Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What's hot from the ICS annual meeting 2008

The International Continence Society (ICS) annual meeting this year (2008) was held in Cairo, Egypt. This was the first time that the meeting was held in an African country. There were a record number of abstracts submitted for this ICS meeting, and it proved to be a very fruitful and educational meeting. There was a 144% increase in abstracts submitted from Africa, especially North Africa, and 71% increase from Asia, especially East Asia, compared to previous meetings. There were 17 sessions; 5 podium sessions and 12 poster sessions. The podium sessions were 15 min long and the poster sessions were 7 min long. Here we aim to summarize some of the 138 presented articles. In this article we summarize a personal overview of what was discussed at this meeting. Clearly by virtue of its nature, as an attempt to summarize the meeting it is subject to considerable inevitable personal bias, but we hope that the readers will find it useful.
Soil‐transmitted helminthiasis in Myanmar and approximate costs for countrywide control

Previous surveys in Myanmar indicate that soil‐transmitted helminths (STH) are a significant public health problem. However the majority of these surveys are small scale or hospital based. To date there has been no countrywide assessment of the prevalence and intensity of STH infection. We conducted a survey (June 2002–June 2003) to assess the magnitude of STH infection in school age children in each of the different ecological areas of the country. In each area, five schools were selected and from each one, 50 children were randomly chosen. Parasitological and nutritional data were collected from each child. We found an overall prevalence of infection of 69%: 18% had a moderate–heavy intensity of infection, 22% were anaemic. A pilot exercise to treat 25 000 school age children in the 200 schools of Nyangdone Township tested the strategy before scaling up and to generate some rough costings. A crude calculation of the expenditure to buy and deliver the drugs, including the costs incurred in the teacher training, concluded that the cost per child was approximately 0.05 USD.
Raising Standards While Watching the Bottom Line Making a Business Case for Infection Control

While society would benefit from a reduced incidence of nosocomial infections, there is currently no direct reimbursement to hospitals for the purpose of infection control, which forces healthcare institutions to make economic decisions about funding infection control activities. Demonstrating value to administrators is an increasingly important function of the hospital epidemiologist because healthcare executives are faced with many demands and shrinking budgets. Aware of the difficulties that face local infection control programs, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) Board of Directors appointed a task force to draft this evidence-based guideline to assist hospital epidemiologists in justifying and expanding their programs. In Part 1, we describe the basic steps needed to complete a business-case analysis for an individual institution. A case study based on a representative infection control intervention is provided. In Part 2, we review important basic economic concepts and describe approaches that can be used to assess the financial impact of infection prevention, surveillance, and control interventions, as well as the attributable costs of specific healthcare-associated infections. Both parts of the guideline aim to provide the hospital epidemiologist, infection control professional, administrator, and researcher with the tools necessary to complete a thorough business-case analysis and to undertake an outcome study of a nosocomial infection or an infection control intervention.
Decreased incidence of anterior uveitis in patients with ankylosing spondylitis treated with the anti-tumor necrosis factor agents infliximab and etanercept.

OBJECTIVE To estimate the incidence of anterior uveitis in patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) who underwent anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) therapy, using data from recently performed trials. METHODS Data from 4 placebo-controlled studies with anti-TNF agents in AS (2 with etanercept and 2 with infliximab) and 3 open-label studies were analyzed for the prestudy prevalence and the incidence of reported flares of anterior uveitis. RESULTS A total of 717 patients who received treatment for anterior uveitis during the course of published clinical studies were identified by a systematic literature search using Medline. Followup information on the course of anterior uveitis was available for 397 patients. Of these, 297 were exposed to etanercept and 90 were exposed to infliximab for a total of 430 and 146.4 years, respectively. Among 190 patients who received placebo, the overall exposure was 70.5 years. The frequency of flares of anterior uveitis in the placebo group was 15.6 per 100 patient-years (95% confidence interval 7.8-27.9), while the patients treated with anti-TNF agents had a mean of only 6.8 anterior uveitis flares per 100 patient-years (P = 0.01). Flares of anterior uveitis occurred less frequently (although not significantly) in patients treated with infliximab than in patients treated with etanercept (3.4 per 100 patient-years and 7.9 per 100 patient-years, respectively). CONCLUSION Treatment of AS patients with biologic agents directed against TNFalpha is associated with a significant decrease in the number of anterior uveitis flares. This reduction was slightly more marked among patients treated with infliximab, but the difference was not significant.
Quality of Life and Affective Health of Patients with Vitiligo

