Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of family background on attitude of adolescents towards sex education

The purpose of this research is to ascertain the influence of family background on the attitude of adolescent towards sex education. To achieve the purpose of this study, twenty (20) item structured questionnaires of Agree, Disagree and Undecided was administered to one hundred and eighty (180) respondents randomly sampled from public and private schools in Ogba, Egbema and Ndoni Local government areas of Rivers State, Nigeria. The data gathered were analysed with a simple statistical mean. From the analysis, it was found that: (a) Adolescents show a fair attitude towards sex education, (b) Adolescents lack good knowledge of sex education, (c) Sex education has a great effect on adolescents, and (d) There are various risks associated with sexual activities among adolescents. Recommendations were also made.
Central Portalization Correlates with Fibrosis but Not with Risk Factors for Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis in Steatotic Chronic Hepatitis C

Concomitant steatosis in chronic hepatitis C is associated with fibrosis and unfavorable treatment outcome. Central zone injury in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) manifests as central portalization, with centrizonal microvessels and ductular reaction. We investigated whether central portalization in steatotic HCV biopsies would identify patients with metabolic risk factors for NASH. Liver biopsies with chronic hepatitis C and >10% steatosis (n = 65) were evaluated for the degree of steatosis, zonation of steatosis, fibrosis, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) activity score. The presence of centrizonal microvessels, sinusoidal capillarization, ductular reaction, and CK7 positive intermediate-phenotype hepatocytes were evaluated by CD34 and CK7 immunostain. The degree of steatosis and fibrosis showed a positive correlation. Additional positive correlations were noted between centrizonal angiogenesis and NAFLD activity score and central portalization and fibrosis. However, neither central portalization nor zonation of steatosis identified patients with metabolic risk factors for NASH. Therefore, central portalization cannot be used as a surrogate marker to identify patients with metabolic risk factors for NASH in steatotic HCV biopsies. The mechanism of centrizonal injury in steatotic HCV hepatitis is not solely attributable to the metabolic risk factors for NASH.
Online K-12 Teachers’ Perceptions and Practices of Supporting Self-Regulated Learning

With growing interest in and popularity of online learning and lifelong learners, students’ ability to be engaged in self-regulated learning (SRL) has become more important. Moreover, online learning is becoming an important feature of K-12 education. Although SRL is known to be important and teachable, little research has been conducted on teachers’ practices and perceptions of SRL. Survey responses of 112 teachers who were teaching at K-12 online schools in the United States revealed that they perceived the importance of both their students’ SRL and their own responsibility for teaching SRL to their students. However, the survey also showed that their practices for supporting SRL had a narrow focus concentrating on conventional teaching, which may have prevented their students from developing the full range of SRL abilities. Possible solutions, limitations, and implication of the study were also discussed.
Fistuloclysis Improves Liver Function and Nutritional Status in Patients with High-Output Upper Enteric Fistula

Background. We aimed to determine the efficacy of fistuloclysis in patients with high-output upper enteric fistula (EF). Methods. Patients were assigned into the fistuloclysis group (n = 35, receiving fistuloclysis plus total enteral nutrition (TEN)) and the control group (n = 60, receiving TEN). Laboratory variables were measured during the four-week treatment. Results. At baseline, variables were similar between the two groups. Delta value was defined as the changes from baseline to day 28. Compared with the control group, the fistuloclysis group showed greater improvements in liver function (Delta total bilirubin (TB): 20.3 ± 9.7 in the fistuloclysis group versus 15.6 ± 6.3 in the control group, P = 0.040; Delta direct bilirubin (DB): 12.5 ± 3.4 versus 10.0 ± 3.6, P = 0.011; Delta alkaline phosphatase (ALP): 98.4 ± 33.5 versus 57.6 ± 20.9, P < 0.001); nutritional status (Delta total protein: 21.8 ± 8.7 versus 10.7 ± 2.1, P < 0.001; Delta albumin: 11.3 ± 2.5 versus 4.2 ± 1.3, P < 0.001). In the fistuloclysis subgroups, biliary fistula patients had the maximum number of variables with the greatest improvements. Conclusions. Fistuloclysis improved hepatic and nutritional parameters in patients with high-output upper EF, particularly in biliary fistula patients.
Critical Consciousness and Sexual Pleasure: Evidence for a Sexual Empowerment Process for Heterosexual and Sexual Minority Women

