Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Avian influenza: a review.

PURPOSE A review of the avian influenza A/H5N1 virus, including human cases, viral transmission, clinical features, vaccines and antivirals, surveillance plans, infection control, and emergency response plans, is presented. SUMMARY The World Health Organization (WHO) considers the avian influenza A/H5N1 virus a public health risk with pandemic potential. The next human influenza pandemic, if caused by the avian influenza A/H5N1 virus, is estimated to have a potential mortality rate of more than a hundred million. Outbreaks in poultry have been associated with human transmission. WHO has documented 258 confirmed human infections with a mortality rate greater than 50%. Bird-to-human transmission of the avian influenza virus is likely by the oral-fecal route. The most effective defense against an influenza pandemic would be a directed vaccine to elicit a specific immune response toward the strain or strains of the influenza virus. However, until there is an influenza pandemic, there is no evidence that vaccines or antivirals used in the treatment or prevention of such an outbreak would decrease morbidity or mortality. Surveillance of the bird and human populations for the highly pathogenic H5N1 is being conducted. Infection-control measures and an emergency response plan are discussed. CONCLUSION Avian influenza virus A/H5N1 is a public health threat that has the potential to cause serious illness and death in humans. Understanding its pathology, transmission, clinical features, and pharmacologic treatments and preparing for the prevention and management of its outbreak will help avoid its potentially devastating consequences.
Financial Slack and Firm Performance during Economic Downturn : In: Spotlight Session, 2015. Eurpean Business and Management Conference (EBMC) 2015

This paper examines whether financial slack has an impact on performance in the particularly hostile environment of an economic downturn. Organizational theory posits that the impact of high levels of slack on performance should be positive during such a time, as excess resources buffer the core of the firm from external shocks. Using the most recent economic downturn in Germany, the paper investigates whether firms that built up excess resources up until the onset of the crisis experience superior performance during the downturn. Financial slack is measured along the following dimensions: The proportion of current assets to current liabilities, the ratio of equity to total debt, and the ratio of general and administrative expenses to sales (SG&A). These proxies are measured over a time period of four years prior to the crisis. Financial performance is then evaluated over the duration of the downturn. The results show that high pre-crisis levels of liquidity do not impact performance during a crisis. However, the findings support the view that high pre-crisis levels of debt have a negative impact on firm performance during the latest economic downturn. For slack stemming from the ratio of SG&A to sales, the association with performance was found to be positive, albeit at a declining rate. Both findings support the hypothesis that financial slack has value during an economic downturn. The originality of the approach lies in the evaluation of both linear and curvilinear performance effects of financial slack for German firms during an economic downturn.
Mosaic methylation of Xist gene before chromosome inactivation in undifferentiated female mouse embryonic stem and embryonic germ cells

Epigenetic modification is implicated in the choice of the X chromosome to be inactivated in the mouse. In order to gain more insight into the nature of such modification, we carried out a series of experiments using undifferentiated mouse cell lines as a model system. Not only the paternally derived X (XP) chromosome, but the maternally derived one (XM) was inactivated in the outer layer of the balloon‐like cystic embryoid body probably corresponding to the yolk sac endoderm of the post‐implantation embryo in which XP is preferentially inactivated. Hence, it is likely that the imprint responsible for the nonrandom XP inactivation in early mouse development has been erased or masked in female ES cells. CpG sites in the 5′ region of the Xist gene were partially methylated in female ES and EG and parthenogenetic ES cell lines as in the female somatic cell in which the silent Xist allele on the active X is fully methylated, whereas the expressed allele on the inactive X is completely unmethylated. In the case of undifferentiated ES cells, however, methylation was not differential between two Xist alleles. This observation was supported by the demonstration that single‐cell clones derived from female ES cell lines were not characterized by either allele specific Xist methylation or nonrandom X inactivation upon cell differentiation. Apparently these findings are at variance with the view that Xist expression and X inactivation are controlled by preemptive methylation in undifferentiated ES cells and probably in epiblast. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Presidential Address: Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers, and the promotion of competition are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because these policy initiatives do not directly address the educational challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have contributed little—and are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm. Addressing the educational challenges faced by children from disadvantaged families will require a broader and bolder approach to education policy than the recent efforts to reform schools. C � 2012 by the Association
The Space‐Lifetime Hypothesis: Viewing Organisms in Four Dimensions, Literally

