Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combating inequality in Africa: lessen inequities to reduce poverty and reach MDGs says UN.

Workers in Burkina Faso are angry. Four times in 2005 and then again this May the countrys trade unions shut down economic activity through a series of national general strikes. Thousands marched in the streets of that West African nation to protest low salaries high prices lost jobs and inadequate social benefits. Very often the strikers contrasted their living standards with those of the elites. At one march in Bobo-Dioulasso the main commercial city union leader Bakary Millogo decried the workers "rampant pauperization" as opposed to the "scandalous and ostentatious" lifestyles of high government officials. Burkina commented a columnist for the independent daily LObservateur Paalga is "running the risk of a social explosion of unpredictable consequences. " The dangers are all the greater he added because endemic poverty exists alongside visible signs of wealth. "Some take a plane to get treated for hay fever" he wrote "while others die because they cant afford malaria treatment. " (excerpt)
Cardiovascular Effects of Saffron: An Evidence-Based Review

Herbal medicine can be a valuable source of assistance for traditional medicine. There are a number of herbs that can be used in conjunction with modern medicine. Herbs can also be taken to aid recovery from serious diseases. Although one should never aim to treat diseases such as cardiovascular disease solely with herbal medicine, the value of herbs used in tandem with modern medicine cannot be ignored. Saffron has been reported to help lower cholesterol and keep cholesterol levels healthy. Animal studies have shown saffron to lower cholesterol by as much as 50%. Saffron has antioxidant properties; it is, therefore, helpful in maintaining healthy arteries and blood vessels. Saffron is also known to have anti-inflammatory properties, which are beneficial to cardiovascular health. The people of Mediterranean countries, where saffron use is common, have lower than normal incidence of heart diseases. From saffron’s cholesterol lowering benefits to its anti inflammatory properties, saffron may be one of the best supplements for cardiac health. This paper reviews the studies regarding the beneficial effects of saffron in cardiovascular health.
13 Graphical Causal Models

This chapter discusses the use of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) for causal inference in the observational social sciences. It focuses on DAGs’ main uses, discusses central principles, and gives applied examples. DAGs are visual representations of qualitative causal assumptions: They encode researchers’ beliefs about how the world works. Straightforward rules map these causal assumptions onto the associations and independencies in observable data. The two primary uses of DAGs are (1) determining the identifiability of causal effects from observed data and (2) deriving the testable implications of a causal model. Concepts covered in this chapter include identification, d-separation, confounding, endogenous selection, and overcontrol. Illustrative applications then demonstrate that conditioning on variables at any stage in a causal process can induce as well as remove bias, that confounding is a fundamentally causal rather than an associational concept, that conventional approaches to causal mediation analysis are often biased, and that causal inference in social networks inherently faces endogenous selection bias. The chapter discusses several graphical criteria for the identification of causal effects of single, time-point treatments (including the famous backdoor criterion), as well identification criteria for multiple, time-varying treatments.
The Immune Interplay between Thyroid Papillary Carcinoma and Hepatic Fibrosis

Background A high prevalence of thyroid papillary cancer was reported in hepatitis-C-virus (HCV) positive patients. However, the mechanistic role of hepatic-fibrosis in thyroid malignancy progressions is still unclear. Aim We aimed to study the immune-modulatory interactions between thyroid papillary carcinoma and hepatic-fibrosis. Methods Hepatic-fibrosis was induced in nude-nu-male mice by intra-peritoneal administration of carbon-tetrachloride. To induce thyroid-tumor, a thyroid papillary carcinoma cell line (NPA) was injected subcutaneously in the backs. Fibrotic profile was estimated by α-smooth-muscle-actin (αSMA) expression in liver tissue extracts using western-blots and RT-PCR. Intra-hepatic NK cells were isolated and stained for NK activity (CD107a) by flow cytometry. Liver histopathology (H&E staining), thyroid tumor mass and serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), serum vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and free-T4 levels were also assessed. Results Ex-vivo: NPA cells were co-cultured with intra-hepatic NK cells isolated from fibrotic mice with/without the tumor were analyzed for CFSE-proliferations. Both tumor groups (with/without hepatic-fibrosis) excreted higher serum free T4 levels. Hepatic-fibrosis increased tumor weight and size and serum free-T4 levels. In addition, tumor induction increased liver injury (both hepatic-fibrosis, necro-inflammation and serum ALT levels). In addition, tumor-bearing animals with hepatic-fibrosis had increased NK activity. NPA tumor-bearing animals increased fibrosis in spite of increased NK activity; probably due to a direct effect through increased serum free-T4 excretions. Serum VEGF levels were significantly increased in the fibrotic- bearing tumor groups compared to the non-fibrotic groups. In-vitro, NK cells from fibrotic tumor-bearing animals reduced proliferation of NPA cells. This decrease is attributed to increase NK cells activity in the fibrotic animals with the NPA tumors. Conclusions Our results propose that NK cells although were stimulated in advanced fibrosis with tumor, they lost their anti-tumor and anti-fibrotic activity probably due to secretions of T4 and VEFG and may explain increased risk of thyroid tumors in chronic HCV patients.
Faktory ovlivňující dělbu domácí práce v českých domácnostech a hodnocení její spravedlnosti

