Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices Towards Seasonal Influenza and Vaccine among Private High School Students in Connecticut

Background: The United States suffered from its worst influenza season since 2009 during the winter of 2017-2018. High school is prone to influenza outbreak due to the high density of students and close social spaces. In order to understand the weak points of knowledge, attitudes and practices towards seasonal influenza and its vaccine among high school students, a cross-sectional questionnaire study was conducted in Connecticut. Methods: From March to May, 2018, a close-ended self-administered questionnaire with 24 multiple choice questions about the knowledge, attitudes and practices towards seasonal influenza and vaccine was distributed to all the enrolled students in Suffield Academy, Connecticut. The knowledge score was calculated for each student, which was compared across demographic categories. Factors associated with uptake of seasonal influenza vaccine were explored using multivariate logistic regression. Results: 60% of the students responded to the questionnaire, of whom 228 were included in analysis. The number of respondents was balanced across grades, of whom 10.5% were international students. The average knowledge score was 11.6±1.4 out of 14 points. The score of international students was significantly lower than that of domestic students (p<0.001). Only 56.6% of students recognized that flu might cause serious complications, and nearly 60% mistakenly believed flu could be transmitted by food or blood. Most students get their flu knowledge from school (68.4%), while other information sources like public media and internet were underused. 84.2% and 57.9% students believed in the safety and effectiveness of seasonal flu vaccine, while few students felt a high risk to get a flu or to develop into severe illness (25.4% and 9.6% respectively). Respondents showed good compliance to preventive behaviors like wash hands and avoid contact with patients, and 60.1% of them got the flu shot annually in the past 3 years. High knowledge scores (OR=1.34, 95% CI 1.05-1.72), high perceived vaccine safety (OR=4.01, 95% CI 1.60-10.00) and effectiveness (OR=2.37, 95% CI 1.26-4.45) were significantly associated with vaccine uptake behavior after adjusting for gender, grade and nationality. The main reason for no vaccination was afraid of the pain of injection, while financial cost was the least consideration. The most persuasive messages focused on the direct and indirect benefits of the vaccine. Conclusion: More knowledge of influenza and positive attitudes towards the safety and effectiveness of seasonal influenza vaccine are positive predictors for vaccine uptake. Students tend to underestimate the risk of infection and the severity of the illness, and have misconception on the transmission mode of influenza. Future health promotion activities should improve the weak points of knowledge and emphasize the benefits of vaccination, with more attention paid to international student study in the US.
Fairness and Transparency in Ranking

Ranking in Information Retrieval (IR) has been traditionally evaluated from the perspective of the relevance of search engine results to people searching for information, i.e., the extent to which the system provides "the right information, to the right people, in the right way, at the right time. " However, people in current IR systems are not only the ones issuing search queries, but increasingly they are also the ones being searched. This raises several new problems in IR that have been addressed in recent research, particularly with respect to fairness/non-discrimination, accountability, and transparency. This is a summary of some these initial developments.
Non-invasive monitoring system to detect sitting people

Determining the position of a body is crucial in the context of the Ambient Assisted Living: knowing if a person is standing, lying down or sitting makes the difference in the process of detecting anomalies due to inactivity. We present a non-invasive monitoring system to recognize if a person is seated using Bluetooth Low Energy technology. The system is composed by devices that can be easily attached to the furniture: a transmitter module that continuously broadcasts Bluetooth signal, and a receiver which collects the RSSi value of the received messages. Finally, a central server evaluates the attenuation of the Bluetooth signal within the 2.4GHz band, correlating it to the presence of a human body in the proximity of the device.
Transformative and Troublesome? Students' and Professional Programmers' Perspectives on Difficult Concepts in Programming

