Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Household ownership and use of insecticide treated nets among target groups after implementation of a national voucher programme in the United Republic of Tanzania: plausibility study using three annual cross sectional household surveys

Objectives To evaluate the impact of the Tanzania National Voucher Scheme on the coverage and equitable distribution of insecticide treated nets, used to prevent malaria, to pregnant women and their infants. Design Plausibility study using three nationally representative cross sectional household and health facility surveys, timed to take place early, mid-way, and at the end of the roll out of the national programme. Setting The Tanzania National Voucher Scheme was implemented in antenatal services, and phased in on a district by district basis from October 2004 covering all of mainland Tanzania in May 2006. Participants 6115, 6260, and 6198 households (in 2005, 2006, and 2007, respectively) in a representative sample of 21 districts (out of a total of 113). Interventions A voucher worth $2.45 (£1.47, €1.74) to be used as part payment for the purchase of a net from a local shop was given to every pregnant woman attending antenatal services. Main outcome measures Insecticide treated net coverage was measured as household ownership of at least one net and use of a net the night before the survey. Socioeconomic distribution of nets was examined using an asset based index. Results Steady increases in net coverage indicators were observed over the three year study period. Between 2005 and 2007, household ownership of at least one net (untreated or insecticide treated) increased from 44% (2686/6115) to 65% (4006/6198; P<0.001), and ownership of at least one insecticide treated net doubled from 18% (1062/5961) to 36% (2229/6198) in the same period (P<0.001). Among infants under 1 year of age, use of any net increased from 33% (388/1180) to 56% (707/1272; P<0.001) and use of an insecticide treated net increased from 16% (188/1180) to 34% (436/1272; P<0.001). After adjusting for potential confounders, household ownership was positively associated with time since programme launch, although this association did not reach statistical significance (P=0.09). Each extra year of programme operation was associated with a 9 percentage point increase in household insecticide treated net ownership (95% confidence interval −1.6 to 20). In 2005, only 7% (78/1115) of nets in households with a child under 1 year of age had been purchased with a voucher; this value increased to 50% (608/1211) in 2007 (P<0.001). In 2007, infants under 1 year in the least poor quintile were more than three times more likely to have used an insecticide treated net than infants in the poorest quintile (54% v 16%; P<0.001). Conclusions The Tanzania National Voucher Scheme was associated with impressive increases in the coverage of insecticide treated nets over a two year period. Gaps in coverage remain, however, especially in the poorest groups. A voucher system that facilitates routine delivery of insecticide treated nets is a feasible option to “keep up” coverage.
Ecological Correlates of Population and Individual Variation in Antipredator Behavior of Two Species of Desert Lizards

Antipredator behavior was measured in four populations of zebra-tailed lizards (Callisaurus draconoides) and two populations of greater earless lizards (Cophosaurus texanus). Lizards were approached in the field, and five measures of wariness were recorded. Callisaurus had significantly greater approach distance and greater final distance than did Cophosaurus. Among populations of Callisaurus, lizards were wariest at the site with the least plant cover. Within populations, air temperature, the directness of the observer's approach, and the lizard's distance to nearest cover when first sighted had significant direct effects on flight behavior based on path analysis. Windiness and time of day had significant direct effects and indirect effects through their relationships with air temperature and distance to cover. Path analysis indicated no one variable with great overall influence on antipredator behavior in these lizards but rather a combined influence of several environmental factors.
Transluminal, subselective measurement of coronary artery blood flow velocity and vasodilator reserve in man.

Assessment of coronary blood flow and the vasodilator reserve capacity of individual coronary arteries in the catheterization laboratory has been hampered by methodologic limitations. We have developed and validated a small Doppler catheter that can subselectively measure phasic coronary blood flow velocity (CBFV). In seven anesthetized calves, CBFV was varied from 0.1 to 5.7 times control CBFV. Changes in mean CBFV measured intraluminally by catheter in the left anterior descending and left circumflex arteries were similar to those measured simultaneously with an epicardial Doppler probe on the surface of the same vessel (n = 85, r = .95, slope = 1.04) and to changes in coronary sinus flow (n = 69, r = .97, slope = 1.06) measured with timed venous collections. Identical maximal coronary reactive hyperemic responses with the catheter present and absent in the artery being studied demonstrated that coronary obstruction by the catheter was minimal. Safety studies in six additional calves demonstrated that the catheter caused small changes in coronary endothelial permeability. Histologic studies revealed no endothelial denudation or thrombus formation. Stable phasic recordings of coronary blood flow velocity have been obtained in 58 of 70 patients studied. One of the 70 patients studied had abrupt coronary occlusion probably related to catheter-induced vasospasm. In 10 normal patients, intracoronary meglumine diatrizoate increased CBFV to 3.5 times that at rest (range 2.8 to 5.0). CBFV rose 5.0-fold after an intravenous infusion of dipyridamole (range 3.8 to 7.0). In each patient, dipyridamole produced greater vasodilation than meglumine diatrizoate. The time- and dose-response characteristics to dipyridamole infusion were heterogeneous, underscoring the advantage of continuous on-line measurement of CBFV in the measurement of vasodilator reserve. This method of measuring CBFV and assessing vasodilator reserve in the catheterization laboratory should facilitate studies of the coronary circulation in man.
Provable Non-convex Phase Retrieval with Outliers: Median TruncatedWirtinger Flow

