Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Burden of Invasive Pneumococcal Disease in Children Aged 1 Month to 12 Years Living in South Asia: A Systematic Review

Objective The primary objective was to estimate the burden of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in children aged 1 month to 12 years in South Asian countries. Methods We searched three electronic databases (PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library) using a comprehensive search strategy, we manually searched published databases (Index Medicus and Current Contents) and we also searched the bibliographies of the included studies and retrieved reviews. The searches were current through June 2013. Eligible studies (community-based and hospital-based) were pooled and a separate analysis for India was also completed. A meta-regression analysis and heterogeneity analysis were performed. The protocol was registered with PROSPERO registration number CRD42013004483. Results A total of 22 studies surveying 36,714 children were included in the systematic review. Hospital-based prospective studies from South Asia showed that 3.57% of children had IPD, and 15% of all bacterial pneumonia cases were due to Streptococcus pneumoniae. Indian studies showed that the incidence of IPD was 10.58% in children admitted to hospitals with suspected invasive bacterial diseases, and 24% of all bacterial pneumonia cases were due to S. pneumonia. Population-based studies from South Asian countries showed that 12.8% of confirmed invasive bacterial diseases were caused by S. pneumonia whereas retrospective hospital-based studies showed that 28% of invasive bacterial diseases were due to S. pneumoniae. Meta-regression showed that there was a significant influence of the antigen testing method for diagnosing IPD on IPD prevalence. Conclusion S. pneumoniae is responsible for a substantial bacterial disease burden in children of South Asian countries including India despite the presence of high heterogeneity in this meta-analysis. Treatment guidelines must be formulated, and preventive measures like vaccines must also be considered.
Analyzing Website privacy requirements using a privacy goal taxonomy

Privacy has recently become a prominent issue in the context of electronic commerce websites. Increasingly, Privacy policies posted on such websites are receiving considerable attention from the government and consumers. We have used goal-mining, to extract pre-requirements goals from post-requirements text artifacts, as a technique for analyzing privacy policies. The identified goals are useful for analyzing implicit internal conflicts within privacy policies and conflicts with the corresponding websites and their manner of operation. These goals can be used to reconstruct the implicit requirements met by the privacy policies. This paper interrelates privacy policy and requirements for websites; it introduces a privacy goal taxonomy and reports the analysis of 23 Internet privacy policies for companies in three health care industries: pharmaceutical, health insurance and online drugstores. The evaluated taxonomy provides a valuable framework for requirements engineering practitioners, policy makers and regulatory bodies, and also benefits website users.
An Inhibitor of FtsZ with Potent and Selective Anti-Staphylococcal Activity

FtsZ is an essential bacterial guanosine triphosphatase and homolog of mammalian β-tubulin that polymerizes and assembles into a ring to initiate cell division. We have created a class of small synthetic antibacterials, exemplified by PC190723, which inhibits FtsZ and prevents cell division. PC190723 has potent and selective in vitro bactericidal activity against staphylococci, including methicillin- and multi-drug–resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The putative inhibitor-binding site of PC190723 was mapped to a region of FtsZ that is analogous to the Taxol-binding site of tubulin. PC190723 was efficacious in an in vivo model of infection, curing mice infected with a lethal dose of S. aureus. The data validate FtsZ as a target for antibacterial intervention and identify PC190723 as suitable for optimization into a new anti-staphylococcal therapy.
A Unified Detail-Preserving Liquid Simulation by Two-Phase Lattice Boltzmann Modeling

