Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neurodevelopmental outcome at 2 years in offspring of women randomised to metformin or insulin treatment for gestational diabetes

Objective Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is a common complication of pregnancy and is increasingly being treated with metformin that crosses the placenta rather than insulin, which does not. This study seeks to examine the neurodevelopment of offspring of women treated with metformin or insulin for GDM. Design We performed a prospective follow-up study of children whose mothers had been randomly assigned at 20–33 weeks gestation to treatment with metformin or insulin for GDM. Of the 211 children followed up at 2 years, 128 were from Auckland, New Zealand (64 metformin vs 64 insulin), and 83 from Adelaide, Australia (39 metformin vs 49 insulin). Neurodevelopment was examined with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development V.2 mental development index (MDI) and psychomotor development index (PDI). Clinical and demographic background characteristics were obtained at enrolment, birth and follow-up. Results No significant differences were found between treatment groups in clinical or demographic characteristics. The MDI and PDI composite scores were tested with general linear models. No significant differences were found between metformin and insulin, respectively, in New Zealand (MDI, M=83.6 vs 86.9 and PDI, M=83.4 vs M=85.2) or Australia (MDI, M=102.5 vs M=98.4 and PDI, M=105.6 vs M=99.9) and no interactions observed. The differences in neurodevelopmental outcomes between the Auckland and Adelaide cohorts were explained by parental ethnicity, infant birth weight >4000 g, neonatal hypoglycaemia, maternal glycaemia and smoking in the household. Conclusions This study provides additional data supporting the safety of metformin in the treatment of GDM. Trial registration number ACTRN 12605000311651.
Image denoising using NL-means via smooth patch ordering

In our recent work we proposed an image denoising scheme based on reordering of the noisy image pixels to a one dimensional (1D) signal, and applying linear smoothing filters on it. This algorithm had two main limitations: It did not take advantage of the distances between the noisy image patches, which were used in the reordering process; and the smoothing filters required a separate training set to be learned from. In this work, we propose an image denoising algorithm, which applies similar permutations to the noisy image, but overcomes the above two shortcomings. We eliminate the need for learning filters by employing the nonlocal means (NL-means) algorithm. We estimate each pixel as a weighted average of noisy pixels in union of neighborhoods obtained from different global pixel permutations, where the weights are determined by distances between the patches. We show that the proposed scheme achieves results which are close to the state-of-the-art.
Runaway ornament diversity caused by Fisherian sexual selection.

Fisher's runaway process of sexual selection is potentially an important force generating character divergence between closely related populations. We investigated the evolution of multiple female preferences by Fisher's runaway process. There are two outcomes of runaway. The first is the evolution of mate preference to a stable equilibrium. This evolution occurs if the benefits of mate choice are sufficiently large relative to the cost of choice. Alternatively, mate preferences evolve cyclically. The rate and pattern of cyclic evolution depends primarily on the individual cost of choice and epistasis in the joint cost of choice. If there are small differences in natural selection (e.g., predation risk) between populations, cyclic evolution quickly leads to divergence in mate preferences and sexual ornaments and so to sexual isolation.
Activation of inflammatory immune gene cascades by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in the porcine colonic tissue ex‐vivo model

The technique of challenging postmortem tissue explants with inflammation inducer such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS) followed by gene expression analysis is used widely for evaluating the immune‐suppressing effect of bioactives. Using porcine colonic tissue as an ex‐vivo model of mammalian intestinal gut, this study evaluated the effect of incubation time on the integrity of gene transcripts and activation of inflammatory immune gene cascade by LPS treatment. Post‐slaughter colon was removed surgically and explants were incubated for 0, 3, 6 and 12 h and the abundance of mRNA transcripts of a panel of 92 immune genes were evaluated using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) arrays. The mRNA transcripts were highly intact after 0 and 3 h of incubation; however, after 6 h the degradation was clearly evident. Following 3 h incubation, 98·8% and 100% mRNA transcripts were detectable in the colonic tissue harvested from weaned and mature pigs, respectively. In the explants of weaned piglets, LPS treatment activated inflammatory signalling pathways [high mobility group B1 (HMGB1), dendritic cell maturation, interleukin (IL)‐6, IL‐8, IL‐17F], while these pathways were inhibited by dexamethasone treatment. Activations of inflammatory genes were also evident in the explants collected from the mature pigs subjected to ex‐vivo incubation for 3 h in the absence or presence of LPS. It is concluded that the colonic explant remains physiologically viable and responsive to immunological challenge for up to 3 h ex‐vivo.
The lived experience of Glue Ear : voices of mothers and young people

