Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Judging Text Presented on Screen: Implications for Validity

Technological innovation undoubtedly offers many potential benefits for education and the assessment of learning, which have been acknowledged elsewhere. One area that is relatively under-researched relates to the practice of how assessors interact with longer texts that are presented on screen. This is an important area of study because there might be moves to scan or digitally capture longer texts, such as essays or portfolios that contain long textual chunks, and to deliver them online to assessors. This use of technology affords a number of benefits, including the opportunity to transfer data speedily. It also allows a number of assessors to view the same evidence simultaneously, enabling the timely checking of assessor reliability during the assessment process. This article explores the theoretical and limited empirical literature to discuss the potential impact that technology might have on assessors' judgments of texts presented on screen. The review cites literature from across a variety of educational settings where it is increasingly becoming common practice to capture and assess learners' work through digital methods.
Acute Viral Hepatitis A – Clinical, Laboratory and Epidemiological Characteristics

Background and Aims: Infection with hepatitis A virus is still one of the most common causes of hepatitis worldwide. The clinical manifestation of acute hepatitis A (AHA) in adults can vary greatly, ranging from asymptomatic infection to severe and fulminant hepatitis. The aim of this study was to describe the demographic, clinical characteristics, laboratory features and hospital outcome of adult patients with AHA over a consecutive period of 4 years within an area from Eastern European country. Methods: Two hundred and two adult patients diagnosed with AHA were retrospective, observational and analytic analized over a period of 4 years. Based on prothrombin time less than 50, the study group was stratified in medium (79.2%) and severe forms (20.8%). We investigated the clinical, laboratory and epidemiological features. Statistical analysis were applied to compare the medium and severe forms of AHA. Results: Most patients (72.7%) were younger than 40 years. The main symptoms included: dyspepsia (72.07%), jaundice (86.63%), asteno-adynamia (86.72%), and flu-like symptoms (53.46%). The hemorrhagic cutaneous-mucous manifestations (6.93%) associated with the severe forms of AHA (OR =12.19, 95%CI -3.59 - 41.3, p =0.001). We found statistically significant differences for PT (p <0.001), INR (p <0.001), TQ (p <0.001), ALAT (p <0.001), ASAT (p <0.001), ALP (p <0.001) and platelets (p =0.009) between severe and medium AHA forms. We found that TQ, INR, ALAT and ASAT have the highest diagnostic values, statistically significant (p <0.05 ) for severe AHA forms with AUC (0.99, 0.99, 0.72, 0.70) at values of sensitivity (95%, 90.5%, 89%, 95%) and specificity (98%, 99%, 88%,94%). Conclusions Medium severity AHA forms were found in most of the study group patients (79.2%). The severe AHA forms were associated with hemorrhagic cutaneous-mucous manifestations (OR =12.19, p =0.001). The univariate analysis proved a negatively statistically significant correlation between IP and ALAT, ASAT. The present study revealed that TQ, INR and ALAT have the highest diagnostic values and are statistically significant for severe AHA forms.
Cross-Species Evidence of Interplay Between Neural Connectivity at the Micro- and Macroscale of Connectome Organization in Human, Mouse, and Rat Brain

The mammalian brain describes a multiscale system. At the microscale, axonal, dendritic, and synaptic elements ensure neuron-to-neuron communication, and at the macroscale, large-scale projections form the anatomical wiring for communication between cortical areas. Although it is clear that both levels of neural organization play a crucial role in brain functioning, their interaction is not extensively studied. Connectome studies of the mammalian brain in cat, macaque, and human have recently shown that regions with larger and more complex pyramidal cells to have more macroscale corticocortical connections. In this study, we aimed to further validate these cross-scale findings in the human, mouse, and rat brain. We combined neuron reconstructions from the NeuroMorpho.org neuroarchitecture database with macroscale connectivity data derived from connectome mapping by means of tract-tracing (rat, mouse) and in vivo diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (human). Across these three mammalian species, we show cortical variation in neural organization to be associated with features of macroscale connectivity, with cortical variation in neuronal complexity explaining significant proportions of cortical variation in the number of white matter projections of cortical areas. Our findings converge on the notion of a relationship between features of micro- and macroscale neural connectivity to form a central aspect of mammalian neural architecture.
Girls’ hidden penalty: analysis of gender inequality in child mortality with data from 195 countries

