Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of clinical and CSF profiles in children with tuberculous and pyogenic meningitis; role of CSF protein: glucose ratio as diagnostic marker of tuberculous meningitis.

OBJECTIVES To compare the clinical and laboratory features of tuberculous meningitis with bacterial meningitis and to determine if protein glucose ratio in the cerebrospinal fluid can be predictive of the condition. METHODS It was a retrospective descriptive study at the Paediatric Ward of Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, for which records of 46 patients with tuberculous meningitis and 33 with bacterial meningitis were reviewed. All records related to the study period that was from January 2005 to October 2010. The records were retrieved in December 2010. Tuberculous meningitis was defined as illness > or = 14 days, basal enhancement or tuberculoma on computerised tomography scan and response to anti-tuberculous therapy. Pyogenic meningitis was defined by the presence of a pathogenic isolate inthe cerebrospinal fluid (bacterial culture) or by positive latex particle agglutination or a pathogen on cerebrospinal fluid gram stain and clinical improvement with antibiotics. Logistic regression was used to model the probability of having tuberculous meningitis. To define the optimal protein-glucose ratio, cutoff point for the diagnosis of tuberculous meningitis, a receiver operating characteristic curve was applied. All analysis were done using SPSS 16. RESULTS Features predictive of a diagnosis of tuberculous meningitis were protein:glucose ratio of > or = 2 (OR 21 95% CI 4.7-93); cerebrospinal fluid total leukocyte count < 800 (OR 58, 95% CI 5-649); and the presence of hydrocephalus (OR 19, 95% CI 3.3-109). CONCLUSION A set of simple clinical, laboratory and radiological criteria can help in predicting tuberculous meningitis. The value of cerebrospinal fluid protein:glucose ratio needs to be validated in larger studies with bacteriologically-confirmed cases of tuberculous meningitis.
Genetic Diversity among Lassa Virus Strains

ABSTRACT The arenavirus Lassa virus causes Lassa fever, a viral hemorrhagic fever that is endemic in the countries of Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea and perhaps elsewhere in West Africa. To determine the degree of genetic diversity among Lassa virus strains, partial nucleoprotein (NP) gene sequences were obtained from 54 strains and analyzed. Phylogenetic analyses showed that Lassa viruses comprise four lineages, three of which are found in Nigeria and the fourth in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Overall strain variation in the partial NP gene sequence was found to be as high as 27% at the nucleotide level and 15% at the amino acid level. Genetic distance among Lassa strains was found to correlate with geographic distance rather than time, and no evidence of a “molecular clock” was found. A method for amplifying and cloning full-length arenavirus S RNAs was developed and used to obtain the complete NP and glycoprotein gene (GP1 and GP2) sequences for two representative Nigerian strains of Lassa virus. Comparison of full-length gene sequences for four Lassa virus strains representing the four lineages showed that the NP gene (up to 23.8% nucleotide difference and 12.0% amino acid difference) is more variable than the glycoprotein genes. Although the evolutionary order of descent within Lassa virus strains was not completely resolved, the phylogenetic analyses of full-length NP, GP1, and GP2 gene sequences suggested that Nigerian strains of Lassa virus were ancestral to strains from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Compared to the New World arenaviruses, Lassa and the other Old World arenaviruses have either undergone a shorter period of diverisification or are evolving at a slower rate. This study represents the first large-scale examination of Lassa virus genetic variation.
Enhanced in vitro invasiveness and drug resistance with altered gene expression patterns in a human lung carcinoma cell line after pulse selection with anticancer drugs

