Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection and Quantification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the Sputum of Culture-Negative HIV-infected Pulmonary Tuberculosis Suspects: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Rationale Rapid diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) is critical for timely initiation of treatment and interruption of transmission. Yet, despite recent advances, many patients remain undiagnosed. Culture, usually considered the most sensitive diagnostic method, is sub-optimal for paucibacillary disease. Methods We evaluated the Totally Optimized PCR (TOP) TB assay, a new molecular test that we hypothesize is more sensitive than culture. After pre-clinical studies, we estimated TOP’s per-patient sensitivity and specificity in a convenience sample of 261 HIV-infected pulmonary TB suspects enrolled into a TB diagnostic study in Mbarara, Uganda against MGIT culture, Xpert MTB/RIF and a composite reference standard. We validated results with a confirmatory PCR used for sequencing M. tuberculosis. Measurements and Results Using culture as reference, TOP had 100% sensitivity but 35% specificity. Against a composite reference standard, the sensitivity of culture (27%) and Xpert MTB/RIF (27%) was lower than TOP (99%), with similar specificity (100%, 98% and 87%, respectively). In unadjusted analyses, culture-negative/TOP-positive patients were more likely to be older (P<0·001), female (P<0·001), have salivary sputum (P = 0·05), sputum smear-negative (P<0.001) and less advanced disease on chest radiograph (P = 0.05). M. tuberculosis genotypes identified in sputum by DNA sequencing exhibit differential growth in culture. Conclusions These findings suggest that the TOP TB assay is accurately detecting M. tuberculosis DNA in the sputum of culture-negative tuberculosis suspects. Our results require prospective validation with clinical outcomes. If the operating characteristics of the TOP assay are confirmed in future studies, it will be justified as a “TB rule out” test.
Characterization of Imidazopyridine Compounds as Negative Allosteric Modulators of Proton-Sensing GPR4 in Extracellular Acidification-Induced Responses

G protein-coupled receptor 4 (GPR4), previously proposed as the receptor for sphingosylphosphorylcholine, has recently been identified as the proton-sensing G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) coupling to multiple intracellular signaling pathways, including the Gs protein/cAMP and G13 protein/Rho. In the present study, we characterized some imidazopyridine compounds as GPR4 modulators that modify GPR4 receptor function. In the cells that express proton-sensing GPCRs, including GPR4, OGR1, TDAG8, and G2A, extracellular acidification stimulates serum responsive element (SRE)-driven transcriptional activity, which has been shown to reflect Rho activity, with different proton sensitivities. Imidazopyridine compounds inhibited the moderately acidic pH-induced SRE activity only in GPR4-expressing cells. Acidic pH-stimulated cAMP accumulation, mRNA expression of inflammatory genes, and GPR4 internalization within GPR4-expressing cells were all inhibited by the GPR4 modulator. We further compared the inhibition property of the imidazopyridine compound with psychosine, which has been shown to selectively inhibit actions induced by proton-sensing GPCRs, including GPR4. In the GPR4 mutant, in which certain histidine residues were mutated to phenylalanine, proton sensitivity was significantly shifted to the right, and psychosine failed to further inhibit acidic pH-induced SRE activation. On the other hand, the imidazopyridine compound almost completely inhibited acidic pH-induced action in mutant GPR4. We conclude that some imidazopyridine compounds show specificity to GPR4 as negative allosteric modulators with a different action mode from psychosine, an antagonist susceptible to histidine residues, and are useful for characterizing GPR4-mediated acidic pH-induced biological actions.
Earnings on the Information Technology Roller Coaster: Insight from Matched Employer-Employee Data

This article uses matched employer-employee data for the State of Georgia to examine workers' earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector's employment boom of the mid-1990s and bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for pre-boom individual characteristics, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than workers who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is no benefit to having been touched by technology, likely because of the nontransferability of manufacturing experience to other industries.
MEMORANDUM No 08 / 2000 Deductive Reasoning in Extensive Games By

We justify the application to extensive games of the concept of ‘fully permissible sets’, which corresponds to choice sets when there is common certain belief of the event that each player prefer one strategy to another if and only if the former weakly dominates the latter on the set of all opponent strategies or on the union of the choice sets that are deemed possible for the opponent. The extensive games considered illustrate how our concept yields support to forward induction, without necessarily promoting backward induction. JEL Classification Number: C72. Date: 29 February 2000. Acknowledgements: During our work with this paper and the companion paper “Admissibility and common belief”, we have received helpful comments from many scholars, including Pierpaolo Battigalli and Larry Samuelson.
SU-8-based microneedles for in vitro neural applications