Programming skills are an increasingly desirable asset across disciplines; however, learning to program continues to be difficult for many students. To improve pedagogy, we need to better understand the concepts that students find difficult and which have the biggest impact on their learning. Threshold-concept theory provides a potential lens on student learning, focusing on concepts that are troublesome and transformative. However, there is still a lack of consensus as to what the most relevant threshold concepts in programming are. The challenges involved are related to concept granularity and to evidencing some of the properties expected of threshold concepts. In this article, we report on a qualitative study aiming to address some of these concerns. The study involved focus groups with undergraduate students of different-year groups as well as professional software developers so as to gain insights into how perspectives on concepts change over time. Four concepts emerged from the data, where the majority of participants agreed on their troublesome nature—including abstract classes and data structures. Some of these concepts are considered transformative, too, but the evidence base is weaker. However, even though these concepts may not be considered transformative in the “big” sense of threshold concept theory, we argue the “soft” transformative effect of such concepts means they can provide important guidance for pedagogy and the design of programming courses. Further analysis of the data identified additional concepts that may hinder rather than help the learning of these threshold concepts, which we have called “accidental complexities. ” We conclude the article with a critique of the use of threshold concepts as a lens for studying students’ learning of programming.
Designing Low-Complexity Heavy-Traffic Delay-Optimal Load Balancing Schemes: Theory to Algorithms

We establish a unified analytical framework for designing load balancing algorithms that can simultaneously achieve low latency, low complexity, and low communication overhead. We first propose a general class ∏ of load balancing policies and prove that they are both throughput optimal and heavy-traffic delay optimal. This class ∏ includes popular policies such as join-shortest-queue (JSQ) and power-of-d as special cases, but not the recently proposed join-idle-queue (JIQ) policy. In fact, we show that JIQ is not heavy-traffic delay optimal even for homogeneous servers. By exploiting the flexibility offered by the class ∏, we design a new load balancing policy called join-below-threshold (JBT-d), in which the arrival jobs are preferentially assigned to queues that are no greater than a threshold, and the threshold is updated infrequently. JBT-d has several benefits: (i) JBT-d belongs to the class ∏ and hence is throughput optimal and heavy-traffic delay optimal. (ii) JBT-d has zero dispatching delay, like JIQ and other pull-based policies, and low message overhead due to infrequent threshold updates. (iii) Extensive simulations show that JBT-d has good delay performance, comparable to the JSQ policy in various system settings.
Distributed Statistical Machine Learning in Adversarial Settings

We consider the distributed statistical learning problem over decentralized systems that are prone to adversarial attacks. This setup arises in many practical applications, including Google's Federated Learning. Formally, we focus on a decentralized system that consists of a parameter server and m working machines; each working machine keeps N/m data samples, where N is the total number of samples. In each iteration, up to q of the m working machines suffer Byzantine faults -- a faulty machine in the given iteration behaves arbitrarily badly against the system and has complete knowledge of the system. Additionally, the sets of faulty machines may be different across iterations. Our goal is to design robust algorithms such that the system can learn the underlying true parameter, which is of dimension d, despite the interruption of the Byzantine attacks. In this paper, based on the geometric median of means of the gradients, we propose a simple variant of the classical gradient descent method. We show that our method can tolerate q Byzantine failures up to 2(1+ε)q ≤ for an arbitrarily small but fixed constant ε > 0. The parameter estimate converges in O(log N) rounds with an estimation error on the order of max{√dq/N, √d/N, which is larger than the minimax-optimal error rate √d/N in the centralized and failure-free setting by at most a factor of √q. The total computational complexity of our algorithm is of O((Nd/m) log N) at each working machine and O(md + kd log3 N) at the central server, and the total communication cost is of O(m d log N). We further provide an application of our general results to the linear regression problem. A key challenge arises in the above problem is that Byzantine failures create arbitrary and unspecified dependency among the iterations and the aggregated gradients. To handle this issue in the analysis, we prove that the aggregated gradient, as a function of model parameter, converges uniformly to the true gradient function.
Generalized Shifted Chebyshev Koornwinder's Type Polynomials: Basis Transformations