Introduction Gender inequality has been associated with child mortality; however, sex-specific mortalities have yet to be explored. The aim of this study is to assess the associations between gender inequality and the child mortality sex ratio at country level, worldwide and to infer on possible mechanisms. Methods Data on sex-specific under-five mortality rates (U5MR) and the corresponding sex ratio (U5MSR) for the year 2015, by country, were retrieved from the Unicef database. Excess under-five female mortality was derived from previous published work. Gender inequality was measured using the Gender Inequality Index (GII). Additional biological and social variables have been included to explore potential mechanistic pathways. Results A total of 195 countries were included in the analysis. In adjusted models, GII was significantly negatively associated with the U5MSR (β=−0.29 (95% CI −0.42 to –0.16), p<0.001) and borderline significantly positively associated with excess under-five female mortality (β = 3.25 (95% CI −0.28 to 6.67, p=0.071). The association between GII and U5MSR was strong and statistically significant only in low-income and middle-income countries and in the Western Pacific area. Conclusion The more gender unequal a society is, the more girls are penalised in terms of their survival chances, in particular in low-income and middle-income countries. In order to decrease child mortality and excess girl mortality, global policy should focus on reducing gender inequality surrounding measures of reproductive health, women’s political empowerment, educational attainment and participation in the workforce.
Pembrolizumab monotherapy for previously treated metastatic triple-negative breast cancer: cohort A of the phase II KEYNOTE-086 study

BACKGROUND Treatment options for previously treated metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC) are limited. In cohort A of the phase II KEYNOTE-086 study, we evaluated pembrolizumab as second or later line of treatment for patients with mTNBC. PATIENTS AND METHODS Eligible patients had centrally confirmed mTNBC, ≥1 systemic therapy for metastatic disease, prior treatment with anthracycline and taxane in any disease setting, and progression on or after the most recent therapy. Patients received pembrolizumab 200 mg intravenously every 3 weeks for up to 2 years. Primary end points were objective response rate in the total and PD-L1-positive populations, and safety. Secondary end points included duration of response, disease control rate (percentage of patients with complete or partial response or stable disease for ≥24 weeks), progression-free survival, and overall survival. RESULTS All enrolled patients (N = 170) were women, 61.8% had PD-L1-positive tumors, and 43.5% had received ≥3 previous lines of therapy for metastatic disease. ORR (95% CI) was 5.3% (2.7-9.9) in the total and 5.7% (2.4-12.2) in the PD-L1-positive populations. Disease control rate (95% CI) was 7.6% (4.4-12.7) and 9.5% (5.1-16.8), respectively. Median duration of response was not reached in the total (range, 1.2+-21.5+) and in the PD-L1-positive (range, 6.3-21.5+) populations. Median PFS was 2.0 months (95% CI, 1.9-2.0), and the 6-month rate was 14.9%. Median OS was 9.0 months (95% CI, 7.6-11.2), and the 6-month rate was 69.1%. Treatment-related adverse events occurred in 103 (60.6%) patients, including 22 (12.9%) with grade 3 or 4 AEs. There were no deaths due to AEs. CONCLUSIONS Pembrolizumab monotherapy demonstrated durable antitumor activity in a subset of patients with previously treated mTNBC and had a manageable safety profile. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02447003.
Assessment of risk factors of non-communicable diseases among high school students in Mangalore, India

