Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
COPPER AND ZINC LEVELS IN HAIR OF BOTH SCHIZOPHRENIC AND DEPRESSED PATIENTS

The aim of this paper is to estimate hair copper and zinc levels in schizophrenic and depressed patients and to correlate these levels to the severity of schizophrenia and major depressive disorder. The study was carried on 80 male and female persons with their ages between 20 -40 years. Twenty of them were healthy and helped as control, 30 were suffering from schizophrenia (group I) and 30 were suffering from major depressive disorder (group II). Exclusion criteria included pregnancy, another co-morbid psychiatric disorders and drugs known to affect trace element metabolism. Approximately 100 mg of scalp hair samples were cut from each person. Zinc and copper levels in the hair samples were determined by atomic absorption spectrophotometry after wet ashing. The mean hair copper level was significantly higher in both schizophrenic patients (group I) and depressed patients (group II) when compared with their corresponding mean level in healthy control group. On the other hand, the mean hair zinc level was significantly lower in both schizophrenic patients (group I) and depressed patients (group II) when compared with its mean level in the healthy control group. In depressed patients, the mean hair copper level was insignificantly higher while, the mean hair zinc level was significantly lower when compared with their corresponding mean level in schizophrenic patients. From these results, it can be concluded that copper excess and zinc deficiency may have a role in the pathogenesis of either schizophrenia and/ or depressive disorders. It can also be concluded that zinc deficiency may have more important role in inducing depressive disorders. So, it is recommended to evaluate both copper and zinc hair and serum levels in schizophrenic and depressed patients especially in those resistant to the traditional therapy measures. Moreover, this may have a prognostic value. It is recommended also to use zinc supplementation during antidepressant therapy as it may improve response to therapy and/ or decrease the antidepressant dose that can minimize the side effects.
Analysis of user behavior under error conditions in spoken dialogs

We focus on developing an account of user behavior under error conditions, working with annotated data from real human-machine mixed initiative dialogs. In particular, we examine categories of error perception, user behavior under error, effect of user strategies on error recovery, and the role of user initiative in error situations. A conditional probability model smoothed by weighted ASR error rate is proposed. Results show that users discovering errors through implicit confirmations are less likely to get back on track (or succeed) and take a longer time in doing so than other forms of error discovery such as system reject and reprompts. Further successful user error-recovery strategies included more rephrasing, less contradicting, and a tendency to terminate error episodes (cancel and startover) than to attempt at repairing a chain of errors.
Clarifying the role of impulsivity in bulimia nervosa.

OBJECTIVE With the goal of demonstrating that urgency impulsivity is associated with bulimic symptoms, not (lack of) planning impulsivity, the authors conducted two studies assessing these personality traits and bulimic symptoms in undergraduate women. METHOD In study 1 291 women completed urgency and deliberation scales of the NEO PIR and the BULIT-R. In study 2 101 women completed alternative measures tapping these personality constructs and the BULIT-R. RESULTS In both studies, what is commonly assessed with impulsivity measures, a lack of planning, was not significantly associated with bulimic symptoms. However, urgency, the tendency to act rashly when experiencing negative affect, was positively correlated with bulimic symptoms. DISCUSSION The authors suggest that future researchers assess urgency, not lack of planning, when assessing impulsivity as a risk factor for bulimia nervosa.
The Effectiveness of Intervention: Recent Trends and Current Issues

From the 1960s to the early 1970s, there was a broad surge of confidence in intervention's ability to change and control offenders on both a short-and long-term basis. This high optimism was largely replaced by widespread pessimism during 1975-1981. Since the mid-1980s intervention regained considerable strength in terms of focus, direction, and “legitimacy. ” This partly resulted from several major meta-analyses and literature reviews that showed its frequent effectiveness. Intervention's relegitimization is a major development in American corrections, one with sizable program and policy implications. As the 1990s begin, intervention has an increasingly recognized and accepted role, especially, but not only, with serious and multiple offenders.
The Influence of Female-Headed Households on Black Achievement

This study attempts to go beyond the individual-level factors that explain the underachievement of the Black male student and specifically focuses on the enormous growth of female-headed households. To this end, 2,849 middle school students in a large Midwestern school district in the United States were used. It was found that there is a significant association between the proportion of female-headed households and the achievement of Black male students only, in contrast to that of Black female and White students. Specifically, as the proportion of female-headed households in neighborhoods increases, Black male students tend to show poorer outcomes. Implications for the finding are reviewed.
Optical and Radio Monitoring of S5 1803+784