Traditional methods in graphics to simulate liquid-air dynamics under different scenarios usually employ separate approaches with sophisticated interface tracking/reconstruction techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel unified approach which is easy and effective to produce a variety of liquid-air interface phenomena. These phenomena, such as complex surface splashes, bubble interactions, as well as surface tension effects, can co-exist in one single simulation, and are created within the same computational framework. Such a framework is unique in that it is free from any complicated interface tracking/reconstruction procedures. Our approach is developed from the two-phase lattice Boltzmann method with the mean field model, which provides a unified framework for interface dynamics but is numerically unstable under turbulent conditions. Considering the drawbacks of the existing approaches, we propose techniques to suppress oscillations for significant stability enhancement, as well as derive a new subgrid-scale model to further improve stability, faithfully preserving liquid-air interface details without excessive diffusion by taking into account the density variation. The whole framework is highly parallel, enabling very efficient implementation. Comparisons with the related approaches show superiority on stable simulations with detail preservation and multiphase phenomena simultaneously involved. A set of animation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Role of Hec1 in Spindle Checkpoint Signaling and Kinetochore Recruitment of Mad1/Mad2

The spindle checkpoint delays sister chromatid separation until all chromosomes have undergone bipolar spindle attachment. Checkpoint failure may result in chromosome mis-segregation and may contribute to tumorigenesis. We showed that the human protein Hec1 was required for the recruitment of Mps1 kinase and Mad1/Mad2 complexes to kinetochores. Depletion of Hec1 impaired chromosome congression and caused persistent activation of the spindle checkpoint, indicating that high steady-state levels of Mad1/Mad2 complexes at kinetochores were not essential for checkpoint signaling. Simultaneous depletion of Hec1 and Mad2 caused catastrophic mitotic exit, making Hec1 an attractive target for the selective elimination of spindle checkpoint–deficient cells.
Scrapworthy Lives: A Cognitive Sociological Analysis of a Modern Narrative Form

Over the past 20 years, scrapbooking has become immensely popular in America. This dissertation is the study of scrapworthy lives, that is, how lives become structured by scrapbooking and how people show others that their own life and the lives of their loves ones are value—or scrapworthy. I conducted in-depth interviews with 38 scrapbookers, 11 scrapbook industry workers, and 10 family and friends of scrapbookers. I also used photo-elicitation interviewing techniques with both the scrapbookers and the family members and friends of 10 scrapbookers to examine a selection of scrapbook pages the respondents had completed. I used grounded theory methods to analyze my data, providing a more thorough understanding of
Inducing Deterministic Prolog Parsers from Treebanks: A Machine Learning Approach

This paper presents a method for constructing deterministic Prolog parsers from corpora of parsed sentences. Our approach uses recent machine learning methods for inducing Prolog rules from examples (inductive logic programming). We discuss several advantages of this method compared to recent statistical methods and present results on learning complete parsers from portions of the ATIS corpus.
Multitemporal Soil Moisture Retrieval from Three-Day Repeat ERS/SAR Data

The Sentinel-1 mission will offer the opportunity to obtain C-band radar data characterized by short revisit time, thus allowing the generation of frequent soil moisture maps through the application of multitemporal retrieval algorithms. Exploiting the availability of some archived ERS SAR data with a short revisit time, this paper compares the estimates obtained by applying a multitemporal algorithm, developed in a previous work, to moisture provided by a land surface model and in situ data, as well as to soil moisture products derived from low resolution satellite data (ASCAT and SMOS). Results indicate the multitemporal algorithm produces soil moisture estimates that agree with model and in situ data at watershed scale. At finer scale, SAR presents better performances than other satellite instruments when compared to in situ data, although the correlation is not very high.
Effect of citrate on the activities of 6-phosphofructokinase from nervous and muscle tissues from different animals and its relationships to the regulation of glycolysis.

1. Citrate inhibits the activities of phosphofructokinase from muscles and nervous tissues from different animals across the Animal Kingdom except for the insects. The enzymes from the flight muscle of nine different insects and the cerebral ganglion of the locust were investigated: no inhibition by citrate was observed. Inhibition was observed with the enzymes from both aerobic (e.g. pectoral muscle of pigeon) and anaerobic (e.g. fish muscle, pectoral muscle of the game birds) muscles. It is suggested that this inhibition is of physiological importance in decreasing the rate of glucose utilization in skeletal muscle of animals during starvation and/or prolonged exercise. 2. The rates of glucose utilization by the sartorius and gastrocnemius muscles of the frog were markedly decreased by ketone bodies. The latter elevated the glucose 6-phosphate and citrate contents of the gastrocnemius muscle, indicating that citrate inhibition of phosphofructokinase could be, in part, responsible for the decreased rate of glycolysis. 3. These findings provide evidence that the concept of the glucose-fatty acid-ketone-body cycle involves both aerobic and anaerobic skeletal muscle and nervous tissue from a wide range of animals except the insects. In the latter the concept of the cycle may not be applicable.
Sagittal MR of multiple sclerosis in the spinal cord: fast versus conventional spin-echo imaging.