Solving systems of quadratic equations is a central problem in machine learning and signal processing. One important example is phase retrieval, which aims to recover a signal from only magnitudes of its linear measurements. This paper focuses on the situation when the measurements are corrupted by arbitrary outliers, for which the recently developed non-convex gradient descent Wirtinger flow (WF) and truncated Wirtinger flow (TWF) algorithms likely fail. We develop a novel median-TWF algorithm that exploits robustness of sample median to resist arbitrary outliers in the initialization and the gradient update in each iteration. We show that such a non-convex algorithm provably recovers the signal from a near-optimal number of measurements composed of i.i. d. Gaussian entries, up to a logarithmic factor, even when a constant portion of the measurements are corrupted by arbitrary outliers. We further show that median-TWF is also robust when measurements are corrupted by both arbitrary outliers and bounded noise. Our analysis of performance guarantee is accomplished by development of non-trivial concentration measures of median-related quantities, which may be of independent interest. We further provide numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
Activity of Liposomal Amphotericin B with Prolonged Circulation in Blood versus Those of AmBisome and Fungizone against Intracellular Candida albicans in Murine Peritoneal Macrophages

ABSTRACT Activity against intracellular Candida albicans was assessed in C. albicans-infected murine peritoneal macrophages exposed to long-circulating pegylated amphotericin B liposomes (PEG-AMB-LIP), AmBisome, or Fungizone. The level of antifungal activity of Fungizone is much higher than that of AmBisome or PEG-AMB-LIP, while PEG-AMB-LIP and AmBisome show equivalent activity levels. Previous exposure of uninfected macrophages to PEG-AMB-LIP or AmBisome is advantageous for intracellular antifungal activity.
Optical induction of plasticity at single synapses reveals input-specific accumulation of αCaMKII

Long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of synaptic plasticity, is a primary experimental model for understanding learning and memory formation. Here, we use light-activated channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) as a tool to study the molecular events that occur in dendritic spines of CA1 pyramidal cells during LTP induction. Two-photon uncaging of MNI-glutamate allowed us to selectively activate excitatory synapses on optically identified spines while ChR2 provided independent control of postsynaptic depolarization by blue light. Pairing of these optical stimuli induced lasting increase of spine volume and triggered translocation of αCaMKII to the stimulated spines. No changes in αCaMKII concentration or cytoplasmic volume were observed in neighboring spines on the same dendrite, providing evidence that αCaMKII accumulation at postsynaptic sites is a synapse-specific memory trace of coincident activity.
Successful intrauterine treatment with radiofrequency ablation in a case of acardiac twin pregnancy complicated with a hydropic pump twin

Twin reversed arterial perfusion sequence is a serious complication of monochorionic twin pregnancy, as the pump twin that perfuses blood to the acardiac twin may experience heart failure and fetal hydrops resulting in a poor perinatal outcome. A woman with an acardiac twin pregnancy complicated by a hydropic pump twin underwent intrauterine treatment with radiofrequency ablation (RFA) at 27 weeks of gestation. Obliteration of blood flow to the acardiac twin from the pump twin was successful. Fetal hydrops resolved by the time of delivery at 32 weeks of gestation, in spite of transient deterioration, and a good postnatal outcome was achieved for the pump twin. We found that RFA was an effective intrauterine treatment for acardiac twin pregnancy and suggest that it could be introduced in cases complicated by a hydropic pump twin. Copyright © 2004 ISUOG. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Was it worth the hassle?: ten years of mobile HCI research discussions on lab and field evaluations

Evaluation is considered one of the major cornerstones of human-computer interaction (HCI). During the last decade, several studies have discussed pros and cons of lab and field evaluations. Based on these discussions, we conduct a review to explore the past decade of mobile HCI research on field and lab evaluation, investigating responses in the literature to the "is it worth the hassle? " paper from 2004. We find that while our knowledge and experience with both lab and field studies have grown considerably, there is still no definite answer to the lab versus field question. In response we suggest that the real question is not if -- but when and how -- to go into the field. In response we suggest moving beyond usability evaluations, and to engage with field studies that are truly in-the-wild, and longitudinal.
Current Concepts of Neurolysis and Clinical Applications.

