Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Question Answering with Subgraph Embeddings

This paper presents a system which learns to answer questions on a broad range of topics from a knowledge base using few hand-crafted features. Our model learns low-dimensional embeddings of words and knowledge base constituents; these representations are used to score natural language questions against candidate answers. Training our system using pairs of questions and structured representations of their answers, and pairs of question paraphrases, yields competitive results on a recent benchmark of the literature.
Vitamin K Intake and Sensitivity to Warfarin in Patients Consuming Regular Diets

Summary The effect of dietary vitamin K intake on warfarin sensitivity is known only from case reports and few small clinical studies. We followed 50 patients commencing warfarin and consuming their regular diets (for 8 weeks) to study this relationship. A one-week recall dietary questionnaire was completed at weeks 2 and 8. Daily intake of nutrients and vitamin K was calculated from standard tables. Warfarin sensitivity index (WSI) was defined as final INR/final warfarin dose (mg/day/m2 of body surface area) (week 8). Vitamin K intake was 17-974 (median: 179) μg/day. Median WSI was 0.82 (0.31-4.47). A WSI value of 1.1 significantly separated excess (≥250 μg/day) from normal (<250 μg/day) vitamin K consumers (16/18 vs. 15/32, respectively, p <0.01). The former had lower day 5 INR (median: 1.9 vs. 3.0, p <0.001), needed more warfarin to achieve INR ≥2.0 (32.0 ± 9.2 mg vs. 25.4 ± 6.4 mg, p = 0.009) and required a higher maintenance steady state warfarin dose (5.7 ± 1.7 mg/day vs. 3.5 ± 1.0 mg/day, p <0.001). We conclude that in 32% (16/50) of anticoagulated patients under usual dietary conditions sensitivity to warfarin is decreased by vitamin K intake ≥250 μg/day.
Faecal contamination of water and fingertip-rinses as a method for evaluating the effect of low-cost water supply and sanitation activities on faeco-oral disease transmission. I. A case study in rural north-east Thailand

SUMMARY Most villagers in north-east Thailand carry water to their homes and store it in separate containers depending on its subsequent use. In one village, information on water use was collated with the bacteriological quality of stored water, water sources and fingertip-rinses. Stored water quality was a function of water-related activities rather than quality at source (P<0·0001). Specifically water used for toilet, washing dishes and cooking-related activities was much more contaminated with faecal bacteria than that used for drinking and cooking. Salmonella spp. was significantly more common in water used for washing dishes than drinking (P<0·05). Escherichia coli contamination of fingertip-rinses was strongly associated with the individual's activity prior to testing (P<0·0001); child care, food and water-related activities produced much higher levels of fingertip contamination than others. Dirty utensils used for cooking and eating were usually left to soak and faecal bacterial growth occurred in this grossly contaminated soak-water. Cross-contamination via water handling was the main mechanism of stored water pollution. These results were used to develop a hygiene intervention study presented in a companion paper.
Interleukin-6 (IL-6) influence on colonic anastomosis healing in rats.

PURPOSE To observe the effect of pro-inflamatory citokin, Interleukin-6 (IL-6), administration on the healing of colonic anastomosis in rats. METHODS Thirty Wistar rats were divided into 2 groups of 15 animals each: a control group and an experiment group. The animals of the experiment group were submitted to injection of 500microg/kg of IL-6 Recombinant (Sandoz Phamarceutical(R)) subcutaneously 24 and 12 hours preceding the surgery, and the control group, were submitted to the injection of saline solution, using the same volume of solution as well as the way of administration. The rats were submitted to an end to end colonic anastomosis, being sacrificed in the 7th post-operative day, the site of the anastomosis was evaluated regarding to the adhesions that was quantified and the presence of complications was observed. The colon containing the anastomosis was submitted to a tensiometric study and a sample were sent for histological studies with HE and Sirius Red dye. RESULTS The macroscopic and the tensiometric study did not demonstrate any significant differences between the control and experiment group. Regarding the histological evaluation, there was a significant reduction of the chronic inflammatory process in the experiment group (p=0,0209) and a lesser granulation area (p=0,0099). The total amount of collagen was similar in both groups, however, the experimental group showed a predominant area of immature collagen (p=0.009). CONCLUSIONS The longer persistence of the acute phase of wound healing in the experiment group, as well as a decreased of the mature collagen type I, demonstrating that the IL-6 was harmful to the colonic healing anastomosis in rats.
The joint essential numerical range of operators: convexity and related results