PURPOSE We compared conventional spin-echo (CSE) with fast spin-echo (FSE) dual-echo MR images to determine which of these sequences was better able to depict spinal cord abnormalities in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). METHODS CSE and FSE dual-echo MR images were obtained in 37 patients with MS and in six healthy control subjects, all of whom were examined on a 1.0-T MR unit with a phased-array coil and cardiac triggering. Two blinded interpreters graded the MR studies, first separately and then by consensus. Images were scored for presence of artifacts, number of focal lesions, and presence of a diffuse increase in signal intensity. RESULTS No abnormalities were seen in the volunteers. The CSE sequences were significantly less hindered by MR imaging artifacts than were the FSE sequences. Interobserver agreement was slightly higher for the CSE than the FSE sequences. After reaching a consensus, the observers found that both CSE and FSE techniques enabled detection of approximately the same number of focal lesions; however, in three patients, small single lesions seen on the CSE images were missed on the FSE images. Also, depiction of a diffuse increase in signal intensity was better on the CSE images. As a result, more patients had abnormal findings on the CSE sequences than on the FSE sequences (35 versus 31). CONCLUSION Cardiac-triggered dual-echo FSE sequences are almost as good as CSE sequences for depicting spinal MS lesions. Therefore, in cases of established spinal MS, FSE techniques may be as effective as CSE techniques. Because sensitivity for subtle abnormalities is lower with FSE imaging, CSE remains the preferred technique for patients with suspected MS of the spinal cord.
Is Peer Review Training Effective in Iranian EFL Students' Revision?

This study aims to investigate the effect of peer review training on the Iranian EFL students’ subsequent revision in an advanced writing class in Larestan Islamic Azad University. After 12 weeks class demonstration, teacher-reviewer conferences with 20 male and female students, the students’ first drafts, revisions, and reviewers’ comments were collected and compared the comments before and after peer review training. The findings revealed that the students incorporated significantly more comments into subsequent revisions after peer review training. Therefore, peer review training had a positive effect on the students’ subsequent revisions.
Effect of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of Function in Patients with Stroke

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the upper limb of function of patients with post-stroke hemiplegia. [Subjects] Twenty subjects were randomly allocated to either the upper tDCS group or the functional training group, with 10 subjects in each group. [Methods] The two groups received functional training for thirty minutes a day, five days a week for four weeks. The tDCS group additionally received tDCS for 20 minutes. The outcome was assessed by the Box and Block test (BBT), grip strength, and the Fugl-Meyer assessment (FMA). [Results] There were significant improvements between pre- and post- intervention in both groups, in the BBT, grip strength, and the upper limb and lower lims sub-items of the FMA. The tDCS group showed significantly greater improvements than the control group in the BBT, and upper limb and lower limb sub-items of the FMA. [Conclusion] These findings suggest that tDCS may be more beneficial than functional training for improving the upper and lower limb functions of chronic stroke patients.
Do measures of body fat distribution provide information on the risk of type 2 diabetes in addition to measures of general obesity? Comparison of anthropometric predictors of type 2 diabetes in Pima Indians.