This qualitative research enabled the participants (three young people, aged nine to fourteen years, and seven mothers) to explain their experience of living with long-term Glue Ear. As far as I could ascertain this is the first research in which young people and their mothers have led the researcher in exploring their experience. This innovative research illustrates the effects of the condition at home and school. It provides insight into participants’ views of interactions with healthcare and educational professionals. Photovoice is usually used with groups, but in this research it was successfully adapted to enable individual participants to reflect on their experience. The data was analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to keep the focus on each participant’s words. Innovatively combining these two methodologies provided depth to both the data gathering and the data analysis. Five healthcare and educational professionals were interviewed to understand their perspective. The contribution of this research is that the methodology enabled young people and their mothers to reflect on their experience and lead the researcher in understanding the impact Glue Ear had on their day-to-day life. It highlighted the need for educational professionals to receive more formal training about Glue Ear’s potential educational and social impacts and to potentially adapt their teaching and learning practices to better support affected students. Young people and their parents demonstrated that they have valuable information to contribute to decisions about their healthcare and education requirements and would welcome the opportunity to work collaboratively with such professionals.
High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility

In order to guarantee recoverable transaction execution, database systems permit a transaction's writes to be observable only at the end of its execution. As a consequence, there is generally a delay between the time a transaction performs a write and the time later transactions are permitted to read it. This delayed write visibility can significantly impact the performance of serializable database systems by reducing concurrency among conflicting transactions. This paper makes the observation that delayed write visibility stems from the fact that database systems can arbitrarily abort transactions at any point during their execution. Accordingly, we make the case for database systems which only abort transactions under a restricted set of conditions, thereby enabling a new recoverability mechanism, early write visibility, which safely makes transactions' writes visible prior to the end of their execution. We design a new serializable concurrency control protocol, piece-wise visibility (PWV), with the explicit goal of enabling early write visibility. We evaluate PWV against state-of-the-art serializable protocols and a highly optimized implementation of read committed, and find that PWV can outperform serializable protocols by an order of magnitude and read committed by 3X on high contention workloads.
The role of paper-nip interactions on electrostatic toner transfer forces in Xerographic printing

We present a new model that uses a 3D stochastic fibre networks to simulate the role of paper structure and paper-nip interactions on the process of toner transfer in Xerographic printing. Our simulations show that the surface properties of paper under deformation in the print nip are critical in establishing the electrostatic field responsible for transferring toner to paper. When the spatial distributions of simulated electrostatic transfer fields – established in the presence of paper surfaces in a state of z-compression – are compared to the distribution of toner experimentally printed onto laboratory handsheet, good agreement is found.
Identification of oral bacterial species associated with halitosis.

BACKGROUND The authors examined the tongue bacteria associated with oral halitosis (bad breath originating from the oral cavity), focusing on noncultivable bacteria-bacteria that cannot be identified by bacterial culture techniques. METHODS The authors took samples from the dorsal tongue surface of eight adult subjects with halitosis and five control subjects who did not have halitosis. They identified the bacteria in these samples by using both anaerobic culture and direct amplification of 16S ribosomal DNA, a method that can identify both cultivable and noncultivable microorganisms. They analyzed the resulting microbiological data using chi(2) and correlation coefficient tests. RESULTS Clinical measures of halitosis were correlated highly with each other and with tongue coating scores. Of 4,088 isolates and phylotypes identified from the 13 subjects, 32 species including 13 noncultivable species were found only in subjects with halitosis. Solobacterium moorei was present in all subjects with halitosis but not in any control subjects. CONCLUSIONS Subjects with halitosis harbor some bacterial species on their dorsal tongue surfaces that are distinct from bacterial species found in control subjects. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that halitosis has a microbial etiology. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS Like other oral diseases with microbial etiology, halitosis may be amenable to specific and nonspecific antimicrobial therapy targeted toward the bacteria associated with it.
Vulnerable Populations and the Transition to Adulthood