The human lung carcinoma cell line DLKP was exposed to sequential pulses of 10 commonly used chemotherapeutic drugs (VP‐16, vincristine, taxotere, mitoxantrone, 5‐fluorouracil, methotrexate, CCNU, BCNU, cisplatin and chlorambucil); resulting cell lines exhibited resistance to the selecting agents (ranging approx. 1.5‐ to 36‐fold) and, in some cases, cross‐resistance to methotrexate (approx. 1.4‐ to 22‐fold), vincristine (1.6‐ to 262‐fold), doxorubicin (Adriamycin, approx. 1.1‐ to 33‐fold) and taxotere (approx. 1.1‐ to 36‐fold). Several of the variants displayed collateral sensitivity to cisplatin. A marked increase in in vitro invasiveness and motility was observed with variants pulsed with mitoxantrone, 5‐fluorouracil, methotrexate, BCNU, cisplatin and chlorambucil. There was no significant change in invasiveness of cells pulsed with VP‐16, vincristine, taxotere or CCNU. All of the pulse‐selected variants showed elevated levels of MDR‐1/P‐gp protein by Western blot analysis, although mdr‐1 mRNA levels were not increased (except for DLKP‐taxotere). In DLKP‐taxotere, MRP1 protein levels were also greatly elevated, but mrp1 mRNA levels remained unchanged. BCRP was upregulated in DLKP‐mitoxantrone at both the mRNA and protein levels. Gelatin zymography, Western blot and RT‐PCR showed that DLKP and its variants secreted MMPs 2, 9 and 13. MMP inhibition assays suggested that MMP‐2 plays a more important role than MMPs 9 and 13 in cell invasion of these DLKP drug‐resistant variants in vitro. These results indicate that drug exposure may induce not only resistance but also invasiveness in cancer cells. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A construct‐oriented analysis of individual‐level polychronicity

This paper provided construct validity evidence for polychronicity in two related studies. Study 1 assessed the relationship between individuals’ stated polychronicity preferences and peer ratings of polychronicity in a multitrait‐multimethod design, which indicated that different raters were able to agree about an individual’s polychronicity. Additional construct validity evidence was provided by linking polychronicity to several potentially related constructs such as achievement striving, impatience/irritability, stress, and performance. In study 2, hypothesized relationships between polychronicity and both time urgency and time management behavior dimensions were supported. In addition, similar relationships between polychronicity and time urgency dimensions were identified across French and US samples. Together, these two studies provide a clearer understanding of the correlates and potential outcomes of polychronicity. Directions for future research are also discussed.
Warm, cold, competent or incompetent? An empirical assessment of public perceptions of the higher and less educated

Growing educational differentials in different domains have made some scholars wonder whether these differences have the potential to grow into an educational conflict and associated education-based group consciousness. In this article that question is contrasted with a body of literature which considers educational credentials a form of symbolic capital, that is, institutionalized social status. Theoretical insights derived from the social psychological stereotype content model are used to disentangle this apparent paradox. In the empirical section survey data from Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium; N = 1967) are used to assess the perceptions held by the public at large about the higher and less educated. A within-subject design whereby respondents rated the less and higher educated in terms of traits related to warmth and competence shows that indications of legitimate status differences but also intergroup conflict can be found depending on the dimension on which higher and less educated people are compared. In addition, the study demonstrates that higher and less educated groups use a different stereotype dimension to differentiate educational groups. The conclusion elaborates on the implications of these findings.
Surrender and Recovery

Abstract One year following treatment at a Minnesota-model center, alcoholics (N= 29) reported on the status of their recovery in this pilot study. On the basis of a median split on a Surrender scale, we formed two groups, High Surrender (n= 15) and Low Surrender (n= 14). Those in the High Surrender group had the higher quality of recovery, as measured by the Speer Recovery Scale. Implications for treatment are discussed.
Cognitive style and gender differences in children’s mathematics achievement

Males are often found to outperform females in tests of mathematics achievement and it has been proposed that this may in part be explained by differences in cognitive style. This study investigated the relation between Wholistic-Analytic and Verbal-Imagery cognitive style, gender and mathematics achievement in a sample of 190 Australian primary school students aged between 8–11 years (M = 9.77, SD = 1.05). It was hypothesised that males would outperform females in mathematics achievement tests, and that gender would interact with cognitive style on mathematics performance. A significant gender/cognitive style interaction was found. Boys with an Analytic/Imagery style achieved significantly higher results than the girls with an Analytic/Imagery style, supporting the contention that certain cognitive styles affect boys and girls mathematics performance differently. Implications of results and strategies for improving mathematics achievement among girls are discussed.
Release and interconversion of P2 receptor agonists by human osteoblast‐like cells