Author(s): Grose, Rose Grace | Advisor(s): Grabe, Shelly | Abstract: It has long been argued that gender-based inequalities within patriarchy create barriers to women’s sexual well-being, in particular to sexual pleasure. This study integrated Empowerment Theory with research on women’s sexuality to examine multiple factors related to women’s sexual pleasure and satisfaction. An empowerment process is one social psychological mechanism through which less powerful individuals gain influence and power that results in increased opportunities to control decisions that affect their lives. In the present study, 271 heterosexual and 159 sexual minority undergraduate women completed a questionnaire assessing dimensions of sexual empowerment processes, including critical consciousness about gender and sexuality (e.g., feminist identity, conformity to feminine norms), sexual subjectivity (e.g., entitlement to pleasure, self-efficacy, body image self-consciousness), actions (e.g., sexual assertiveness), and sexual pleasure (e.g., sexual satisfaction and orgasm experience). Data were analyzed with structural equation modeling and support was found for sexual empowerment processes in which critical consciousness about gender was indirectly related to sexual pleasure through relationships with two mediators, sexual subjectivity and sexual assertiveness, in line with the hypotheses. While sexual empowerment processes were largely similar for sexual minority and heterosexual women, the groups differed in baseline levels of critical consciousness, some aspects of sexual subjectivity, and sexual assertiveness. Implications for sexual education, clinical practice, and future research are discussed.
Osteoporosis Self-Assessment Tool Performance in a Large Sample of Postmenopausal Women of Mendoza, Argentina

The Osteoporosis Self-assessment Tool (OST) is a clinical instrument designed to select patients at risk of osteoporosis, who would benefit from a bone mineral density measurement. The OST only takes into account the age and weight of the subject. It was developed for Asian women and later validated for European and North American white women. The performance of the OST in a sample of 4343 women from Greater Mendoza, a large metropolitan area of Argentina, was assessed. Dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scans of lumbar spine and hip were obtained. Patients were classified as either osteoporotic (N = 1830) or nonosteoporotic (n = 2513) according to their lowest T-score at any site. Osteoporotic patients had lower OST scores (P < 0.0001). A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed an area under the curve of 71% (P < 0.0001), with a sensitivity of 83.7% and a specificity of 44% for a cut-off value of 2. Positive predictive value was 52% and negative predictive value was 79%. The odds ratio for the diagnosis of osteoporosis was 4.06 (CI95 3.51 to 4.71; P < 0.0001). It is concluded that the OST is useful for selecting postmenopausal women for DXA testing in the studied population.
The effect of experimental pain during motor skill training on acquisition and motor cortical maps Master ’ s thesis Master of sport science