OBJECTIVE To investigate which anthropometric measurements of obesity best predict type 2 diabetes in a population of Pima Indians and whether additional information on diabetes risk could be obtained by combining measures of general obesity with measures of body fat distribution. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We conducted a prospective study of 624 men and 990 nonpregnant women >18 years of age without diabetes. Subjects were followed a mean of 5.25 years for the development of type 2 diabetes (using 1997 American Diabetes Association criteria). RESULTS A total of 322 new cases of type 2 diabetes (107 men and 215 women) were diagnosed during follow-up. Baseline obesity measurements were highly correlated and predicted diabetes in proportional hazards models adjusted for age. BMI had the highest hazard ratio in men and women, with age-adjusted hazard ratios per SD of 1.73 (95% CI 1.44-2.07) and 1.67 (1.45-1.91), respectively. According to receiver-operating characteristic analysis, BMI and waist-to-height ratio were the best predictors of diabetes in men, while in women BMI, waist-to-height ratio, waist circumference, and waist-to-thigh ratio were the best predictors. The predictive abilities of models containing BMI were not significantly improved by including other measures of general obesity or measures of the body fat distribution. CONCLUSIONS Throughout its range, BMI was an excellent predictor of type 2 diabetes risk in Pima Indians and was not significantly improved by combining it with other measures of general adiposity or body fat distribution.
[1‐13C] glucose MRS in chronic hepatic encephalopathy in man

[1‐13C]‐labeled glucose was infused intravenously in a single dose of 0.2 g/kg body weight over 15 min in six patients with chronic hepatic encephalopathy, and three controls. Serial 13C MR spectra of the brain were acquired. Patients exhibited the following characteristics relative to normal controls: 1) Cerebral glutamine concentration was increased (12.6 ± 3.8 vs. 6.5 ± 1.9 mmol/kg, P < 0.006) and glutamate was reduced (8.2 ± 1.0 vs. 9.9 ± 0.6 mmol/kg, P < 0.02). 2) 13C incorporation into glutamate C4 and C2 positions was reduced in patients (80 min after start of infusion C4: 0.43 ± 0.09 vs. 0.84 ± 0.15 mmol/kg, P < 0.001; C2: 0.20 ± 0.03 vs. 0.45 ± 0.07 mmol/kg, P < 0.0001). 3) 13C incorporation into bicarbonate was delayed (90 ± 21 vs. 40 ± 10 min, P < 0.003), and the time interval between detection of glutamate C4 and C2 labeling was longer in patients (22 ± 8 vs. 12 ± 3 min, P < 0.03). 4) Glutamate C2 turnover time was reduced in chronic hepatic encephalopathy (17.1 ± 6.8 vs. 49.6 ± 8.7 min, P < 0.0002). 5) 13C accumulation into glutamine C2 relative to its substrate glutamate C2 increased progressively with the severity of clinical symptoms (r = 0.96, P < 0.01). These data indicate disturbed neurotransmitter glutamate/glutamine cycling and reduced glucose oxidation in chronic hepatic encephalopathy. [1‐13C] glucose MRS provides novel insights into disease progression and the pathophysiology of chronic hepatic encephalopathy. Magn Reson Med 45:981–993, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Molecular Responses to Small Regulating Molecules against Huanglongbing Disease

Huanglongbing (HLB; citrus greening) is the most devastating disease of citrus worldwide. No cure is yet available for this disease and infected trees generally decline after several months. Disease management depends on early detection of symptoms and chemical control of insect vectors. In this work, different combinations of organic compounds were tested for the ability to modulate citrus molecular responses to HLB disease beneficially. Three small-molecule regulating compounds were tested: 1) L-arginine, 2) 6-benzyl-adenine combined with gibberellins, and 3) sucrose combined with atrazine. Each treatment contained K-phite mineral solution and was tested at two different concentrations. Two trials were conducted: one in the greenhouse and the other in the orchard. In the greenhouse study, responses of 42 key genes involved in sugar and starch metabolism, hormone-related pathways, biotic stress responses, and secondary metabolism in treated and untreated mature leaves were analyzed. TGA5 was significantly induced by arginine. Benzyladenine and gibberellins enhanced two important genes involved in biotic stress responses: WRKY54 and WRKY59. Sucrose combined with atrazine mainly upregulated key genes involved in carbohydrate metabolism such as sucrose-phosphate synthase, sucrose synthase, starch synthase, and α-amylase. Atrazine also affected expression of some key genes involved in systemic acquired resistance such as EDS1, TGA6, WRKY33, and MYC2. Several treatments upregulated HSP82, which might help protect protein folding and integrity. A subset of key genes was chosen as biomarkers for molecular responses to treatments under field conditions. GPT2 was downregulated by all small-molecule treatments. Arginine-induced genes involved in systemic acquired resistance included PR1, WRKY70, and EDS1. These molecular data encourage long-term application of treatments that combine these regulating molecules in field trials.
Can known risk factors explain racial differences in the occurrence of bacterial vaginosis?