This paper presents novel design, fabrication, packaging and the first in vitro neural activity recordings of SU-8-based microneedles. The polymer SU-8 was chosen because it provides excellent features for the fabrication of flexible and thin probes. A microprobe was designed in order to allow a clean insertion and to minimize the damage caused to neural tissue during in vitro applications. In addition, a tetrode is patterned at the tip of the needle to obtain fine-scale measurements of small neuronal populations within a radius of 100 µm. Impedance characterization of the electrodes has been carried out to demonstrate their viability for neural recording. Finally, probes are inserted into 400 µm thick hippocampal slices, and simultaneous action potentials with peak-to-peak amplitudes of 200–250 µV are detected.
An initial demonstration of underwater acoustic communication using time reversal

In July 1999, an at-sea experiment to measure the focus of a 3.5-kHz centered time-reversal mirror (TRM) was conducted in three different environments: an absorptive bottom, a reflective bottom, and a sloping bottom. The experiment included a preliminary exploration of using a TRM to generate binary-phase shift keying communication sequences in each of these environments. Broadside communication transmissions were also made, and single-source communications were simulated using the measured-channel response. A comparison of the results is made and time reversal is shown to be an effective approach for mitigating inter-symbol interference caused by channel multipath.
Does Congress Represent Public Opinion as it is or as it Might Be?

Recent research has demonstrated that Congress is far representing public opinion as it expressed in surveys, but has neglected alternative benchmarks for evaluating representation. In this paper, I show that senators may act as roughly representative draws from the distribution of issue opinion that would exist if citizens were more uniformly informed about political issues. Using data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, I show that the subset of Americans who demonstrate knowledge of the political alignment of seven political issues hold positions on those issues that are comparably polarized to the Senate and far more polarized than the public as a whole. The association of this particular form of political knowledge with holding partisan profiles of issue positions is consistent with a large and polarizing causal effect of political knowledge on issue positions via cue-taking. To the extent that the disparity in measured polarization between the public and Congress is due to many members of the public being unfamiliar with the partisan alignment of many issues, the quality of Congressional representation is higher than previous studies have suggested.
An analysis of trends and cycles of land prices using wavelet transforms

This paper analyses the low‐frequency temporal variation of unit land prices in two single localities, the municipalities of Espoo and Nurmijarvi, of the Finnish real estate markets by the use of the wavelet transforms. These transforms are nonparametric orthogonal series estimators, which are capable of providing the necessary time and frequency information of land prices simultaneously in a highly flexible fashion. In the empirical section of this paper both the raw and the quality‐adjusted unit price series are analysed. The estimated cycles and trends are all nonlinear and, in particular, the behavior of cyclical component is highly curvelinear and transient in time. The findings strongly suggest that the sub‐markets in question are not in a steady state, but are continuously evolving in time. It seems that much of the temporal variation present in the untransformed series is, in fact, explained by the quality differences in the attribute variables. The use of quality corrections produced significant improvements in the internal reliability of results.
Processing of Voiced and Unvoiced Acoustic Stimuli in Musicians

Past research has shown that musical training induces changes in the processing of supra-segmental aspects of speech, such as pitch and prosody. The aim of the present study was to determine whether musical expertise also leads to an altered neurophysiological processing of sub-segmental information available in the speech signal, in particular the voice-onset-time. Using high-density EEG-recordings we analyzed the neurophysiological responses to voiced and unvoiced consonant-vowel-syllables and noise-analogs in 26 German speaking adult musicians and non-musicians. From the EEG the N1 amplitude of the event-related potential and two microstates from the topographical EEG analysis (one around the N1 amplitude and one immediately preceding the N1 microstate) were calculated to the different stimuli. Similar to earlier studies the N1 amplitude was different to voiced and unvoiced stimuli in non-musicians with larger amplitudes to voiced stimuli. The more refined microstate analysis revealed that the microstate within the N1 time window was shorter to unvoiced stimuli in non-musicians. For musicians there was no difference for the N1 amplitudes and the corresponding microstates between voiced and unvoiced stimuli. In addition, there was a longer very early microstate preceding the microstate at the N1 time window to non-speech stimuli only in musicians. Taken together, our findings suggest that musicians process unvoiced stimuli (irrespective whether these stimuli are speech or non-speech stimuli) differently than controls. We propose that musicians utilize the same network to analyze unvoiced stimuli as for the analysis of voiced stimuli. As a further explanation it is also possible that musicians devote more neurophysiological resources into the analysis of unvoiced segments.
Student use of the PeerWise system

