Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence and risk factors of Otitis Media with effusion in school children in Qassim Region of Saudi Arabia.

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of otitis media with effusion (OME) among school children in Qassim region of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and to determine relevant risk factors in affected children. METHODS Through a cross-sectional study, 1488 children in the age range 6-12 years were randomly selected from 25 primary schools in Qassim region. A questionnaire was used to determine risk factors for OME. Otoscopy and tympanometry were used to diagnose and confirm OME. Pure tone average for children with confirmed OME was measured. Teachers of children were asked to complete a questionnaire evaluating child's level of school performance. RESULTS Prevalence of OME in the study population was 7.5% (112/1488). In univariate analysis, it was strongly associated with age less than 8 years (p< 0.0001; OR= 4.23, 95% CI: 2.85-6.29 ), family size more than 4 members in the household((p<0.0001; OR= 4.45, 95% CI: 2.23-8.88), mother education less than secondary school education (p<0.0001; OR=2.2, 95% CI: 1.47-3.29), recurrent acute otitis media (AOM) (p<0.0001; OR=5.73, 95% CI: 3.47-9.45), and hearing loss symptom (p< 0.0001; OR= 3.39, 95% CI: 1.92-5.99). It is less strongly associated with history of preschool AOM (p= 0.002; OR= 3.15, 95% CI: 1.67-5.97), nasal discharge (p= 0.003; OR= 1.91, 95% CI: 1.24-2.93) and snoring (p=0.03; OR= 1.76, 95% CI: 1.06-2.94). OME was significantly higher in schools located in rural districts (p<0.001, OR= 2.82, 95% CI: 1.86-4.28). In multivariate regression model, five of these factors were found to be predictors of OME: age less than 8 years (OR= 5.052, 95% CI:3.289-7.762), family size more than4 members in the household) (OR= 4.192, 95% CI: 2.033-8.643), rural school district (OR=3.037, 95% CI: 1.933-4.772), mother education lower than secondary school education) (OR=2.041, 95% CI:1.602-3.877) and recurrent AOM (OR=4.914, 95% CI: 2.677-9.02). Children with OME tend to have poorer school performance compared to normal children (p=0.067). No significant correlation was found between OME and type of feeding during the first two years of life (p=0.62; OR= 0.87, 95% CI: 0.51-1.49), preschool daycare attendance (p=0.17; OR= 0.71, 95% CI: 0.44-1.16), home exposure to cigarette smoke (p=0.4; OR= 1.34, 95% CI:0.68-2.65), visits to ENT clinic (p=0.13; OR= 0.58, 95% CI:0.29-1.18), and ENT operations (p=0.12; OR= 0.46, 95% CI: 0.17-1.27). CONCLUSION Prevalence of OME in Qassim region reaches 7.5% in school children. Age less than 8 years, family size more than 4 members in the household, mother education less than secondary school education, living in rural area and recurrent AOM are found to be predictors of OME in Qassim region. In this population of children, otoscopy and tympanometry should be used as screening tools for OME.
Psychological and neural perspectives on the role of motion in face recognition.

In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how facial motion affects memory for faces. The authors offer a theoretical framework that synthesizes psychological findings on memory for moving faces. Three hypotheses about the possible roles of facial motion in memory are evaluated. In general, although facial motion is helpful for recognizing familiar/famous faces, its benefits are less certain with unfamiliar faces. Importantly, the implicit social signals provided by a moving face (e.g., gaze changes, expression, and facial speech) may mediate the effects of facial motion on recognition. Insights from the developmental literature, which highlight the significance of attention in the processing of social information from faces, are also discussed. Finally, a neural systems framework that considers both the processing of socially relevant motion information and static feature-based information is presented. This neural systems model provides a useful framework for understanding the divergent psychological findings.
Return to Elite Level of Play and Performance in Professional Golfers After Arthroscopic Hip Surgery

Background: Hip conditions, such as femoroacetabular impingement and labral injury, can cause pain and limit the ability to play sports at a professional level. Purpose: To evaluate performance metrics of professional golfers prior to arthroscopic hip surgery and after surgery. Study Design: Case series; Level of evidence, 4. Methods: This study included professional golfers who underwent arthroscopic hip surgery. Primary outcome variables were greens in regulation and driving distance. Metrics were recorded for 2 years prior to arthroscopic hip surgery and 1, 2, and 5 years after arthroscopy. Results: A consecutive cohort of 20 male professional golfers (27 hips) from 2000 to 2011 underwent arthroscopic hip surgery by a single surgeon. All players were on the PGA Tour with a mean age of 38 years (range, 26-54 years). Eleven hips had labral repair and 16 had labral debridements. Four hips required microfracture of a chondral lesion. All players returned to play at a mean of 4.7 months (range, 1 month to 2 years). The mean number of years played after surgery was 5.72. There was no significant difference between preoperative and postoperative greens in regulation (P = .227). The mean distance per golf drive was significantly longer at 1 and 2 years postoperative compared with prior to surgery (P < .01), and driving distance at 5 years was also longer than preoperative (P = .008). Conclusion: Arthroscopic management of chondrolabral dysfunction due to femoroacetabular impingement in the professional golfer allowed the golfer to return to the same skill level prior to surgery. Mean driving distance was found to increase after arthroscopy, demonstrating not only a return but also an improvement in driving performance from prior level of play.
Congestion and the Valuation of Recreation Benefits

