs.
Exploring the Relationship among Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Psychological Empowerment and Turnover Intensions with the Mediating Role of Affective Commitment

The paper aims to clarify the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior, psychological empowerment, affective commitment and turnover intensions along with mediating effects of variables. Main purpose of the study is to analyze the organizational citizenship behavior on the basis of five dimensions altruisem, courtesy, sportsmanship, civic virtue and conscientiousness and finding how OCB and psychological empowerment influence the affective commitment and turnover intensions of workers directly and indirectly. The paper opted for a causal study using the standardized questionnaire approach. Data set of 410 respondents, employees representing middle level management belonging to Hattar industry was studied. Analysis was conducted by application of SEM to explore the direct and indirect relationship among the constructs. The paper provides empirical insights about how variables influence each other and finally concluded that OCB with its five dimensions and psychological empowerment, both affect affective commitment positively in a respective manner while both the variables have negative impact on turnover intensions of employees. Research also resulted that Affective commitment acts as a mediating variable between OCB and Turnover intensions as well as psychological empowerment and turnover intensions of industry middle management workers. Keywords: Organization citizenship behavior, psychological empowerment, affective commitment, turnover intensions JEL Classifications: J10, M10
Mining Social Entrepreneurship Strategies Using Topic Modeling

Despite the burgeoning research on social entrepreneurship (SE), SE strategies remain poorly understood. Drawing on extant research on the social activism and social change, empowerment and SE models, we explore, classify and validate the strategies used by 2,334 social entrepreneurs affiliated with the world’s largest SE support organization, Ashoka. The results of the topic modeling of the social entrepreneurs’ strategy profiles reveal that they employed a total of 39 change-making strategies that vary across resources (material versus symbolic strategies), specificity (general versus specific strategies), and mode of participation (mass versus elite participation strategies); they also vary across fields of practice and time. Finally, we identify six meta-SE strategies―a reduction from the 39 strategies―and identify four new meta-SE strategies (i.e., system reform, physical capital development, evidence-based practices, and prototyping) that have been overlooked in prior SE research. Our findings extend and deepen the research into SE strategies and offer a comprehensive model of SE strategies that advances theory, practice and policy making.
A Simple Signal Processing Architecture for Instantaneous Radar Polarimetry

This paper describes a new radar primitive that enables instantaneous radar polarimetry at essentially no increase in signal processing complexity. This primitive coordinates transmission of distinct waveforms on orthogonal polarizations and applies a unitary matched filter bank on receive. This avoids the information loss inherent in single-channel matched filters. A further advantage of this scheme is the elimination of range sidelobes
Attentional sensitization of unconscious visual processing: Top-down influences on masked priming

Classical theories of automaticity assume that automatic processes elicited by unconscious stimuli are autonomous and independent of higher-level cognitive influences. In contrast to these classical conceptions, we argue that automatic processing depends on attentional amplification of task-congruent processing pathways and propose an attentional sensitization model of unconscious visual processing: According to this model, unconscious visual processing is automatic in the sense that it is initiated without deliberate intention. However, unconscious visual processing is susceptible to attentional top-down control and is only elicited if the cognitive system is configured accordingly. In this article, we describe our attentional sensitization model and review recent evidence demonstrating attentional influences on subliminal priming, a prototypical example of an automatic process. We show that subliminal priming (a) depends on attentional resources, (b) is susceptible to stimulus expectations, (c) is influenced by action intentions, and (d) is modulated by task sets. These data suggest that attention enhances or attenuates unconscious visual processes in congruency with attentional task representations similar to conscious perception. We argue that seemingly paradoxical, hitherto unexplained findings regarding the automaticity of the underlying processes in many cognitive domains can be easily accommodated by our attentional sensitization model. We conclude this review with a discussion of future research questions regar-ding the nature of attentional control of unconscious visual processing.
A NOVEL ARCHITECTURE FOR VLIW PROCESSOR

Technology has seen the development of processor industry right from micro to the latest Nanotechnology with speed being important criteria. Not much attention has been given to the power required to drive these Integrated Circuits. With gaining popularity in mobile computing, developing mobile processors have gained popularity since these processors possess unique properties like low power consumption and dissipation. This paper aims at designing a low power Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processor with built in FFT processor, which uses single clock frequency. This VLIW processor is designed with two modules one for VLIW processor and the other one is Hybrid dynamic voltage scaling module. Using the DVS algorithm the power can be reduced up to 20 to 25 % of normal VLIW processor. The design is simulated and synthesized using Xilinx project Navigator and the report is given in the paper. Keyword: VLIW processor, VHDL, interDVS, intraDVS, Hybrid DVS etc.,
A Passage-of-time Model of the Cerebellar Purkinje Cell

