Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Profile of an HIV Testing and Counseling Unit in Bangladesh: Majority of New Diagnoses among Returning Migrant Workers and Spouses

Introduction Analysis of data from HIV testing and counseling (HTC) services provides an opportunity to identify important populations for targeting of HIV prevention efforts. Our primary aim was to describe the demographics of clients presenting to HTC in Bangladesh, a low HIV prevalence country. Our secondary aim was to determine the risk factors for HIV positivity among returning migrant workers who were tested. Methods We performed a cross-sectional study of data collected between 2002 and 2010 from the first HTC service established in Bangladesh, located in three large cities. Results 8973 individuals attended HTC services, with 558 (6.2%) of clients testing positive for HIV, including 33 children. The majority of those who tested positive were aged 25–44 (71%), male (70%), and married (68%). Key populations considered at increased risk of HIV, such as female sex workers, people who inject drugs, and males who have sex with males accounted for only 11% of adults who tested positive. Notably, 75% of adults testing positive had a history of migrant work or was the spouse of a migrant worker. In multivariable logistic regression of those with a migrant work history presenting for HTC, we found rural residence, working in the Middle East, and longer duration of migrant work to be independently associated with testing positive, and female gender and higher level of education to be negatively associated. Conclusions These data suggest that in Bangladesh, in addition to targeting traditional key populations, HIV prevention efforts should also focus on migrant workers and their spouses.
Non Selective Inhibition of COX Activity Reversed Inflammation and Reactive Oxygen Radicals Mediated Prostate Cancer Risk and Decreased Disease Progression in Preclinical Model

Prostate cancer (PCa) represents the most frequent urologic diagnosis in elderly males. We have previously shown that exposure of prostate to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) promotes cancer risk. We investigated the effect of non-selective cyclooxygenase (COX) inhibition on prostate inflammation-mediated cancer risk in vivo. The prostates of male rats were inoculated with E. coli as sources of inflammatory molecules (LPS) and were treated with COX inhibitor, aspirin 2 mg/Kg orally for 14 days or PBS. Oxidative stress was induced with two 2 mls of hydrogen peroxide orally twice daily or PBS for 14 days; they were either treated with COX inhibitor or PBS for another 14 days. Blood was collected and analyzed for acid phosphatase and PSA. Data showed presences of LPS in the prostate of the rats resulted in gradual increase in PSA when compared to control (P P 2O2 had 2.5 fold increase in acid phosphatase (ACP) compared control (P P ity in rats.
Robust regression through the Huber’s criterion and adaptive lasso penalty

The Huber's Criterion is a useful method for robust regression. The adaptive least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) is a popular technique for simultaneous estimation and variable selection. The adaptive weights in the adaptive lasso allow to have the oracle properties. In this paper we propose to combine the Huber's criterion and adaptive penalty as lasso. This regression technique is resistant to heavy-tailed er- rors or outliers in the response. Furthermore, we show that the estimator associated with this procedure enjoys the oracle properties. This approach is compared with LAD-lasso based on least absolute deviation with adaptive lasso. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate satisfactory finite-sample performance of such procedure. A real example is analyzed for illustration purposes.
Higher order Matching Pursuit for Low Rank Tensor Learning

Low rank tensor learning, such as tensor completion and multilinear multitask learning, has received much attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose higher order matching pursuit for low rank tensor learning problems with a convex or a nonconvex cost function, which is a generalization of the matching pursuit type methods. At each iteration, the main cost of the proposed methods is only to compute a rank-one tensor, which can be done efficiently, making the proposed methods scalable to large scale problems. Moreover, storing the resulting rank-one tensors is of low storage requirement, which can help to break the curse of dimensionality. The linear convergence rate of the proposed methods is established in various circumstances. Along with the main methods, we also provide a method of low computational complexity for approximately computing the rank-one tensors, with provable approximation ratio, which helps to improve the efficiency of the main methods and to analyze the convergence rate. Experimental results on synthetic as well as real datasets verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Simple and Effective Approach for Consistent Training of Hierarchical Phrase-based Translation Models

In this paper, we present a simple approach for consistent training of hierarchical phrase-based translation models. In order to consistently train a translation model, we perform hierarchical phrasebased decoding on training data to find derivations between the source and target sentences. This is done by synchronous parsing the given sentence pairs. After extracting k-best derivations, we reestimate the translation model probabilities based on collected rule counts. We show the effectiveness of our procedure on the IWSLT German! English and English! French translation tasks. Our results show improvements of up to 1.6 points BLEU.
Modeling Time-Varying Volatility in Financial Returns: Evidence from the Bond Markets