PeerWise is a web-based system that supports the creation of student-generated test banks of multiple choice questions. Students contribute question stems and answers, provide explanations, answer questions contributed by other students, rate questions for difficulty and quality, and participate in on-line discussions of all these activities. In 2007, the system was used in four computing classes that varied in level, instructors, and student reward. We present results that show common patterns of response from students, and outline some initial investigations into the impact of the system on student performance. Our main findings are: external motivators are needed only for question generation; exam performance is correlated with participation in on-line discussions; and, despite student enthusiasm, drill-and-practice use does not contribute to exam success.
Transnational active citizens : theorising the experiences of young Somali males in London

This thesis focuses on young Somali males in London and their transnational engagements. It offers a critical intervention within the literature on forced migration, diaspora, transnationalism, citizenship, intergenrational acculturation and masculinity and challenges existing definitions, concepts and approaches employed in this work. It further unpacks the dominant narrative of ‘citizen suspects’ associated with young British Somali men: it, thus, addresses a gap generally overlooked by diaspora and transnational theories, which commonly focus on the problematised participation of young migrants. It offers a more nuanced approach to youth migration highlighting various social and structural interactions between host-societies, diaspora communities and generations in the UK. The research seeks to engage with four key questions that have been largely overlooked in the literature: 1) What are young people’s understandings of notions of ‘belonging’ and ‘home’? ; 2) How do young people perceive their place in society, deal with the challenges that they face and become active citizens while forging (united) voices? ; 3) How do intergenerational matters affect young people? 4) How do young people’s networks function at the local and transnational level and how are these sustained? Through semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation, the research frames young Somali men as active citizens by shedding new light onto how they understand and construct their social, political, civic and religious spaces both locally and transnationally. In so doing, it offers a more balanced account with regards to notions of home and belonging. It contributes to research on Somali diaspora(s) in general, and its youth more specifically, as well as their more grounded transnational engagements. It unravels the complexities of intergenerational issues and reveals how young Somalis manage multiple notions of belonging, whilst negotiating broader diaspora and transnational engagements. It concludes that young people’s broader experiences and adopted social positions are firmly shaped by their historical context, interactions with their immediate social environment and more broadly the host-society and transnational narratives. Such experiences are fluid, varied and interactive usually dictating the delicate balance and outcome of reception and rejection in the host-society. Whilst the focus of the thesis is on young Somali males, there are wider theoretical implications for the study of diaspora, transnationalism and citizenship.
Minimal Model Semantics and Rational Closure in Description Logics

We define the notion of rational closure in the context of Description Logics. We start from an extension of ALC with a typicality operator T allowing to express concepts of the form T(C), whose meaning is to select the “most normal” instances of a concept C. The semantics we consider is based on rational models and exploits a minimal models mechanism based on the minimization of the rank of domain elements. We show that this semantics captures exactly a notion of rational closure which is a natural extension to Description Logics of Lehmann and Magidor’s one. We also extend the notion of rational closure to the ABox, by providing an EXPTIME algorithm for computing it that is sound and complete with respect to the minimal model semantics.
The speech recognition and machine translation system of IOIT for IWSLT 2013

This paper describes the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Translation (MT) systems developed by IOIT for the evaluation campaign of IWSLT2013. For the ASR task, using Kaldi toolkit, we developed the system based on weighted finite state transducer. The system is constructed by applying several techniques, notably, subspace Gaussian mixture models, speaker adaptation, discriminative training, system combination and SOUL, a neural network language model. The techniques used for automatic segmentation are also clarified. Besides, we compared different types of SOUL models in order to study the impact of words of previous sentences in predicting words in language modeling. For the MT task, the baseline system was built based on the open source toolkit N -code, then being augmented by using SOUL on top, i.e., in N -best rescoring phase.
Lie-Rinehart algebras, Gerstenhaber algebras and Batalin-Vilkovisky algebras

© Annales de l’institut Fourier, 1998, tous droits réservés. L’accès aux archives de la revue « Annales de l’institut Fourier » (http://annalif.ujf-grenoble.fr/) implique l’accord avec les conditions générales d’utilisation (http://www.numdam.org/conditions). Toute utilisation commerciale ou impression systématique est constitutive d’une infraction pénale. Toute copie ou impression de ce fichier doit contenir la présente mention de copyright.
Financial Sector Reforms, Macroeconomic Instability and the Order of Economic Liberalization: The Evidence from Nigeria