The optical (BVRI) and radio (8.4 GHz) light curves of S5 1803+784 on a time span of nearly 6 yr are presented and discussed. The optical light curve showed an overall variation greater than 3 mag, and the largest changes occurred in three strong flares. No periodicity was found in the light curve on timescales up to a year. The variability in the radio band is very different and shows moderate oscillations around an average constant flux density rather than relevant flares, with a maximum amplitude of ∼30%, without a simultaneous correspondence between optical and radio luminosity. The optical spectral energy distribution was always well fitted by a power law. The spectral index shows small variations, and there is indication of a positive correlation with the source luminosity. Possible explanations of the source behavior are discussed in the framework of current models.
T Helper 1–Inducing Adjuvant Protects against Experimental Paracoccidioidomycosis

Immunostimulatory therapy is a promising approach to improving the treatment of systemic fungal infections such as paracoccidioidomycosis (PCM), whose drug therapy is usually prolonged and associated with toxic side effects and relapses. The current study was undertaken to determine if the injection of a T helper (Th) 1–stimulating adjuvant in P. brasiliensis–infected mice could have a beneficial effect on the course of experimental PCM. For this purpose, mice were infected and treated with complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA), a well-established Th1 experimental inductor, or incomplete Freund's adjuvant (IFA - control group) on day 20 postinfection. Four weeks after treatment, the CFA-treated mice presented a mild infection in the lungs characterized by absence of epithelioid cell granulomas and yeast cells, whereas the control mice presented multiple sites of focal epithelioid granulomas with lymphomonocytic halos circumscribing a high number of viable and nonviable yeast cells. In addition, CFA administration induced a 2.4 log reduction (>99%) in the fungal burden when compared to the control group, and led to an improvement of immune response, reversing the immunosuppression observed in the control group. The immunotherapy with Th1-inducing adjuvant, approved to be used in humans, might be a valuable tool in the treatment of PCM and potentially useful to improve the clinical cure rate in humans.
Facial Emotion Recognition Deficits following Moderate–Severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): Re-examining the Valence Effect and the Role of Emotion Intensity

Abstract Many individuals who sustain moderate–severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are poor at recognizing emotional expressions, with a greater impairment in recognizing negative (e.g., fear, disgust, sadness, and anger) than positive emotions (e.g., happiness and surprise). It has been questioned whether this “valence effect” might be an artifact of the wide use of static facial emotion stimuli (usually full-blown expressions) which differ in difficulty rather than a real consequence of brain impairment. This study aimed to investigate the valence effect in TBI, while examining emotion recognition across different intensities (low, medium, and high). Method: Twenty-seven individuals with TBI and 28 matched control participants were tested on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). The TBI group was more impaired in overall emotion recognition, and less accurate recognizing negative emotions. However, examining the performance across the different intensities indicated that this difference was driven by some emotions (e.g., happiness) being much easier to recognize than others (e.g., fear and surprise). Our findings indicate that individuals with TBI have an overall deficit in facial emotion recognition, and that both people with TBI and control participants found some emotions more difficult than others. These results suggest that conventional measures of facial affect recognition that do not examine variance in the difficulty of emotions may produce erroneous conclusions about differential impairment. They also cast doubt on the notion that dissociable neural pathways underlie the recognition of positive and negative emotions, which are differentially affected by TBI and potentially other neurological or psychiatric disorders. (JINS, 2014, 20, 1–10)
Converse Bounds for Private Communication Over Quantum Channels

This paper establishes several converse bounds on the private transmission capabilities of a quantum channel. The main conceptual development builds firmly on the notion of a private state, which is a powerful, uniquely quantum method for simplifying the tripartite picture of privacy involving local operations and public classical communication to a bipartite picture of quantum privacy involving local operations and classical communication. This approach has previously led to some of the strongest upper bounds on secret key rates, including the squashed entanglement and the relative entropy of entanglement. Here, we use this approach along with a “privacy test” to establish a general meta-converse bound for private communication, which has a number of applications. The meta-converse allows for proving that any quantum channel’s relative entropy of entanglement is a strong converse rate for private communication. For covariant channels, the meta-converse also leads to second-order expansions of relative entropy of entanglement bounds for private communication rates. For such channels, the bounds also apply to the private communication setting in which the sender and the receiver are assisted by unlimited public classical communication, and as such, they are relevant for establishing various converse bounds for quantum key distribution protocols conducted over these channels. We find precise characterizations for several channels of interest and apply the methods to establish converse bounds on the private transmission capabilities of all phase-insensitive bosonic channels.
Full-Length Characterization of Hepatitis C Virus Subtype 3a Reveals Novel Hypervariable Regions under Positive Selection during Acute Infection