Nucleotides, acting as agonists at P2 receptors, are important extracellular signaling molecules in many tissues. In bone they affect both bone‐forming osteoblast and bone‐resorbing osteoclast cell activity. The presence of nucleotides in the extracellular microenvironment is largely determined by their release from cells and metabolism by ecto‐enzymes, both of which have scarcely been studied in bone. We have investigated adenosine 5′‐triphosphate (ATP) release from SaOS‐2 osteoblastic cells and the activities of cell surface ecto‐enzymes on ATP metabolism. ATP, but not LDH, was detected in SaOS‐2 cell conditioned medium, suggesting these cells were actively releasing ATP. Introduction of ADP resulted in increased ATP concentrations in the medium, which was found not to be receptor mediated. Nucleotide inhibition and substrate specificity studies revealed an ecto‐nucleoside diphosphokinase (ecto‐NDPK) was responsible for the ADP→ATP conversion; PCR and immunocytochemistry confirmed its presence. Analysis of ATP metabolism over time demonstrated overall ATP degradation was increased by inhibiting ecto‐NDPK activity; confirming that the combined action of multiple osteoblast‐expressed ecto‐enzymes affected extracellular nucleotide concentration. The data establish the coexistence of ATP‐consuming, and for the first time, ATP‐generating activities on the osteoblast cell surface, the discovery of which has significant implications for studies involving P2 receptor subtypes in bone. FASEB J. 17, 1401–1410 (2003)
Alternating decision trees for early diagnosis of heart disease

Recent survey shows that heart disease is a leading cause of death in India and in world wide. Significant life savings can be achieved, if a timely and cost effective clinical decision system is developed. Adverse reactions occur if a disease is not diagnosed properly. A clinical decision support system can assist health care professionals for early diagnosis of heart disease from patient's medical data. Machine learning and modern data mining methods are useful for predicting and classifying heart disease. In this paper we wish to develop effective alternating decision tree approach for early diagnosis of heart disease. Alternating decision tree is a new type of classification rule. It is a generalization of decision trees, voted decision stumps and voted decision trees. We have applied our approach on heart disease patient records collected from various hospitals in Hyderabad. Optimization of features improves efficiency of earning algorithm. We used PCA to determine essential features of heart disease data. Experimental results show that our decision support system achieves high accuracy and proving its usefulness in the diagnosis of heart disease.
Insulinlike Activity of New Antidiabetic Agent CP 68722 in 3T3-L1 Adipocytes

We examined the in vitro effects of CP 68722, a novel antidiabetic agent, in 3T3-L1 adipocytes. CP 68722 stimulated 2-deoxyglucose uptake in the absence of insulin. At least 30 min of incubation were required for stimulation of uptake. This effect increased over 5 h and was sustained up to 72 h. The stimulation of 2-deoxyglucose uptake by CP 68722 could be inhibited ∼60% by inhibition of protein synthesis with cycloheximide. Half-maximal and maximal responses to CP 68722 at 72 h of incubation were observed at 10 and 100 μM of drug, respectively, with a threefold stimulation of uptake at 100 μM approximating the maximal response of these cells to acute insulin stimulation. CP 68722 was able to overcome insulin resistance induced by dexamethasone in 3T3-L1 cells. The effect of drug, like that of insulin, was primarily to increase the Vmax of 2-deoxyglucose uptake. The stimulation of uptake by CP 68722 or insulin could be prevented by incubating the cells at 10°C, a temperature that impedes translocation of glucose transporters to the plasma membrane. Therefore, it appears that CP 68722, like insulin, stimulates glucose uptake by a mechanism that involves translocation of intracellular glucose transporters to the plasma membrane and de novo protein synthesis. We compared the effect of CP 68722 with the sulfonylureas, the primary drugs used in the treatment of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM). CP 68722 was a more potent and effective stimulator of 2-deoxyglucose uptake in 3T3-L1 cells than either first- or second-generation sulfonylureas. Our results suggest that CP 68722 could be an effective therapeutic agent for the treatment of NIDDM.
The human factors of consistency maintenance in multiplayer computer games

