Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Significance of fever in Jamaican patients with homozygous sickle cell disease

OBJECTIVE To investigate the cause and outcome of high fever in Jamaican children with homozygous sickle cell disease. DESIGN Retrospective review of febrile episodes in a three year period (1 September 1993 to 31 August 1996). SETTING Sickle cell clinic, an outpatient clinic in Kingston run by the Medical Research Council Laboratories (Jamaica). PATIENTS Patients with homozygous sickle cell disease under 17 years of age presenting with an axillary temperature ⩾ 39.0°C (102.4°F). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Diagnosis, death. RESULTS There were 165 events in 144 patients (66 (45.8%) boys) with a median age of 6.1 years. Bacteraemia was found in 10 (6.1%) events (threeStreptococcus pneumoniae, twoHaemophilus influenzae type b, twoSalmonella sp, oneEscherichia coli, oneEnterobacter sp, and oneAcinetobacter sp), and urinary tract infections in four (2.4%). All cultures of cerebrospinal fluid were sterile. Acute chest syndrome occurred in 36 (21.8%) events. A painful crisis was associated with 45 (27.3%) events and was the only pathology identified in 20 events (12.1%). Hospital admission was necessary in 66 cases including all those with bacteraemia and 31 with acute chest syndrome. There were two deaths: a 5 year old boy with septic shock associated with H influenzaesepticaemia, and a 3 year old boy with the acute chest syndrome. CONCLUSIONS Painful crisis and acute chest syndrome were the most common complications associated with high fever, but other important associated features included bacteraemia and urinary tract infection. Enteric Gram negative organisms accounted for 50% of positive blood cultures.
Put Option Implied Risk-Premia in General Equilibrium under Recursive Preferences

We show that the large time-series variation of put option prices on the S&P 500 Futures Index can be understood through traditional asset-pricing theory. This phenomenon is explained through a general equilibrium model based on recursive preferences, linear production technology and time-varying production growth rates. We directly take our general equilibrium framework to structural estimation using Bayesian methodologies and filter the underlying economic states and estimate the structural parameters from a panel of put option prices and consumption growth dynamics. The model implied risk-premium estimated from put options is large, counter-cyclical and captured through the long-run risk channel of recursive preferences, however, with short-run dynamics. We distinguish ourselves from other long-run risk models that rely on exogenous specifications of stochastic volatility to generate time-variation in risk-premium. We rely on the non-linearity of the endogenously determined consumption-to-capital ratio that generates strong precautionary savings in poor economic states. This provides us an useful channel to study insurance motivation and explain why put option prices are highly counter-cyclical. The Bayesian estimation technique gives us the computational flexibility to estimate structural parameters and filter a latent state variable even though the underlying state-space is highly non-linear.
A New Crocodyliform from the Middle Cretaceous Galula Formation, Southwestern Tanzania

ABSTRACT A new taxon of peirosaurid crocodyliform, Rukwasuchus yajabalijekundu, gen. et sp. nov., is described on the basis of a well-preserved partial skull from the middle Cretaceous Galula Formation exposed in southwestern Tanzania. The skull is distinguished from those of other crocodyliforms by the presence of a mediolaterally narrow, elongate, and septate internal narial fenestra (choana) located anteriorly on the pterygoid; a markedly depressed posterior border of the parietal, excluding the supraoccipital from the dorsal cranial table; and a ventrally directed descending process of the postorbital with a well-developed posteroventral process. The lateral surface of the braincase is exquisitely preserved and includes a well-developed laterosphenoid bridge dividing the foramina for the three primary branches of the trigeminal nerve. In overall morphology, the holotype skull and isolated teeth compare closely with Hamadasuchus rebouli from the middle Cretaceous Kem Kem Beds of Morocco. Reevaluation of the problematic putative African peirosaurid taxa Stolokrosuchus lapparenti and Trematochampsa taqueti reveal a number of derived cranial characters shared with Peirosauridae and Araripesuchus. A close relationship between Rukwasuchus and other African members of Peirosauridae is supported by a parsimony analysis of Crocodyliformes. As the only known sub-Saharan peirosaurid from Africa, Rukwasuchus represents the only link between middle Cretaceous southern vertebrate faunas and much more abundant, taxonomically diverse, and potentially penecontemporaneous faunas from northern Africa.
Reducing patient mortality in hospitals: the role of human resource management

