Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Components of Perceived Risk: A Reconciliation of Previous Findings

People's perceptions of the risk associated with a product, in large measure, determines the degree of caution they will exhibit with regard to that product. Previous attempts to examine risk and to determine what factors are important in the composition of risk have produced disparate findings. Specifically, some studies have demonstrated that likelihood of injury plays an important role in risk perceptions (e.g., Slovic, Fischhoff & Lichtenstein, 1980), and other research shows that severity of potential injury plays the foremost role (e.g., Wogalter, Desaulniers & Brelsford, 1986; 1987). It was not until risk was conceived of in multidimensional terms that a coherent picture of risk seemed possible. The present study uses principal components analysis (PCA) to see if stable multidimensional solutions could be extracted from two qualitatively (and significandy) different item lists (as demonstrated by Young, Wogalter & Brelsford, 1992). Two sets of subjects rated the two different item lists on the same rating questions. The results were collapsed across subjects and submitted to a PCA. The solutions that emerged from the two item lists were strikingly similar. Each produced three components, with similar variable loadings and magnitudes. The results demonstrate clearly that risk, conceived of multidimensionally, is not affected by the products, technologies or activities under consideration. Rather, risk is a construct that could be tapped in order to give people a proper appreciation of the hazards associated with products and technologies that they encounter every day.
JC Virus Infection of the Brain

SUMMARY: Since its initial description, there have been significant changes in the epidemiology, pathogenesis, and clinical and imaging manifestations of JCV infection of brain. The most common clinical manifestation is PML. Other recently described CNS manifestations are JCE, JCVGCN, and JCM. Although AIDS is the most common predisposing factor for JCV reactivation, there is increasing incidence of brain manifestations of JCV reactivation in non-HIV settings, including different rheumatologic, hematologic, and oncologic conditions; monoclonal antibody therapy; transplant recipients; primary immunodeficiency syndromes; and even in patients without any recognizable immune deficiency. IRIS may develop secondary to restoration of immunity in HIV-positive patients with PML receiving antiretroviral therapy. This is of profound clinical significance and needs to be diagnosed promptly. Imaging plays a crucial role in the diagnosis of the disease, monitoring of treatment response, identifying disease progression, and predicting prognosis. In this article, current understanding of the epidemiology, pathogenesis, clinical presentations, and all aspects of imaging of JCV infection of the brain have been comprehensively reviewed.
A School-Based Cross-Sectional Survey of Adverse Events following Co-Administration of Albendazole and Praziquantel for Preventive Chemotherapy against Urogenital Schistosomiasis and Soil-Transmitted Helminthiasis in Kwale County, Kenya

Background Soil-transmitted helminths and schistosomiasis are mostly prevalent in developing countries due to poor sanitation and lack of adequate clean water. School-age children tend to be the target of chemotherapy-based control programmes because they carry the heaviest worm and egg burdens. The present study examines adverse events (AEs) experienced following co-administration of albendazole and praziquantel to school-age children in a rural area in Kwale County, Kenya. Methods Children were treated with single doses of albendazole and praziquantel tablets and then interviewed using a questionnaire for post treatment AEs. Results Overall, 752 children, 47.6% boys, participated in the study. Their median (interquartile range) age was 12.0 (10.0–14.0) years. A total of 190 (25.3%) children reportedly experienced at least one AE. In total, 239 cases of AEs were reported with the most frequent being abdominal pains (46.3%), dizziness (33.2%) and nausea (21.1%). Majority of the reported AEs (80.8%) resolved themselves while 12.1% and 6.3% were countered by, respectively, self-medication and visiting a nearby health facility. More girls (60.5%) than boys (39.5%) reported AEs (P = 0.027). Conclusions The AEs were mild and transient, and were no worse than those expected following monotherapy. The current study adds to the evidence base that dual administration of albendazole and praziquantel in school-based mass drug administration is safe with only mild adverse events noted.
A randomized trial of integrated outpatient treatment for medically ill alcoholic men.