Chronic Pain is a serious public health problem both in the United States and globally. Neurolysis therapy with radiofrequency, phenol/alcohol, and cryotherapy has been used in pain management for several decades. Characteristics of each modality are reviewed in this article including: history, mechanism, clinical indication, contraindication, side effects, and efficacy. An extensive literature search has been performed to determine which technique has the best efficacy while producing the least amount of adverse effects.
Single Image Reflection Removal Using Deep Encoder-Decoder Network

Image of a scene captured through a piece of transparent and reflective material, such as glass, is often spoiled by a superimposed layer of reflection image. While separating the reflection from a familiar object in an image is mentally not difficult for humans, it is a challenging, ill-posed problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional encoder-decoder method to remove the objectionable reflection by learning a map between image pairs with and without reflection. For training the neural network, we model the physical formation of reflections in images and synthesize a large number of photo-realistic reflection-tainted images from reflection-free images collected online. Extensive experimental results show that, although the neural network learns only from synthetic data, the proposed method is effective on real-world images, and it significantly outperforms the other tested state-of-the-art techniques.
An efficient and robust corner detection algorithm

Corner detection has been shown to be extremely useful in many computer vision applications. In this paper, an improved SUSAN corner detector is proposed and its performance is compared with Harris and SUSAN corner detection. The method adopts an adaptive multi-threshold strategy based on local brightness rather than one threshold for the whole image, and divides the circular mask area of SUSAN into two or more parts. Next, the number of pixels in the part where the nucleus locates is calculated. If the number is less than half the total pixels of the circular mask, the nucleus becomes a corner candidate. The exact positions of image corners are those candidates with local minimum numbers. In order to improve the computational efficiency of the algorithm, we limit the search space for corner candidates to those pixels whose intensity gradient magnitudes by Sobel operator are higher than a threshold. Experiments have demonstrated that our corner detector is accurate and efficient.
Cell-Type-Dependent Targeting of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Assembly to the Plasma Membrane and the Multivesicular Body

ABSTRACT The human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) assembly-and-release pathway begins with the targeting of the Gag precursor to the site of virus assembly. The molecular mechanism by which Gag is targeted to the appropriate subcellular location remains poorly understood. Based on the analysis of mutant Gag proteins, we and others have previously demonstrated that a highly basic patch in the matrix (MA) domain of Gag is a major determinant of Gag transport to the plasma membrane. In this study, we determined that in HeLa and T cells, the MA mutant Gag proteins that are defective in plasma membrane targeting form virus particles in a CD63-positive compartment, defined as the late endosome or multivesicular body (MVB). Interestingly, we find that in primary human macrophages, both wild-type (WT) and MA mutant Gag proteins are targeted specifically to the MVB. Despite the fact that particle assembly in macrophages occurs at an intracellular site rather than at the plasma membrane, we observe that WT Gag expressed in this cell type is released as extracellular virions with high efficiency. These results demonstrate that Gag targeting to and assembly in the MVB are physiologically important steps in HIV-1 virus particle production in macrophages and that particle release in this cell type may follow an exosomal pathway. To determine whether Gag targeting to the MVB is the result of an interaction between the late domain in p6Gag and the MVB sorting machinery (e.g., TSG101), we examined the targeting and assembly of Gag mutants lacking p6. Significantly, the MVB localization of Gag was still observed in the absence of p6, suggesting that an interaction between Gag and TSG101 is not required for Gag targeting to the MVB. These data are consistent with a model for Gag targeting that postulates two different cellular binding partners for Gag, one on the plasma membrane and the other in the MVB.
HadoopDB: An Architectural Hybrid of MapReduce and DBMS Technologies for Analytical Workloads

The production environment for analytical data management applications is rapidly changing. Many enterprises are shifting away from deploying their analytical databases on high-end proprietary machines, and moving towards cheaper, lower-end, commodity hardware, typically arranged in a shared-nothing MPP architecture, often in a virtualized environment inside public or private "clouds". At the same time, the amount of data that needs to be analyzed is exploding, requiring hundreds to thousands of machines to work in parallel to perform the analysis. There tend to be two schools of thought regarding what technology to use for data analysis in such an environment. Proponents of parallel databases argue that the strong emphasis on performance and efficiency of parallel databases makes them well-suited to perform such analysis. On the other hand, others argue that MapReduce-based systems are better suited due to their superior scalability, fault tolerance, and flexibility to handle unstructured data. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of building a hybrid system that takes the best features from both technologies; the prototype we built approaches parallel databases in performance and efficiency, yet still yields the scalability, fault tolerance, and flexibility of MapReduce-based systems.
Henneguya curvata sp. n. (Myxosporea: Myxobolidae) parasitizing the gills of Serrasalmus spilopleura (Characidae: Serrasalminae), a South American freshwater fish.