Background: Vitiligo is a common hypopigmentary skin disease that can affect the quality of life and has an impact on the psychological health of the patient. Unfortunately these aspects are usually missed in the care process and underestimated in the assessment and management of vitiligo patients. Aim of the Study: To determine the quality of life and assess the psychological impact of Vitiligo among Saudi patients, to understand the variables which may influence their psychological wellbeing and to assess the association between the quality of life and psychological morbidity. Methods: Using cross sectional design, 234 adult patients were recruited from different hospitals in Saudi Arabia between October 2010 and February 2011. Quality of life and psychological health were assessed by Dermatological Quality of life Index and Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale respectively, which are well known, widely accepted questionnaires. Results: Quality of life was more affected in females, age group (21 -30) years, low income patients and patients with generalized vitiligo. Anxiety was noticed more in females and in patients with jobs which required dealing with people on daily basis. Depression was higher in less educated and low income patients. DQLI score positively correlated with the HAD scale. Conclusion: Vitiligo has a large impact on quality of life and mental health. Psychosocial history should be assessed and considered in any patient with Vitiligo.
Structure-Activity Relationship of Synthetic Variants of the Milk-Derived Antimicrobial Peptide αs2-Casein f(183–207)

ABSTRACT Template-based studies on antimicrobial peptide (AMP) derivatives obtained through manipulation of the amino acid sequence are helpful to identify properties or residues that are important for biological activity. The present study sheds light on the importance of specific amino acids of the milk-derived αs2-casein f(183–207) peptide to its antibacterial activity against the food-borne pathogens Listeria monocytogenes and Cronobacter sakazakii. Trimming of the peptide revealed that residues at the C-terminal end of the peptide are important for activity. Removal of the last 5 amino acids at the C-terminal end and replacement of the Arg at position 23 of the peptide sequence by an Ala residue significantly decreased activity. These findings suggest that Arg23 is very important for optimal activity of the peptide. Substitution of the also positively charged Lys residues at positions 15 and 17 of the αs2-casein f(183–207) peptide also caused a significant reduction of the effectiveness against C. sakazakii, which points toward the importance of the positive charge of the peptide for its biological activity. Indeed, simultaneous replacement of various positively charged amino acids was linked to a loss of bactericidal activity. On the other hand, replacement of Pro residues at positions 14 and 20 resulted in a significantly increased antibacterial potency, and hydrophobic end tagging of αs2-casein f(193–203) and αs2-casein f(197–207) peptides with multiple Trp or Phe residues significantly increased their potency against L. monocytogenes. Finally, the effect of pH (4.5 to 7.4), temperature (4°C to 37°C), and addition of sodium and calcium salts (1% to 3%) on the activity of the 15-amino-acid αs2-casein f(193–207) peptide was also determined, and its biological activity was shown to be completely abolished in high-saline environments.
Distributive pairing: mechanism for segregation of compound autosomal chromosomes in oocytes of Drosophila melanogaster.

HE segregational behavior of Drosophila chromosomes in the first meiotic Tdivision of the oocyte is quite different from that expected from the classical picture of the independent assortment of nonhomologous chromosomes and the regular segregation of homologous chromosomes. Under appropriate circumstances, nonhomologous chromosomes may segregate very regularly to opposite poles of the spindle of the first meiotic division, and conversely, homologs may frequently pass to the same pole (R. F. GRELL 1957, l959,1962a, 1962b, 1964a, 1964b). Simple rules which reliably predict the behavior of chromosomes in oocytes have been formulated and incorporated into the distributive pairing model of meiosis (R. F. GRELL 1962a, 1962b, 1964a, 1964b; E. H. GRELL 1963). According to the distributive pairing hypothesis, after the crossing over process noncrossovers and compound chromosomes make up the “distributive Chromosomes in this pool are distributed to the two poles without being influenced by homology but according to certain rules. The relative sizes of the members of the pool determine their segregation (see reviews by R. F. GRELL 1965, 1967). Nonhomologous distributive pairing occurs only in oocytes and does not occur during meiosis in males (R. F. GRELL 195 7) . Compound autosomes are a class of useful and interesting chromosomes in Drosophila. They consist of two identical autosomal arms attached to one centromere, and are sometimes called isochromosomes in the cytological literature. They were first synthesized in the laboratory of E. B. LEWIS. Compound 2L, compound 2R and compound 3L were synthesized by INGE RASMUSSEN; compound 3R by E. ORIAS and P. DEAL (RASMUSSEN 1960); and compound 4 by LEWIS and A. ROBERTS. Compound autosomes have been used in a number of experiments. LEWIS (1967) used compound 3R chromosomes to recover both reciprocal products of crossing over between pseudoalleles of the bx complex. RASMUSSEN (unpublished) recovered the hZ h double mutant with a compound 3L. HEXTER, LOZNER and BUNN (1967) obtained reciprocal crossovers between members of the ss complex. BATEMAN (1968) used compound autosomes to study radiation-induced nondisjunction and compound formation. MCCLOSKEY (1 966) used them to demonstrate that sperm lacking a whole chromosome arm are functional. LINDSLEY and GRELL (1969) extended the demonstration to show that
Analyzing Spatial Structure of IP Addresses for Detecting Malicious Websites