The existence of congestion at outdoor recreation sites gives rise to certain problems in benefits evaluation, especially when demands for facilities are interdependent. Specifically, where additions to recreation capacity via the expansion of existing parks or the development of new ones has the incidental effect of alleviating or exacerbating the congestion at existing facilities, efficiency benefits of the project are not narrowly defined as the "area under the demand curve" for the new facility. In these cases some relevant increments in surpluses associated with the demand for existing facilities must be taken into account as well. The basic principles of valuation under the above circumstances are developed in this paper under two different assumptions about the pricing policy in effect. The first policy (policy A) assumes that marginal-cost pricing is practiced everywhere (at least in the recreation sector); second best considerations are not considered relevant. The second policy (policy B) assumes the "zero-price" approach favored in North America.1 It will be shown that implications for investment strategy differ only slightly in respect to these extreme cases. The "mixed" case is not explicitly considered. Although others have considered various aspects of the recreation congestion problem (Anderson and Bonsor 1974, Burt and Brewer 1971, Cicchetti and Smith 1976, McConnell and Duff 1976, Wetzel 1977) the particular issues taken up here have not been exposed, with perhaps one exception. A paper by Knetsch (1977) correctly points out the conditions under which one does not take into account the effects on existing facilities of introducing a new facility into the system (he ignores congestion). 2 Si ce this paper considers the conditions under which one does take into account the effects on existing facilities it can be c nsidered as an extension or complement to Knetsch's work.
Large scale primordial magnetic fields from inflation and preheating

We consider models in which the (transverse) photon mass is non-zero during inflation and drops to zero non-adiabatically at the end of inflation. Through this process, vacuum fluctuations of the photon field are converted into physical, long-wavelength modes with high amplitude. The resulting spectrum of the field strength is approximately B_l ~ 1/l, where l is the relevant coherence scale. With a reasonable model of field evolution we obtain, on comoving galactic scales, a magnetic field strong enough to seed a dynamo mechanism and generate the observed galactic magnetic fields.
Honey, the Currency Union Effect on Trade Hasn't Blown Up

as the value of real bilateral trade between‘countries’ i and j at time t, CU is a dummy variable which is unity if i and j sharethe same currency at time t, Z is a vector of controls given by an augmentedgravity model, c are the associate nuisance coefficients, and is a (hopefully)well-behaved residual. My chief finding was that was large and robust; mypoint estimate was ‹1:2, implying that currency union is associated with atripling (since exp(1.2)ˇ3) of trade.In his paper in this issue, Volker Nitsch provides three pieces of value-added.First he finds and corrects a number of data errors in my original data set. Second,he shows that adding extra controls to my empirical setup, disaggregating bycurrency unions, and adjusting for missing data affects the results. He concludesthat the effect of currency union on trade is smaller than my original estimates,has not been reliably estimated, and may be zero.
Raising the Bar: Ethics Education for Quality Teachers

Since the 1970s an 'ethics boom' has occurred to counter the disappearance of ethics education from tertiary institutions. This 'boom' appears to be absent from teacher education programs in Australia and the United States. Given persistent calls to enhance teacher quality this is problematic because quality teaching is inexorably linked to teachers' beliefs, values and professional ethics. This case study, conducted in a regional Australian university, was designed to document examples of ethical dilemmas faced by pre- service and practising teachers, to explore pre-service teachers' perceptions of ethics education and to examine the BEd course curriculum for ethics subjects across the four-year degree course. Results highlight a need for teacher training courses to include ethical philosophy units. This represents a sustainable way to support professional practice and enhance teacher quality, by preparing and equipping teachers with techniques to explore and teach complex ethical issues in the classroom. Quality teachers are considered to be those individuals whose pedagogy is grounded in values and beliefs that lead to caring, positive teacher-student relationships, embedded in trust and high standards of professional ethics. In a context of focused attention upon professional ethics and values education, this case study was conducted to: a) explore professional ethical dilemmas encountered by pre-service and practising teachers, b) explore pre-service teachers' perceptions of the ethics education delivered during their bachelor of education course and c) examine the ethics content of a bachelor of education degree at an Australian university.
The build-up of haloes within Press–Schechter theory