D. Wayne Osgood, E. Michael Foster, and Mark E. Courtney examine the transition to adulthood for youth involved in social service and justice systems during childhood and adolescence. They survey the challenges faced by youth in the mental health system, the foster care system, the juvenile justice system, the criminal justice system, and special education, and by youth with physical disabilities and chronic illness, as well as runaway and homeless youth.One problem is that the services these vulnerable populations receive from these systems as children and adolescents often end abruptly as they transition to adulthood, even though the need for them continues. Youth must leave systems tailored for clients their age and, if they are eligible for further services at all, enter adult systems that are not equipped to address their needs. One exception is the special education system, whose services extend into early adulthood and are designed for individuals' needs.The authors review current public policies directed toward vulnerable youth in transition and find problems in four areas: eligibility criteria that exclude youth from services that might benefit them, inadequate funding for transition services, a lack of coordination across service systems, and inadequate training about young-adult developmental issues for service professionals.The authors then discuss policy options that can help create a developmentally appropriate and socially inclusive system of support for vulnerable youth. Among the options are strengthening all programs for youth in transition, improving the existing systems of care for children and adolescents, addressing the loss of access to services at the age of majority, and coordinating today's multiple systems into a single coherent system. The authors see heightened governmental interest in better supports for vulnerable young adults, both through expanding the federal role in their lives and through improving coordination of the systems that serve them. The Fostering Connections Act of 2008, for example, extended services to adolescents in foster care from the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-one.
Techniques for low jitter clock multiplication

Phase realigning clock multipliers, such as Multiplying Delay-Locked Loops (MDLL), offer significantly reduced random jitter compared to typical Phase-Locked Loops (PLL). This is achieved by introducing the reference signal directly into their voltage controlled oscillators (VCO) to realign the phase to the clean reference. However, the typical cost of this benefit is a significant increase in deterministic jitter due to path mismatch in the detector as well as analog nonidealities in the tuning circuits. This thesis proposes a mostly-digital tuning technique that drastically reduces deterministic jitter in phase realigning clock multipliers. The proposed technique eliminates path mismatch by using a single-path digital detection method that leverages a scrambling time-to-digital converter (TDC) and correlated double sampling to infer the tuning error from the difference in cycle periods of the output. By using a digital loop filter that consists of a digital accumulator, the tuning technique avoids the analog nonidealities of typical tuning paths. The scrambling TDC is not a contribution of this thesis. A highly-digital MDLL prototype that uses the proposed tuning technique consists of two custom 0.13 μm ICs, an FPGA board, a discrete digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with effective 8 bits, and a simple RC filter. The measured performance (for a 1.6 GHz output and 50 MHz reference) demonstrated an overall jitter of 0.93 ps rms, and estimated random and deterministic jitter of 0.68 ps rms and 0.76 ps peak-topeak, respectively. The proposed MDLL architecture is especially suitable for digital ICs, since its highly-digital architecture is mostly compatible with digital design flows, which eases its porting between technologies. Post-publication note: this PDF version of the thesis was updated after degree-fulfillment submission. Comments and noteworthy edits will be mentioned in the footnotes.
When Is the Government Spending Multiplier Large?

We argue that the government-spending multiplier can be much larger than one when the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate binds. The larger the fraction of government spending that occurs while the nominal interest rate is zero, the larger the value of the multiplier. After providing intuition for these results, we investigate the size of the multiplier in a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model. In this model the multiplier effect is substantially larger than one when the zero bound binds. Our model is consistent with the behavior of key macro aggregates during the recent financial crisis.
A Recurrent Neural Network that Learns to Count

Parallel distributed processing (PDP) architectures demonstrate a potentially radical alternative to the traditional theories of language processing that are based on serial computational models. However, learning complex structural relationships in temporal data presents a serious challenge to PDP systems. For example, automata theory dictates that processing strings from a context-free language (CFL) requires a stack or counter memory device. While some PDP models have been hand-crafted to emulate such a device, it is not clear how a neural network might develop such a device when learning a CFL. This research employs standard backpropagation training techniques for a recurrent neural network (RNN) in the task of learning to predict the next character in a simple deterministic CFL (DCFL). We show that an RNN can learn to recognize the structure of a simple DCFL. We use dynamical systems theory to identify how network states reflect that structure by building counters in phase space. The work is an empirical investigation which is complementary to theoretical analyses of network capabilities, yet original in its specific configuration of dynamics involved. The application of dynamical systems theory helps us relate the simulation results to theoretical results, and the learning task enables us to highlight some issues for understanding dynamical systems that process language with counters.
Oral Health Care for Children With Developmental Disabilities

Children with developmental disabilities often have unmet complex health care needs as well as significant physical and cognitive limitations. Children with more severe conditions and from low-income families are particularly at risk with high dental needs and poor access to care. In addition, children with developmental disabilities are living longer, requiring continued oral health care. This clinical report describes the effect that poor oral health has on children with developmental disabilities as well as the importance of partnerships between the pediatric medical and dental homes. Basic knowledge of the oral health risk factors affecting children with developmental disabilities is provided. Pediatricians may use the report to guide their incorporation of oral health assessments and education into their well-child examinations for children with developmental disabilities. This report has medical, legal, educational, and operational implications for practicing pediatricians.
Analysis of whole-genome microarray replicates using mixed models