Financial sector reforms began in Nigeria with the deregulation of interest rates in August 1987. Since then, far-reaching policy measures including the chartering of new banks, reform of the capital market and a move from direct to indirect monetary controls have been undertaken. The results from the implementation of the reforms have been disappointing, however. Bank insolvency, high inflation and excessively high interest rates have become common phenomena in the economy. This study uses discriminant analysis to demonstrate that the health of banks deteriorated following reforms in Nigeria. The study cautiously identifies a wrong sequencing process as a major factor in the poor performance of the financial sector reforms, but agrees that a lot more research needs to be done in this area.
Quality Signaling, Advertising and Firm Numbers

This paper investigates whether low-quality firms can pretend through advertising to be high-quality firms, which is a signal of product quality, when the number of firms increases. We assume that consumers remain loyal to high-quality firms after purchasing high-quality products and will therefore not patronize low-quality firms, which pretend through advertising to be high-quality firms. Our results indicate that the possibility of low-quality firms entering the high-quality market declines when the number of high-quality firms increases. Furthermore, the result of this paper suggests that if the number of low-quality firms is larger than that of high-quality firms, it may not be profitable for low-quality firms to advertise. In the time of the Warring States in China, there was a monarch called Qi Xuan King in Qi State. He enjoyed the band performance of reed pipe the most. In the band, there was a man called Nan Kuo who did not know how to play the reed pipe at all. When performing, he would pose to be a master. Afterwards, Qi Min King succeeded to the throne and he also enjoyed listening to reed pipe. However, he preferred solo performance. Thus, he commanded the musicians to play in turn. Nan Kuo foresaw that his pretension would be discovered and thus he left stealthily. – “Stories of Idioms”: scraping the bottom of the barrel
Constraints on the Lyman continuum radiation from galaxies: First results with FUSE on Mrk 54

We present Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer observations of the star-forming galaxy Mrk 54 at z =0 :0448. The Lyman continuum radiation is not detected above the H i absorption edge in our Galaxy. An upper limit is evaluated by comparison with the background measured in regions of the detector adjacent to the observed spectrum. A spectral window of 16 A, reasonably free of additional H i Lyman series line absorption, is used. No correction is needed for molecular hydrogen absorption in our Galaxy but a foreground extinction of 0.29 mag is accounted for. An upper limit of 6:15 10 16 erg cm 2 s 1 A 1 is obtained for the flux at900 A in the rest frame of Mrk 54. By comparison with the number of ionizing photons derived from the H flux, this limit translates into an upper limit of fesc < 0:062 for the fraction of Lyman continuum photons that escape the galaxy without being absorbed by interstellar material. This limit compares with the limits obtained in three other nearby galaxies and is compatible with the escape fractions predicted by models. The upper limits obtained in nearby galaxies contrasts with the detection of Lyman continuum flux in the composite spectrum of Lyman-break galaxies at z 3:4. The diculties and implications of a comparison are discussed.
A Stock Pattern Recognition Algorithm Based on Neural Networks

Recent studies show that stock patterns might implicate useful information for stock price forecasting. The patterns underlying the price time series can not be discovered exhaustively by the pure man power in a limited time, thus the computer algorithm for stock price pattern recognition becomes more and more popular. Currently, there are mainly two kinds of stock price pattern recognition algorithms: the algorithm based on rule-matching and the algorithm based on template-matching. However, both of the two algorithms highly require the participation of domain experts, as well as their lacks of the learning ability. To solve these problems, the paper proposes a stock price pattern recognition approach based upon the artificial neural network. The experiment shows that the neural network can effectively learn the characteristics of the patterns, and accurately recognize the patterns.
Poverty in Canada: Does Manufacturing Matter?

We focus our research on this question: Does an expansion in the percentage of labour employed in the manufacturing sector lead to reductions in the poverty rate? While some research suggests that regional differences in the employment share of the manufacturing sector explain variation in poverty rates, we do not find empirical evidence of this poverty-ameliorating effect in our regression analysis of Canadian Census Districts between the years 2001 and 2006.
Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity

Shabana Mir's powerful ethnographic study of women on Washington, D.C., college campuses reveals that being a young female Muslim in post-9/11 America means experiencing double scrutinyuscrutiny from the Muslim community as well as from the dominant non-Muslim community. Muslim American Women on Campus illuminates the processes by which a group of ethnically diverse American college women, all identifying as Muslim and all raised in the United States, construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives. Mir, an anthropologist of education, focuses on key leisure practices--drinking, dating, and fashion--to probe how Muslim American students adapt to campus life and build social networks that are seamlessly American, Muslim, and youthful. In this lively and highly accessible book, we hear the womenAEs own often poignant voices as they articulate how they find spaces within campus culture as well as their Muslim student communities to grow and assert themselves as individuals, women, and Americans. Mir concludes, however, that institutions of higher learning continue to have much to learn about fostering religious diversity on campus.