Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From “Primitive Migration” to “Climate Refugees”: The Curious Fate of the Natural Environment in Migration Studies

Beginning with Friedrich Ratzel, the founders of migration studies all mentioned the natural environment as an important determinant of human mobility. As migration theories grew in coherence and complexity over the course of the twentieth century, however, environmental considerations generally disappeared from explanations of displacement. They would reappear in a largely unconnected discourse stressing the threat of future waves of “environmental migrants” in the end-of-the-century context of climate change anxiety. This alarmist stance was heavily criticized by several migration scholars during the same period of time as a corpus of empirical studies emerged that reconsidered the possible impact of the environment on migration. The purpose of this article is to analyze the intellectual history of this swing of the pendulum. The first part examines the rationale for the temporary disappearance of the environment from migration studies, as this major shift has not yet been fully or systematically studied. The second part considers the renewal of interest in environmental migration. Finally, the last part argues that although a solid body of new research documents the contemporary migration–environment nexus, additional work is needed to reembed the environment more firmly within migration theories, taking into account the increased focus on the nature–society nexus, which has recently expanded in geography.
Conditional Cash Transfers to Increase Retention in PMTCT Care, Antiretroviral Adherence, and Postpartum Virological Suppression: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background:Novel strategies are needed to increase retention in prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) services. We have recently shown that small, incremental cash transfers conditional on attending clinic resulted in increased retention along the PMTCT cascade. However, whether women who receive incentives to attend clinic visits are as adherent to antiretrovirals (ARV) as those who do not was unknown. Objective:To determine whether HIV-infected women who received incentives to remain in care were as adherent to antiretroviral treatment and achieved the same level of viral suppression at 6 weeks postpartum as those who did not receive incentives but also remained in care. Methods:Newly diagnosed HIV-infected women at ⩽32 weeks gestational age were recruited at antenatal care clinics in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Women were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to an intervention or control group. The intervention group received compensation ($5, plus $1 increment at each subsequent visit) conditional on attending scheduled clinic visits and accepting offered PMTCT services, whereas the control group received usual care. The proportion of participants who remained in care, were fully adherent (took all their pills at each visit) or with undetectable viral load at 6 weeks postpartum were compared across group. Results:Among 433 women randomized (216 in intervention group and 217 in control group), 332 (76.7%) remained in care at 6 weeks postpartum, including 174 (80.6%) in the intervention group and 158 (72.8%) in the control group, (P = 0.04). Data on pill count were available for 297 participants (89.5%), including 156 (89.7%) and 141 (89.2%) in the intervention and control groups, respectively; 69.9% (109/156) and 68.1% (96/141) in the intervention and control groups had perfect adherence [risk difference, 0.02; 95% CI: −0.06 to 0.09]. Viral load results were available for 171 (98.3%) and 155 (98.7%) women in the intervention and control groups, respectively; 66.1% (113/171) in the intervention group and 69.7% (108/155) in the control group had an undetectable viral load (risk difference, −0.04; 95% CI: −0.14 to 0.07). Results were similar after adjusting for marital status, age, education, baseline CD4 count, viral load, gestational age, and initial ARV regimen. Conclusions:Although the provision of cash incentives to HIV-infected pregnant women led to higher retention in care at 6 weeks postpartum, among those retained in care, adherence to ARVs and virologic suppression did not differ by study group.
Development in attention functions and social processing: Evidence from the Attention Network Test

According to the attention network approach, attention is best understood in terms of three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct networks - alerting, orienting, and executive attention. Recent findings showed that social information influences the efficiency of these networks in adults. Using some social and non-social variants of the Attentional Network Test (ANT), this study was aimed to evaluate the development of the three attention networks in childhood, also assessing the development of the ability to manage social or non-social conflicting information. Sixty-six children (three groups of 6, 8, and 10 years of age) performed three variants of the original ANT, using fish, schematic, or real faces looking to the left or right as target and flanker stimuli. Results showed an improvement from 6 to 8 and 10 years of age in reaction time (RT) and accuracy, together with an improvement of executive control and a decrement in alerting. These developmental changes were not unique to social stimuli, and no differences were observed between social and no-social variants of the ANT. However, independently from the age of the children, a real face positively affected the executive control (as indexed by RTs) as compared to both a schematic face and a fish. Findings of this study suggest that attentional networks are still developing from 6 to 10 years of age and underline the importance of face information in modulating the efficiency of executive control. Statement of contribution What is already known? Younger children made more errors and slower reaction times (RTs) than older children, in line with the majority of the past selective attention studies. Younger children showed both greater conflict and alerting effect than older children. The prediction that younger children would display larger interference effects than older children was supported. What does this study add? Extending the findings observed in adults and children, independently from their age, demonstrated greater cognitive interference (i.e., slower RTs and higher percentage of errors to incongruent relative to congruent conditions) when fish and schematic faces were presented than when photographs of real faces were used as stimuli. Like adults, children have a greater ability in the control of social information as compared to non-social information. These results seem to indicate that the ability to handle social conflicts proceeds in parallel with the ability to manage non-social conflicting information.
Catastrophizing and Causal Beliefs in Whiplash