Web-based malware attacks have become one of the most serious threats that need to be addressed urgently. Several approaches that have attracted attention as promising ways of detecting such malware include employing one of several blacklists. However, these conventional approaches often fail to detect new attacks owing to the versatility of malicious websites. Thus, it is difficult to maintain up-to-date blacklists with information for new malicious websites. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new scheme for detecting malicious websites using the characteristics of IP addresses. Our approach leverages the empirical observation that IP addresses are more stable than other metrics such as URLs and DNS records. While the strings that form URLs or DNS records are highly variable, IP addresses are less variable, i.e., IPv4 address space is mapped onto 4-byte strings. In this paper, a lightweight and scalable detection scheme that is based on machine learning techniques is developed and evaluated. The aim of this study is not to provide a single solution that effectively detects web-based malware but to develop a technique that compen- sates the drawbacks of existing approaches. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by using real IP address data from existing blacklists and real traffic data on a campus network. The results demonstrate that our scheme can expand the coverage/accuracy of existing blacklists and also detect unknown malicious websites that are not covered by conventional approaches.
Testicular‐Associated Immune Deviation: Flushing of the Testicular Lymph Sinusoids Induces Immunosuppression and Inhibits Formation of EAE in SJL Mice

Injection of antigen into the testis has been previously proved to induce systemic tolerance in rats. Testicular‐associated immune deviation (TAID) has thus far been induced and studied only in the rat and the present study was planned to study if TAID could be induced in mice as well. In addition, it was studied if TAID is organ‐specific. Mouse spinal cord homogenate (MSCH), as well as phosphate‐buffered saline (PBS), was injected into the testes of SJL and BALB/c male mice before the induction of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis into the animals. The control animals received MSCH intramuscularly into the hamstring muscles. The animals were followed and graded daily for symptoms attending the next 30 days. In the SJL strain, mice treated with an intratesticular (i.t.) MSCH injection prior to the induction of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) had the shortest duration of symptoms and the longest time to the onset of the first symptoms. In addition, the mice injected i.t. with PBS had as mild symptoms as those injected with MSCH. There was a statistically significant difference, however, between the groups injected either with MSCH or PBS intratesticularly. In general, mice treated with an intramuscular injection of MSCH got sick first, and had the most severe symptoms for the longest duration of time. In the case of the BALB/c mice, there were no statistical differences between the groups investigated. It is concluded that TAID is a testis‐ and strain‐specific phenomenon in the mouse, and not specific to the rat. In addition, i.t. injection of PBS is just as effective in creating tolerance against EAE as i.t. injection of MSCH in the SJL mice.
Generative Semantic Manipulation with Contrasting GAN

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved significant improvement on paired/unpaired image-to-image translation, such as photo$\rightarrow$ sketch and artist painting style transfer. However, existing models can only be capable of transferring the low-level information (e.g. color or texture changes), but fail to edit high-level semantic meanings (e.g., geometric structure or content) of objects. On the other hand, while some researches can synthesize compelling real-world images given a class label or caption, they cannot condition on arbitrary shapes or structures, which largely limits their application scenarios and interpretive capability of model results. In this work, we focus on a more challenging semantic manipulation task, which aims to modify the semantic meaning of an object while preserving its own characteristics (e.g. viewpoints and shapes), such as cow$\rightarrow$sheep, motor$\rightarrow$ bicycle, cat$\rightarrow$dog. To tackle such large semantic changes, we introduce a contrasting GAN (contrast-GAN) with a novel adversarial contrasting objective. Instead of directly making the synthesized samples close to target data as previous GANs did, our adversarial contrasting objective optimizes over the distance comparisons between samples, that is, enforcing the manipulated data be semantically closer to the real data with target category than the input data. Equipped with the new contrasting objective, a novel mask-conditional contrast-GAN architecture is proposed to enable disentangle image background with object semantic changes. Experiments on several semantic manipulation tasks on ImageNet and MSCOCO dataset show considerable performance gain by our contrast-GAN over other conditional GANs. Quantitative results further demonstrate the superiority of our model on generating manipulated results with high visual fidelity and reasonable object semantics.
Cholinesterase-restoring agents in the therapy of experimental tetanus.

