Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safety of over Twelve Hundred Infant Male Circumcisions Using the Mogen Clamp in Kenya

Background Several sub-Saharan African countries plan to scale-up infant male circumcision (IMC) for cost-efficient HIV prevention. Little data exist about the safety of IMC in East and southern Africa. We calculated adverse event (AE) rate and risks for AEs associated with introduction of IMC services at five government health facilities in western Kenya. Methods AE data were analyzed for IMC procedures performed between September, 2009 and November, 2011. Healthy infants aged ≤2 months and weighing ≥2.5 kg were eligible for IMC. Following parental consent, trained clinicians provided IMC services free of charge under local anesthesia using the Mogen clamp. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were used to explore AE risk factors. Findings A total of 1,239 IMC procedures were performed. Median age of infants was 4 days (IQR = 1, 16). The overall AE rate among infants reviewed post-operatively was 2.7% (18/678; 95%CI: 1.4, 3.9). There was one severe AE involving excision of a small piece of the lateral aspect of the glans penis. Other AEs were mild or moderate and were treated conservatively. Babies one month of age or older were more likely to have an AE (OR 3.20; 95%CI: 1.23, 8.36). AE rate did not differ by nurse versus clinical officer or number of previous procedures performed. Conclusion IMC services provided in Kenyan Government hospitals in the context of routine IMC programming have AE rates comparable to those in developed countries. The optimal time for IMC is within the first month of life.
Studying Z-DNA and B- to Z-DNA transitions using a cytosine analogue FRET-pair

Abstract Herein, we report on the use of a tricyclic cytosine FRET pair, incorporated into DNA with different base pair separations, to study Z-DNA and B-Z DNA junctions. With its position inside the DNA structure, the FRET pair responds to a B- to Z-DNA transition with a distinct change in FRET efficiency for each donor/acceptor configuration allowing reliable structural probing. Moreover, we show how fluorescence spectroscopy and our cytosine analogues can be used to determine rate constants for the B- to Z-DNA transition mechanism. The modified cytosines have little influence on the transition and the FRET pair is thus an easily implemented and virtually non-perturbing fluorescence tool to study Z-DNA. This nucleobase analogue FRET pair represents a valuable addition to the limited number of fluorescence methods available to study Z-DNA and we suggest it will facilitate, for example, deciphering the B- to Z-DNA transition mechanism and investigating the interaction of DNA with Z-DNA binding proteins.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of the prognosis of language outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder

Background Language difficulties are common in autism spectrum disorder, yet little is known about the prognosis of language in children with autism spectrum disorder. The aim of this study was to systematically review studies reporting language outcomes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Method A comprehensive search strategy with a well-established sensitive prognosis filter for Medline, adapted for five other databases, was used. Included studies observed individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder for ≥12 months and had ≥30 participants. Risk of bias was assessed. Results Fifty-four studies (N = 5064) met inclusion criteria. Language outcomes were standardised assessments (n = 35), notation of presence/absence of verbal language (n = 11) or both (n = 8). Age at baseline ranged from 17 months to 26 years, duration of follow-up from 1 to 38 years. Most publications (92%) were rated medium to high risk of bias. In all but one study individuals had below-average scores at baseline and follow-up. However, in most (n = 24/25; 96%) studies reporting standard scores, individuals (aged ≤ 11 years at follow-up) progressed at a comparable rate to age-expected norms or demonstrated some ‘catch up’ over time. Meta-analyses found mean standard scores increased over time in three language domains (composite receptive language, composite expressive language and adaptive language). Nineteen to thirty percent of children aged five years and under gained verbal language. For children aged over five years 5–32% gained verbal language over the course of study. Age, baseline language scores, IQ and length of follow-up did not moderate between study differences in composite language or adaptive language growth or the acquisition of verbal language. Conclusion Despite variability in study methods, findings were consistent, with the majority of studies reporting children under 11 years on average progressed at a comparable rate to age-expected norms or with some ‘catchup’ over time. Implications This review provides synthesised information for families and clinicians on language development over time and on language outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Such information can be useful for prognostic counselling and may assist planning around future resources and support needs. This review also makes recommendations regarding methodology for future studies so that prognosis can become more fine-tuned at an individual level.
Iatrogenic facial nerve exposure in cochlear implant surgery: incidence and clinical significance in the absence of intra-operative nerve monitoring