Study Design. Prospective cohort study. Objective. This study investigates the role of pain catastrophizing and causal beliefs with regard to severity and persistence of neck complaints after motor vehicle accidents. Summary of Background Data. In previous research on low back pain, somatoform disorders and chronic fatigue syndrome, pain catastrophizing and causal beliefs were found to be related to perceived disability and prognosis. Furthermore, it has been argued with respect to whiplash that culturally dependent symptom expectations are responsible for a chronic course. Methods. Individuals involved in traffic accidents who initiated compensation claim procedures with a Dutch insurance company were sent questionnaires (Q1) containing the Neck Disability Index, the Pain Catastrophizing Scale, and the Causal Beliefs Questionnaire–Whiplash. Of 1252 questionnaires dispatched, 747 (59.7%) were returned. Only car occupants with neck complaints were included in this study (n = 140). Complaints were monitored using additional questionnaires administered 6 (Q2) and 12 months (Q3) after the accident. Results. Pain catastrophizing and causal beliefs were related to the severity of concurrent whiplash disability. The severity of initial complaints was related to the severity and persistence of whiplash complaints. Attributing initial neck complaints to whiplash was found to predict the persistence of disability at 6 and 12 months follow-up, over and above the severity of the initial complaints. Conclusion. The results suggest that causal beliefs may play a major role in the perceived disability and course of neck complaints after motor vehicle accidents, whereas pain catastrophizing is predominantly related to concurrent disability. The current findings are consistent with the view that an early conviction that neck complaints are caused by the medico-cultural entity whiplash has a detrimental effect on the course of symptoms.
Illusions regarding Helicobacter pylori clinical trials and treatment guidelines

Identification of reliable Helicobacter pylori eradication therapy has proved difficult, in part because brief exposure of H. pylori to commonly used antimicrobials such as macrolides, nitroimidazoles or quinolones often results in resistance (bystander effect). Most treatment studies and meta-analyses contains major flaws preventing generalisability that making reliable treatment recommendations and guidelines an illusion (box 1). Box 1 ### Helicobacter pylori treatment illusions Development of H. pylori therapy differs from other infectious diseases. Since the advent of antibiotics, infectious diseases therapy has been susceptibility based, whereas most H. pylori treatment guidelines recommend susceptibility testing only after two empiric therapy failures. Increased penicillin resistance in the 1970s prompted rapid changes in recommendations and the development of antimicrobial surveillance programme to regularly update recommendations thus allowing empirical therapies to remain effective.1 Despite increasing resistance, H. pylori treatment guidelines have continued to recommend increasingly ineffective therapies and most new empiric therapies consist of variations using those same drugs (eg, sequential therapy). Treatment success has focused on comparisons between regimens irrespective of cure rates and without consideration of the antibiotic susceptibility profile of the infection, thus producing illusions of success. For example, sequential therapy consists of 5 days of dual proton pump inhibitor (PPI)–amoxicillin therapy followed by 5 days of PPI–clarithromycin and metronidazole triple therapy (Bazzoli’s triple therapy). 2 Interestingly, sequential therapy …
Why rate when you could compare? Using the “EloChoice” package to assess pairwise comparisons of perceived physical strength

We introduce “EloChoice”, a package for R which uses Elo rating to assess pairwise comparisons between stimuli in order to measure perceived stimulus characteristics. To demonstrate the package and compare results from forced choice pairwise comparisons to those from more standard single stimulus rating tasks using Likert (or Likert-type) items, we investigated perceptions of physical strength from images of male bodies. The stimulus set comprised images of 82 men standing on a raised platform with minimal clothing. Strength-related anthropometrics and grip strength measurements were available for each man in the set. UK laboratory participants (Study 1) and US online participants (Study 2) viewed all images in both a Likert rating task, to collect mean Likert scores, and a pairwise comparison task, to calculate Elo, mean Elo (mElo), and Bradley-Terry scores. Within both studies, Likert, Elo and Bradley-Terry scores were closely correlated to mElo scores (all rs > 0.95), and all measures were correlated with stimulus grip strength (all rs > 0.38) and body size (all rs > 0.59). However, mElo scores were less variable than Elo scores and were hundreds of times quicker to compute than Bradley-Terry scores. Responses in pairwise comparison trials were 2/3 quicker than in Likert tasks, indicating that participants found pairwise comparisons to be easier. In addition, mElo scores generated from a data set with half the participants randomly excluded produced very comparable results to those produced with Likert scores from the full participant set, indicating that researchers require fewer participants when using pairwise comparisons.
Effect of a behavioral intervention of the SALdável program to reduce salt intake among hypertensive women: A randomized controlled pilot study