Prolonged treatment with the cholinesterase-restoring agents pralidoxime methanesulfonate (40 mg/kg per day) and vitamin B12 (100 [tg/kg per day) plus (after symptoms appeared) a single dose of serum containing antitoxin (ATS, 1,500 international units/kg) was given for 10 days as therapy for experimental tetanus in donkeys that had been inoculated with 12 minimal lethal doses (MLD) Of tetanus toxin. Comparison of a group of five animals treated in this manner with other groups of donkeys, one untreated and the others treated with serum alone, with pralidoxime plus ATS, or with vitamin B12 plus ATS, showed statistically significant improvement with the complete serum and pharmacologic therapy used.
Task scenario effects on bank web site expectations

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to explore whether consumer expectations of web site attributes differ according to information‐seeking or transaction tasks. Information seeking is a distinct online activity and is an important first stage of the Internet adoption process. However, there is little empirical research that compares online search and transaction behaviour.Design/methodology/approach – This pilot study focuses on retail bank web sites in order to select a service familiar to consumers for which a web site would serve as both an information source and a transaction channel. A self‐administered questionnaire collected data from a convenience sample of 160 UK adults in December 2005. The questionnaire measured normative and predictive expectations of systems and information quality.Findings – The findings show differences between task contexts with regards to the requirement to supply personal details, the presence of a search engine and the inclusion of moving graphics. There are impl.
Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse

and profound. It is profound because it argues for the advantage of a psychological skill characterized by witnessing mind states rather than fixing and changing them. It supports the testable assertion that if depressives cultivate this mindfulness practice in their lives, it may decrease the frequency of relapses. In fact, what the masters in the East would say is that they have evidence over 2000 years that most everyone will find this kind of practice beneficial. This is now considered a bonafide empirical question that the scientific community can explore. The authors’ beautifully written, sincere account of their journey has changed their patients, the researchers, and, I would say, even the field of therapy for depression.
The complexity of the Pigeonhole Principle

The Pigeonhole Principle forn is the statement that there is no one-to-one function between a set of sizen and a set of sizen−1. This statement can be formulated as an unlimited fan-in constant depth polynomial size Boolean formulaPHPn inn(n−1) variables. We may think that the truth-value of the variablexi,j will be true iff the function maps thei-th element of the first set to thej-th element of the second (see Cook and Rechkow [5]). PHPn can be proved in the propositional calculus. That is, a sequence of Boolean formulae can be given so that each one is either an axiom of the propositional calculus or a consequence of some of the previous ones according to an inference rule of the propositional calculus, and the last one isPHPn. Our main result is that the Pigeonhole Principle cannot be proved this way, if the size of the proof (the total number or symbols of the formulae in the sequence) is polynomial inn and each formula is constant depth (unlimited fan-in), polynomial size and contains only the variables ofPHPn.
RCN 1-Regulated Phosphatase Activity and EIN 2 Modulate Hypocotyl Gravitropism by a Mechanism That Does Not Require Ethylene Signaling 1 [ W ]

The roots curl in naphthylphthalamic acid1 (rcn1) mutant of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) has altered auxin transport, gravitropism, and ethylene response, providing an opportunity to analyze the interplay between ethylene and auxin in control of seedling growth. Roots of rcn1 seedlingswere previously shown to have altered auxin transport, growth, and gravitropism,while rcn1 hypocotyl elongation exhibited enhanced ethylene response. We have characterized auxin transport and gravitropism phenotypes of rcn1 hypocotyls and have explored the roles of auxin and ethylene in controlling these phenotypes. As in roots, auxin transport is increased in etiolated rcn1hypocotyls.Hypocotyl gravity response is accelerated, although overall elongation is reduced, in etiolated rcn1 hypocotyls. Etiolated, but not light grown, rcn1 seedlings also overproduce ethylene, and mutations conferring ethylene insensitivity restore normal hypocotyl elongation to rcn1. Auxin transport is unaffected by treatmentwith the ethyleneprecursor 1-aminocyclopropane carboxylic acid in etiolatedhypocotyls ofwild-type and rcn1 seedlings. Surprisingly, the ethylene insensitive2-1 (ein2-1) and ein2-5mutations dramatically reduce gravitropic bending in hypocotyls. However, the ethylene resistant1-3 (etr1-3) mutation does not significantly affect hypocotyl gravity response. Furthermore, neither the etr1 nor the ein2 mutation abrogates the accelerated gravitropismobserved in rcn1hypocotyls, indicating that bothwild-type gravity response and enhanced gravity response in rcn1 do not require an intact ethylene-signaling pathway. We therefore conclude that the RCN1 protein affects overall hypocotyl elongation via negative regulation of ethylene synthesis in etiolated seedlings, and that RCN1 and EIN2 modulate hypocotyl gravitropism and ethylene responses through independent pathways.