BACKGROUND Black women are more likely to have bacterial vaginosis (BV) than are non-Hispanic white women. We examined whether this disparity can be explained by racial differences in known BV risk factors. METHODS Nine hundred black and 235 white women were enrolled from five US sites. At baseline, structured interviews were conducted and vaginal swabs self-collected for Gram-stain and culture. RESULTS Black women were more likely than white women to have BV/intermediate vaginal flora. They also were more likely to be older, have lower educational attainment and family incomes, have a history of a sexually transmitted disease, and douche. After adjustment for demographic and lifestyle factors, blacks remained at elevated risk for BV/intermediate flora (OR 2.2, 95% CI 1.5-3.1). Blacks also were more likely to have specific BV-related vaginal microflora, as well as gonococcal or chlamydial cervicitis (OR 2.2, 95% CI 1.2-3.8) after adjustment for known BV risk factors. CONCLUSION Risk factor differences did not explain the observed racial disparity in the occurrence of BV, BV-related microflora, or gonococcal or chlamydial cervicitis. These findings highlight our limited understanding of the factors accounting for the occurrence of bacterial vaginosis and cervicitis among black and white women.
Enhanced bioactive myocardial transforming growth factor-β in advanced human heart failure.

BACKGROUND Transforming growth factor (TGF)-β activation is known to play a central role in progressive ventricular remodeling in advanced heart failure in animal models, but there has been no direct evidence of increased TGF-β activity in the myocardium of patients with advanced human heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS: Using a recently developed bioassay that measures TGF-β bioactivity rather than TGF-β abundance, we measured bioactive TGF-β in human myocardium from control non-failing donors (NF), and patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy (ICM) and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). Both free and total soluble TGF-β were significantly increased in ICM and DCM compared with NF. Free TGF-β had an excellent correlation with phosphorylated Smad2 (R(2)=0.55, P<0.0001), a downstream marker of TGF-β signaling. Collagen type I and type III were significantly upregulated in DCM compared with NF, consistent with histological evidence of myocardial fibrosis. Expression of fibulin-2, a positive modulator of TGF-β, was significantly increased in DCM compared with NF, and the free TGF-β level was correlated with fibulin-2 mRNA (R(2)=0.24, P<0.006). CONCLUSIONS Although both free and total soluble TGF-β are significantly increased in ICM and DCM compared with NF, the superior correlation of free TGF-β with downstream signaling suggests that this is the most functionally relevant form. The present findings suggest that sustained TGF-β activation in both ICM and DCM contributes to excess myocardial fibrosis.
Transmitting electric energy through a metal wall by acoustic waves using piezoelectric transducers

The feasibility of transmitting electric energy through a metal wall by propagating acoustic waves using piezoelectric transducers is examined by studying the efficiency of power transmission and its dependence upon the relevant system parameters for a simplified system consisting of an elastic plate sandwiched by two piezoelectric layers. One of these layers models the driving transducer for generating acoustic wave, and the other layer models the receiving transducer for converting the acoustic energy into electric energy to power a load circuit. The output voltage, the output power, and the efficiency of this system are expressed as explicit functions of the system parameters. A numerical example is included to illustrate the dependence of the system performance upon the physical and geometrical parameters.