The aim of the study was to determine if acute experimental pain in the soleus (SOL) affects the learning of a novel trace-tracking task involving fine control of dorsi flexion of the ankle joint, and the associated motor cortical maps of the tibialis (TA) and SOL, as assessed preand post-training. Twenty-four healthy participants (20 men, 4 women, age 24.79 ± 0.57 years, height 1.81 ± 0.02 m, weight 80.67 ± 2.49 kg, sporting activity per week 6.63 ± 0.58 hours) were semi-randomly divided into a pain and control group. Multiple injections of either hypertonic saline (0.5 mL, 0.6 mL, 0.8 mL, 1 mL, 5.8%) or isotonic saline (0.5 mL, 0.6, mL, 0.8 mL, 1 mL, 0.9%) as a control, was administered to the dominant soleus muscle throughout a 24-minute tracetracking training period. Before and after the training, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the primary motor cortex (MI) to generate motor cortical maps of TA and SOL. Pain and control groups improved equally in motor skill performance, and pain did not interfere with performance improvement. Furthermore, no alterations were found in the motor maps for either TA or SOL for either group. PERSPECTIVE: Since the present study shows that pain does not interfere with motor skill acquisition or alter the motor cortical maps. This can be useful in rehabilitation since patients can acquire new or modified motor skills without the influence of pain which might help them to move in a more beneficial way.
Nurturing Nature: Testing the Three-hit Hypothesis of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental disorder characterized by a hyperactive dopamine system and deregulated stress system. Human studies have suggested that the schizophrenia symptoms precipitate if a hyperactive dopaminergic genotype interacts with adverse life experiences that activate the stress system. To examine this gene-by-environment interaction, we exposed rats genetically-selected for enhanced apomorphine susceptibility to two stress-provoking life events, poor maternal care early-in-life, and isolation rearing later-in-life. This promoted the development of schizophrenia endophenotypes. Our experiments involved two complementary steps: First, we focused on the immediate endocrine adaptations to maternal separation in common rats. It is known that a single episode of prolonged maternal separation slowly increases corticosterone levels in the neonate rat. We discovered that if the pups had been previously exposed to maternal separation, this rise in corticosterone was abolished, suggesting that the pups had learned to predict the return of the dam. While readily adapting to repeated maternal absence, the pups, surprisingly, stayed alert and displayed a rapid response to an acute stressor. We then investigated whether pup’s stress responsiveness was influenced by the context of maternal separation. It appeared that the experience of being kept in isolation in a novel environment during repeated maternal separation, rather than the maternal absence per se, caused priming of the amygdala fear pathway, with lasting consequences for the responsiveness of the neuroendocrine and behavioral stress system. These endocrine and behavioral alterations, caused by early-life stress experience, consisted of schizophrenia-like phenotypes. Second, we sought to investigate the interplay of such early-life stress experience with schizophrenia genetic predisposition and/or later-life social stress experience. Thus, we were able to test the three-hit (cumulative stress) and the developmental mismatch hypotheses. The former states that exposure to earlylife adversity and later-life psychosocial stressors, superimposed on genetic susceptibility, result in a severe schizophrenia-like phenotype. The latter proposes that experiences early-in-life program the developing brain in preparation for the future. In the case of genetically-predisposed apomorphine susceptible rats (schizophrenia-susceptible), we provide strong evidence for the three-hit hypothesis. In the case of the nongenetically selected Wistar rats, the mismatch hypothesis is supported since the outcome of early-life stress often negatively interacted with the pre-puberty social context. In agreement with the three-hit hypothesis of schizophrenia, we conclude from the current experiments that early-life stress experience in interaction with highly reactive dopaminergic alleles, leads to amygdala priming that, together with additional stressors, precipitate schizophrenia.
Development of a self-administrated quality of life questionnaire for sarcopenia in elderly subjects: the SarQoL

Background: the impact of sarcopenia on quality of life is currently assessed by generic tools. However, these tools may not detect subtle effects of this specific condition on quality of life. Objective: the aim of this study was to develop a sarcopenia-specific quality of life questionnaire (SarQoL, Sarcopenia Quality of Life) designed for community-dwelling elderly subjects aged 65 years and older. Settings: participants were recruited in an outpatient clinic in Liège, Belgium. Subjects: sarcopenic subjects aged 65 years or older. Methods: the study was articulated in the following four stages: (i) Item generation—based on literature review, sarcopenic subjects' opinion, experts' opinion, focus groups; (ii) Item reduction—based on sarcopenic subjects' and experts' preferences; (iii) Questionnaire generation—developed during an expert meeting; (iv) Pretest of the questionnaire—based on sarcopenic subjects' opinion. Results: the final version of the questionnaire consists of 55 items translated into 22 questions rated on a 4-point Likert scale. These items are organised into seven domains of dysfunction: Physical and mental health, Locomotion, Body composition, Functionality, Activities of daily living, Leisure activities and Fears. In view of the pretest, the SarQoL is easy to complete, independently, in ∼10 min. Conclusions: the first version of the SarQoL, a specific quality of life questionnaire for sarcopenic subjects, has been developed and has been shown to be comprehensible by the target population. Investigations are now required to test the psychometric properties (internal consistency, test–retest reliability, divergent and convergent validity, discriminant validity, floor and ceiling effects) of this questionnaire.
Achieving high cache hit ratios for CDN memory caches with size-aware admission