LetW (A) andWe(A) be the joint numerical range and the joint essential numerical range of an m-tuple of self-adjoint operators A = (A1, . . . , Am) acting on an infinite dimensional Hilbert space, respectively. In this paper, it is shown that We(A) is always convex and admits many equivalent formulations. In particular, for any fixed i ∈ {1, . ,m}, We(A) can be obtained as the intersection of all sets of the form cl(W (A1, . . . , Ai+1, Ai + F,Ai+1, . . . , Am)), where F = F ∗ has finite rank Moreover, it is shown that the closure cl(W (A)) of W (A) is always star-shaped with the elements in We(A) as star centers. Although cl(W (A)) is usually not convex, an analog of the separation theorem is obtained, namely, for any element d / ∈ cl(W (A)), there is a linear functional f such that f(d) > sup{f(a) : a ∈ cl(W (A))}, where A is obtained from A by perturbing one of the components Ai by a finite rank self-adjoint operator. Other results on W (A) and We(A) extending those on a single operator are obtained. AMS Subject Classification 47A12, 47A13, 47A55.
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND OF CHANGE: EASTERN CAPE WHITE COMMERCIAL FARMERS' DISCOURSES OF DEMOCRACY

This paper deals with the accounts of Eastern Cape white commercial farmers on the subject of Democracy. Drawing on the methodology of Discourse Analysis, the paper seeks to provide an analysis of the rhetorical strategies and ideological positions within the participants’ accounts. Such accounts of the social, historical and political circumstances in which farmers find themselves are thought to provide insight into the manner in which the process of democratic change has been received by members of the agricultural sector. Data collection was conducted via brief, audio taped, semistructured interviews. Participants were white men and women, living in a commercial farming region of the Eastern Cape Province. Responses to the interviews were analysed according to the discursive approaches advanced by both Ian Parker and Jonathan Potter & Margaret Wetherell. Analyses reveal that participants tend towards criticism of the notion of democracy from a particularly liberal ideological standpoint and make use of notions and techniques of “Othering” to construct a defensive subject positioning. These findings illustrate what is in many ways still an ongoing political and ideological struggle in the rural regions of the country.
Forty Years of Death: The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty in South Carolina (Still Arbitrary after All These Years)

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States deemed constitutional new death penalty laws intended to minimize the arbitrariness which led the Court to invalidate all capital sentencing statutes four years earlier in Furman v. Georgia. Over the last four decades the Court has — time and again — attempted to regulate the “machinery of death. ” Looking back over the Court’s work, many observers, including two current Supreme Court justices, have questioned whether the modern death penalty has lived up to expectations set by the Court in the 1970s or if, despite 40 years of labor, the American death penalty continues to be administered in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. This Article presents data from South Carolina’s forty-year experiment with capital punishment and concludes that the administration of the death penalty in that state is still riddled with error and infected with racial and gender bias. It is — in short — still arbitrary after all these years. The authors maintain that the only true cure it to abolish South Carolina’s death penalty, although they do argue that lesser steps including additional safeguards and procedure may limit, but will not eliminate, some of the arbitrariness and bias which are present in the current imposition of South Carolina’s most extreme punishment.
La formación de las competencias profesionales a través del aprendizaje servicio

Resumen El objetivo de este artículo es el de proponer el aprendizaje servicio como una modalidad formativa que incide en el proceso de adquisición (enseñanza-aprendizaje) de competencias profesionales dado que se trata de una estrategia formativa que asume perfectamente el doble objetivo de la formación universitaria: la formación para el trabajo y la formación para una ciudadanía activa. En este sentido se argumenta que se trata de una modalidad de formación práctica superior que integra, en el conjunto de las competencias profesionales, la dimensión social, ética y cívica de los propios perfiles profesionales. A tal fin, se clarifican las nociones de competencias y aprendizaje servicio, para posteriormente centrar la atención en las consecuencias e implicaciones de las mismas en la adquisición y desarrollo de competencias profesionales.
Student and Teacher Perceptions of Middle School Climate

Abstract This study examined student and teacher perceptions pertaining to school climate at a large, urban Illinois middle school. Students showed a one-dimensional feeling for school climate; most either liked or disliked being at school. Eighth graders had more of a negative view of school climate than seventh or sixth graders, but we observed no distinct differences between boys and girls. Teachers had a multidimensional perception of climate and a more positive and multiphased point of view of the interaction among the academic, social, and developmental aspects of school.
Networks of action control

Every day regions within our brain facilitate us to deliberately select or inhibit planned responses - think of the right click on a mouse button, or stopping by a traffic light. In the last decade, neurophysiological work has shown that our ability to select or inhibit responses involves both cortical and subcortical regions within our brain. However, in isolation, no single node in the brain can achieve the goal of deliberately initiating or inhibiting a response. I try to inform this discussion by asking how different regions in our brain collaborate (as a network, or system) to initiate or withdraw controlled actions. First, we demonstrate that the ability to withdraw a planned action relies on the communication between the prefrontal cortex and sub-cortical structures within the basal ganglia. By studying the dynamics of this system, we further show how this inhibitory circuit can be requited in advance when we anticipate the need for stopping in the future. We then proceed by showing how cortical and subcortical regions communicate to select a response, and how this selection can be influenced by the quality of information available in sensory parts of the brain. Think of how reduced visibility in traffic might alter driving behavior. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how regions within our brain communicate to select or inhibit a response. Moreover, we shed light on how the ‘goal-oriented’ frontal part of our brain communicates with the more "response gating" deeper subcortical structures, to facilitate voluntary goal-oriented behavior.
Holistic Security Requirements Engineering for Socio-Technical Systems