Approximating continuous functions by polynomials is vital to scientific computing and numerous numerical techniques. On the other hand, polynomials can be characterized in several ways using different bases, where every form of basis has its advantages and power. By a proper choice of basis, several problems will be removed; for instance, stability and efficiency can be improved, and numerous complications can be resolved. In this paper, we provide an explicit formula of the generalized shifted Chebyshev Koornwinder’s type polynomial of the first kind, T r * ( K 0 , K 1 ) ( x ) , using the Bernstein basis of fixed degree. Moreover, a Bézier’s degree elevation was used to rewrite T r * ( K 0 , K 1 ) ( x ) in terms of a higher degree Bernstein basis without altering the shapes. In addition, explicit formulas of conversion matrices between generalized shifted Chebyshev Koornwinder’s type polynomials and Bernstein polynomial bases were given.
Probabilistic Modeling of Speech in Spectral Domain using Maximum Likelihood Estimation

The performance of many speech processing algorithms depends on modeling speech signals using appropriate probability distributions. Various distributions such as the Gamma distribution, Gaussian distribution, Generalized Gaussian distribution, Laplace distribution as well as multivariate Gaussian and Laplace distributions have been proposed in the literature to model different segment lengths of speech, typically below 200 ms in different domains. In this paper, we attempted to fit Laplace and Gaussian distributions to obtain a statistical model of speech short-time Fourier transform coefficients with high spectral resolution (segment length >500 ms) and low spectral resolution (segment length <10 ms). Distribution fitting of Laplace and Gaussian distributions was performed using maximum-likelihood estimation. It was found that speech short-time Fourier transform coefficients with high spectral resolution can be modeled using Laplace distribution. For low spectral resolution, neither the Laplace nor Gaussian distribution provided a good fit. Spectral domain modeling of speech with different depths of spectral resolution is useful in understanding the perceptual stability of hearing which is necessary for the design of digital hearing aids.
Representation by Chebyshev Polynomials for Sums of Finite Products of Chebyshev Polynomials

In this paper, we consider sums of finite products of Chebyshev polynomials of the first, third, and fourth kinds, which are different from the previously-studied ones. We represent each of them as linear combinations of Chebyshev polynomials of all kinds whose coefficients involve some terminating hypergeometric functions 2 F 1 . The results may be viewed as a generalization of the linearization problem, which is concerned with determining the coefficients in the expansion of the product of two polynomials in terms of any given sequence of polynomials. These representations are obtained by explicit computations.
The ISApl12 Dimer Circular Intermediate Participates in mcr-1 Transposition

Objectives: The mobile colistin resistance gene mcr-1 is a serious threat to global human and animal health. The composite transposon Tn6330 and its circular intermediate were proposed to be involved in the spread of mcr-1 but their roles remain poorly understood. Methods: To further explore the intermediates during the transposition of Tn6330, we engineered Escherichia coli strains that carry an intact Tn6330 transposon or its deletion derivatives. PCR assays were performed to detect IR-IR junctions and possible circular intermediates. We carried out transposition experiments to calculate transposition frequency. The transposition sites were characterized by whole genome sequence and ISMapper-based analyses. Results: The presence of an intact Tn6330 was demonstrated to be essential for the successful transposition of mcr-1, although both Tn6330 and Tn6330-ΔIR could form circular intermediates. The insertion sequence junction structure was observed in all constructed plasmids but the ISApl1 dimer was only formed in one construct containing an intact Tn6330. The average frequency of mcr-1 transposition in an E. coli strain possessing an intact Tn6330 was ∼10-6 per transformed cell. We identified 27 integration sites for the Tn6330 transposition event. All the transposition sites were flanked by 2 bp target duplications and preferentially occurred in AT-rich regions. Conclusion: These results indicate that mcr-1 transposition relies on the presence of an intact Tn6330. In addition, formation of the tandem repeat ISApl12 could represent a crucial intermediate. Taken together, the current investigations provide mechanistic insights in the transposition of mcr-1.
Decision-Making Deficits Are Associated With Learning Impairments in Female College Students at High Risk for Anorexia Nervosa: Iowa Gambling Task and Prospect Valence Learning Model