The author draws on data from the ISSP 2002 to analyse the factors influencing the division of housework in Czech households and personal evaluations of whether the division is equitable. Drawing on economic principles (theory of relative resources, theory of temporal accessibility) and the significance of gender roles the author uses a multi-linear regression analysis to examine whether the absolute or the relative temporal involvement of men and women in household work differs 1) according to the possibilities and limitations on a person's time, 2) according to their income level in comparison with their partner, and 3) according to their level of education, and whether these factors influence the way people evaluate their contribution to household work. The results show that, in addition to gender, the most important factor is temporal accessibility. As the burden of paid work grows, temporal involvement in housework declines. For women, the volume of housework is also increased by the presence of children in the family. Conversely, neither relative income nor education level is a clear predictor of the degree of involvement in housework. Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2005, Vol. 41, No. 1: 57–77
Lack of association of PTPN22, STAT4 and TRAF1/C5 gene polymorphisms with cardiovascular risk in rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVES To determine whether the PTPN22, STAT4 and TRAF1/C5 gene polymorphisms may be implicated in the development of cardiovascular (CV) events and subclinical atherosclerosis manifested by the presence of endothelial dysfunction or increased carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) in a series of Spanish patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS Six hundred and twelve patients fulfilling the 1987 American College of Rheumatology classification criteria for RA, seen at the rheumatology outpatient clinics of Hospital Xeral-Calde, Lugo, and Hospital San Carlos, Madrid, were studied. Patients were genotyped using predesigned TaqMan single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping assays. Moreover, between March and December 2007, a subgroup of unselected RA patients with no history of CV events was studied for the presence of subclinical atherosclerosis by the assessment of the endothelial function (n=126) and the carotid artery IMT (n=110) by ultrasonography studies. RESULTS No significant differences in the allele or genotype frequencies for the PTPN22, STAT4 and TRAF1/C5 gene polymorphisms between RA patients with or without CV events were found. It was also the case when we analysed the potential influence of the genotypes in the presence of endothelial dysfunction or increased carotid artery IMT of patients with RA. CONCLUSIONS Our results do not show that the PTPN22, STAT4 and TRAF1/C5 gene polymorphisms may confer a direct risk of CV disease in patients with RA.
An assessment of tag presentation techniques

With the growth of social bookmarking a new approach for metadata creation called tagging has emerged. In this paper we evaluate the use of tag presentation techniques. The main goal of our evaluation is to investigate the effect of some of the different properties that can be utilized in presenting tags e.g. alphabetization, using larger fonts etc. We show that a number of these factors can affect the ease with which users can find tags and use the tools for presenting tags to users.
Planning and Implementing a Systems-Based Patient Safety Curriculum in Medical Education

Using a successful 6-step approach to medical curriculum development, a multidisciplinary systems-based safety curriculum for first-year medical students was developed and implemented. A targeted needs assessment was completed based on students' perceptions of patient safety. Goals and objectives identified were the following: (1) provide a practical framework to identify defects, (2) identify patient hazards, (3) investigate an adverse event, (4) understand incident reporting, (5) understand the impact of teamwork and communication in safety, (6) acquire skills to improve teamwork and communication, and (7) learn to disclose medical mistakes. Students were able to identify many of the teamwork and communication problems entrenched in our current health care culture. Interactive learning was important to the learning process and, on evaluation, deemed a valuable experience. The findings indicate that this is an effective curriculum development strategy and that systems-based patient safety was effective in changing perceptions of patient harm and the provider's role in patient safety. (Am J Med Qual 2008;23:271-278)
How useful is adaptive action?