Background: Excessive salt intake has been directly associated with cardiovascular diseases, especially hypertension, and non-cardiovascular diseases. Despite the current recommendations, salt intake remains high, indicating the need to develop theory-based interventions aimed at reducing this intake. Aim: The purpose of this study was to test the impact of a theory-based intervention - the SALdável Program – to promote the use of less than 4 g of salt/day during cooking. Methods: This was a two-arm parallel-group randomized study. A total of 92 hypertensive women were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. The intervention was aimed at motivating participants to reduce salt addition by increasing self-efficacy and counteracting the negative influence of habit. Primary outcomes were the behavioral question of salt addition and total salt addition, secondary outcomes were overall salt intake, provided by 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, and psychosocial variables (intention, self-efficacy, and habit). Results: At three-month follow-up, the intervention group improved significantly more than the control group regarding salt addition measures (p-values between 0.05 and 0.001) and psychosocial variables (all p-values ⩽0.001). The reduction in 24-hour urinary sodium excretion was not significant. Conclusion: The findings showed that this theory-based intervention was effective to motivate and change the behavior of hypertensive women regarding daily salt use in cooking meals. This was accomplished by means of improvements in intention and self-efficacy and reduction of the habit of using more than 4 g of salt/day during cooking.
A quantitative approach for sex estimation based on cranial morphology.

OBJECTIVES This paper proposes a method for the quantification of the shape of sexually dimorphic cranial traits, namely the glabella, mastoid process and external occipital protuberance. MATERIALS AND METHODS The proposed method was developed using 165 crania from the documented Athens Collection and tested on 20 Cretan crania. It is based on digital photographs of the lateral view of the cranium, drawing of the profile of three sexually dimorphic structures and calculation of variables that express the shape of these structures. RESULTS The combinations of variables that provide optimum discrimination between sexes are identified by means of binary logistic regression and discriminant analysis. The best cross-validated results are obtained when variables from all three structures are combined and range from 75.8 to 85.1% and 81.1 to 94.6% for males and females, respectively. The success rate is 86.3-94.1% for males and 83.9-93.5% for females when half of the sample is used for training and the rest for prediction. Correct classification for the Cretan material based upon the standards developed for the Athens sample was 80-90% for the optimum combinations of discriminant variables. DISCUSSION The proposed method provides an effective way to capture quantitatively the shape of sexually dimorphic cranial structures; it gives more accurate results relative to other existing methods and it does not require specialized equipment. Equations for sex estimation based on combinations of variables are provided, along with instructions on how to use the method and Excel macros for calculation of discriminant variables with automated implementation of the optimum equations.
Long antibody HCDR3s from HIV-naïve donors presented on a PG9 neutralizing antibody background mediate HIV neutralization

Significance When HIV neutralizing antibody (Ab) responses occur, they are often mediated by Abs with exceptional levels of somatic mutation. An exception are HIV neutralizing Abs that feature long heavy-chain complementarity-determining region 3 (HCDR3) regions, such as the Ab PG9. Relative to many other HIV broadly neutralizing Abs (bnAbs), PG9 has fewer somatic mutations than most potent bnAbs. Here we used deep-sequencing and computational methods to identify a panel of HCDR3 sequences in HIV-naïve donors that mediated binding and neutralization of HIV by mimicking the bnAb PG9 long HCDR3 region when expressed in the context of the rest of the PG9 antibody sequence. Thus, it may be possible for structure-based vaccine design efforts to engage long HCDR3s available in the HIV-naïve Ab repertoire and elicit a neutralizing response. Development of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) against HIV-1 usually requires prolonged infection and induction of Abs with unusual features, such as long heavy-chain complementarity-determining region 3 (HCDR3) loops. Here we sought to determine whether the repertoires of HIV-1–naïve individuals contain Abs with long HCDR3 loops that could mediate HIV-1 neutralization. We interrogated at massive scale the structural properties of long Ab HCDR3 loops in HIV-1–naïve donors, searching for structured HCDR3s similar to those of the HIV-1 bnAb PG9. We determined the nucleotide sequences encoding 2.3 × 107 unique HCDR3 amino acid regions from 70 different HIV-1–naïve donors. Of the 26,917 HCDR3 loops with 30-amino acid length identified, we tested 30 for further study that were predicted to have PG9-like structure when chimerized onto PG9. Three of these 30 PG9 chimeras bound to the HIV-1 gp120 monomer, and two were neutralizing. In addition, we found 14 naturally occurring HCDR3 sequences that acquired the ability to bind to the HIV-1 gp120 monomer when adding 2- to 7-amino acid mutations via computational design. Of those 14 designed Abs, 8 neutralized HIV-1, with IC50 values ranging from 0.7 to 98 µg/mL. These data suggest that the repertoire of HIV-1–naïve individuals contains rare B cells that encode HCDR3 loops that bind or neutralize HIV-1 when presented on a PG9 background with relatively few or no additional mutations. Long HCDR3 sequences are present in the HIV-naïve B-cell repertoire, suggesting that this class of bnAbs is a favorable target for rationally designed preventative vaccine efforts.
Combining Multiple Kernel Methods on Riemannian Manifold for Emotion Recognition in the Wild