The unusually uncertainphase in the global nancial markets has inspired many researchers to study the e¤ects of ambiguity (or Knightian uncertainty) on the decisions made by investors and its implications in the capital markets. We contribute to this literature by using the time-varying GARCH model of Amado and Teräsvirta (2011) to analyse whether the increasing uncertainty has caused excess volatility in the US and European government bond markets. In our model, volatility is multiplicatively decomposed into a stable conditional variance and time-varying unconditional volatility components. We suggest that the time-varying risk is captured by the conditional volatility parameters, whereas the time-variation in the unconditional volatility is driven by the level of uncertainty in the markets. Corresponding author. E-mail: camado@eeg.uminho. pt. yEmail: helina.laakkonen@bof. Views are those of the author and do not necessarily reect the views of the Bank of Finland.
Detection of X-ray emission from the host clusters of 3CR quasars

We report the detection of extended X-ray emission around several powerful 3CR quasars with redshifts out to 0.73. The ROSAT HRI images of the quasars have been corrected for spacecraft wobble and compared with an empirical point-spread function. All the quasars examined show excess emission at radii of 15 arcsec and more, the evidence being strong for the more distant objects and weak only for the two nearest ones, which are known from other wavelengths not to lie in strongly clustered environments. The spatial profile of the extended component is consistent with thermal emission from the intracluster medium of moderately rich host clusters to the quasars. The total luminosities of the clusters are in the range ∼4×1044–3×1045 erg s−1, assuming a temperature of 4 keV. The inner regions of the intracluster medium are, in all cases, dense enough to be part of a cooling flow.
Alterations in dendritic morphology of hippocampal neurons in adult rats after neonatal administration of N‐omega‐nitro‐L‐arginine

The dendritic length and dendritic‐spine density of the pyramidal neurons of the prefrontal cortex and the CA1 hippocampus of rats using the nonselective nitric oxide synthase inhibitor N‐omega‐nitro‐L‐arginine (L‐NNA) at different postnatal day (P) periods of the brain development (P1–P3, P4–P6, and P7–P9) were assessed using Golgi–Cox staining after puberty (P60). At P4–P6, the L‐NNA treatment produced a significant decrease of the dendritic length and dendritic‐spine density of the pyramidal cells of the CA1 hippocampus. In addition, the dendritic length of the pyramidal neurons of the CA1 hippocampus decreased because of the L‐NNA treatment at P1–P3. These data suggest that during a specific step in the development of the brain, the nitric oxide levels may play a critical role in the morphological modifications of the pyramidal neurons of the CA1 hippocampus at postpubertal age. Synapse 61:785–789, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Foundations of Individuals' Generalized Social Trust: A Review

This chapter reviews the literature on the causes of individuals' generalized social trust (trust in unknown others) from a wide-range of social science disciplines. We structure the review around two broad classes of explanations: dispositional explanations (trust as a disposition) and experiential explanations (trust as a response to individual experiences). Specific attention is paid to the potential for drawing causal inferences - based on quality of data, and the methods used - in the studies reviewed.
Gene Genealogies Within a Fixed Pedigree, and the Robustness of Kingman’s Coalescent

We address a conceptual flaw in the backward-time approach to population genetics called coalescent theory as it is applied to diploid biparental organisms. Specifically, the way random models of reproduction are used in coalescent theory is not justified. Instead, the population pedigree for diploid organisms—that is, the set of all family relationships among members of the population—although unknown, should be treated as a fixed parameter, not as a random quantity. Gene genealogical models should describe the outcome of the percolation of genetic lineages through the population pedigree according to Mendelian inheritance. Using simulated pedigrees, some of which are based on family data from 19th century Sweden, we show that in many cases the (conceptually wrong) standard coalescent model is difficult to reject statistically and in this sense may provide a surprisingly accurate description of gene genealogies on a fixed pedigree. We study the differences between the fixed-pedigree coalescent and the standard coalescent by analysis and simulations. Differences are apparent in recent past, within ∼
Electrical Excitability of Atrioventricular Nodal Cells

The electrical threshold of A-V nodal cells of isolated rabbit heart preparations was estimated by techniques which permitted stimulation and recording through the same micropipette. Cells within the node were significantly less excitable than adjacent atrial and ventricular tissues; thresholds exceeded 5 × 10-6 amp in some instances. Recovery of excitability was delayed well beyond repolarization; in cells of the midnodal region, “diastolic” threshold was not attained until 0.2 to 0.5 seconds after restoration of resting membrane potential. A cumulative effect of frequency upon excitability (fatigue) was demonstrated. At high driving rates, the lag in recovery was further delayed, and the late diastolic threshold was increased. Responses to single-cell stimulation indicate that summation may be an important feature of propagation within the node.
Student teachers’ proactive strategies for avoiding study-related burnout during teacher education