The cerebellar Purkinje cell controlling eyeblinks can learn, remember and reproduce the interstimulus interval in a classical conditioning paradigm. Given temporally separated inputs, the cerebellar Purkinje cell learns to pause its tonic inhibition of a motor pathway with high temporal precision so that an overt blink occurs at the right time. Most models relegate the Purkinje cell's passage-of-time representation to afferent granule cells, a subpopulation of which is supposedly selected for synaptic depression in order to make the Purkinje cell pause. However, granule cell models have recently faced two crucial challenges: 1) bypassing granule cells and directly stimulating the Purkinje cell's pre-synaptic fibers during training still produces a well-timed pause, and 2) the Purkinje cell can reproduce the learned pause, invariant to the temporal structure of probe stimulation. Here, we present a passage-of-time model which is internal to the Purkinje cell and is invariant to probe structure. The model accurately simulates the Purkinje cell learning mechanism and makes testable electrophysiological predictions. Importantly, the model is a numerical proof-of-principle for a biological learning mechanism which does not rely on changes of synaptic strength.
Cross-Lingual Sentiment Classification with Bilingual Document Representation Learning

Cross-lingual sentiment classiﬁcation aims to adapt the sentiment resource in a resource-rich language to a resource-poor language. In this study, we propose a representation learning approach which simultaneously learns vector representations for the texts in both the source and the target languages. Different from previous research which only gets bilingual word embedding, our Bilingual Document Representation Learning model BiDRL directly learns document representations. Both semantic and sentiment correlations are utilized to map the bilingual texts into the same embedding space. The experiments are based on the multilingual multi-domain Amazon review dataset. We use English as the source language and use Japanese, German and French as the target languages. The experimental results show that BiDRL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for all the target languages.
Causation and caution in financial aid reform: a historical perspective through multiple shades of gray literature.

To better understand how a once well-intentioned concept of financial tuition assistance for college students has devolved into its current troubled and broken state, this doctoral thesis explored the evolution of the U.S. system of federal financial aid in higher education from a historical perspective. The study began with a review of the current state of the federal student aid system in U.S. higher education and then looked back at four key junctures in financial aid’s history to understand influences that shaped it to be what it is today. Using a historical research approach, this doctoral thesis examined the gray literature (Bucciarelli, 2012) -reports, speeches, testimonies and other materials from three major educational professional associations -coupled with congressional records, presidential remarks and speeches, and the popular media, for significant events and trends in the history of the U.S. system of financial aid in higher education from the establishment of the first federal student loans in 1958 to the present. To assist with identifying the context of key changes and potential casual connections, the causal model theory framed this study (Murphey, 1973). This examination of federal student aid’s history sought to contribute to existing scholarship and perspective as the nation tackles the contemporary concerns of the troubled student aid system with policy and practice reforms.
Melioidosis, Northeastern Brazil

Melioidosis was first recognized in northeastern Brazil in 2003. Confirmation of additional cases from the 2003 cluster in Ceará, more recent cases in other districts, environmental isolation of Burkholderia pseudomallei, molecular confirmation and typing results, and positive serosurveillance specimens indicate that melioidosis is more widespread in northeastern Brazil than previously thought.
Steelhead Life History on California's Central Coast: Insights from a State-Dependent Model

Abstract Steelhead Oncorhynchus mykiss display a dizzying array of life history variation (including the purely resident form, rainbow trout). We developed a model for female steelhead in coastal California (close to the southern boundary of their range) in small coastal streams. We combined proximate (physiological) and ultimate (expected reproductive success) considerations to generalize the notion of a threshold size for emigration or maturity through the development of a state-dependent life history theory. The model involves strategies that depend on age, size or condition, and recent rates of change in size or condition during specific periods (decision windows) in advance of the actual smolting or spawning event. This is the first study in which such a model is fully parameterized based on data collected entirely from California steelhead populations, the majority of data coming from two watersheds the mouths of whose rivers are separated by less than 8 km along the coast of Santa Cruz County. We p.
Automatic discounting rate computation using a dissent criterion

An iterative method for automatic discounting rate computation is introduced in this paper. As part of a conjunctive combination of sources, discounting reduces the impact of a source on the result of the fusion. The key problems related to discounting are: what sources must be discounted and up to what degree. We propose a method that jointly tackles these two issues by computing rates using a dissent measure. The dissension of the sources is evaluated by comparing them to the average of their mass functions. Sources very different from others (like sources resulting from outliers) are thus heavily discounted. This discounting process is iterated so as to obtain a minimum distance between the conjunctive combination of the discounted sources and a categorical mass function. The efficiency of the method is evaluated through several simulations.
Lipoprotein Lipase Gene Mutations and the Genetic Susceptibility of Preeclampsia

