Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stakeholder Views, Financing and Policy Implications for Reuse of Wastewater for Irrigation: A Case from Hyderabad, India

When flowing through Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, India, the Musi River picks up (partially) treated and untreated sewage from the city. Downstream of the city, farmers use this water for the irrigation of rice and vegetables. Treatment of the river water before it is used for irrigation would address the resulting risks for health and the environment. To keep the costs and operational efforts low for the farmers, the use of constructed wetlands is viewed as a suitable option. Towards this end, the paper investigates the interests and perceptions of government stakeholders and famers on the treatment of wastewater for irrigation and further explores the consumer willingness to pay a higher price for cleaner produced vegetables. Full cost recovery from farmers and consumers cannot be expected, if mass scale treatment of irrigation water is implemented. Instead, both consumers and farmers would expect that the government supports treatment of irrigation water. Most stakeholders associated with the government weigh health and environment so high, that these criteria outweigh cost concerns. They also support the banning of irrigation with polluted water. However, fining farmers for using untreated river water would penalize them for pollution caused by others. Therefore public funding of irrigation water treatment is recommended.
Nonparaneoplastic Limbic Encephalitis in a Patient with Relapsing Polychondritis

Relapsing polychondritis is a rare immune mediated systemic disorder which destroys cartilaginous structures such as the auricles, eyes, nose, joints and other parts of the body. Many cases of relapsing polychondritis are associated with other systemic autoimmune diseases particularly various vasculitidites. Neurological involvement is rare and the pathogenesis is currently unknown. We present a case of a patient with diagnosed polychondritis who presented with memory disturbance and MRI revealed bitemporal signal change. Workup was negative for infection, malignancy, or paraneoplastic antibodies. Treatment with high-dose steroids resulted in improvement in symptoms.
Misallocation Cycles

We estimate a general equilibrium model with ﬁrm heterogeneity and a representative household with Epstein-Zin preferences. Firms face investment frictions and permanent shocks, which feature time-variation in common idiosyncratic skewness. Quantitatively, the model replicates well the cyclical dynamics of the cross-sectional output growth and investment rate distributions. Economically, the model generates business cycles through ineﬃciencies in the allocation of capital across ﬁrms. These cycles arise because ( i ) permanent Gaussian shocks give rise to a power law distribution in ﬁrm size and ( ii ) rare negative Poisson shocks cause time-variation in common idiosyncratic skewness. Despite the ab-sence of ﬁrm-level granularity, a power law in the ﬁrm size distribution implies that idiosyncratic Poisson shocks have a large eﬀect on the dynamics of aggregate consumption and wealth. In addition, shocks to aggregate wealth spill over to all ﬁrms in the economy because of Epstein-Zin preferences.
High-Performance Reduction Circuits Using Deeply Pipelined Operators on FPGAs

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have become an attractive option for accelerating scientific applications. Many scientific operations such as matrix-vector multiplication and dot product involve the reduction of a sequentially produced stream of values. Unfortunately, because of the pipelining in FPGA-based floating-point units, data hazards may occur during these sequential reduction operations. Improperly designed reduction circuits can adversely impact the performance, impose unrealistic buffer requirements, and consume a significant portion of the FPGA. In this paper, we identify two basic methods for designing serial reduction circuits: the tree-traversal method and the striding method. Using accumulation as an example, we analyze the design trade-offs among the number of adders, buffer size, and latency. We then propose high-performance and area-efficient designs using each method. The proposed designs reduce multiple sets of sequentially delivered floating-point values without stalling the pipeline or imposing unrealistic buffer requirements. Using a Xilinx Virtex-ll Pro FPGA as the target device, we implemented our designs and present performance and area results.
Esthetic, Functional, and Everyday Life Assessment of Individuals with Cleft Lip and/or Palate