Security has been a growing concern for large organizations, especially financial and gov- ernmental institutions, as security breaches in the systems they depend have repeatedly resulted in losses of billions per year, and this cost is on the rise. A primary reason for these breaches is the “socio-technical” nature of today’s systems that consist of an amal- gam of social and human actors, processes, technology and infrastructure. We refer to such systems as Socio-Technical Systems (STSs). Finding secure solutions for STSs is a difficult and error-prone task because of their heterogeneity and complexity. The thesis proposes a holistic security requirements analysis framework which catego- rizes system security concerns into three layers, including a social layer (social actors and business processes), a software layer (software applications that support the social layer) and an infrastructure layer (physical infrastructure, hardware, and devices). Within each layer, security requirements are elicited, and security mechanisms are designed to satisfy the security requirements. In particular, a cross-layer support link is defined to capture how security mechanisms deployed at one layer influence security requirements of the next layer down, allowing us to systematically and iteratively analyze security for all three layers and eventually produce holistic security solutions for the systems. To ensure the quality of the analysis of our approach and to promote practical adoption of the three-layer approach, the thesis includes two additional components. Firstly, we propose a holistic attack analysis, which takes an attacker’s perspective to explore realistic attacks that can happen to a system and thus contributes to the identification of critical security requirements. This approach consists of an attack strategy identification method which analyzes attacker’s alternative malicious intentions, and an attack strategy operationalization method which analyzes realistic attack actions that can be performed by attackers. Secondly, the thesis proposes a systematic approach for selecting and applying security patterns, which describe proven security solutions to known security problems. As such, analysts with little security knowledge can efficiently leverage reusable security knowledge to operationalize security requirements in terms of security mechanisms. This approach also allows us to systematically analyze and enforce the impact of deployed security mechanisms on system functional specifications. We have developed a prototype tool, which implements the formalized analysis methods of our three-layer framework and enables the semi-automatic application of our proposal. With the help of the tool, we apply our framework to two large-scale case studies so as to validate the efficacy of our approach.
Decrease of CD4+ and B-Lymphocyte Populations Is Not Associated with Severe Infectious Complications in Children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia during Maintenance

The suppression of lymphopoiesis and immune competence during the maintenance phase in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and the occurrence of infectious complications remain an unexplored area. In this study we assessed lymphocyte subpopulation disturbances during maintenance for childhood ALL along with the incidence, type, and severity of infections that occur during that period in the absence of neutropenia. Twenty-eight children (13 boys, 15 girls) with ALL aged 3-14 years (median 7 years) and treated according to the ALL-BFM 90/95 protocol were studied during maintenance for ALL. Complete white blood cell (WBC) counts and peripheral blood lymphocyte (PBL) analyses were performed. Major lymphocyte subsets (CD19+, CD3+CD4+, CD3+CD8+, CD3-CD16+CD56+, CD45RA+, CD45RO+) and markers of T-cell activation (CD25, CD38, CD69, HLA-DR) were analyzed with flow cytometry. Serum immunoglobulin G (IgG), IgA, and IgM levels were measured by a nephelometric assay. All infectious episodes during the study period were recorded in detail. Additionally, 41 age-matched immunocompetent children were used as controls. Absolute WBC counts (median, 3627/µL) and PBL counts (median, 1206/µL) were significantly below the age-adjusted control values (7400/µL and 2673/µL, respectively; P < 0001). B-lymphocyte, total CD4+, and memory CD4+ (CD4+CD45RO+) subsets were also significantly decreased (33/µL versus 377/µL [P <.0001], 531/µL versus 1045/µL [P <.01], and 80/µL versus 299/µL [P <.001], respectively). Significantly lower immunoglobulin levels were found in all patients. Twenty-two of the 28 patients presented with 74 episodes of a variety of minor infections (mostly respiratory viral [39], skin [7], and gastrointestinal [3]), none demanding prolonged hospital treatment. Our findings demonstrate a profound immunosuppression throughout maintenance therapy in children with ALL that has no major clinical impact in terms of increased incidence or severity of systemic infections.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Review