Abstract The study aims to gain a better understanding of the function of proactive strategies in buffering study burnout among student teachers at the early stage of their studies. There is some evidence that the use of active social coping strategies during studies is related to reduced burnout levels among early career teachers. Less is known about the association between the proactive strategies and burnout among student teachers. Altogether, 244 Finnish student teachers completed the survey. The data were analysed by using SEM. The results suggested that the proactive strategies adopted by student teachers seem to prevent study-related burnout, especially in terms of exhaustion in studies and inadequacy in studying, but not directly the perceived cynicism towards studies. The results imply that learning how to use proactive strategies is functional in coping with study-related stressors, by reducing the risk of student teachers’ burnout.
Subjective Quality Optimized Intra Mode Selection for H.264 I Frame Coding Based on SSIM

H.264/AVC adopts rate distortion optimization (RDO) technique to select optimal macro block (MB) coding mode and achieves higher compression efficiency, but the traditional RDO framework employs pixel wise mean square error (MSE) and the like as objective distortion metric, which can not acquire optimal subjective quality. This paper applies structural similarity (SSIM) based subjective distortion to RDO-based intra mode decision in H.264 I frame coding, and further proposes a frame layer adaptive Lagrange multiplier adjustment scheme to get better tradeoff between rate and SSIM distortion. Experimental results show that, the proposed scheme encodes more image structural information and thus acquires better subjective quality and coding efficiency compared with MSE-based RDO method.
Happiness and Loss Aversion: When Social Participation Dominates Comparison

A central finding in happiness research is that a person’s income relative to the average income in her social reference group is more important for her life satisfaction than the absolute level of her income. This dependence of life satisfaction on relative income can be related to the reference dependence of the value function in Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) prospect theory. In this paper we investigate whether the characteristics of the value function like concavity for gains, convexity for losses, and loss aversion apply to the dependence of life satisfaction on relative income. This is tested with a new measure for the reference income for a large German panel for the years 1984-2001. We find concavity of life satisfaction in positive relative income, but unexpectedly strongly significant concavity of life satisfaction in negative relative income as well. The latter result is shown to be robust to extreme distortions of the reported-life-satisfaction scale. It implies a rising marginal sensitivity of life satisfaction to more negative values of relative income, and hence loss aversion (in a wide sense). This may be explained in terms of increasing financial obstacles to social participation.
The Effect of Internal Dissipation and Surface Irradiation on the Structure of Disks and the Location of the Snow Line around Sun-like Stars

In theory of accretion disks, angular momentum and mass transfer are associated with the generation of energy through viscous dissipation. In the construction of SED models of protostellar disks, the stellar irradiation is usually assumed to be the dominant heating source. Here we construct a new set of self-consistent analytical disk models by taking into account both sources of thermal energy and the thermal structure of the disk across the midplane. We deduce a set of general formulae for the relationship between the mass accretion rate and the surface density profile. We apply it to determine the structure of protostellar disks under a state of steady accretion and derive the radial distribution of surface density and midplane temperature. The incorporation of the viscous heating in our model reduces the disk flaring angle and leads to lower photospheric temperatures than previously thought. Around T Tauri stars, the snow line can evolve from outside 10 AU during FU Orionis outbursts, to 2 AU during the quasi-steady accretion phase, to 0.7 AU when the accretion rate falls to about 10-9 M☉ yr-1, and finally reexpand beyond 2.2 AU during the protostellar-to-debris disk transition. The nonmonotonous evolution of the snow line may lead to the observed isotopic composition of water on both Venus and Earth. We also infer the presence of a marginally opaque, isothermal region with a surface density distribution similar to that of the MSN model. With a 40% higher temperature than that in the region immediately within, this transition may lead to an upturn in the SEDs in the MIR (24-70 μm) wavelength range. The optically thin, outermost regions of the disk have a shallow surface density profile of the dust that is consistent with millimeter observations of spatially resolved disks.
Implementing Abstract Objects with Inheritance in Datalogneg

We present an elegant technique to reduce inheritance and encapsulation to pure deduction. The reduction technique presented in this paper makes it possible to model object-oriented database features in a purely deductive system. Encapsulation has been given a formal treatment for the first time by introducing the so called conteztresolution scheme. The completion technique presented in this paper elegantly tackles inheritance with overriding and conflict resolution by avoiding non-monotonic reasoning. We show that the completion based reduction technique is robust and appealing compared to any other known rewriting based approaches. We propose an objectoriented front-end language called the Datalog+‘, and discuss a rewriting scheme to the acclaimed Datalogneg for this language that exploits the context resolution and completion techniques presented here. We claim that our approach outperforms other known approaches in the literature in terms of its modeling capabilities and efficiency. Unlike most others, an implementation based on our reduction technique does not require metainterpretation and consequently readily exploits the rich set of optimization techniques available in Datalogneg
Illumination of Parainfluenza Virus Infection and Transmission in Living Animals Reveals a Tissue-Specific Dichotomy