BACKGROUND Medically ill alcoholics often do not respond to conventional alcoholism treatment or decline physician referrals. Integrated outpatient treatment (IOT), a new treatment specifically designed for this population, combines comprehensive medical care with alcoholism interventions. OBJECTIVE To compare the efficacy of IOT with that of standard treatment approaches. METHODS One hundred five male veterans with severe medical complications caused by alcoholism and recent drinking were randomly assigned to receive IOT or referral to standard alcoholism and medical treatment and were evaluated over 2 years. Integrated outpatient treatment patients received medical care and alcoholism interventions once or twice monthly. Patients in the control group were referred for alcoholism treatment, but few accepted. However, patients in the control group did engage in outpatient medical care. RESULTS At baseline, the mean +/- SD age of the control group was 57.2 + 10.0 years, compared with 52.8 +/- 11.5 years in the IOT group (P= .04). The groups were well matched in other respects. The mean +/- SD number of visits over 2 years for the IOT patients was 42.2 +/- 29.1, compared with 17.4 +/- 15.6 for the control patients (P<.001); the frequency of hospital use was similar in both groups. After 2 years, 28 (74%) of 38 surviving IOT patients and 17 (47%) of 36 control patients were abstinent (P=.02). Nearly twice as many control patients (30% [n = 16]) as IOT patients (18% [n= 9]) died, but the results of Cox survival analysis were not significant. There were no differences in symptoms of alcohol dependence, quality of life, or life problems. The incremental cost of IOT was approximately $1100 per patient per year. CONCLUSIONS Standard medical care alone was surprisingly effective in inducing abstinence in surviving medically ill alcoholics. Integrated outpatient treatment significantly increased both engagement and abstinence for a modest annual cost. Further refinement and testing of IOT is indicated.
Autopsy Prevalence of Tuberculosis and Other Potentially Treatable Infections among Adults with Advanced HIV Enrolled in Out-Patient Care in South Africa

Background Early mortality among HIV-positive adults starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) remains high in resource-limited settings, with tuberculosis (TB) the leading cause of death. However, current methods to estimate TB-related deaths are inadequate and most autopsy studies do not adequately represent those attending primary health clinics (PHCs). This study aimed to determine the autopsy prevalence of TB and other infections in adults enrolled at South African PHCs in the context of a pragmatic trial of empiric TB treatment (“TB Fast Track”). Methods and Findings Adults with CD4 ≤150 cells/μL, not on ART or TB treatment, were enrolled to TB Fast Track and followed up for at least six months. Minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) was conducted as soon as possible after death. Lungs, liver, and spleen were biopsied; blood, CSF, and urine aspirated; and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid obtained. Samples underwent mycobacterial, bacterial, and fungal culture; molecular testing (including Xpert® MTB/RIF); and histological examination. 34 MIAs were conducted: 18 (53%) decedents were female; median age was 39 (interquartile range 33–44) years; 25 (74%) deaths occurred in hospitals; median time from death to MIA was five (IQR 3–6) days. 16/34 (47%) had evidence of TB (14/16 [88%] with extrapulmonary disease; 6/16 [38%] not started on treatment antemortem); 23 (68%) had clinically important bacterial infections; four (12%) cryptococcal disease; three (9%) non-tuberculous mycobacterial disease; and two (6%) Pneumocystis pneumonia. Twenty decedents (59%) had evidence of two or more concurrent infections; 9/16 (56%) individuals with TB had evidence of bacterial disease and two (13%) cryptococcal disease. Conclusions TB, followed by bacterial infections, were the leading findings at autopsy among adults with advanced HIV enrolled from primary care clinics. To reduce mortality, strategies are needed to identify and direct those at highest risk into a structured pathway that includes expedited investigation and/or treatment of TB and other infections.
Learning the Gestalt Rule of Collinearity from Object Motion

The Gestalt principle of collinearity (and curvilinearity) is widely regarded as being mediated by the long-range connection structure in primary visual cortex. We review the neurophysiological and psychophysical literature to argue that these connections are developed from visual experience after birth, relying on coherent object motion. We then present a neural network model that learns these connections in an unsupervised Hebbian fashion with input from real camera sequences. The model uses spatiotemporal retinal filtering, which is very sensitive to changes in the visual input. We show that it is crucial for successful learning to use the correlation of the transient responses instead of the sustained ones. As a consequence, learning works best with video sequences of moving objects. The model addresses a special case of the fundamental question of what represents the necessary a priori knowledge the brain is equipped with at birth so that the self-organized process of structuring by experience can be successful.
Academic Integrity of Millennials: The Impact of Religion and Spirituality

The majority of traditional students enrolled at most colleges and universities are a part of what has been termed the Millennial Generation, also known as Generation Y, which typically describes the group of individuals born in most of the 1980s and 1990s. This cohort’s life has been shaped by corporate scandals, economic instability, and worldwide tragedies. Concurrently, business ethics has become a popular topic in the news within the last 2 decades due to the increase in the number of high-profile business scandals. Unfortunately, this trend has also been accompanied by an increased number of reported incidents of academic dishonesty at many major universities. Two underresearched factors that may be related to academic dishonesty and cheating behavior are religiosity and spirituality. This article attempts to shed more light on the relationship between religious beliefs and unethical behavior, with a focus on millennial college students. It is posited that religiosity and spirituality influence an individual’s attitudes, views, decisions, and ultimately behaviors. The results of this study indicate that religiosity but not spirituality is a predictor of students’ attitudes toward cheating and cheating behavior.
Unbeatable Set Consensus via Topological and Combinatorial Reasoning