Developing effective health care organizations is increasingly complex as a result of demographic changes, globalization, and developments in medicine. This study examines the potential contribution of organizational behavior theory and research by investigating the relationship between systems of human resource management (HRM) practices and effectiveness of patient care in hospitals. Relatively little research has been conducted to explore these issues in health care settings. In a sample of 52 hospitals in England, we examine the relationship between the HRM system and health care outcome. Specifically, we study the association between high performance HRM policies and practices and standardized patient mortality rates. The research reveals that, after controlling for prior mortality and other potentially confounding factors such as the ratio of doctors to patients, greater use of a complementary set of HRM practices has a statistically and practically significant relationship with patient mortality. The findings suggest that managers and policy makers should focus sharply on improving the functioning of relevant HR management systems in health care organizations as one important means by which to improve patient care. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Mean Redshift of 2.8 for Swift gamma - ray bursts

The exceptionally high luminosities of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), gradually emerging as extremely useful probes of star formation, make them promising tools for exploration of the high-redshift Universe. Here we present a carefully selected sample of Swift GRBs, intended to estimate in an unbiased way the GRB mean redshift (z(mean)), constraints on the fraction of high-redshift bursts and an upper limit on the fraction of heavily obscured afterglows. We find that z(mean) = 2.8 and that at least 7% of GRBs originate at z > 5. In addition, consistent with pre-Swift observations, at most 20% of afterglows can be heavily obscured. The redshift distribution of the sample is qualitatively consistent with models where the GRB rate is proportional to the star formation rate in the Universe. We also report optical, near-infrared and X-ray observations of the afterglow of GRB 050814, which was seen to exhibit very red optical colours. By modelling its spectral energy distribution we find that z = 5.3 +/- 0.3. The high mean redshift of GRBs and their wide redshift range clearly demonstrates their suitability as efficient probes of galaxies and the intergalactic medium over a significant fraction of the history of the Universe. (Less)
Ultimatums, Dictators and Manners

Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici? sici=0895-3309%28199521%299%3A2%3C209%3AAUDAM%3E2.0. CO%3B2-QThe Journal of Economic Perspectives is currently published by American Economic Association.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/aea.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.orgTue Oct 9 13:13:01 2007
Interactive Separating Streak Surfaces

Streak surfaces are among the most important features to support 3D unsteady flow exploration, but they are also among the computationally most demanding. Furthermore, to enable a feature driven analysis of the flow, one is mainly interested in streak surfaces that show separation profiles and thus detect unstable manifolds in the flow. The computation of such separation surfaces requires to place seeding structures at the separation locations and to let the structures move correspondingly to these locations in the unsteady flow. Since only little knowledge exists about the time evolution of separating streak surfaces, at this time, an automated exploration of 3D unsteady flows using such surfaces is not feasible. Therefore, in this paper we present an interactive approach for the visual analysis of separating streak surfaces. Our method draws upon recent work on the extraction of Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS) and the real-time visualization of streak surfaces on the GPU. We propose an interactive technique for computing ridges in the finite time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE) field at each time step, and we use these ridges as seeding structures to track streak surfaces in the time-varying flow. By showing separation surfaces in combination with particle trajectories, and by letting the user interactively change seeding parameters such as particle density and position, visually guided exploration of separation profiles in 3D is provided. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the reconstruction and display of semantic separable surfaces in 3D unsteady flows can be performed interactively, giving rise to new possibilities for gaining insight into complex flow phenomena.
Information structure: Notional distinctions, ways of expression

Information Structure, the packaging of information to satisfy the immediate communicative needs, exerts a powerful force on all structural levels of language. We show how this concept can be defined, we argue for focus, givenness, topic, frame setting and delimitation as important subconcepts, and we illustrate the wide variety in which these information structural functions are expressed in languages. 1. What is Information Structure? The phenomena we subsume under the notion of information structure (IS, for short) have enjoyed the attention of linguists for a long time. They have been identified since the medieval Arab grammatical tradition by different linguistic schools in a number of ways. To mention the perhaps most influential one, the Prague School initiated by Mathesius has argued that the identification of given material (the theme) and the highlighting of new material (the rheme) exerts a powerful force on language structure. Today, the effects of IS are recognized in every theoretic framework that strives for a comprehensive view of linguistic structure, and they are investigated in a wide variety of distinct languages – witness the contributions to the Parallel Session on Information Structure at CIL 18. But what is IS? Following Chafe (1976), we understand it to refer to the packaging of information that meets the immediate communicative needs of the interlocutors, i.e. the techniques that optimize the form of the message with the goal that it be well understood by the addressee in the current attentional state. One such feature, for example, is the highlighting of constituents, called focus. In (1), a question creates a particular attentional state, which is recognized by the focus in the answer, expressed by pitch accent on tiger (cf. 1a). Pitch accent on road, as in (1b), would lead to an infelicitous answer, even though the truth conditions of (1a) and (1b) are the same, as it does not fit to the context question. (1) {What did you see on the road? } a. We saw a TIGER on the road. b. #We saw a tiger on the ROAD.
Improving Dependency Parsing Using Punctuation