ABSTRACT Hepatitis C virus subtype 3a is a highly prevalent and globally distributed strain that is often associated with infection via injection drug use. This subtype exhibits particular phenotypic characteristics. In spite of this, detailed genetic analysis of this subtype has rarely been performed. We performed full-length viral sequence analysis in 18 patients with chronic HCV subtype 3a infection and assessed genomic viral variability in comparison to other HCV subtypes. Two novel regions of intragenotypic hypervariability within the envelope protein E2, of HCV genotype 3a, were identified. We named these regions HVR495 and HVR575. They consisted of flanking conserved hydrophobic amino acids and central variable residues. A 5-amino-acid insertion found only in genotype 3a and a putative glycosylation site is contained within HVR575. Evolutionary analysis of E2 showed that positively selected sites within genotype 3a infection were largely restricted to HVR1, HVR495, and HVR575. Further analysis of clonal viral populations within single hosts showed that viral variation within HVR495 and HVR575 were subject to intrahost positive selecting forces. Longitudinal analysis of four patients with acute HCV subtype 3a infection sampled at multiple time points showed that positively selected mutations within HVR495 and HVR575 arose early during primary infection. HVR495 and HVR575 were not present in HCV subtypes 1a, 1b, 2a, or 6a. Some variability that was not subject to positive selection was present in subtype 4a HVR575. Further defining the functional significance of these regions may have important implications for genotype 3a E2 virus-receptor interactions and for vaccine studies that aim to induce cross-reactive anti-E2 antibodies.
A Customer Churn Prediction Model in Telecom Industry Using Boosting

With the rapid growth of digital systems and associated information technologies, there is an emerging trend in the global economy to build digital customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This trend is more obvious in the telecommunications industry, where companies become increasingly digitalized. Customer churn prediction is a main feature of in modern telecomcommunication CRM systems. This research conducts a real-world study on customer churn prediction and proposes the use of boosting to enhance a customer churn prediction model. Unlike most research that uses boosting as a method to boost the accuracy of a given basis learner, this paper tries to separate customers into two clusters based on the weight assigned by the boosting algorithm. As a result, a higher risk customer cluster has been identified. Logistic regression is used in this research as a basis learner, and a churn prediction model is built on each cluster, respectively. The result is compared with a single logistic regression model. Experimental evaluation reveals that boosting also provides a good separation of churn data; thus, boosting is suggested for churn prediction analysis.
Physical fitness of rural children compared with urban children in North Cyprus: a normative study.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of environmental factors on physical fitness of rural and urban children. METHODS To reveal the differences between physical fitness of children living in urban and rural districts of the Turkish Cypriot population, 3939 nine- to eleven-year-old male primary school children from 90 schools of North Cyprus were tested. Testing procedures were similar to the Eurofit tests. RESULTS The results showed that body mass index and skinfold thicknesses were higher in the urban children (P<.05). Differences in cardiopulmonary and motor fitness were also found between groups. In addition, flexibility and muscle endurance were significantly higher in the rural children. CONCLUSION The significantly lower flexibility, muscle endurance, and strength of urban children might indicate a lower habitual physical activity level.
Using Seroprevalence and Immunisation Coverage Data to Estimate the Global Burden of Congenital Rubella Syndrome, 1996-2010: A Systematic Review

Background The burden of Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS) is typically underestimated in routine surveillance. Updated estimates are needed following the recent WHO position paper on rubella and recent GAVI initiatives, funding rubella vaccination in eligible countries. Previous estimates considered the year 1996 and only 78 (developing) countries. Methods We reviewed the literature to identify rubella seroprevalence studies conducted before countries introduced rubella-containing vaccination (RCV). These data and the estimated vaccination coverage in the routine schedule and mass campaigns were incorporated in mathematical models to estimate the CRS incidence in 1996 and 2000–2010 for each country, region and globally. Results The estimated CRS decreased in the three regions (Americas, Europe and Eastern Mediterranean) which had introduced widespread RCV by 2010, reaching <2 per 100,000 live births (the Americas and Europe) and 25 (95% CI 4–61) per 100,000 live births (the Eastern Mediterranean). The estimated incidence in 2010 ranged from 90 (95% CI: 46–195) in the Western Pacific, excluding China, to 116 (95% CI: 56–235) and 121 (95% CI: 31–238) per 100,000 live births in Africa and SE Asia respectively. Highest numbers of cases were predicted in Africa (39,000, 95% CI: 18,000–80,000) and SE Asia (49,000, 95% CI: 11,000–97,000). In 2010, 105,000 (95% CI: 54,000–158,000) CRS cases were estimated globally, compared to 119,000 (95% CI: 72,000–169,000) in 1996. Conclusions Whilst falling dramatically in the Americas, Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean after vaccination, the estimated CRS incidence remains high elsewhere. Well-conducted seroprevalence studies can help to improve the reliability of these estimates and monitor the impact of rubella vaccination.
Human Cytomegalovirus-Induced Upregulation of Intercellular Cell Adhesion Molecule-1 on Villous Syncytiotrophoblasts