MOTIVATION Microarray experiments are inherently noisy. Replication is the key to estimating realistic fold-changes despite such noise. In the analysis of the various sources of noise the dependency structure of the replication needs to be taken into account. RESULTS We analyzed replicate data sets from a Mycobacterium tuberculosis trcS mutant in order to identify differentially expressed genes and suggest new methods for filtering and normalizing raw array data and for imputing missing values. Mixed ANOVA models are applied to quantify the various sources of error. Such analysis also allows us to determine the optimal number of samples and arrays. Significance values for differential expression are obtained by a hierarchical bootstrapping scheme on scaled residuals. Four highly upregulated genes, including bfrB, were analyzed further. We observed an artefact, where transcriptional readthrough from these genes led to apparent upregulation of adjacent genes. AVAILABILITY All methods and data discussed are available in the package YASMAhttp://www.cryst. bbk.ac. uk/wernisch/yasma.html for the statistical data analysis system R (http://www.R-project.org).
The Entropy Power Inequality for Quantum Systems

When two independent analog signals, X and Y are added together giving Z=X+Y, the entropy of Z, H(Z), is not a simple function of the entropies H(X) and H(Y), but rather depends on the details of X and Y's distributions. Nevertheless, the entropy power inequality (EPI), which states that e2H(Z) ≥ e2H(X)+e2H(Y), gives a very tight restriction on the entropy of Z. This inequality has found many applications in information theory and statistics. The quantum analogue of adding two random variables is the combination of two independent bosonic modes at a beam splitter. The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed outline of the proof of two separate generalizations of the EPI to the quantum regime. Our proofs are similar in spirit to the standard classical proofs of the EPI, but some new quantities and ideas are needed in the quantum setting. In particular, we find a new quantum de Bruijin identity relating entropy production under diffusion to a divergence-based quantum Fisher information. Furthermore, this Fisher information exhibits certain convexity properties in the context of beam splitters.
Contingent capture of involuntary visual spatial attention does not differ between normally hearing children and proficient cochlear implant users.

PURPOSE Evidence suggests that deafness-induced changes in visual perception, cognition and attention may compensate for a hearing loss. Such alterations, however, may also negatively influence adaptation to a cochlear implant. This study investigated whether involuntary attentional capture by salient visual stimuli is altered in children who use a cochlear implant. METHODS Thirteen experienced implant users (aged 8-16 years) and age-matched normally hearing children were presented with a rapid sequence of simultaneous visual and auditory events. Participants were tasked with detecting numbers presented in a specified color and identifying a change in the tonal frequency whilst ignoring irrelevant visual distractors. RESULTS Compared to visual distractors that did not possess the target-defining characteristic, target-colored distractors were associated with a decrement in visual performance (response time and accuracy), demonstrating a contingent capture of involuntary attention. Visual distractors did not, however, impair auditory task performance. Importantly, detection performance for the visual and auditory targets did not differ between the groups. CONCLUSION These results suggest that proficient cochlear implant users demonstrate normal capture of visuospatial attention by stimuli that match top-down control settings.
Physiological correlates of temporal envelope perception

The perception of speech and other behaviorally relevant sounds is strongly influenced by the amplitude-modulated (AM) properties of the signal (i.e., its temporal envelope). To gain a better understanding of the representation of AM stimulus features in the normal auditory system, experiments were carried out in psychophysics, physiology, and computational modeling, using comparable parametric spaces. Existing AM psychophysical data were supplemented with results from new translations of basic audio-frequency psychoacoustic paradigms into the AM-frequency domain to provide a wide range of stimulus conditions to test with the physiology and modeling. A reasonable working hypothesis that has emerged because of the qualitative parallels between AM perception and physiology is that neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) are physiological implementations of the “effective” signal-processing style modulation filters derived from psychophysics. This testable hypothesis drove much of the experimental design and analysis, and several fundamental findings emerged as a result. To summarize the most basic results, we found that (1) the system appears to use a temporal code for AM at low modulation depths and an averaged or integrated response quantification at high depths, (2) temporal adaptation to AM is weak, as measured both perceptually and physiologically, and (3) some aspects of AM perception are contextdependent, a feature that is not present in either the IC responses or the simulated model responses. These findings have direct implications for models of AM processing and interpretation of proposed neural coding strategies. Other potential applications include the refinement of devices designed to assist the hearing impaired and the development of signal-processing strategies for speech recognition and audio coding systems. Physiological Correlates of Temporal Envelope Perception