Modelling the build-up of haloes is important for linking the formation of galaxies with cosmological models. A simple model of halo growth is provided by Press–Schechter (PS) theory, where the initial field of density fluctuations is smoothed using spherically symmetric filters centred on a given position to obtain information about the likelihood of later collapse on varying scales. In this paper the predicted halo mass growth is compared for three filter shapes: Gaussian, top-hat and sharp k-space. Preliminary work is also presented analysing the build-up of haloes within numerical simulations using a friends-of-friends group finder. The best-fit to the simulation mass function was obtained using PS theory with a top-hat filter. By comparing both the backwards conditional mass function, which gives the distribution of halo progenitors, and the distribution of halo mergers in time, the build-up of haloes in the simulations is shown to be better fitted by PS theory with a sharp k-space filter. This strengthens previous work, which also found the build-up of haloes in simulations to be well matched to PS theory with a sharp k-space filter by providing a direct comparison of different filters and by extending the statistical tools used to analyse halo mass growth. The usefulness of this work is illustrated by showing that the cosmological evolution in the proportion of haloes that have undergone recent merger is predicted to be independent of mass and power spectrum and to only depend upon cosmology. Recent results from observations of field galaxies are shown to match the evolution expected, but are not sufficiently accurate to distinguish usefully between cosmological parameters.
Part-based PCA for facial feature extraction and classification

With the latest advances in the fields of computer vision, image processing and pattern recognition, facial expression recognition is becoming more and more feasible for human computer interaction in Virtual Environments (VEs). In order to achieve subject-independent facial feature extraction and classification, we present part-based PCA (Principal Component Analysis) for facial feature extraction and apply a modified PCA reconstruction method for expression classification. Part-based PCA is employed to minimize the influence of individual differences which hinder facial expression recognition. For the purpose of obtaining part-based PCA, a novel feature detection and extraction approach based on multi-step integral projection is proposed. The features can be automatically detected and located by multi-step integral projection curves without being manually picked and PCA is applied in the detected area instead of the whole face. To solve the problem that the features extracted from PCA are not the best features suitable for classification, we propose a modified PCA reconstruction method. We divide the training set into 7 classes and carry out PCA reconstruction on each class independently. We can identify the expression class by measuring the similarity between the input image and the reconstructed image. Experiments demonstrate that when tested on the JAFFE database, the part-based PCA outperforms traditional PCA of higher recognition rate.
Wrist Tenosynovitis due to Mycobacterium bovis Infection: Case Series and Review of the Literature

Summary: Tuberculosis infections are still one of the most important public health problems among developing countries. Musculoskeletal involvement represents 10–15% of all extrapulmonary cases. Tuberculosis tenosynovitis is usually misdiagnosed as nonspecific tenosynovitis. To avoid misdiagnosis and mistreatment, it is important to be alert for mycobacterial infections. This article presents 3 patients with wrist tenosynovitis, which was caused by Mycobacterium bovis infection. The article also includes review of the literature.
Cost, Output, and Scale Economies in the Life and Health Insurance Industry

The existence or lack of scale economies in the life and health insurance industry is reinvestigated. In the process, numerous output proxies and several cost functional forms are examined in order to select the best-fitting regression models. Also operating and loss costs of insurers are separately analyzed to measure their respective size efficiencies. The results of the study show 1) profound size economics in operating costs with little evidence of scale diseconomies for large insurers, and 2) a weak evidence of size inefficiency for large insureres in terms of loss costs.
Media made criminality: The representation of crime in the mass media

This is the substantially updated and revised third edition of the highly acclaimed Handbook of Criminology. It is the most comprehensible and authoritative single volume guide to the subject; combining masterly reviews of all the key topics with extensive references to aid further research. In addition to the history of the discipline and reviews of different theoretical perspectives, the book provides up-to-date reviews of such diverse topics as crime statistics, the criminal justice process, race and gender and the media and crime. It is essential reading for all teachers and students of criminology and an indispensable source book for professionals.
Unexpectedly high early prevalence of anaemia in 6-month-old breast-fed infants in rural Bangladesh

Abstract Objective To determine the prevalence of anaemia and maternal and infant factors associated with Hb values in infants at 6 months of age in rural Bangladesh. Design Infants (born to mothers supplemented with Fe–folic acid from mid-pregnancy) were visited at birth and 6 months of age. Mothers’ anthropometric status, and infants’ birth weight, gestational age at birth, weight and Hb concentration at 6 months were measured. Household socio-economic and demographic data, infant feeding practices and health status were collected using a pre-tested structured questionnaire. Setting Rural Bangladesh. Subjects Four hundred and two infants. Results For the total cohort (n 402), the range of anaemia prevalence values was from 30·6 % using a cut-off value of Hb < 95 g/l to 71·9 % using a value of Hb < 110 g/l. Birth weight and month of birth were the only factors positively associated with infant Hb in a linear regression model (P = 0·008 and 0·011, respectively). Conclusions There was an unexpectedly high prevalence of anaemia in infants at 6 months of age, before the assumed period of vulnerability. Hb at this age tended to be higher in those with higher birth weight. We also found a season effect on Hb, as it tended to be higher as the study progressed. The high prevalence of anaemia at such an early age needs to be addressed to minimize the disease’s long-term consequences.
The Association of Rapid Temporal Perception With Orthographic and Phonological Processing in Children and Adults With Reading Impairment