Content delivery networks (CDNs) allow billions of users to expediently access content with higher reliability and performance from proximal “edge” caches deployed around the world. Each edge cache typically uses an in-memory Hot Object Cache (HOC) and a disk-based cache. While the HOC provides very fast response times, it is also very small. Maximizing the object hit ratio (OHR) of the HOCs is a major goal of a CDN. Almost all prior work on caching policies has focused on improving the OHR via highly complex eviction policies. In contrast, this work investigates the superiority of size-aware admission policies, where the emphasis is on simplicity. Specifically, we propose two policies that either admit an object with some probability proportional to its size, or as a simple size threshold. Our results are based on two expansive production HOC traces from 2015 captured in the Akamai CDN. Unlike older traces, we find that object sizes in these traces span ten orders of magnitude, and that highly popular objects have an order of magnitude smaller size on average. Our simple policies efficiently exploit this property and achieve a 23-92% OHR improvement over state-of-the-art research-based and commercial caching systems. The superior performance of our policies stems from a new statistical cache tuning method, wich automatically adapts the parameters of our admission policies to the request traffic. We find that our statistical tuning method is significantly superior to state-of-the-art cache tuning methods such as hill climbing. Our method consistently achieves 80% of the OHR of offline parameter tuning. To demonstrate feasibility in a production setting, we show that our tuning method can be incorporated into a high-performance caching system with low processing and memory overheads and negligible impact on cache server throughput.
Memory-specific temporal profiles of gene expression in the hippocampus

Many experiments in the past have demonstrated the requirement of de novo gene expression during the long-term retention of learning and memory. Although previous studies implicated individual genes or genetic pathways in learning and memory, they did not uncover the collective behaviors or patterns of the genes. We have used genome-scale screening to analyze gene expression during spatial learning of rats in the Morris water maze. Our results show distinct temporal gene expression profiles associated with learning and memory. Exogenous administration of one peptide whose sustained increase during memory retention was implicated by microarray analysis, fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-18, improved spatial learning behavior, suggesting that pharmacological modulation of pathways and targets identified may allow new therapeutic approaches for improving learning and memory. Results of this study also suggest that while learning and physical activity involve common groups of genes, the behavior of learning and memory emerges from unique patterns of gene expression across time.
ROUTING ELASTIC DEMANDS: A POLYMORPHISM BASED METAHEURISTIC SCHEME

We present here a Demand Maximizing Circuit Problem, which involves time elastic demands, and which is related to applications of Network Synthesis to the design of urban public transportation systems. This problem consists in the optimization, on some irregular domain, of some quantity whose computation involves heavy computational costs. We propose a specific metaheuristic Pursuit scheme, based upon the application to the original problem of a multiform rewriting process. We present and discuss various interpretations of this scheme together with practical experimentations. The whole paper is an extension of a work which was presented during the LT ‘2007 conference in Sousse.
Identification and verification of heat shock protein 60 as a potential serum marker for colorectal cancer