This study investigated deficits in decision-making ability in female college students at high risk for anorexia nervosa (AN) using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the prospect valence learning (PVL) model. Based on scores on the Korean version of the Eating Attitude Test-26 (KEAT-26), participants were assigned to either the high risk for AN group (n = 42) or the control group (n = 43). The high risk for AN group exhibited significantly lower total net scores and block net scores on the third, fourth, and fifth blocks of the IGT than the control group did. The high risk for AN group selected cards significantly more often from the disadvantageous A and B decks and less often from the advantageous D deck than the control group did. In addition, the block net scores of the high risk for AN group did not differ across the five blocks, whereas those of the control group increased as the trials progressed. There was a significant negative correlation between IGT total net score and total score on the KEAT−26. The high risk for AN group had significantly lower values than the control group on the learning and response consistency parameters of the PVL model. These results indicate that female college students at high risk for AN have deficits in decision-making ability, and that these deficits are related to difficulties in remembering experience obtained from earlier trials and applying it to later trials. These difficulties further lead them to make decisions randomly.
CVID-Associated Tumors: Czech Nationwide Study Focused on Epidemiology, Immunology, and Genetic Background in a Cohort of Patients With CVID

Background: Common variable immunodeficiency disorder (CVID) is one of the most frequent inborn errors of immunity, increased occurrence of malignancies, particularly lymphomas, and gastric cancers, has long been noted among CVID patients. Multifactorial etiology, including immune dysregulation, infections, chronic inflammation, or genetic background, is suggested to contribute to tumor development. Here, we present the results of the first Czech nationwide study focused on epidemiology, immunology and genetic background in a cohort of CVID patients who also developed tumors Methods: The cohort consisted of 295 CVID patients followed for 3,070 patient/years. Standardized incidence ratio (SIR) was calculated to determine the risk of cancer, and Risk ratio (RR) was established to evaluate the significance of comorbidities. Moreover, immunophenotyping, including immunoglobulin levels and lymphocyte populations, was assessed. Finally, Whole exome sequencing (WES) was performed in all patients with lymphoma to investigate the genetic background. Results: Twenty-five malignancies were diagnosed in 22 patients in a cohort of 295 CVID patients. SIR was more than 6 times greater in comparison to the general population. The most common neoplasias were gastric cancers and lymphomas. History of Immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) was established as a potential risk factor, with over 3 times higher risk of cancer development. The B cell count at diagnosis of lymphoma was reduced in the lymphoma group; moreover, post-treatment B and T cell lymphopenia, associated with poorer outcome, was found in a majority of the patients. Intriguingly, no NK cell depression was observed after the chemotherapy. WES revealed heterogeneous genetic background among CVID patients with tumors, identifying gene variants associated with primary immunodeficiencies (such as CTLA4, PIK3CD, PMS2) and/or increased cancer susceptibility (including BRCA1, RABEP1, EP300, KDM5A). Conclusions: The incidence of malignancy in our CVID cohort was found to be more than 6 times greater compared to the general population. Gastric cancers and lymphomas were the most frequently diagnosed tumors. ITP was identified as a risk factor for malignancy in CVID patients. WES analysis confirmed a wide genetic heterogeneity among CVID patients. The identified causative or modifying gene variants pointed to errors in mechanisms contributing to both immunodeficiency and malignancy.
Visual Hebb Repetition Effects: The Role of Psychological Distinctiveness Revisited