White matter tracts of the brain allow neurons and neuronal networks to communicate and function with high efficiency. The aim of this review is to briefly introduce diffusion tensor imaging methods that examine white matter tracts and then to give an overview of the studies that have investigated white matter integrity in the brains of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). From the 48 studies we reviewed, persons with ASD tended to have decreased fractional anisotropy and increased mean diffusivity in white matter tracts spanning many regions of the brain but most consistently in regions such as the corpus callosum, cingulum, and aspects of the temporal lobe. This decrease in fractional anisotropy was often accompanied by increased radial diffusivity. Additionally, the review suggests possible atypical lateralization in some white matter tracts of the brain and a possible atypical developmental trajectory of white matter microstructure in persons with ASD. Clinical implications and future research directions are discussed. Autism Res 2012, 5: 289–313. © 2012 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Atorvastatin treatment modulates the interaction between leptin and adiponectin, and the clinical parameters in patients with type II diabetes

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of atorvastatin treatment on levels of leptin, adiponectin and insulin resistance, and their correlation with clinical parameters, in patients with type II diabetes. Patients with diabetes (n=394) were divided into two groups, comprising 161 patients who received 20 mg/day atorvastatin (statin group), and 233 patients who did not receive statins (statin-free group). The results showed that atorvastatin treatment of patients with diabetes was not associated with changes in leptin, adiponectin, the leptin/adiponectin (L/A) ratio or homeostasis model assessment-insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). However, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), triglycerides (TG) and total cholesterol (Tchol) were positively correlated with leptin and L/A ratio in the statin group only (P<0.05). By contrast, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) showed a significant positive correlation with adiponectin in the statin and statin-free groups (P<0.05). Additionally, a positive correlation was found between HOMA-IR and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), and TG, in both groups, whereas Tchol was positively correlated with HOMA-IR in the statin group only (P<0.05). When multivariate analysis was performed with HOMA-IR as the dependent variable, and with adjustment for age, body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference, HbA1c was found to be a significant predictor of HOMA-IR or insulin resistance. In conclusion, atorvastatin treatment may have several effects on the interaction between leptin and adiponectin, and on clinical parameters in patients with type II diabetes.
Assessment of nonscholastic abilities and its associated factors among medical students: An exploratory study

Background: Nonscholastic abilities among medical students are an important area of concern for the health professionals. Very few studies had been conducted in the past with regard to it. Objective: This study was an exploratory study aimed to assess the nonscholastic abilities among medical students in a medical institution in coastal South India. Materials and Methods: This study assessed three broad domains of nonscholastic abilities namely personal qualities, interpersonal activities, and communication skills among 106 medical students using a structured questionnaire (27 questions with a total score of 27). The data were analyzed by independent t-test and linear regression model. Results: About 41.5% (44) of the subjects were males and 52.8% (56) of them were belonged to 18–19 years age group. Overall mean score of nonscholastic abilities was found to be 19.40 (standard deviation = 3.27). Percentile distribution of subjects is at score 17 (25th percentile), 20 (50th percentile), and 22 (75th percentile). Mean personal quality domain score was found to be proportionately lesser than other domains of nonscholastic abilities. Nonscholastic ability score was significantly associated with marks obtained in the previous examination (P = 0.006). However, linear regression analysis revealed that the presence of family problems (P = 0.005) and alcohol use (P = 0.026) were associated with low nonscholastic ability score among medical students. Conclusion: Nonscholastic abilities are still a required need in medical student's career. Further analytical studies will help in identifying the in-depth evaluation of factors associated with it.
Integrative and Translational Physiology : Inflammation and Immunity in Organ System Physiology Short-term bed rest increases TLR 4 and IL-6 expression in skeletal muscle of older adults

Micah J. Drummond, Kyle L. Timmerman, Melissa M. Markofski, Dillon K. Walker, Jared M. Dickinson, Mohammad Jamaluddin, Allan R. Brasier, Blake B. Rasmussen, and Elena Volpi Departments of Nutrition and Metabolism and Internal Medicine; Division of Rehabilitation Science; Sealy Center on Aging; Institute for Translational Sciences University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas; and The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
Limitations of the Current World Health Organization Growth References for Children and Adolescents

Since the 1970s, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the use of the growth references developed by the United States National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) based on national survey data collected in the 1960s and 1970s. These references are known as the WHO or NCHS/WHO growth references. Over the past three decades, the WHO or NCHS/WHO growth references have played an important role internationally in the assessment of child and adolescent growth and nutritional status. However, the references have a number of weaknesses. The limitations of the infant portion of the references were thoroughly assessed in WHO's effort to develop a new international growth reference for infants and preschool children. The present report discusses the limitations of the NCHS/WHO references for school-aged children and adolescents, including a number of conceptual, methodological, and practical problems. The global obesity epidemic poses another challenge that the NCHS/WHO reference cannot appropriately meet. There is a need for a single international reference to assess the nutritional status and growth of school-aged children and adolescents across different countries.