The set consensus problem has played an important role in the study of distributed systems for over two decades. Indeed, the search for lower bounds and impossibility results for this problem spawned the topological approach to distributed computing, which has given rise to new techniques in the design and analysis of protocols. The design of efficient solutions to set consensus has also proven to be challenging. In the synchronous crash failure model, the literature contains a sequence of solutions to set consensus, each improving upon the previous ones. This paper presents an unbeatable protocol for nonuniform k-set consensus in the synchronous crash failure model. This is an efficient protocol whose decision times cannot be improved upon. Moreover, the description of our protocol is extremely succinct. Proving unbeatability of this protocol is a nontrivial challenge. We provide two proofs for its unbeatability: one is a subtle constructive combinatorial proof, and the other is a topological proof of a new style. These two proofs provide new insight into the connection between topological reasoning and combinatorial reasoning about protocols, which has long been a subject of interest. In particular, our topological proof reasons in a novel way about subcomplexes of the protocol complex, and sheds light on an open question posed by Guerraoui and Pochon (2009). Finally, using the machinery developed in the design of this unbeatable protocol, we propose a protocol for uniform k-set consensus that beats all known solutions by a large margin.
CyberKnife Stereotactic Ablative Radiotherapy for Lung Tumors

Stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR) has emerged as a promising treatment for early stage non-small cell lung cancer, particularly for patients unable to tolerate surgical resection. High rates of local tumor control have been demonstrated with acceptable toxicity and the practical advantage of a short course of treatment. The CyberKnife image-guided robotic radiosurgery system has unique technical characteristics that make it well suited for SABR of tumors that move with breathing, including lung tumors. We review the qualities of the CyberKnife platform for lung tumor SABR, and provide a summary of clinical data using this system specifically.
When bad things happen to good trees *

When the edges in a tree or rooted tree fail with a certain fixed probability, the (greedoid) rank may drop. We compute the expected rank as a polynomial in p and as a real number under the assumption of uniform distribution. We obtain several different expressions for this expected rank polynomial for both trees and rooted trees, one of which is especially simple in each case. We also prove two extremal theorems that determine both the largest and smallest values for the expected rank of a (rooted or unrooted) tree, and precisely when these extreme bounds are achieved. We conclude with directions for further study. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Graph Theory 37: 79–99, 2001
Design of an integrated system solution for urban vehicle localization

Recently, with the development of Intelligent Transport System (ITS), vehicular wireless communication technology has received more and more considerable attention. Many researchers have done a lot of work for developing a new kind of wireless network to build a vehicle to vehicle (V2V) wireless transmission platform, which increases various applications on ITS. In such networks, wireless communication devices transmit and receive message frames with each other in real time. On the other hand, vehicle localization and navigation are more and more important in modern peoples' everyday lives. Urban vehicle localization is still a challenge because it's useless to do positioning only by satellite positioning systems in traffic dense metropolitan areas. This paper describes a new integrated dynamic localization system. In this concept, signals with RSSI values among beacon nodes could be used to measure distances between each two nodes. Unknown nodes use the Distance — RSSI map to determine their locations in this region. Finally, a test bed is built to test the performance of the system.
Effects of Foot-in-the-Door, Cash Incentives, and Followups on Survey Response

Only followup contacts and monetary incentives have been shown to be consistently effective in improving survey response rates. Recently researchers have been encouraged by findings that compliance with a smaller request (i.e., a foot-in-the-door) increases the probability of subsequent compliance with a larger request and have sought to exploit the technique to increase survey responses. In the authors’ study, the “foot” had no effect on initial responses to a mail survey, but did affect responses to a followup request. A cash incentive worked significantly better than the “foot. ” No difference was found in the overall response rates whether the incentive was sent with the initial or followup mailing or with both mailings.
Dynamics Assessment of Advanced Single-Phase PLL Structures

Recently, several advanced phase-locked loop (PLL) techniques have been proposed for single-phase applications. Among these, the Park-PLL and the second-order-generalized-integrator-based PLL are very attractive, owing to their simple digital implementation, low computational burden, and desired performance under frequency-varying and harmonically distorted grid conditions. Despite the wide acceptance and use of these two advanced PLLs, no comprehensive design guidelines to fine-tune their parameters have been reported yet. Through a detailed mathematical analysis, it is shown that these two PLL structures are equivalent to each other, from the control point of view. Then, a linearized model is developed which is valid for both PLLs. The derived model significantly simplifies the stability analysis and the parameter design. To fine-tune the PLL parameters, a systematic design approach is suggested afterward, which guarantees a fast dynamic response, a high disturbance rejection ability, and a robust performance. Finally, the simulation and experimental results are presented to support the theoretical analysis.
Cubic and Hexagonal Liquid Crystals as Drug Delivery Systems