Channels with action-dependent states, as defined in [1], are considered. While [1] investigated the scenario of message dependent non-adaptive action sequences, this work focuses on adaptive action sequences, where the action is a strictly causal function of the message and the state sequences. The capacity of such a channel is characterized for the case when the state information is available non-causally at the channel encoder and it is shown that the adaptive action is not useful in increasing the capacity. The capacity of the action-dependent additive Gaussian channel, which was left open in [1], is then characterized by showing the equivalence of the current setting to the problem of the cooperative multiple access channel (MAC) with asymmetric state information at the encoders [2]. The problem setting is then extended to characterize the rate-distortion region of the source coding dual of the adaptive action-dependent channel coding setup, where a source is to be communicated with some fidelity to a decoder with adaptive action-dependent side information. In this setting adaptivity offers no help in enlarging the rate-distortion region.
Pose estimation of anime/manga characters: a case for synthetic data

2D articulated pose estimation is the task of locating the body joint positions of a human figure in an image. A pose estimator that works on anime/manga images could be an important component of an automatic system to create 3D animation from existing manga or anime, which could significantly the lower cost of media production. To create an accurate pose estimator, however, a sizable and high-quality dataset is needed, and such a dataset can be expensive to create. To alleviate data scarcity, we propose using a database of 3D character models and poses to generate synthetic training data for 2D pose estimators of anime/manga characters based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). We demonstrate that a high-performing estimator can be obtained by pretraining a network on a large synthetic dataset and then fine-tuning it on a small dataset of drawings. We also show that the approach yields a pose estimator competitive with many previous works when applied to a photograph-based dataset, establishing our synthetic data's usefulness beyond the intended domain.
High‐speed separation system of randomly suspended single living cells by laser trap and dielectrophoresis

We developed a new system for random separation of a single microorganism, such as a living cell and a microbe, in the microfluidic device under the microscope by integrating the laser‐trapping force and dielectrophoretic (DEP) force. An arbitrarily selected single microbe could be isolated in a microchannel, despite the presence of a large number of microbes in solution. Once the target microbe is trapped at the focal point of the laser, we can easily realize exclusion of excess microbes around the target by controlling the electric field, while keeping the target trapped by the laser at the focal point. To realize an efficient separation system, we proposed a new separation cell and produced it by microfabrication. Flow speed in the microchannel is adjusted and balanced to realize high‐speed and high‐purity extraction of the target. Some preliminary experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness. The target is trapped by the laser, transported, and is taken out from the extraction port. Total separation time is less than 20 s. Our method is extremely useful in the pure cultivation of the cell and will be a promising method for biologists in screening useful microbes.
Interference and bandwidth adjusted ETX in wireless multi-hop networks

In this paper, we propose a new quality link metric, interference and bandwidth adjusted ETX (IBETX) for wireless multi-hop networks. As MAC layer affects the link performance and consequently the route quality, the metric therefore, tackles the issue by achieving twofold MAC-awareness. Firstly, interference is calculated using cross-layered approach by sending probes to MAC layer. Secondly, the nominal bit rate information is provided to all nodes in the same contention domain by considering the bandwidth sharing mechanism of 802.11. Like ETX, our metric also calculates link delivery ratios that directly affect throughput and selects those routes that bypass dense regions in the network. Simulation results by NS-2 show that IBETX gives 19% higher throughput than ETX and 10% higher than Expected Throughput (ETP). Our metric also succeeds to reduce average end-to-end delay up to 16% less than Expected Link Performance (ELP) and 24% less than ETX.
An instruction sequence assembling methodology for testing microprocessors

Hierarchically designed microprocessor-like VLSI circuits have complex data paths and complex embedded control machines to execute instructions. When a test pattern has to be applied to the input of an embedded module, determination of a sequence of instructions, which will apply this pattern and propagate the fault effects, is extremely diflcult. In this paper, we present a new methodology for automatic assembly of a sequence of instructions to satisfy the internal test goals. Combined with the previous equation-solving approach, this new high level ATPG methodology forms a complete solution for a variety of microprocessor-like circuits. This new approach has been implemented and experimented on three high level circuits. The results show that our approach is very effective in achieving complete automation for high level test generation.
Comparison of the Effects of Pulsed Dye Laser, Pulsed Dye Laser + Salicylic Acid, and Clobetasole Propionate + Salicylic Acid on Psoriatic Plaques