Consistency maintenance (CM) techniques are a crucial part of many distributed systems, and are particularly important in networked games. In this paper we describe a framework of the human factors of CM, to help designers of networked games make better decisions about its use. The framework shows that there is wide variance in the CM requirements of different game situations, identifies the types of requirements that can be considered, and analyses the effects of several consistency schemes on user experience factors. To further explore these issues, we carried out a simulation study that compared four CM algorithms. The experiment confirms many of the predictions of the framework, and reveals additional subtleties of the algorithms. Our work is the first to look comprehensively at the tradeoffs and costs of CM, and our results are a strong starting point that will help designers improve on the user's quality of experience in distributed shared environments.
Residual Convolutional CTC Networks for Automatic Speech Recognition

Deep learning approaches have been widely used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and they have achieved a significant accuracy improvement. Especially, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been revisited in ASR recently. However, most CNNs used in existing work have less than 10 layers which may not be deep enough to capture all human speech signal information. In this paper, we propose a novel deep and wide CNN architecture denoted as RCNN-CTC, which has residual connections and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss function. RCNN-CTC is an end-to-end system which can exploit temporal and spectral structures of speech signals simultaneously. Furthermore, we introduce a CTC-based system combination, which is different from the conventional frame-wise senone-based one. The basic subsystems adopted in the combination are different types and thus mutually complementary to each other. Experimental results show that our proposed single system RCNN-CTC can achieve the lowest word error rate (WER) on WSJ and Tencent Chat data sets, compared to several widely used neural network systems in ASR. In addition, the proposed system combination can offer a further error reduction on these two data sets, resulting in relative WER reductions of $14.91\%$ and $6.52\%$ on WSJ dev93 and Tencent Chat data sets respectively.
Comparison of Physicochemical Properties of Spray-dried Camel's Milk and Cow's Milk Powder

In the present study, fresh raw camel and cow's milk were concentrated to 20-30% total solids, and then dried using a pilot spray-dryer. The effect of direction of feed on physicochemical properties camel milk powders on physicochemical characteristics of the various spray-dried milks were determined. Some of the examined parameters of spray dried milks were affected, such as the water activity which had low values (0.154 - 0.208). Moreover, the degree of lightness was affected by direction of feeding, where co-current feeding gave the highest degree of lightness (97.73), when compared to counter current (93.82). The spray-drying samples also affected the solubility which recorded higher values of tested milk powder samples. The flowability was affected by the direction of feeding; the co-current feeding gave high values, when compared to counter-current feeding which gave less values (1.21-1.37). The yield was also affected, the spray-dried samples gave (68.84-88.20). The chemical analysis indicated that moisture, protein, fat, ash and acidity ranged 1.01-2.41%, 23.75-26.64%, 27.86-29.82% and 0.1-029%, respectively. The results show the importance of optimizing the drying process, in order to obtain products with better functional and physicochemical properties.
A High-Quality Preconditioning Technique for Multi-Length-Scale Symmetric Positive Definite Linear Systems

We study preconditioning techniques used in conjunction with the conjugate gradient method for solving multi-length-scale symmetric positive definite linear sys- tems originating from the quantum Monte Carlo simulation of electron interaction of correlated materials. Existing preconditioning techniques are not designed to be adap- tive to varying numerical properties of the multi-length-scale systems. In this paper, we propose a hybrid incomplete Cholesky (HIC) preconditioner and demonstrate its adaptivity to the multi-length-scale systems. In addition, we propose an extension of the compressed sparse column with row access (CSCR) sparse matrix storage format to efficiently accommodate the data access pattern to compute the HIC preconditioner. We show that for moderately correlated materials, the HIC preconditioner achieves the opti- mal linear scaling of the simulation. The development of a linear-scaling preconditioner for strongly correlated materials remains an open topic.
Sphere Bundles with 1/4-pinched Fiberwise Metrics