Objectives. To evaluate the level of satisfaction of individuals with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) and their parents concerning the esthetic and functional treatment outcomes, the impact of the cleft on everyday life, and potential associations with treatment outcome satisfaction. Subjects and Methods. The sample consisted of 33 patients (7 CP, 20 unilateral CLP, and 6 bilateral CLP; median age: 17.1, range: 9.0–33.1 years) and 30 parents, who responded to a questionnaire in an interview-guided session. All participants received their orthodontic treatment at the Department of Orthodontics in the University of Athens. Results. Patients and their parents were quite satisfied with esthetics and function. Patients with UCLP primarily were concerned about nose esthetics (BCLP about lip esthetics and CP about speech). Increased satisfaction was associated with decreased influence of the cleft in everyday life (0.35 < rho < 0.64, P < 0.05). Parents reported significant influence of the cleft on family life, while patients did not. Conclusions. Despite the limited sample size of subgroups, the main concerns of patients with different cleft types and the importance of satisfying lip, nose, and speech outcomes for an undisturbed everyday life were quite evident. Thus, the need for targeted treatment strategies is highlighted for individuals with cleft lip and/or palate.
A Simple, Fast Diverse Decoding Algorithm for Neural Generation

In this paper, we propose a simple, fast decoding algorithm that fosters diversity in neural generation. The algorithm modifies the standard beam search algorithm by adding an inter-sibling ranking penalty, favoring choosing hypotheses from diverse parents. We evaluate the proposed model on the tasks of dialogue response generation, abstractive summarization and machine translation. We find that diverse decoding helps across all tasks, especially those for which reranking is needed. We further propose a variation that is capable of automatically adjusting its diversity decoding rates for different inputs using reinforcement learning (RL). We observe a further performance boost from this RL technique. This paper includes material from the unpublished script "Mutual Information and Diverse Decoding Improve Neural Machine Translation" (Li and Jurafsky, 2016).
Prevention and treatment of scars

186 The skin is one of the most important organs of our body, but it is also vulnerable and can easily get damaged. After healing of the damaged skin, scarring is likely to be present. In some cases and in some individuals, abnormal or excessive scarring following damage occurs. Abnormal scarring can cause major physical complaints and aesthetic disfigurement, hence impairing the quality of life of the patient. This thesis describes current scar modalities for the treatment of such abnormal scars. The focus lies on the prevention of hypertrophic scars following acute burn wounds or reconstructive wounds (Part I). In addition, novel keloid scar treatments are evaluated (Part II + III) Part I. Dermal substitutes for treatment of acute burns and reconstructive wounds Due to improvements in medical health care, the mortality rate following large burn trauma decreased. However, severe scarring is still seen and therefore new challenges within current burn trauma medicine have risen. Until now, grafting of the burned area with autologous split thickness skin grafts (SSG) is the gold standard. However, severe scarring following grafting with SSG's is seen. The severe scarring is thought to be due to the lack of dermal tissue in the grafts, which initiated the development of dermal substitutes. In chapter 2, we outline the biological background of the three main classes of dermal substitutes. Furthermore we relate several characteristics to clinical requirements and discuss the current available dermal substitutes. In Chapter 3, the clinical implementation of such a dermal substitute is evaluated in a long-term follow-up. This study represents the first long-term and objective follow-up of a dermal substitute in which its effectiveness was investigated in acute and reconstructive burn surgery. Seventy-nine percent of the patients of the original study of Van Zuijlen et al, were screened twelve years post-treatment. Both subjective and objective evaluation tools were used. The study shows that even after twelve years, a higher elasticity was seen in reconstructive wounds treated with the dermal substitute compared to the non-substituted reconstructive wounds.
First Approach for the Modelling of the Electric Field Surrounding a Piezoelectric Transformer in View of Plasma Generation

This paper is about an open multi-physics modelling problem resulting from recent investigations into plasma generation by piezoelectric transformers. In this first approach, the electric field distribution surrounding the transformer is studied according to a weak coupling formulation. Electric potential distribution views obtained numerically are compared to real views of plasma generation observed experimentally.
Evolution of planetary nebulae II. Population effects on the bright cut-off of the PNLF