Much of the debate about alternative scaling exponents may result from unawareness of the dimensionality appropriate for different data and questions; in some cases, analysis has to include a fourth temporal dimension, and in others, it does not. Proportional scaling simultaneously applied to an organism and its generation time, treating the latter as a natural fourth dimension, produces a simple explanation for the 3/4 power in large‐scale interspecies comparisons. Analysis of data sets of reduced dimensionality (e.g., data sets constructed such that one or more of the four dimensions are fixed), results in predictably lower metabolic exponents of 2/3 and 1/2 under one and two constraints, respectively. Our space‐lifetime view offers a predictive framework that may be useful in developing a more complete mechanistic theory of metabolic scaling.
Children ’ s higher order cognitive abilities and the development of secondary memory

ties both improve with age, but the nature of the relation between these two developmental trends is not yet well understood. Much recent research on higher order cognitive abilities in adults has been focused on working memory’s contribution to these abilities, and developmental researchers have also pursued this approach (e.g., Bayliss, Jarrold, Baddeley, & Gunn, 2005; Kail, 2007). Working memory tasks (e.g., reading span, operation span), sometimes termed complex span tasks, require processing, as well as short-term storage of information. This processing requirement distinguishes complex span tasks from simple span tasks, which require only storage. Complex span tasks have been reported to be better predictors of higher order abilities than are simple span tasks (e.g., Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999; Swanson & Howell, 2001). However, recent research with both children (e.g., Bayliss et al., 2005) and adults (e.g., Colom, Shih, Flores-Mendoza, & Quiroga, 2006) has raised questions regarding this distinction. Unsworth and Engle (2007) recently proposed a twocomponent theory that takes a new approach to this issue. According to Unsworth and Engle (2007), both simple and complex span tasks involve maintaining items in primary memory and retrieving them from secondary memory, but they differ in the relative contributions made by these two processes. They suggest that retrieval from secondary memory becomes important to working memory performance under two conditions: (1) when processing that is interleaved between the encoding of successive memory items displaces those items from primary memory (as on complex span tasks) and (2) when the number of items exceeds the capacity of primary memory, even if the task involves only storage (as in recall of supraspan lists). Although both primary and secondary memory are hypothesized to play a role in the correlation between working memory and higher order cognition, Unsworth and Engle (2007) presented data showing that primary and secondary memory abilities are largely independent of each other and that the unique contribution of secondary memory to higher order cognition is roughly twice that of primary memory. If Unsworth and Engle (2007) are correct, developmental and individual differences in children’s higher order cognitive abilities should be more strongly related to their secondary memory than to their primary memory abilities. In the present study, we tested this hypothesis. To measure children’s primary and secondary memory, we made use of the long-standing idea (reiterated by Unsworth and Engle, 2007) that in immediate free recall, items from the beginning of a supraspan list are retrieved from secondary memory, whereas items from the end tend to be retrieved from primary memory (Waugh & Norman, 1965; for recent neuroimaging evidence, see Talmi, Grady, Goshen-Gottstein, & Moscovitch, 2005). Unsworth and Engle (2007) also assumed that the capacity of primary
Event Argument Identification on Dependency Graphs with Bidirectional LSTMs

In this paper we investigate the performance of event argument identification. We show that the performance is tied to syntactic complexity. Based on this finding, we propose a novel and effective system for event argument identification. Recurrent Neural Networks learn to produce meaningful representations of long and short dependency paths. Convolutional Neural Networks learn to decompose the lexical context of argument candidates. They are combined into a simple system which outperforms a feature-based, state-of-the-art event argument identifier without any manual feature engineering.
Oral lichenoid lesions and allergy to dental materials.

BACKGROUND Dental materials, oral hygiene products and food additives may cause contact allergic reactions in the mouth with varied clinical presentation. Oral lichenoid lesions (lichen planus-like lesions) can be induced by hypersensitivity to dental restorative metals, acrylates, flavorings and other substances. AIM The aim of this study was to demonstrate contact allergy to dental materials in patients with oral lichenoid lesions using patch tests. PATIENTS AND METHODS Routine patch tests with two sets of allergens - "European Standard" and "Dental Screening" (Chemotechnique Diagnostics, Sweden) supplemented with pulverized amalgam, iridium, indium, menthol, sorbic acid and platinum were done on a set of 25 patients with lichenoid lesions located on the buccal mucosa, tongue and lips. Application and interpretation of the tests were conducted according to ICDRG (International Contact Dermatitis Research Group). RESULTS 15 (60 %) patients showed sensitization to 1 or more allergens, with a total of 31 positive reactions. The greatest frequency of positive reactions was to dental metals, with a total of 27 positive reactions. The order of tested metals according to frequency of positive reactions was mercury (6/25/24 %), amalgam (6/25/24 %), nickel (4/25/16 %), palladium (4/25/16 %), cobalt (3/25/12 %), gold (2/25/8 %), chrome (1/25/4 %), indium (1/25/4 %). The clinical relevance of the results with regard to the material's presence in the mouth was demonstrated in 11 (44 %) patients. In 9 patients, replacement of the positively tested materials led to healing or to significant regression of mucosal changes. CONCLUSIONS The results of the patch tests showed the possible contribution of contact sensitization in the pathogenesis of lichenoid manifestations in the oral cavity. Due to the premalignant character of these lesions, replacement of positively tested materials and follow up of these patients is advised.
Differential Diagnosis of Bilateral Parietal Abnormalities in I-123 IMP SPECT Imaging