The parainfluenza viruses (PIVs) are highly contagious respiratory paramyxoviruses and a leading cause of lower respiratory tract (LRT) disease. Since no vaccines or antivirals exist, non-pharmaceutical interventions are the only means of control for these pathogens. Here we used bioluminescence imaging to visualize the spatial and temporal progression of murine PIV1 (Sendai virus) infection in living mice after intranasal inoculation or exposure by contact. A non-attenuated luciferase reporter virus (rSeV-luc(M-F*)) that expressed high levels of luciferase yet was phenotypically similar to wild-type Sendai virus in vitro and in vivo was generated to allow visualization. After direct intranasal inoculation, we unexpectedly observed that the upper respiratory tract (URT) and trachea supported robust infection under conditions that result in little infection or pathology in the lungs including a low inoculum of virus, an attenuated virus, and strains of mice genetically resistant to lung infection. The high permissivity of the URT and trachea to infection resulted in 100% transmission to naïve contact recipients, even after low-dose (70 PFU) inoculation of genetically resistant BALB/c donor mice. The timing of transmission was consistent with the timing of high viral titers in the URT and trachea of donor animals but was independent of the levels of infection in the lungs of donors. The data therefore reveals a disconnect between transmissibility, which is associated with infection in the URT, and pathogenesis, which arises from infection in the lungs and the immune response. Natural infection after transmission was universally robust in the URT and trachea yet limited in the lungs, inducing protective immunity without weight loss even in genetically susceptible 129/SvJ mice. Overall, these results reveal a dichotomy between PIV infection in the URT and trachea versus the lungs and define a new model for studies of pathogenesis, development of live virus vaccines, and testing of antiviral therapies.
Exploring the Impact of Ineffective Communication on Educators’ Teaching Performance at Primary Schools

Abstract This paper reports on an investigation of ineffective communication among educators’ teaching performance in Fezile-Dabi District, Free State Province, South Africa. The study utilized a qualitative paradigm. Open-ended questionnaires were used as a research instrument to collect data from six purposively selected educators in one primary school. The findings revealed that working with authoritarian principals is a major debilitating factor because there is no effective communication. As a result, there is low morale, conflicts and job dissatisfaction, which contribute to a deterioration of the culture of learning and teaching (COLT) because educators are deprived opportunities to participate in school restructuring processes. Furthermore, research participants stated that owing to a toxic environment and the unhealthy relations they have with the principal, their psychological well-being has been adversely affected. In conclusion, when there exists ineffective communication among educators, stress, depression and insomnia are most likely to occur. Given that authoritarian leadership styles could be destructive in any organization, the recommendations are that professional development and support for the principal from the district is a necessity in the democratic dispensation.
Disability discrimination in higher education: analyzing the quality of counseling services

ABSTRACT We conduct a field experiment to analyze barriers disabled students face when entering higher education institutions. Fictitious high-school graduates request information regarding the admission process and special accommodations to ease studying. Potential applicants randomly reveal one of four impairment types. Response rates are similar for all four conditions. Evaluating response contents reveals differential treatment by impairment type. Students with depression or dyslexia are provided less information and services compared to students with physical impairments or students with no disability. Our results suggest that general information deficits about health conditions exist. Psychological and learning impairments are less often recognized as disabilities.
ON THE RANK OF QUADRATIC TWISTS OF ELLIPTIC CURVES OVER FUNCTION FIELDS

We prove quantitative upper bounds for the number of quadratic twists of a given elliptic curve E/Fq(C) over a function field over a finite field that have rank ≥ 2, and for their average rank. The main tools are constructions and results of Katz and uniform versions of the Chebotarev density theorem for varieties over finite fields. Moreover, we conditionally derive a bound in some cases where the degree of the conductor is unbounded.
Robust Phase Retrieval and Super-Resolution from One Bit Coded Diffraction Patterns

In this paper we study a realistic setup for phase retrieval, where the signal of interest is modulated or masked and then for each modulation or mask a diraction pattern is collected, producing a coded diraction pattern (CDP) [CLM13]. We are interested in the setup where the resolution of the collected CDP is limited by the Fraunhofer diraction limit of the imaging system. We investigate a novel approach based on a geometric quantization scheme of phase-less linear measurements into (one-bit) coded diraction patterns, and a corresponding recovery scheme. The key novelty in this approach consists in comparing pairs of coded diractions patterns across frequencies: the one bit measurements obtained rely on the order statistics of the un-quantized measurements rather than their values . This results in a robust phase recovery, and unlike currently available methods, allows to eciently perform phase recovery from measurements aected by severe (possibly unknown) non linear, rank preserving perturbations, such as distortions. Another important feature of this approach consists in the fact that it enables also super-resolution and blind-deconvolution, beyond the diraction limit of a given imaging system.