We investigate the bright cut-off of the (O ) λ5007 planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF), that has been sug- gested as a powerful extragalactic distance indicator in virtue of its observed invariance against populations effects. Theoretical PNLFs are constructed via Monte-Carlo simulations of populations of PNe, whose individual properties are described with the aid of recent PN synthetic models (Marigo et al. 2001, A&A, 378, 958), coupled to a detailed photoionisation code (CLOUDY). The basic dependences of the cut-off magnitude M ∗ are then discussed. We find that : (i) In galaxies with recent or ongoing star formation, the modelled PNLF present M ∗ values between − 4a nd−5, depending on model details. These are very close to the observationally-calibrated value for the LMC. (ii) In these galaxies, the PNLF cut-off is produced by PNe with progenitor masses of about 2.5 M� , while less massive stars give origin to fainter PNe. As a consequence M ∗ is expected to depend strongly on the age of the last burst of star formation, dimming by as much as 5 mag as we go from young to 10-Gyr old populations. (iii) Rather than on the initial metallicity of a stellar population, M ∗ depends on the actual (O/H) of the observed PNe, a quan- tity that may differ significantly from the initial value (due to dredge-up episodes), especially in young and intermediate-age PN populations. (iv) Also the transition time from the end of AGB to the PN phase, and the nuclear-burning properties (i.e. H- or He-burning) of the central stars introduce non-negligible effects on M ∗ . The strongest indication derived from the present calculations is a serious difficulty to explain the age-invariance of the cut-off brightness over an extended interval, say from 1 to 13 Gyr, that observations of PNLFs in galaxies of late-to-early type seem to suggest. We discuss the implications of our findings, also in relation to other interpretative pictures proposed in the past literature.
Human genomic Z-DNA segments probed by the Zα domain of ADAR1

Double-stranded DNA is a dynamic molecule that adopts different secondary structures. Experimental evidence indicates Z-DNA plays roles in DNA transactions such as transcription, chromatin remodeling and recombination. Furthermore, our computational analysis revealed that sequences with high Z-DNA forming potential at moderate levels of DNA supercoiling are enriched in human promoter regions. However, the actual distribution of Z-DNA segments in genomes of mammalian cells has been elusive due to the unstable nature of Z-DNA and lack of specific probes. Here we present a first human genome map of most stable Z-DNA segments obtained with A549 tumor cells. We used the Z-DNA binding domain, Zα, of the RNA editing enzyme ADAR1 as probe in conjunction with a novel chromatin affinity precipitation strategy. By applying stringent selection criteria, we identified 186 genomic Z-DNA hotspots. Interestingly, 46 hotspots were located in centromeres of 13 human chromosomes. There was a very strong correlation between these hotspots and high densities of single nucleotide polymorphism. Our study indicates that genetic instability and rapid evolution of human centromeres might, at least in part, be driven by Z-DNA segments. Contrary to in silico predictions, however, we found that only two of the 186 hotspots were located in promoter regions.
Predicting Emotion Perception Across Domains: A Study of Singing and Speaking

Emotion affects our understanding of the opinions and sentiments of others. Research has demonstrated that humans are able to recognize emotions in various domains, including speech and music, and that there are potential shared features that shape the emotion in both domains. In this paper, we investigate acoustic and visual features that are relevant to emotion perception in the domains of singing and speaking. We train regression models using two paradigms: (1) within-domain, in which models are trained and tested on the same domain and (2) cross-domain, in which models are trained on one domain and tested on the other domain. This strategy allows us to analyze the similarities and differences underlying the relationship between audio-visual feature expression and emotion perception and how this relationship is affected by domain of expression. We use kernel density estimation to model emotion as a probability distribution over the perception associated with multiple evaluators on the valence-activation space. This allows us to model the variation inherent in the reported perception. Results suggest that activation can be modeled more accurately across domains, compared to valence. Furthermore, visual features capture cross-domain emotion more accurately than acoustic features. The results provide additional evidence for a shared mechanism underlying spoken and sung emotion perception.
Validation of the psychosocial impact of dental aesthetics questionnaire (Pidaq) in Spanish adolescents