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major public health issue worldwide, and novel tumor markers may contribute to its efficient management by helping in early detection, prognosis or surveillance of disease. The aim of our study was to identify new serum biomarkers for CRC, and we followed a phased biomarker discovery and validation process to obtain an accurate preliminary assessment of potential clinical utility. We compared colonic tumors and matched normal tissue from 15 CRC patients, using two‐dimensional difference gel electrophoresis (2D‐DIGE), and identified 17 proteins that had significant differential expression. These results were further confirmed by western blotting for heat shock protein (HSP) 60, glutathione‐S‐transferase Pi, α‐enolase, T‐complex protein 1 subunit β, and leukocyte elastase inhibitor, and by immunohistochemistry for HSP60. Using mAbs raised against HSP60, we developed a reliable (precision of 5–15%) and sensitive (0.3 ng·mL−1) immunoassay for the detection of HSP60 in serum. Elevated levels of HSP60 were found in serum from CRC patients in two independent cohorts; the receiver‐operating characteristic curve obtained in 112 patients with CRC and 90 healthy controls had an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.70, which was identical to the AUC of carcinoembryonic antigen. Combination of serum markers improved clinical performance: the AUC of a three‐marker logistic regression model combining HSP60, carcinoembryonic antigen and carbohydrate antigen 19‐9 reached 0.77. Serum HSP60 appeared to be more specific for late‐stage CRC; therefore, future studies should evaluate its utility for determining prognosis or monitoring therapy rather than early detection.
Biopolitical precarity in the permeable body: the social lives of people, viruses and their medicines

Abstract This article is based on multi-sited ethnography that traced a dynamic network of actors (activists, policy-makers, health care systems, pharmaceutical companies) and actants (viruses and medicines) that shaped South African women’s access to, and embodiment of, antiretroviral therapies (ARVs). Using actor network theory and post-humanist performativity as conceptual tools, the article explores how bodies become the meeting place for HIV and ARVs, or non-human actants. The findings centre around two linked sets of narratives that draw the focus out from the body to situate the body in relation to South Africa’s shifting biopolitical landscape. The first set of narratives articulate how people perceive the intra-action of HIV and ARVs in their sustained vitality. The second set of narratives articulate the complex embodiment of these actants as a form biopolitical precarity. These narratives flow into each other and do not represent a totalising view of the effects of HIV and ARVs in the lives of the people with whom I worked. The positive effects of ARVs (as unequivocally essential for sustaining life) were implicit and the precarious vitality of the people in this ethnography was fundamental. However, a related and emergent set of struggles become salient during the study that complicate a view of ARVs as a ‘technofix’. These emergent struggles were biopolitical, and they related first to the intra-action of HIV and ARVs ‘within’ the body; and second, to the ‘outside’ socio-economic context in which people’s bodies were situated.
The Role of Gatekeepers in Research: Learning from Reflexivity and Reflection

Research is now an integral part of everyday health, education and social science practice. These professions need to be responsive to meet the changing needs in light of evidence based research findings. Within this process, gatekeepers have a key role to ensure researchers gain access to potential participants and sites for research. Positive influences of the gatekeepers can be invaluable to the research process by facilitating the smooth running of research activity to completion. At times, gatekeeping can be problematic with researchers having limited or no access to sites. In this present study to recruit vulnerable adolescents, a number of gatekeepers denied, limited or delayed access to potential participants and sites despite ethical, professional and organizational approval. In response, the researchers incorporated learning tools to address challenges brought about by gatekeepers in this study and for improvements in future studies. Reflexivity was used during the study to critically review all aspects of the research process and retrospective reflection identified areas that worked well and those areas for improvement in future studies. In broad terms, a number of factors were found to influence the action of gatekeepers. This related to level of understanding about the research, communication issues, motivation issues and fear or anxiety about the outcome. One recurring issue seemed to relate to the sensitive nature of the study and the deeply held attitudes and values of the individual gatekeepers. Researchers need to engage and involve the gatekeeper/s early in the research process. Other positive influences include sharing of clear information with the purpose of the research, the gatekeeper being motivated with a positive attitude to research which is also supported within the gatekeeper’s environment. When these positive influences are not present then this can have a negative influence on research activity.