This report discusses the clinical significance of bilateral parietal abnormalities on I-123 IMP SPECT imaging in 158 patients with cerebral disorders. This pattern was seen in 15 out of 21 patients with Alzheimer's disease; it was also seen in 4 out of 5 patients with Parkinson's disease with dementia, in 3 out of 17 patients with vascular dementia, in 1 out of 36 patients with cerebral infarction without dementia, in 1 out of 2 patients with hypoglycemia, and in 1 out of 2 patients with CO intoxication. Detection of bilateral parietal abnormalities is a useful finding in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, but one should keep in mind that other cerebral disorders may also show a similar pattern with I-123 IMP SPECT imaging.
Transition-Age Youth with Intellectual Disabilities: Providers' Perspectives on Improving Postschool Outcomes

The transition from high school to adulthood is challenging for all youth, but especially for youth with disabilities. Youth with disabilities face a number of barriers to experiencing postschool success. Youth with intellectual disabilities (ID) in particular struggle to access employment and postsecondary education (PSE) after exiting high school. Recent research has focused on identifying means of improving postschool outcomes through transition services; however, much of this research examines the experiences of youth with learning disabilities, even though youth with ID appear to struggle the most with the transition to adulthood. The present qualitative study examined the perspectives of four transition service providers (i.e., teachers, a work coordinator, and a school social worker) in order to identify the barriers preventing transition-age youth with ID from accessing employment and PSE and to explore means of improving transition services to promote greater postschool success. A content analysis of participants’ interviews revealed a number of critical factors contributing to postschool success (e.g., workrelated experiences, collaborative service delivery), barriers to postschool success (e.g., unrealistic expectations, inadequate work opportunities, lack of PSE options), and ways to improve transition services (i.e., build more community partnerships, develop more PSE options, change transition program structure). The findings of this study emphasize the need to further explore ways in which to establish and maintain a variety of community partnerships in order to better prepare youth with ID for adulthood, as well as the need to evaluate and further develop PSE options designed for individuals with ID. Implications for social work practice, policy, and research are discussed. IMPROVING POSTSCHOOL OUTCOMES 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Jessica Toft for her continued support throughout my graduate education. I am grateful to have received much guidance and encouragement from her over the course of this project. I would also like to thank my committee members Kacie Ervasti and Latoya Garrahan for their professional expertise, as well as their kind thoughts and words throughout this process. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support and patience, and for always encouraging me to further my learning. IMPROVING POSTSCHOOL OUTCOMES 4 Table of
Earnings Management and Corporate Governance Mechanisms prior to Leveraged Buyouts in the UK

This research examines the use of accruals (AEM) and real earnings management (REM), and how they are affected by corporate governance mechanisms preceding leveraged buyouts in the UK. The sample includes all UK leveraged buyouts of listed firms between 1997 and 2011, which covers the second wave of leverage buyouts in the UK. The research considers management buyouts (MBOs) and institutional buyouts (IBOs) separately, because managerial incentives regarding earnings management are expected to differ in these two settings. The first empirical study investigates the existence of AEM, and how audit committee characteristics and external auditing quality affect AEM, prior to MBOs and IBOs. The findings suggest that managers engage in negative AEM prior to MBOs, possibly to reduce the perception of firm value, and thus depress the purchasing price of MBOs. The research finds no evidence that firms subsequently targeted in IBOs engage in AEM to a greater degree than non-buyout firms. This finding might be related to the fact that managers are unable to predict IBOs. Moreover, the research suggests that quality of audit committees and external auditing has a greater impact on AEM in IBO than in MBO firms. The second empirical study explores the use of REM preceding MBOs and IBOs, and how block ownership and board characteristics affect it. Surprisingly, the findings suggest that managers pursue positive REM prior to both IBOs and MBOs. As firms targeted by IBOs tend to be undervalued compared to non-buyout firms, managers might engage in positive REM to improve the firm’s share price to reduce the risk of IBO bids. Positive REM prior to MBOs may serve to enhance prospective external financiers’ perceptions of the firm’s value to secure financing for MBOs, even though it is likely to increase the purchasing price of MBOs. The research also indicates a positive relationship between insider and outsider block ownership and REM. While the findings for firms targeted by IBOs in first two empirical projects are consistent with the expectation that managers try to improve the perception of the performance and value of their firms, the findings for MBOs appear inconsistent and rather baffling. The third empirical study thus explores the puzzle of how decisions about AEM and REM are related in firms prior to IBOs and MBOs. The research reveals that, while AEM and REM have a complementary relationship preceding IBOs, prior to MBOs, AEM and REM have a substitutive relationship. This thesis contributes to our understanding of earnings management prior to IBOs and MBOs. Moreover, the findings highlight that the impact of firms’ corporate governance characteristics on earnings management differs depending on the setting. This might be related not only to different managerial incentives but also to a lack of context awareness by directors or auditors.
Re‐regeneration of lower jaws and the dental lamina in adult urodeles