Abstract Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is secreted apically from villous trophoblasts, thus congenital infection is not likely to occur by basal release across the basement membrane. As an alternative route, we hypothesize that an HCMV-infected villous syncytiotrophoblast (ST) upregulates intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1, causing blood monocytes to bind to the ST and induce apoptosis. Purified (>99.99%) populations of human villous trophoblasts were differentiated into an ST-like culture, infected with HCMV strain AD169, and assessed for ICAM-1 expression by immunofluorescence. Infection strongly upregulated ICAM-1 24 h after challenge. ICAM-1 was also stimulated by transfection with viral genes IE2-55, IE1-72, and IE2-86, but not by UV-inactivated virus. Infection with a green fluorescent protein recombinant virus allowed infection and ICAM-1 expression to be topographically located. We found that ICAM-1 was expressed on both infected and noninfected cells. Furthermore, antibody to tumor necrosis factor (TNF)α and, to a lesser extent, interleukin (IL)1β inhibited ICAM-1 upregulation on noninfected cells but not on infected cells. We conclude that HCMV IE proteins stimulate ICAM-1 expression on villous trophoblasts by paracrine release of TNFα and IL1β, as well as by a direct effect on infected cells.
Sheet Resistance Dependence on Ion Angle Deviation

This paper will examine the influence of ion angle deviation (IAD) on sheet resistance. The IAD is derived from the beam intensity profile measured in the MC3-II/GP medium current implanter. IAD is controlled independently in the horizontal and vertical directions by tuning voltages in the Qlens. It was found that the sheet resistance (Rs) regularly increases with an increase of IAD at a tilt of 0° where strong channeling occurs, while the Rs is constant for various IADs at a tilt of 7°. These results suggest that the Rs at 0° is suitable for use as an IAD monitoring method and that the IAD can be flexibly controlled in the MC3-II/GP.
Hepatitis C Virus Genotype 7, a New Genotype Originating from Central Africa

ABSTRACT We report a new hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype identified in patients originating from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The prototype QC69 virus is shown to be a new lineage distinct from genotypes 1 to 6. Three additional patients were also found to be infected by a virus from this lineage, confirming its circulation in humans. We propose that these viruses be classified into HCV genotype 7.
Difference and Political Legitimacy: Speakers' Construction of “Citizen” and “Refugee” Personae in Talk about Hurricane Katrina

Public talk about mainstream U.S. news journalists' use of the term “refugee” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina constituted a social drama that illuminated widely held beliefs about two categories of person in some American public settings: the “citizen” and the “refugee. ” This study examines a corpus of 193 mass media texts that contested the symbols, meanings, premises, and rules for public talk about “citizens” and the differences between them. Using the perspective of speech codes theory, this study expands upon the cultural codes underlying a rule of speaking identified by Philipsen (2000) in the “discourse of difference. ”
God counts for children’s spiritual well-being

Over the last three decades, qualitative studies of children’s spirituality have variously mentioned God. During this time, nearly 300 quantitative measures of spirituality and well-being have been developed and employed with youth and adults. However, very little similar work has been done with children. An article in this journal reported development of a purported spiritual sensitivity scale. That paper is critiqued here on the basis of its statistical methods as well as its failure to mention God in a study with Australian Catholic school students. In this paper, spiritual well-being (SWB) is taken as being reflected in the quality of relationships that people have with themselves, with others, with the environment and/or with God. Empirical evidence derived from extensive studies with primary school children in State, Catholic, Christian community and other independent schools in Australia reveals that an instrument called Feeling Good, Living Life is a statistically sound spirituality measure for children. Of the four sets of relationships reflecting SWB, relationship with God explains greatest variance in SWB overall. In this respect, relationship with God is most important for SWB among primary school students, just as other studies have shown it to be among youth and adults.
Understanding and Predicting The Attractiveness of Human Action Shot

Selecting attractive photos from a human action shot sequence is quite challenging, because of the subjective nature of the "attractiveness", which is mainly a combined factor of human pose in action and the background. Prior works have actively studied high-level image attributes including interestingness, memorability, popularity, and aesthetics. However, none of them has ever studied the "attractiveness" of human action shot. In this paper, we present the first study of the "attractiveness" of human action shots by taking a systematic data-driven approach. Specifically, we create a new action-shot dataset composed of about 8000 high quality action-shot photos. We further conduct rich crowd-sourced human judge studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk(AMT) in terms of global attractiveness of a single photo, and relative attractiveness of a pair of photos. A deep Siamese network with a novel hybrid distribution matching loss was further proposed to fully exploit both types of ratings. Extensive experiments reveal that (1) the property of action shot attractiveness is subjective but predicable (2) our proposed method is both efficient and effective for predicting the attractive human action shots.