Objectives: Iatrogenic facial nerve injury is one of the most feared complications of cochlear implantation. Intraoperative facial nerve monitoring is used as an adjunctive modality in a variety of neurotologic surgeries including cochlear implantation. With the lack of nerve monitoring, there is a theoretically higher risk of iatrogenic fallopian canal dehiscence with facial nerve exposure, particularly the mastoid portion, during cochlear implant surgery. The purpose of this study is to determine the incidence of iatrogenic exposure of the facial nerve and its relation to the incidence of post-operative facial paralysis in the absence of facial nerve monitoring. Methods: This was a retrospective study. Medical charts of 307 patients who underwent cochlear implantation without facial nerve monitoring, from 2012 to 2017 were reviewed to identify cases with a reported iatrogenic defect over the mastoid facial nerve. The incidence of post-operative facial palsy was determined and compared to the incidence with the use of intra-operative monitoring which has been reported in the literature. Results: The incidence of iatrogenic dehiscence with facial nerve exposure was 46.58%. However, the incidence of post-operative facial palsy was only 2.1% which decreased to 0.72% in cases without injury of the facial neural sheath. This was not significantly different from the 0.73% rate reported in the literature with the use of intra-operative facial monitoring (P = 0.99). Conclusion: The incidence of iatrogenic facial nerve exposure during cochlear implantation may be relatively high. However, no additional risk of post-operative facial nerve paralysis was found, provided that the integrity of the neural sheath was preserved, even with the lack of intra-operative monitoring.
Predicting Problem-Solving Behavior and Performance Levels from Visual Attention Data

Inferring high-level cognitive states during interaction with a user interfaces is a fundamental task in building proactive intelligent systems that would allow effective offloading of mental operations to a computational architectures. In this paper, we propose a system that uses real-time eye-tracking to measure user’s visual attention patterns and infers behavior during interaction with a problem solving interface. Using a combination of machine learning techniques, computational modeling and eye tracking, we investigate 1) the differences among good and poor performance groups, and 2) the possibility of inferring distinct cognitive states such as planning or cognition. We employ and train a support-vector machine (SVM) to perform a classification task on a set of features computed from eye movement data that are linked to concurrent high-level behavioral codes based on think aloud protocols. We contend that differences among cognitive states can be inferred from overt visual attention patterns with accuracy highly over chance levels. We observe that such a system can also classify and predict performance with up to 87% recognition rate for an unseen data vector for two classes. We suggest a prediction model as a universal model for understanding of complex strategic behavior. The findings confirm that eye movement data carry important information about problem solving processes and that proactive systems can benefit from real-time monitoring of visual attention.
How Far are We from Fully Automatic High Quality Grammatical Error Correction?

In this paper, we first explore the role of inter-annotator agreement statistics in grammatical error correction and conclude that they are less informative in fields where there may be more than one correct answer. We next created a dataset of 50 student essays, each corrected by 10 different annotators for all error types, and investigated how both human and GEC system scores vary when different combinations of these annotations are used as the gold standard. Upon learning that even humans are unable to score higher than 75% F0.5, we propose a new metric based on the ratio between human and system performance. We also use this method to investigate the extent to which annotators agree on certain error categories, and find that similar results can be obtained from a smaller subset of just 10 essays.
Weight-Loss Induced Changes in Physical Activity and Activity Energy Expenditure in Overweight and Obese Subjects before and after Energy Restriction

Activity energy expenditure (AEE) is the component of daily energy expenditure that is mainly influenced by the amount of physical activity (PA) and by the weight of the body displaced. This study aimed at analyzing the effect of weight loss on PA and AEE. The body weight and PA of 66 overweight and obese subjects were measured at baseline and after 12 weeks of 67% energy restriction. PA was measured using a tri-axial accelerometer for movement registration (Tracmor) and quantified in activity counts. Tracmor recordings were also processed using a classification algorithm to recognize 6 common activity types engaged in during the day. A doubly-labeled water validated equation based on Tracmor output was used to estimate AEE. After weight loss, body weight decreased by 13±4%, daily activity counts augmented by 9% (95% CI: +2%, +15%), and this increase was weakly associated with the decrease in body weight (R(2) = 7%; P<0.05). After weight loss subjects were significantly (P<0.05) less sedentary (-26 min/d), and increased the time spent walking (+11 min/d) and bicycling (+4 min/d). However, AEE decreased by 0.6±0.4 MJ/d after weight loss. On average, a 2-hour/day reduction of sedentary time by increasing ambulatory and generic activities was required to restore baseline levels of AEE. In conclusion, after weight loss PA increased but the related metabolic demand did not offset the reduction in AEE due to the lower body weight. Promoting physical activity according to the extent of weight loss might increase successfulness of weight maintenance.
Young children’s picture-books as a forum for the socialization of emotion