Across two experiments we investigate the role of psychological distinctiveness on the Hebb repetition effect. In direct contradiction to Horton et al. (2008), Experiment 1 demonstrated the Hebb repetition effect for inverted faces. Importantly, the Hebb repetition effect was evident only when the filler and Hebb sequences comprised different items (no-stimulus-overlap) and was abolished when the filler and Hebb trials comprised the same items (full-stimulus-overlap). Experiment 2 further examined the impact of psychological distinctiveness on the Hebb repetition effect by comparing serial recall for upright unfamiliar-faces, inverted unfamiliar-faces, and abstract matrices. We demonstrate the visual Hebb repetition effect for stimuli that possess both purportedly high (upright faces) and low (inverted faces and matrices) levels of psychological distinctiveness. The findings of both experiments contradict the earlier claim (Horton et al., 2008) that stimuli possessing low levels of psychological distinctiveness do not show the visual Hebb repetition effect. However, we further highlight the importance of stimulus overlap between filler and Hebb sequences in determining the visual Hebb repetition effect. More generally, our findings emphasize that the Hebb repetition effect is a common feature of memory across different stimulus types.
The Mechanism and Pathways of Dopamine and Dopamine Agonists in Prolactinomas

Dopamine agonists such as bromocriptine and cabergoline are the predominant treatment drugs for prolactinoma by inhibiting prolactin secretion and shrinking tumor size. However, the pathways of either dopamine or its agonists that lead to the death of cells are incompletely understood and some are even conflicting conclusions. The main aim of this paper is to review the different pathways of dopamine and its agonists in prolactinomas to help to gain a better understanding of their functions and drug resistance mechanisms.
High Prevalence of Multidrug-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae Harboring Several Virulence and β-Lactamase Encoding Genes in a Brazilian Intensive Care Unit

Klebsiella pneumoniae is an important opportunistic pathogen that commonly causes nosocomial infections and contributes to substantial morbidity and mortality. We sought to investigate the antibiotic resistance profile, pathogenic potential and the clonal relationships between K. pneumoniae (n = 25) isolated from patients and sources at a tertiary care hospital’s intensive care units (ICUs) in the northern region of Brazil. Most of K. pneumoniae isolates (n = 21, 84%) were classified as multidrug resistant (MDR) with high-level resistance to β-lactams, aminoglycosides, quinolones, tigecycline, and colistin. All the 25 isolates presented extended-spectrum beta-lactamase-producing (ESBL), including carbapenemase producers, and carried the blaKPC (100%), blaTEM (100%), blaSHV variants (n = 24, 96%), blaOXA-1 group (n = 21, 84%) and blaCTX-M-1 group (n = 18, 72%) genes. The K2 serotype was found in 4% (n = 1) of the isolates, and the K1 was not detected. The virulence-associated genes found among the 25 isolates were mrkD (n = 24, 96%), fimH-1 (n = 22, 88%), entB (100%), iutA (n = 10, 40%), ybtS (n = 15, 60%). The genes related with efflux pumps and outer membrane porins found were AcrAB (100%), tolC (n = 24, 96%), mdtK (n = 22, 88%), OmpK35 (n = 15, 60%), and OmpK36 (n = 7, 28%). ERIC-PCR was employed to determine the clonal relationship between the different isolated strains. The obtained ERIC-PCR patterns revealed that the similarity between isolates was above 70%. To determine the sequence types (STs) a multilocus sequence typing (MLST) assay was used. The results indicated the presence of high-risk international clones among the isolates. In our study, the wide variety of MDR K. pneumoniae harboring β-lactams and virulence genes strongly suggest a necessity for the implementation of effective strategies to prevent and control the spread of antibiotic resistant infections.
Combine Your “Will” and “Able”: Career Adaptability’s Influence on Performance

Adaptivity and adaptability are two key elements representing one’s “willingness” and “ability,” respectively, in the career construction theory (CCT) framework. On the basis of CCT and complemented by the visual of resources in the conservation of resources theory, this study combines career issues and performance and examines the joint effect of adaptivity and adaptability on career self-management which will lead to improved performance. Using a sample of Chinese employees (N = 232), the study first examines the mediating role that career self-management plays between career adaptability and performance and then tests the moderating role of proactive personality. Results show career adaptability positively predicts performance, with this relationship partially mediated by career self-management. The positive effect of career adaptability on career self-management is stronger among those who are more proactive than less proactive. Further, the indirect effect of career adaptability on performance is stronger among proactive employees than those with lower levels of proactive personality. These findings provide implications for both theories and practices.