BACKGROUND Studies show that pulsed dye laser (PDL) has some clinical benefits on psoriasis with a low clearance rate. In addition, it has been suggested that applying keratolytics before treatment might be helpful in PDL therapy. Topical corticosteroids remain the most commonly prescribed agents for psoriasis. OBJECTIVE This study was designed to compare the efficacy of the PDL treatment with that of PDL treatment after salicylic acid on psoriatic plaques. The other goal of this study was to compare the efficacy of the PDL treatment with that of clobetasol propionate treatment. METHODS Twenty-two patients with chronic, stable psoriatic plaques that involved less than 20% of their body were included in the study. Three similar-appearing psoriasis plaques in these patients were selected. Whereas the first plaque received only PDL, the second plaque received PDL after salicylic acid, and the third plaque received clobetasol propionate ointment and salicylic acid. Evaluation of the study plaques was carried out by the modified Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (mPASI) score and by measuring the area of the plaques. RESULTS Of the 21 patients, 19 completed the study. Although the decrease in mPASI scores was determined to be maximum for clobetasol propionate + salicylic acid-treated plaques and minimum for only PDL-treated plaques, the decrease was statistically significant in all groups when compared with baseline (p < .003). At the 3- and 6-week evaluations, there was a statistically significant difference between clobetasol propionate + salicylic acid-treated plaques and the two PDL-treated plaques (p < .003); however, the difference observed at the 9-, 12-, and 15-week evaluations was statistically significant only between clobetasol propionate + salicylic acid-treated plaques and PDL-treated plaques (p < .003). When the baseline and 15-week evaluations were compared, there was no statistically significant increase in the mean lesion areas of clobetasol propionate + salicylic acid-treated psoriatic plaques (p > .003), but there was a statistically significant increase in the mean lesion areas of two PDL-treated psoriatic plaques (p < .003). CONCLUSION The results of this study showed that the effect of PDL could be increased when salicylic acid was added to treatment, although there was no statistically significant difference between both treatment protocols. However, clobetasol propionate + salicylic acid treatment is more effective than both PDL and PDL + salicylic acid treatment.
Underactuated comanipulation for ultrasound breast exams

We investigate the possibility of providing adequate task assistance using under-actuated robots for human-robot tool co-manipulation. This novel approach optimizes robot-user synergy without taking into account any a priori knowledge of parameters depending on the user. Six different actuation modes were compared for a localization and scanning task. The best performance gain was achieved for 1 degree of under-actuation.
Oxidation pathway and exacerbations in COPD: the role of NAC

Oxidative stress is an important trait in the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Consequently, targeting oxidative stress is likely to be beneficial as a treatment in COPD. Glutathione (GSH) is an intracellular antioxidant that protects against a variety of different antioxidant species. The increase of lung GSH in COPD is an attempt to counter excess oxidant production but it is inadequate during exacerbations due to the excessive production of ROS. N-acetyl-l-cysteine (NAC) acts as a precursor for the substrate cysteine in synthesis of GSH and also as a mucolytic and anti-inflammatory agent. NAC prevents COPD exacerbations at high dosage (≥1200 mg daily), while a regular treatment with 600 mg daily is enough in chronic bronchitis. Nonetheless, we must still establish whether the level of bronchial obstruction may influence its effects, the effect of high-dose NAC in Caucasian patients with COPD, and the role of NAC in the escalation and de-escalation of therapy in COPD.
TRAP language identification system for RATS phase II evaluation

Automatic language identification or detection of audio data has become an important preprocessing step for speech/speaker recognition and audio data mining. In many surveillance applications, language detection has to be performed on highly degraded audio inputs. In this paper, we present our work on language detection in highly degraded radio channel scenarios. We provide a brief description of the Targeted Robust Audio Processing (TRAP) language detection system builtfor the Phase II Evaluationof the RobustAutomatic Transcription of Speech (RATS) program. This system is a combination of 15 systems with different frontends and speech activity decisions. We also analyze the usefulness of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based non-linear projection of i-vectors before SVM classification. The proposed backend reduces the Equal Error Rate (EER) by 11%–25% relative compared to the baseline PCA-based feature representation for SVM classification, on the RATS test data consisting of data from eight highfrequency radio communication channels. Index Terms: Language identification (detection), highly degraded radio channel, RATS, i-vector, multi-layer perceptron.
Hediste diversicolor (O.F. Müller 1776) as a Possible Model to Study White Spot Syndrome Virus Infection in Polychaetes

The white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is a highly contagious shrimp pathogen world-wide for which polychaetes are among the many biological vectors. In a previous study WSSV infection was detected in the naturally infected Dendronereis spp. (Nereidae). To further study WSSV infection in polychaetes, a model polychaete that is easy to handle and propagate, and is free of and susceptible to WSSV infection is needed. In the present study the suitability of Hediste diversicolor (Nereidae) was tested as a model animal. WSSV-free H. diversicolor was infected by injection, feeding and immersion, and the infection was followed for 12 days post infection (dpi). In addition, polychaete survival was determined 40 dpi. Hediste diversicolor was able to clear the virus within 4 dpi without showing clinical signs and WSSV-associated mortality. Although a first attempt, it was concluded that H. diversicolor may not be an immediately suitable model animal for WSSV studies in polychaetes.