Lipids have been widely used as main constituents in various drug delivery systems, such as liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, nanostructured lipid carriers, and lipid-based lyotropic liquid crystals. Among them, lipid-based lyotropic liquid crystals have highly ordered, thermodynamically stable internal nanostructure, thereby offering the potential as a sustained drug release matrix. The intricate nanostructures of the cubic phase and hexagonal phase have been shown to provide diffusion controlled release of active pharmaceutical ingredients with a wide range of molecular weights and polarities. In addition, the biodegradable and biocompatible nature of lipids demonstrates the minimum toxicity and thus they are used for various routes of administration. Therefore, the research on lipid-based lyotropic liquid crystalline phases has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. This review will provide an overview of the lipids used to prepare cubic phase and hexagonal phase at physiological temperature, as well as the influencing factors on the phase transition of liquid crystals. In particular, the most current research progresses on cubic and hexagonal phases as drug delivery systems will be discussed.
Neural correlates of phonetic convergence and speech imitation

Speakers unconsciously tend to mimic their interlocutor's speech during communicative interaction. This study aims at examining the neural correlates of phonetic convergence and deliberate imitation, in order to explore whether imitation of phonetic features, deliberate, or unconscious, might reflect a sensory-motor recalibration process. Sixteen participants listened to vowels with pitch varying around the average pitch of their own voice, and then produced the identified vowels, while their speech was recorded and their brain activity was imaged using fMRI. Three degrees and types of imitation were compared (unconscious, deliberate, and inhibited) using a go-nogo paradigm, which enabled the comparison of brain activations during the whole imitation process, its active perception step, and its production. Speakers followed the pitch of voices they were exposed to, even unconsciously, without being instructed to do so. After being informed about this phenomenon, 14 participants were able to inhibit it, at least partially. The results of whole brain and ROI analyses support the fact that both deliberate and unconscious imitations are based on similar neural mechanisms and networks, involving regions of the dorsal stream, during both perception and production steps of the imitation process. While no significant difference in brain activation was found between unconscious and deliberate imitations, the degree of imitation, however, appears to be determined by processes occurring during the perception step. Four regions of the dorsal stream: bilateral auditory cortex, bilateral supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and left Wernicke's area, indeed showed an activity that correlated significantly with the degree of imitation during the perception step.
A Cooperative Low Power Mac Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Over the last decade cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks (WSN) received much attention. A lot of works have been done to propose a MAC layer that supports cooperative communication. However the impact of the association of a cooperative communication technique with a low power listening scheme was not studied in the literature. In this paper we propose CL-MAC, a Cooperative Low power mac protocol for WSNs. CL-MAC implements jointly Low Power Listening and cooperative communication. More precisely, we propose two variants of this protocol: a proactive version CL-MAC(P) and a reactive version CL-MAC(R). In order to evaluate the performances of the two proposed CL-MAC variants, we compare its to those of X-MAC. Simulation results proved that our protocol is able to enhance the use of the channel and to reach promising energy preservation especially in dense networks.
Forecasting Change Based on Employees' Work Engagement: Case Study (Civil Servants in Government Organizations in Sanandaj)

The study tries to identify predictors of change acceptance based on work engagement of civil servants in government organizations in Sanandaj. The population of the study is 4235 civil servants in government organizations in Sanandaj. The present study uses stratified random sampling method. Using Cochran's Formula, as many as 352 people were set as the sample size and the same number of questionnaires was filled by the participants. The study was descriptive co relational and was carried out through a descriptive method. A questionnaire was used for data collection to measure the level of work engagement, the questionnaire proposed by Schaufeli and Becker (2003) was used. To measure change acceptance in the respondents, the questionnaire proposed by Saeatchi, Kamkari and Askarian (2010) was designed according to the model by Kurt Lewin. After the validity and reliability of the questionnaires were confirmed, the questionnaires were distributed among the participants. Cronbach's alpha in work engagement and in change acceptance questionnaires were 0.84 and 0.82, respectively. After completing the questionnaire using SPSS20, Pearson correlation analysis and multivariate regression analysis were calculated and analyzed. The results of regression analysis showed that the dependent variable (change acceptance) was directly affected by liveliness and eagerness of the staff. This variable alone explains 44% of acceptance of change variance in this study. The independent variable is directly affected by eagerness variable. This variable alone accounts for 39% of accepting change variance in the population under study. The third determinant of accepting change is the employees' dedication variable. This variable alone amounts to 31% of change acceptance variance by staff in the population under study.