Guided by Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, this article examined whether characters in emotion picture-books express and talk about emotions in ways that are consistent with theory and research on children’s emotions. In general, we found that picture-books recommended by experts in social-emotional development contain content that is fairly consistent with published research in early childhood. We also found parents’ reading of the picture-books was consistent with the content analysis, even though we recorded their spontaneous emotion-based language in addition to the text presented in the picture-books. The findings also suggested that reading of emotion picture-books may increase preservice teachers’ references to emotions, which could translate into greater use of emotion language in the early childhood classroom. Results are discussed with regard to the role of picture-books as an important source of emotion-related information for children, parents, and teachers.
Improving the reliability of visual acuity measures in young children

Whilst the methodology of adult letter acuity measurement has been substantially refined over the last two decades, relatively little development has occurred in methods for quantifying letter acuity in young children. This study compares a recently developed visual acuity test (Glasgow Acuity Cards), which incorporates several key design features used in adult test charts to improve the sensitivity and reliability of visual acuity measurements. The equivalence of acuity measurements made with Glasgow Acuity Cards were compared with the Bailey–Lovie logMAR chart and Snellen chart in adults, and with traditional Single Letter Acuity and a modified Single Letter Acuity test in children. The test–retest reliability of acuity measurements made with Glasgow Acuity Cards and the Single Letter Acuity tests were also assessed in a large group of visually normal children. In addition, the ability of the pre‐school letter acuity tests to detect differences in acuity between the two eyes, and to detect amblyopia were examined. Ninety‐five percent of vision measurements made with the Bailey–Lovie chart and Glasgow Acuity Cards differ by less than 0.07 log unit. Furthermore, the sensitivity of Glasgow Acuity Cards to detecting changes in acuity longitudinally and inter‐ocular differences in acuity is considerably greater as compared with traditional Single Letter Acuity tests. Improvements in paediatric acuity chart design are important for the effective detection and management of children with amblyopia.
Measuring user behavior in online social networks

The users' role is crucial in the development, deployment and the success of online social networks. Despite this fact, little is known and even less has been published about user activities in operating OSNs. In this article we present a large-scale measurement analysis of user behavior in some popular OSNs: Bebo, MySpace, Netlog, and Tagged. A measurement framework has been created in order to observe user activity: more than 500 PlanetLab nodes across the globe have been used for our measurement, monitoring more than 80,000 users for six weeks by downloading more than 100 million profile pages. Based on the measurements, we address two key issues of online social networks: characterization of user activities and usage patterns in the examined OSNs. The main findings of the article include that users' online time spending can be modeled with Weibull distributions; soon after subscribing, a fraction of users tend to lose interest surprisingly fast; and the duration of OSN users' online sessions shows power law distribution characteristics.
Parallel growing and training of neural networks using output parallelism

In order to find an appropriate architecture for a large-scale real-world application automatically and efficiently, a natural method is to divide the original problem into a set of subproblems. In this paper, we propose a simple neural-network task decomposition method based on output parallelism. By using this method, a problem can be divided flexibly into several subproblems as chosen, each of which is composed of the whole input vector and a fraction of the output vector. Each module (for one subproblem) is responsible for producing a fraction of the output vector of the original problem. The hidden structure for the original problem's output units are decoupled. These modules can be grown and trained in parallel on parallel processing elements. Incorporated with a constructive learning algorithm, our method does not require excessive computation and any prior knowledge concerning decomposition. The feasibility of output parallelism is analyzed and proved. Some benchmarks are implemented to test the validity of this method. Their results show that this method can reduce computational time, increase learning speed and improve generalization accuracy for both classification and regression problems.
Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

Trauma Stewardship is the practice through which individuals, organizations, and societies tend to the hardship, pain, or trauma experienced by humans, other living beings, or our planet itself, while at the same time taking care of oneself.To help achieve this, Lipsky offers a variety of simple and profound practices, drawn from modern psychology and a range of spiritual traditions, that enable us to look carefully at our reactions and motivations and discover new sources of energy and renewal. She includes interviews with successful trauma stewards and even uses New Yorker cartoons to illustrate her points.
An investigation of the transmission system of a tendon driven robot hand

The transmission system of the Utah/MIT Dextrous Hand (UMDH) is investigated theoretically and experimentally. It is shown that the friction of the routing pulleys is not negligible and should be considered in the force control of the UMDH. In the frequency range of the pneumatic actuators (80 Hz), tendons act like springs and the first mode of the tendons is above that frequency range. <<ETX>>
‘Atheism is not the problem. The problem is being a woman’. Atheist women and reasonable feminism