The class Myxosporea of the phylum Myxozoa contains 52 genera (Kent M.L., Andree K.B., Bartholomew J.L., ElMatbouli M., Desser S.S., Devlin R.H., Feist S.W., Hedrick R.P., Hoffmann R.W., Khattra J., Hallett S.L., Lester R.J.G., Longshaw M., Palenzeula O., Siddall M.E., Xiao C.X. 2001: J. Eukaryot. Microbiol. 48: 395–413), most of which parasitize fishes. Henneguya Thelohan, 1892 is the second most common of these genera and contains more than 150 species, some of which are important pathological agents (Dykova I., Lom J. 1978: J. Fish Biol. 12: 197–202; Kalavati C., Narasimhamurti C.C. 1985: Arch. Protistenkd. 129: 199–202; Lom J., Dykova I. 1995: In P.T.K. Woo (Ed.), Fish Diseases and Disorders. Protozoan and Metazoan Infections. Vol. 1. CAB International, Wallingford pp. 97–147; Martins M.L. , Souza V.N. , Moraes J.R. E. , Moraes F.R. 1999: Rev. Bras. Biol. 59: 527– 534). In South America, Henneguya is the most abundant genus, with 31 species. To date, two species of Henneguya have been reported in Serrasalmus spp. : Henneguya iheringi Pinto, 1928 parasitizing Serrasalmus spilopleura caught in the state of Sao Paulo, and H. striolata Casal, Matos et Azevedo, 1997 parasitizing S. striolatus collected in the Amazon River estuary near Belem, state of Para, Brazil. Fish of the genus Serrasalmus are voracious carnivorous fish popularly known as piranhas and are widely distributed throughout South American rivers. In this study, we describe a new species of Henneguya parasitizing S. spilopleura. Eighteen adult and juvenile specimens of S. spilopleura were collected locally from a lake on a farm in the municipality of Campinas, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and examined for the presence of myxosporeans. The fish were captured between January and June 2001, and transported alive to the laboratory where they were killed by transection of the spinal cord then measured and necropsied. The measurements of 30 fresh mature spores (Lom J., Arthur J.R. 1989: J. Fish Dis. 12: 151–156) were obtained using a micrometer incorporated into a microscope eyepiece. The dimensions were expressed as the mean ± standard deviation (SD). India ink staining was used to detect the mucus envelope. The spores were checked for the presence of an iodinophilous vacuole after adding a drop of Lugol solution. Smears containing free spores were stained with Giemsa’s solution and mounted in low viscosity medium as permanent mounts (Adriano E.A., Arana S., Ceccarelli P.S., Cordeiro N.S. 2002: Folia Parasitol. 49: 259–262). For histological analysis, portions of the gills containing plasmodia were fixed in 10% buffered formalin for 24 h, embedded in paraffin, cut into sections 4 μm thick and stained with sirius red (Adriano et al. 2002, op. cit.), haematoxylin and eosin and PAS.
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF SHORT GAMMA-RAY BURST HOST GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGIES, OFFSETS, AND LOCAL ENVIRONMENTS

We present the first comprehensive analysis of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of short-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) host galaxies. These observations allow us to characterize the galactic and local environments of short GRBs as a powerful constraint on the nature of their progenitors. Using the HST data for 10 short GRB hosts, we determine the host morphological properties, measure precise physical and host-normalized offsets relative to the galaxy centers, and study the locations of short GRBs relative to their host light distributions. We find that most short GRB hosts have exponential disk profiles, characteristic of late-type galaxies, but with a median size that is twice as large as that of long GRB hosts, commensurate with their higher luminosities. The observed distribution of projected physical offsets, supplemented by ground-based measurements, has a median of ≈5 kpc, about five times larger than that for long GRBs, and in good agreement with predicted offset distributions for neutron star–neutron star (NS–NS) binary mergers. For the short GRB population as a whole, we find the following robust constraints: (1) ≳25% have projected offsets of ≲10 kpc; and (2) ≳5% have projected offsets of ≳20 kpc. We find no clear systematic trends for the offset distribution of short GRBs with and without extended soft emission. While the physical offsets are larger than those for long GRBs, the distribution of host-normalized offsets is nearly identical due to the larger size of short GRB hosts. Finally, unlike long GRBs, which are concentrated in the brightest regions of their host galaxies, short GRBs appear to under-represent the light distribution of their hosts; this is true even in comparison to core-collapse and Type Ia supernovae. Based on these results, we conclude that short GRBs are consistent with a progenitor population of NS–NS binaries, but partial contribution from prompt or delayed magnetar formation is also consistent with the data. Our study underscores the importance of future HST observations of the larger existing and growing sample of short GRB hosts, which will allow us to delineate the properties of the progenitor population.