In this paper, we present the method for our submission to the Emotion Recognition in the Wild Challenge (EmotiW 2014). The challenge is to automatically classify the emotions acted by human subjects in video clips under real-world environment. In our method, each video clip can be represented by three types of image set models (i.e. linear subspace, covariance matrix, and Gaussian distribution) respectively, which can all be viewed as points residing on some Riemannian manifolds. Then different Riemannian kernels are employed on these set models correspondingly for similarity/distance measurement. For classification, three types of classifiers, i.e. kernel SVM, logistic regression, and partial least squares, are investigated for comparisons. Finally, an optimal fusion of classifiers learned from different kernels and different modalities (video and audio) is conducted at the decision level for further boosting the performance. We perform an extensive evaluation on the challenge data (including validation set and blind test set), and evaluate the effects of different strategies in our pipeline. The final recognition accuracy achieved 50.4% on test set, with a significant gain of 16.7% above the challenge baseline 33.7%.
Demonstration of the usefulness of epigenetic cancer risk prediction by a multicentre prospective cohort study

Background Epigenetic alterations accumulate in normal-appearing tissues of patients with cancer, producing an epigenetic field defect. Cross-sectional studies show that the degree of the defect may be associated with risk in some types of cancer, especially cancers associated with chronic inflammation. Objective To demonstrate, by a multicentre prospective cohort study, that the risk of metachronous gastric cancer after endoscopic resection (ER) can be predicted by assessment of the epigenetic field defect using methylation levels. Design Patients with early gastric cancer, aged 40–80 years, who planned to have, or had undergone, ER, were enrolled at least 6 months after Helicobacter pylori infection discontinued. Methylation levels of three preselected genes (miR-124a-3, EMX1 and NKX6-1) were measured by quantitative methylation-specific PCR. Patients were followed up annually by endoscopy, and the primary endpoint was defined as detection of a metachronous gastric cancer. Authentic metachronous gastric cancers were defined as cancers excluding those detected within 1 year after the enrolment. Results Among 826 patients enrolled, 782 patients had at least one follow-up, with a median follow-up of 2.97 years. Authentic metachronous gastric cancers developed in 66 patients: 29, 16 and 21 patients at 1–2, 2–3 and ≥3 years after the enrolment, respectively. The highest quartile of the miR-124a-3 methylation level had a significant univariate HR (95% CI) (2.17 (1.07 to 4.41); p=0.032) and a multivariate-adjusted HR (2.30 (1.03 to 5.10); p=0.042) of developing authentic metachronous gastric cancers. Similar trends were seen for EMX1 and NKX6-1. Conclusions Assessment of the degree of an epigenetic field defect is a promising cancer risk marker that takes account of life history.
Ozone treatment to reduce deoxynivalenol (DON) and zearalenone (ZEN) contamination in wheat bran and its impact on nutritional quality

ABSTRACT Wheat bran is an important source for human and animal feed. Its nutritional aspects include a high content of fibre and minerals, as well as phenolic compounds that help prevent chronic diseases. However, wheat can be susceptible to contamination by fungus, which can produce mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol (DON) and zearalenone (ZEN), causing adverse health effects. Therefore, methods should be developed to reduce possible contamination. Ozone can be used for this purpose as it is considered safe and environmental friendly. The aim of this study was to evaluate the reduction of DON and ZEN concentrations in wheat bran using the ozonation process as well as to evaluate the effect of ozonation on the nutritional quality of bran. Considering this, wheat bran naturally contaminated with both DON and ZEN was processed using ozone at different conditions. The nutritional quality of the bran was evaluated after processing considering the following aspects: the total phenolic content and the bran antioxidant capacity (by using both DPPH and ABTS radicals). The results showed that the degradation of ZEN was higher and faster than the degradation of DON, which could be explained by their molecular structures. The total phenolic content and antioxidant capacity of the bran were not affected by the ozonation process, which is preferable from a nutritional point of view. Therefore, ozonation was demonstrated to be a possible method for reducing mycotoxins in wheat bran, although more studies are needed in order to better understand and optimise processing and product quality.