Adults and children with reading impairment (N = 67) were administered a rapid auditory task, a rapid visual task, and a battery of orthographic and phonological tasks. Our results support a differential development model of reading disability that argues that deficits in rapid auditory ability in children are primarily associated with problems in phonological processing, whereas deficits in rapid visual ability in children are primarily associated with problems in orthographic processing (Farmer & Klein, 1995). In contrast to the children, the adults showed a strong relation between rapid auditory ability and both orthographic and phonological processing. These results suggest that continued deficits in auditory ability may have a pervasive and negative impact on word processing in general. In addition, adults did not exhibit a relation between rapid visual ability and orthographic-processing problems. Orthographic-processing deficits may result from a reading delay condition that can be overcome with increased reading exposure (Harm & Seidenberg, 1999).
Strong species-environment feedback shapes plant community assembly along environmental gradients

An aim of community ecology is to understand the patterns of competing species assembly along environmental gradients. All species interact with their environments. However, theories of community assembly have seldom taken into account the effects of species that are able to engineer the environment. In this modeling study, we integrate the species' engineering trait together with processes of immigration and local dispersal into a theory of community assembly. We quantify the species' engineering trait as the degree to which it can move the local environment away from its baseline state towards the optimum state of the species (species-environment feedback). We find that, in the presence of immigration from a regional pool, strong feedback can increase local species richness; however, in the absence of continual immigration, species richness is a declining function of the strength of species-environment feedback. This shift from a negative effect of engineering strength on species richness to a positive effect, as immigration rate increases, is clearer when there is spatial heterogeneity in the form of a gradient in environmental conditions than when the environment is homogeneous or it is randomly heterogeneous. Increasing the scale over which local dispersal occurs can facilitate species richness when there is no species-environment feedback or when the feedback is weak. However, increases in the spatial scale of dispersal can reduce species richness when the species-environment feedback is strong. These results expand the theoretical basis for understanding the effects of the strength of species-environment feedback on community assembly.
Fixational eye movements during viewing of dynamic natural scenes

Even during periods of fixation our eyes undergo small amplitude movements. These movements are thought to be essential to the visual system because neural responses rapidly fade when images are stabilized on the retina. The considerable recent interest in fixational eye movements (FEMs) has thus far concentrated on idealized experimental conditions with artificial stimuli and restrained head movements, which are not necessarily a suitable model for natural vision. Natural dynamic stimuli, such as movies, offer the potential to move beyond restrictive experimental settings to probe the visual system with greater ecological validity. Here, we study FEMs recorded in humans during the unconstrained viewing of a dynamic and realistic visual environment, revealing that drift trajectories exhibit the properties of a random walk with memory. Drifts are correlated at short time scales such that the gaze position diverges from the initial fixation more quickly than would be expected for an uncorrelated random walk. We propose a simple model based on the premise that the eye tends to avoid retracing its recent steps to prevent photoreceptor adaptation. The model reproduces key features of the observed dynamics and enables estimation of parameters from data. Our findings show that FEM correlations thought to prevent perceptual fading exist even in highly dynamic real-world conditions.
Determinants of the Location of Foreign Firms in P olish Regions: Does Firm Size Matter?

The goal of this paper is to study empirically the determinants of foreign firms' location in Polish regions with a special focus on the role of firm size. To derive testable hypotheses on the firm location choice an analytical framework that combines the firm heterogeneity and the new economic geography literatures is used. In this framework, agglomeration economies, technical infrastructure, and labour market characteristics may affect location decisions of foreign investors. The hypotheses derived from the theory are validated empirically using the regional dataset at NUTS 2 level of spatial aggregation for the period 1999–2010. The empirical evidence confirms the existence of firm heterogeneity with respect to the determinants of firm location choice.
The State of Collective Bargaining and Worker Representation in Germany: The Erosion Continues

This paper investigates trends in collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany from 2000 to 2008. It seeks to update and widen earlier analyses pointing to a decline in collective bargaining, while providing more information on the dual system as a whole. Using data from the IAB Employment Panel and the German Employment Register, we report evidence of a systematic and continuing erosion of the dual system. Not unnaturally the decline is led by developments in western Germany. Arguably, the path of erosion will continue until rough and ready convergence is reached with eastern Germany. Expressed differently, if the process of decentralization underpinning these developments once was ‘regulated’ it no longer appears to be so.