The high-order graph-based dependency parsing model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy by incorporating rich feature representations. However, its parsing efficiency and accuracy degrades dramatically when the input sentence gets longer. This paper presents a novel two-stage method to improve high-order graph-based parsing, which uses punctuation, such as commas and semicolons, to segment the input sentence into fragments, and then applies a two-level parsing. Experimental results on the Chinese data set of the CoNLL 2009 shared task show that our two-stage method significantly outperforms both the conventional one-stage method and previously-proposed three-stage method in terms of both parsing efficiency and accuracy.
Occurrence of Bifidobacteriaceae in human hypochlorhydria stomach

Background The human stomach, when healthy, is not a suitable host for microorganisms, but in pathological conditions such as gastritis, when gastric acid secretion is impaired, microbial overgrowth can be observed. Apart from Helicobacter pylori, the composition of microbiota, resident or exogenously introduced during neutral/high pH conditions, has not been investigated thoroughly. Thus, it is possible that Bifidobacteriaceae, important autochthonous and beneficial bacteria of human gastrointestinal microbiota, could over-colonize the stomach of hypochlorhydria patients suffering from autoimmune atrophic gastritis (AAG) or omeprazole-treated (OME) gastritis. This prompted us to characterize the Bifidobacteriaceae in such patients’ gastric microbiota and to study its abnormal colonization. Methods Samples of gastric juices, and antrum and corpus mucosa from 23 hypochlorhydria patients (13 AAG and 10 OME) and from 10 control volunteers with base-line normochlorhydria, were cultivated in Brain Heart Infusion (BHI) and selective Bifidobacterium-Tryptone-Phytone-Yeast extract (Bif-TPY) media. The isolates were characterized by the fructose-6-phosphate phosphoketolase (F6PPK) test, electrophoresis of cellular proteins, the fermentation test, guanine-cytosine% DNA content, and DNA–DNA hybridization. Negative F6PPK isolates were characterized by order-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Results A total of 125 isolates, assigned to the Bifidobacteriaceae family on the basis of their morphology, were obtained from AAG and OME patients, but not from normal subjects. Of these isolates, 55 were assigned to the Bifidobacteriaceae family on the basis of their fructose-6-phosphoketolase (PPK) activity, PPK being the key taxonomic enzyme of this family. The remaining 70 isolates, which were PPK-negative, were attributed to the Actinomycetales order following specific primer PCR analysis. We observed a significantly higher abundance of Bifidobacteriaceae (Bifidobacterium dentium, Scardovia inopinata, and Parascardovia denticolens) in OME group than the AAG group. Furthermore, the Actinomycetales distribution was homogeneous for both hypochlorhydria patient groups. Conclusions This study suggests that the Bifidobacteriaceae species, typically found in the oral cavity, readily colonizes the hypochlorhydria stomach of OME patients. The clinical relevance and the mechanism underlying this Bifidobacteriaceae presence in OME gastritis requires further functional studies.
Experimental Study of Different FSAs in Classifying Protein Function

This paper addresses one of the challenges of machine learning in improving performance through feature selection algorithms (FSAs). Application of FSAs in the bioinformatics domain has become a necessity due to enormous growth of public sequence databases. This paper provides an experimental framework on the use of Rough Set Theory (RST) as FSAs in finding minimal feature subsets for classifying protein function. In experimenting RST, three different recent models are explored; Correlation Feature Selection (CFS), FCBF (Fast Correlation-Based Filter) and Artificial Immune System (AIS). The experimental study for these FSAs are based on four criteria: the accuracy (AC), the area under ROC graph (ROC), the length of the reducts (ARL), and the time taken (TT). Classification was performed on the reduced feature set using the Support Vector Machine algorithm. The results demonstrate that CFS and FCBF performs better if the main objectives are to measure the accuracy and ROC, however in terms of duration and rule length, RST is a better choice.
Enhancing the Ethical Conduct of HIV Research with Migrant Sex Workers: Human Rights, Policy, and Social Contextual Influences