Transverse amputations were carried out through one‐third fully regenerated jaw segments and through normal tissue of the mandible on the same and opposite sides of the jaw in adults of Notophthalmus viridescens. Collectively the results suggest that, in adult urodeles, the mandible and the dental lamina can be replaced in an identical manner more than one time. Although the major histological events are the same in jaw regeneration and re‐regeneration, regrowth is more rapid in re‐regeneration. Extensively dedif‐ferentiating muscle fibers and skeletal elements contribute to a rapidly forming blastema in re‐regeneration. It appears that recently differentiated tissues of the regenerate have a higher capacity for regeneration than normal tissues amputated for the first time. Re‐regeneration of the jaw occurs by growth of the original regenerate cartilage which has undergone reorganization. In re‐regeneration, the skeletal elements exhibit no polarity and regrowth occurs in both directions, while the dental lamina possesses an anterior‐posterior polarity and can regrow in an anterior direction only. Information concerning the mechanisms involved in the regenerative events remain to be determined.
Ethics consultation in paediatric and adult emergency departments: an assessment of clinical, ethical, learning and resource needs

Objective We sought to understand ethics and education needs of emergency nurses and physicians in paediatric and adult emergency departments (EDs) in order to build ethics capacity and provide a foundation for the development of an ethics education programme. Methods This was a prospective cross-sectional survey of all staff nurses and physicians in three tertiary care EDs. The survey tool, called Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey, was pilot tested on a similar target audience for question content and clarity. Results Of the 123 participants surveyed, 72% and 84% of nurses and physicians fully/somewhat agreed with an overall positive ethical climate, respectively. 69% of participants reported encountering daily or weekly ethical challenges. Participants expressed the greatest need for additional support to address moral distress (16%), conflict management with patients or families (16%) and resource issues (15%). Of the 23 reported occurrences of moral distress, 61% were associated with paediatric mental health cases. When asked how the ethics consultation service could be used in the ED, providing education to teams (42%) was the most desired method. Conclusions Nurses report a greater need for ethics education and resources compared with their physician colleagues. Ethical challenges in paediatric EDs are more prevalent than adult EDs and nurses voice specific moral distress that are different than adult EDs. These results highlight the need for a suitable educational strategy, which can be developed in collaboration with the leadership of each ED and team of hospital ethicists.
Internet of Things: A Scientometric Review

Internet of Things (IoT) is connecting billions of devices to the Internet. These IoT devices chain sensing, computation, and communication techniques, which facilitates remote data collection and analysis. wireless sensor networks (WSN) connect sensing devices together on a local network, thereby eliminating wires, which generate a large number of samples, creating a big data challenge. This IoT paradigm has gained traction in recent years, yielding extensive research from an increasing variety of perspectives, including scientific reviews. These reviews cover surveys related to IoT vision, enabling technologies, applications, key features, co-word and cluster analysis, and future directions. Nevertheless, we lack an IoT scientometrics review that uses scientific databases to perform a quantitative analysis. This paper develops a scientometric review about IoT over a data set of 19,035 documents published over a period of 15 years (2002–2016) in two main scientific databases (Clarivate Web of Science and Scopus). A Python script called ScientoPy was developed to perform quantitative analysis of this data set. This provides insight into research trends by investigating a lead author’s country affiliation, most published authors, top research applications, communication protocols, software processing, hardware, operating systems, and trending topics. Furthermore, we evaluate the top trending IoT topics and the popular hardware and software platforms that are used to research these trends.
Local Modular Supervisory Control of Timed Discrete-Event Systems

This note presents a local approach for the modular supervisory control of timed discrete-event systems. Our modular supervisors are designed over local models, which are obtained by aggregating only the subsystems affected by each control specification. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for nonblocking optimal global behavior. We also present a comparative analysis of the computational advantages and limitations of the proposed strategy.