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to assess the validity and reliability of the Spanish version of PIDAQ for application in adolescents. Study Design: The questionnaire was translated, cross-culturally adapted and completed by 627 adolescents (366 12-year-olds and 261 15-year-olds). The adolescents were also examined by 4 examiners who had been calibrated against a gold standard and relative to each other (Kappa >0.85) in determining treatment need with the Dental Aesthetic Index (DAI) and the Index of Orthodontic Treatment Need (IOTN) DHC and AC components. Results: Cronbach´s alpha of the translated PIDAQ was 0.90. The 23 items of the questionnaire were divided into four domains that explained 60% of the variance. The test-retest reliability of the questionnaire was 0.93. Discriminant validity revealed a significant association between the scores for the questionnaire and its subscales or domains and those for the DAI, IOTN-DHC and IOTN-AC treatment need indices. Adolescents with orthodontic treatment need scored higher in the questionnaires. Conclusions: The results show that the Spanish version of PIDAQ has a very similar internal structure and psychometric properties to those of the original questionnaire and demonstrate its validity for use with Spanish adolescents. Key words:Orthodontics, epidemiology, quality of life, malocclusion.
Consistent query answering under key and exclusion dependencies: algorithms and experiments

Research in consistent query answering studies the definition and computation of "meaningful" answers to queries posed to inconsistent databases, i.e., databases whose data do not satisfy the integrity constraints (ICs) declared on their schema. Computing consistent answers to conjunctive queries is generally coNP-hard in data complexity, even in the presence of very restricted forms of ICs (single, unary keys). Recent studies on consistent query answering for database schemas containing only key dependencies have analyzed the possibility of identifying classes of queries whose consistent answers can be obtained by a first-order rewriting of the query, which in turn can be easily formulated in SQL and directly evaluated through any relational DBMS. In this paper we study consistent query answering in the presence of key dependencies and exclusion dependencies. We first prove that even in the presence of only exclusion dependencies the problem is coNP-hard in data complexity, and define a general method for consistent answering of conjunctive queries under key and exclusion dependencies, based on the rewriting of the query in Datalog with negation. Then, we identify a subclass of conjunctive queries that can be first-order rewritten in the presence of key and exclusion dependencies, and define an algorithm for computing the first-order rewriting of a query belonging to such a class of queries. Finally, we compare the relative efficiency of the two methods for processing queries in the subclass above mentioned. Experimental results, conducted on a real and large database of the computer science engineering degrees of the University of Rome "La Sapienza", clearly show the computational advantage of the first-order based technique.
A new species of Calomys (Rodentia: Sigmodontinae) from Eastern Brazil

On the basis of combined analyses of karyotypic, molecular and morphologic data, we herein describe a new Calomys species collected in a transitional area between the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado morphoclimatic domains of eastern Brazil. This new taxon differs from all other Brazilian Calomys species by its diploid number (2n=38), the lowest among Brazilian Calomys species, and by its yellowish snout. Phylogenetic analyses based on cytochrome b DNA suggest that this species belongs to the larger-bodied species group within Calomys, together with C. expulsus, C. callidus, C. callosus, and C. tocantinsi.
Is Penicillin Plus Gentamicin Synergistic against Clinical Group B Streptococcus isolates?: An In vitro Study

Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is increasingly causing invasive infections in non-pregnant adults. Elderly patients and those with comorbidities are at increased risk. On the basis of previous studies focusing on neonatal infections, penicillin plus gentamicin is recommended for infective endocarditis (IE) and periprosthetic joint infections (PJI) in adults. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a synergism with penicillin and gentamicin is present in GBS isolates that caused IE and PJI. We used 5 GBS isolates, two clinical strains and three control strains, including one displaying high-level gentamicin resistance (HLGR). The results from the checkerboard and time-kill assays (TKAs) were compared. For TKAs, antibiotic concentrations for penicillin were 0.048 and 0.2 mg/L, and for gentamicin 4 mg/L or 12.5 mg/L. In the checkerboard assay, the median fractional inhibitory concentration indices (FICIs) of all isolates indicated indifference. TKAs for all isolates failed to demonstrate synergism with penicillin 0.048 or 0.2 mg/L, irrespective of gentamicin concentrations used. Rapid killing was seen with penicillin 0.048 mg/L plus either 4 mg/L or 12.5 mg/L gentamicin, from 2 h up to 8 h hours after antibiotic exposure. TKAs with penicillin 0.2 mg/L decreased the starting inoculum below the limit of quantification within 4–6 h, irrespective of the addition of gentamicin. Fast killing was seen with penicillin 0.2 mg/L plus 12.5 mg/L gentamicin within the first 2 h. Our in vitro results indicate that the addition of gentamicin to penicillin contributes to faster killing at low penicillin concentrations, but only within the first few hours. Twenty-four hours after antibiotic exposure, PEN alone was bactericidal and synergism was not seen.
Improved parameters for the transiting planet HD 17156b: a high-density giant planet with a very eccentric orbit

We report high-precision transit photometry for the recently detected planet HD 17156b. Using these new data with previously published transit photometry and radial velocity measurements, we perform a combined analysis based on a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. The resulting mass M-p = 3.09(-0.17)(+0.22) M-Jup and radius R-p = 1.23(-0.20)(+0.17) R-Jup for the planet places it at the outer edge of the density distribution of known transiting planets with rho(p) = 1.66(-0.60)(+1.37) rho(Jup). The obtained transit ephemeris is T-Tr = 2 454 438.48271(-0.00057)(+0.00077) + N x 21.21747(- 0.00067)(+0.00070) BJD. The derived plausible tidal circularization time scales for HD 17156b are larger than the age of the host star. The measured high orbital eccentricity e = 0.6719(-0.0063)(+0.0052) can thus not be interpreted as the clear sign of the presence of another body in the system.
A study of rural high school principals’ perceptions as social justice leaders

This multisite case study explores how rural principals in high poverty schools in a Southern state that had identified themselves as social justice leaders perceived student diversity, specifically LGBTQ students, and how they sustained a socially-just school climate for all students. Using a qualitative approach lent itself to understanding the principals’ descriptions of themselves as social justice leaders in their respective school and community contexts through their conversations (Creswell, 2007; Marshall & Rossman, 2016). The investigators drew from Theoharis’ (2007, 2009) and Bishop’s (2012) studies to serve as the theoretical framework guiding this study. The results indicated that the principals in this case study struggled with recognizing LGBTQ students’ needs and well-being. The findings in this study contain implications for pre-service preparation and in-service professional development programs to draw upon social justice leadership theory and research to inform leadership practices when addressing external and internal resistance. Moreover, this study recognizes the need for leadership preparation programs to integrate critical self-consciousness (Freire, 2000) with purposeful reflection (Webster-Smith, 2011) as essential to the development of the social justice leader. Keywords: school leadership, social justice, LGBTQ students, community resistance, pre-service and in-service preparation programs
The Sexual Trafficking of Juveniles: A Theoretical Model

ABSTRACT Research on the sexual trafficking of juveniles has increased. However, there has been no theoretical model developed incorporating variables into a systemic, interactive analysis of the issue. Utilizing Parsonian functionalism as its foundation, the authors developed such a model. The model is based on sociological, criminological, and psychological theories and concepts with a particular emphasis on the role of environmental design in trafficking. Unique to this study, the authors propose that a symbiotic relationship exists between the adolescent brain and trafficker as psychopath as contextualized in the Stockholm syndrome. We offer research and policy implications based on the model.