We prove that all smooth sphere bundles that admit fiberwise 1/4-pinched metrics are induced bundles of vector bundles, so their structure groups reduce from the diffeomorphism group of the sphere to the orthogonal group. This result implies the existence of many smooth n-sphere bundles over a k-sphere that do not support strictly 1/4-pinched positively curved Riemannian metrics on their fibers.
Independent thinkers and learners: a critical evaluation of the ‘Growing Together Schools Programme’

This article reports on primary data following an evaluative research project examining an innovative outdoor learning programme in the South East of England with pupils from year six in a primary school. The programme focused on enhancing the skills, experiences and personal attributes of children and young people to cope better with the challenges of learning in the classroom. The evaluation focused on how the intervention was successful in building confidence in children and preparing them for academic success. This study is unique, in that it aims to privilege children’s voices and explores their subjective accounts of the programme to actually begin to understand some of the nuances and issues involved in participating from a child’s perspective in an outdoor learning programme.
Mel-Cepstral Distortion of German Vowels in Different Information Density Contexts

This study investigated whether German vowels differ significantly from each other in mel-cepstral distortion (MCD) when they stand in different information density (ID) contexts. We hypothesized that vowels in the same ID contexts are more similar to each other than vowels that stand in different ID conditions. Read speech material from PhonDat2 of 16 German natives (m = 10, f = 6) was analyzed. Bi-phone and word language models were calculated based on DeWaC. To account for additional variability in the data, prosodic factors, as well as corpusspecific frequency values were also entered into the statistical models. Results showed that vowels in different ID conditions were significantly different in their MCD values. Unigram word probability and corpus-specific word frequency showed the expected effect on vowel similarity with a hierarchy between noncontrasting and contrasting conditions. However, these did not form a homogeneous group since there were group-internal significant differences. The largest distance can be found between vowels produced at fast speech rate, and between unstressed vowels.
A warm thermal enclave in the Late Pleistocene of the South‐eastern United States

Physical and biological evidence supports the probable existence of an enclave of relatively warm climate located between the Southern Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean in the United States during the Last Glacial Maximum. The region supported a mosaic of forest and prairie habitats inhabited by a “Floridian” ice‐age biota. Plant and vertebrate remains suggest an ecological gradient towards Cape Hatteras (35°N) wherein forests tended to replace prairies, and browsing proboscideans tended to replace grazing proboscideans. Beyond 35°N, warm waters of the Gulf Stream were deflected towards the central Atlantic, and a cold‐facies biota replaced “Floridian” biota on the Atlantic coastal plain. Because of niche diversity and relatively benign climate, biodiversity may have been greater in the south‐eastern thermal enclave than in other unglaciated areas of North America. However, the impact of terminal Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions may also have been shorter and more severe in the enclave than further north. A comparison with biotic changes that occurred in North America approximately 55 million years (ma) ago at the Paleocene‐Eocene Thermal Maximum suggests that similar processes of change took place under both ice‐house and greenhouse climates.
Technology Readiness in Customers' Perception and Acceptance of M(obile)-Payment: An Empirical Study in Finland, Germany, the USA and Japan

In todays mobile world there is a high potential for m(obile)- payment services, but the mere existence of such services does not mean that the market is ready for them. M-payment services must add value to attract new users. After years of research regarding technology acceptance (TA) of m- payment, the aim of this paper is to examine how technology readiness (TR) in- fluences customers' perception and acceptance of m-payment. TA of consumers in combination with TR is investigated for m-payment in Finland, Germany, the USA and Japan. We conduct an online survey to collect data in those four coun- tries. We use that data to carry out a TA analysis using a structural equation model (SEM). The research model arises from the findings of a priori explora- tive study and a comprehensive literature review. Evaluation results based on an extended TA model (TAM) show that user acceptance of m-payment differs in- fluenced by constructs.