In the pathogenesis of preeclampsia, endothelial cell activation or dysfunction is a central theme, and marked dyslipidemia may contribute to endothelial cell dysfunction. The objective of this study was to evaluate the association between preeclampsia and mutations within the lipoprotein lipase (LPL) gene. DNA was extracted from whole blood or cheek swabs of 250 preeclamptic patients, 265 control subjects, and 106 offspring of preeclamptic patients (all white). Control subjects were women who had undergone ≥2 term pregnancies unaffected by preeclampsia. All samples were genotyped for 3 LPL polymorphisms with the use of polymerase chain reaction of known allelic variants. The 3 mutations studied were the following: (1) Asp9Asn substitution in exon 2, (2) T-to-G substitution at position −93 of the proximal promotor region (−93T/G), and (3) Asn291Ser substitution in exon 6. Results were analyzed with an &khgr;2 contingency table. The prevalences of the Asp9Asn mutation, −93T/G promotor mutation, and Asn291Ser mutation were not significantly different among the preeclamptic patients and control subjects (Asp9Asn: patients, 2.8%; control subjects, 4.0%; −93T/G: patients, 4.5%; control subjects, 5.5%; Asn291Ser: patients, 4.0%; control subject, 3.0%). In addition, there was no difference in the frequency of any of the mutations in the offspring of preeclamptic women compared with that observed in the control population. Between a small group of patients with nulliparous HELLP syndrome (a variant of severe preeclampsia: hemolysis, elevated liver enzyme, low platelets) patients (n=12) and control subjects, there was a significant difference in the prevalence of the Asn291Ser mutation (16.7% versus 3.0%, P =0.01). In this large white population, the Asp9Asn mutation, −93T/G promotor mutation, and Asn291Ser mutation were not associated with an increased risk for preeclampsia. In a small subgroup of patients, the Asn291Ser mutation was associated with an increased risk for nulliparous HELLP syndrome.
DNA microarray analysis of Bacillus subtilis DegU, ComA and PhoP regulons: an approach to comprehensive analysis of B.subtilis two-component regulatory systems.

We have analyzed the regulons of the Bacillus subtilis two-component regulators DegU, ComA and PhoP by using whole genome DNA microarrays. For these experiments we took the strategy that the response regulator genes were cloned downstream of an isopropyl-beta-D-thiogalactopyranoside-inducible promoter on a multicopy plasmid and expressed in disruptants of the cognate sensor kinase genes, degS, comP and phoR, respectively. The feasibility of this experimental design to detect target genes was demonstrated by the following two results. First, expression of lacZ fusions of aprE, srfA and ydhF, the target genes of DegU, ComA and PhoP, respectively, was stimulated in their cognate sensor kinase-deficient mutants upon overproduction of the regulators. Secondly, by microarray analysis most of the known target genes for the regulators were detected and, where unknown genes were found, the regulator dependency of several of them was demonstrated. As the mutants used were deficient in the kinase genes, these results show that target candidates can be detected without signal transduction. Using this experimental design, we identified many genes whose dependency on the regulators for expression had not been known. These results suggest the applicability of the strategy to the comprehensive transcription analysis of the B.subtilis two-component systems.
Urokinase Plasminogen Activator Receptor (uPAR) and Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) Are Potential Predictive Biomarkers in Early Stage Oral Squamous Cell Carcinomas (OSCC)

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is often associated with metastatic disease and a poor 5 year survival rate. Patients diagnosed with small tumours generally have a more favourable outcome, but some of these small tumours are aggressive and lead to early death. To avoid harmful overtreatment of patients with favourable prognosis, there is a need for predictive biomarkers that can be used for treatment stratification. In this study we assessed the possibility to use components of the plasminogen activator (PA) system as prognostic markers for OSCC outcome and compared this to the commonly used biomarker Ki-67. A tissue-micro-array (TMA) based immunohistochemical analysis of primary tumour tissue obtained from a North Norwegian cohort of 115 patients diagnosed with OSCC was conducted. The expression of the biomarkers was compared with clinicopathological variables and disease specific death. The statistical analyses revealed that low expression of uPAR (p = 0.031) and PAI-1 (p = 0.021) in the tumour cells was significantly associated with low disease specific death in patients with small tumours and no lymph node metastasis (T1N0). The commonly used biomarker, Ki-67, was not associated with disease specific death in any of the groups of patients analysed. The conclusion is that uPAR and PAI-1 are potential predictive biomarkers in early stage tumours and that this warrants further studies on a larger cohort of patients.