ABSTRACT While the percentage of religiously unaffiliated women is growing in the West, little is known about the relationship between atheism and feminism. This article redresses the gap by exploring women’s identification with atheism and feminism. The central argument draws on qualitative interview data from the UK, Australia, the US and Poland and emphasizes the role of atheism as a background identity marker through which female subjectivity is enacted in everyday life. The findings are two-fold: first, atheism and feminism are both devalued identities when embraced by women; and second, identifying as an atheist affords the participants an impetus to invent a new vocabulary to account for their identity. In conclusion, I argue that atheism provides a catalyst for the post-feminist discourse of independence, empowerment and freedom of choice as the participants construct narratives of ‘reasonable feminism’.
"It's like living with a friendly stranger": perceptions of personality traits in a smart home

Interacting with smart homes and Internet of Things devices is still far from being a seamless experience as there are often many different interfaces involved. Due to the improvements of speech recognition and synthesis, voice-based agents are becoming more common to give users a unified interface to different individual systems. These agents often exhibit human-like personality traits, such as responding in a humorous way or showing caring behavior in reminders. We are exploring this approach in the context of smart homes and home automation. Should a smart home have a proactive or passive personality? Should it try to socialize with inhabitants? What personality traits do people consider desirable or undesirable? To learn more about this design space, we created two variants of a usage scenario of a domestic routine in a smart home to demonstrate different personality trait combinations. Forty-one participants experienced the scenario and provided feedback about the designs. In this paper, we report findings about participants' preferences, how they responded to the proactive and social behavior our prototype demonstrated and implications for the design of agent-based interfaces in the home.
Grey matter atrophy in cognitively impaired Parkinson's disease

Objective Mild cognitive impairment and dementia are common non-motor features of Parkinson's disease (PD). The aim of this study was to characterise grey matter changes associated with clearly defined stages of cognitive impairment in PD using structural MRI. Methods 96 PD subjects were classified using detailed cognitive testing as PD with normal cognition (PD-N, n=57), PD with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI, n=23) or PD with dementia (PD-D, n=16); 34 controls matched for mean age and sex ratio also participated. Grey matter volume differences were evaluated using voxel based morphometry of grey matter segments derived from T1 weighted 3 T MRI, and multiple linear regression assessed the relationship between cognitive and motor impairments and grey matter concentration. Results Compared with controls, no grey matter differences were found in PD-N. PD-MCI showed limited grey matter atrophy in the temporal, parietal and frontal cortex as well as the bilateral caudal hippocampus, amygdala and right putamen. PD-D subjects exhibited far more extensive atrophy in regions involved in PD-MCI but also had reduced grey matter volume in other large areas of the temporal lobe (including the parahippocampi), the intracalcarine and lingual gyri, posterior cingulate gyrus, frontal regions and bilateral caudate. Grey matter loss in PD correlated with global cognitive score but not motor impairment in most of these regions. Interpretation Marked grey matter atrophy occurs in PD with dementia but far less extensive changes are evident in PD-MCI. Some grey matter atrophy precedes the development of dementia but may be accelerated once frank dementia begins.
Light curves of oscillating neutron stars

We calculate light curves produced by r modes with small azimuthal wavenumbers, m, propagating in the surface fluid ocean of rotating neutron stars. We include relativistic effects due to rapid rotation, and propagate photons from the stellar surface to a distant observer using the Schwarzschild metric. The wave motions of the surface r modes are confined to the equatorial region of the star, and the surface pattern of the temperature variation can be either symmetric (for even modes) or antisymmetric (for odd modes) with respect to the equator. Because for the surface r modes the oscillation frequency in the corotating frame of the star is much smaller than the rotation frequency, Ω, we employ the approximation in which the oscillation frequency in the inertial frame, σ, is given by a = -mΩ. We find that the even, m = 1 r mode produces the largest light variations. The dominant Fourier component in the light curves of these modes is the fundamental having a = -Ω, and the first harmonic component having σ = -2Ω is always negligible in comparison. The dominant Fourier component of the even, m = 2 r modes is the first harmonic. Although the odd r modes produce smaller amplitude light variations compared with the even modes, the light curves of the former have a stronger first harmonic component. If both m = 1 and 2 r modes are excited simultaneously, a rich variety of light curves is possible, including those having an appreciable first harmonic component. We show that the phase difference, δ - δ E , between the bolometric light curve and that at a particular photon energy can possibly be used as a probe of the stellar compactness, RIM, where R and M are the radius and mass of the star. We find that hard leads are expected in general rather than hard lags, although there exists a parameter space of R and the inclination angle i that produces hard lags for the odd modes.