Background Migrant sex workers are often highly marginalized and disproportionately experience health and social inequities, including high prevalence of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and human rights violations. In recent years, research involving migrant sex workers has increased, yet many knowledge gaps remain regarding how best to protect research participant rights and welfare. Our objective was to identify key challenges and opportunities related to the responsible conduct of HIV research with migrant sex workers. Methods Focus groups and interviews conducted with 33 female sex workers ≥18 years old at the Guatemala-Mexico border from June 2013–February 2014 were analyzed. Participants were recruited through community outreach by a local HIV prevention organization to sex work establishments such as bars, hotels, street corners, and truck stops. Results Key themes influencing research engagement for migrant sex workers included researcher mistrust and fear related to research participation, rooted in the social isolation frequently faced by recent migrants; intersecting concerns related to immigration status, fear of criminalization, and compliance with sex work regulations; and perceived benefits and risks of HIV/STI testing for migrants (e.g., immigration implications, stigma) represent potential barriers and opportunities for the responsible conduct of research involving migrant sex workers. Conclusions Results highlight the intersection between the human rights vulnerabilities of migrant sex workers and barriers to research participation, including social isolation of migrants and policy/legal barriers related to immigration and sex work. Findings illustrate the need for researchers to develop population-tailored procedures to address fears related to immigration and criminalization, and to reinforce positive and non-stigmatizing relationships with migrant sex workers. Community-led efforts to reduce stigma and foster community organization and supports for migrant sex workers are recommended, as are broader policy shifts that move away from punitive legal approaches towards approaches that safeguard and prioritize the human rights of migrant sex workers.
El Aprendizaje Basado en Problemas (ABP) en el desarrollo de la inteligencia emocional de estudiantes universitarios

El presente artículo trata sobre el efecto del Aprendizaje Basado en Problemas (ABP) en el desarrollo de la inteligencia emocional de estudiantes del primer ciclo en una universidad privada de Lima. Para lograr este propósito se realizó una investigación de tipo aplicado, empleando el método experimental (diseño cuasi-experimental), dado que se manipulará la variable independiente (ABP) para que produzca un efecto sobre la variable dependiente (Inteligencia Emocional), la cuál será medida. Para ello, se tomó una muestra de 48 estudiantes distribuidos en dos grupos: uno de control (24) y otro experimental (24) de una población total de 1281 ingresantes. Para la recolección de datos, se empleó el test de Inventario de Inteligencia Emocional de Bar-On (I-CE) como prueba de entrada (pretest), aplicándose la metodología del ABP durante 16 sesiones de aprendizaje al grupo experimental, mientras que para el grupo de control se utilizaron metodologías de aprendizaje tradicionales; para luego efectuarse las mediciones con el mismo test de BarOn como prueba de salida (postest) para ambos grupos. Los resultados mostraron que hubo influencia significativa del ABP en el desarrollo de la inteligencia emocional de los estudiantes objeto del estudio.
Practical implementations of program obfuscators for point functions

Point function obfuscators have recently been shown to be the first examples of program obfuscators provable under hardness assumptions commonly used in cryptography. This is remarkable, in light of early results in this area, showing impossibility of a single obfuscation solution for all programs. Point functions can be seen as functions that return 1 if the input value is equal to a secret value stored in the program, and 0 otherwise. In this paper, we select representative point function obfuscators from the literature, state their theoretical guarantees, and report on their (slightly) optimized implementations. We show that implementations of point function obfuscators, satisfying different obfuscation notions, can be used with practical performance guarantees. Notable implementation results due to our design and coding optimizations are: (a) very fast obfuscators based on group theory, and (b) obfuscators based on lattice theory with running time <; 8s, using inexpensive computing resources.
Media Performance, Agenda Building, and Democratization in East Africa

This chapter discusses media performance during the democratization process in the Eastern African countries of Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda, which form a regional union called the East African Community (EAC). The analysis is inspired by over 200 seminal academic studies and expert texts from various disciplines, mostly on East Africa, to assess how these governments influence media performance during their wave of democratization. The chapter examines a range of issues that demonstrate the autocratic means of building a government agenda, such as restrictive press laws, sectarianism, election malpractice, political and ethnic violence, and influence peddling. It shows how this agenda-building approach exercised by the EAC member states undercuts the contributions of the media to the democratization process. The authors demonstrate how the emergence of independent media and religious institutions in some of the EAC member states constitute the most vigilant and influential part of civil society. Further, the argument is that media performance is most successful when its agenda mobilizes citizens to challenge the structures of authoritarian rule by promoting human rights, economic empowerment, and the rule of law.