Context: Non-communicable diseases are ever increasing and will soon outnumber the prevalence of communicable diseases. This study aims to detect prevalence of risk factors of non-communicable diseases in high school students and its comparison among students of private and government schools, Mangalore. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire based study was conducted amongst consenting high-school students. The data collected included socio-demographic factors, dietary habits, smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, height and weight. Data was tabulated and analyzed using Microsoft excel and SPSS version 11.5 software. Chi square test was used to determine the association of various factors with risk factors, P < 0.05 was considered significant. The results were presented as tables. Result: 413 students were surveyed from private and government schools. Age range was 13-15 years. One-tenth of the students had adequate dietary habits. Though most students were physically active, the type and duration of activity was inadequate. Two students were obese, both females. There were statistically significant differences among various socioeconomic classes, type of school and the presence of certain risk factors. Alcohol intake among students of upper class was significant ( P = 0.006). Conclusion: The prevalence of risk factors for NCD is low among high-school students of Mangalore. Students should be educated about having adequate amount of fruits and vegetables and advised to reduce the consumption of fast food. Vigorous activity should be encouraged amongst the students to prevent them from getting obese.
Leprosy: clinical and epidemiological study in patients above 60 years in Espírito Santo State - Brazil*

Background Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease that is endemic in Brazil and little studied in patients over 60 years old. Objective The aim of this study was the epidemiological and clinical description of cases of leprosy in individuals older than 60 years, notified in the State of Espírito Santo - Brazil. Methods It was an observational, descriptive and retrospective study of leprosy patients notified between 2001 and 2011. Results Out of 16,025 notifications, 2,510 (15.6%) were of patients over 60 years of age; the distribution among the period was egalitarian except in the last 2 years, when there was a mild reduction of cases; the average was 70 years of age (±7 years); 46% were women, being 62% of those paucibacillary cases; 1,145 (50.5%) were dark-skined people in particular among paucibacillary cases; 1,638 (72.9%) were illiterates or poorly instructed n particular among multibacillary cases (P=0.022); 59.9% patients were clinically multibacillary cases and 37.4% had positive bacilloscopy; 37.9% patients had clinical alterations on peripheral nerves, 36.7% of all the multibacillary cases were classified as grade I and 15.3% as grade in assessment of disability. Study limitations This was a retrospective study, which used secondary data generated by physicians and notified by other professionals, whar could have enabled possible errors on original data. Conclusions Leprosy in this age group suggests a long incubation period with reactivation of latent focus or late infection. Men were more affected, as well as the afro descendent race was statistically significant in the paucibacillary cases (P=0.000) and illiterate/poor education in multibacillary cases (P=0.022). Nearly 40% of patients had positive bacilloscopy and grade I/II disability, demonstrating a late diagnosis.
“Remind-to-Move” for Promoting Upper Extremity Recovery Using Wearable Devices in Subacute Stroke: A Multi-Center Randomized Controlled Study

This paper examined the effects of “Remind-to-Move” (RTM) via vibration cueing using wearable devices to increase the use of the affected upper limb and integrate upper limb activities undertaken at home in patients with subacute stroke after inpatient discharge. In a multi-centered randomized controlled trial, 84 eligible patients from four general hospitals, who had a first stroke in the last six months, were randomly allocated to either an experimental, sham, or control group, stratified by arm function levels. Patients in the experimental group were treated by RTM, using wearable devices for three consecutive hours daily, over four weeks. The sham group used sham devices, and the control group received usual care alone. A masked assessor evaluated the patients at 0th, 4th, 8th, and 12th weeks using outcome measures included arm function tests, motor activity log, and movement recorded by the devices. Results showed that there was a significant group by time interaction, and the average movement amount and Action Research Arm Test score in the experimental group were significantly higher than in the sham group. This paper demonstrates that RTM via wearable devices used for the hemiplegic upper extremities could promote more arm recovery than the sham or control and, hence, produce an optimal functional improvement for subacute stroke patients.
MG-WFBP: Efficient Data Communication for Distributed Synchronous SGD Algorithms

Distributed synchronous stochastic gradient descent has been widely used to train deep neural networks on computer clusters. With the increase of computational power, network communications have become one limiting factor on the system scalability. In this paper, we observe that many deep neural networks have a large number of layers with only a small amount of data to be communicated. Based on the fact that merging some short communication tasks into a single one may reduce the overall communication time, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the training iteration time. We develop an optimal solution named merged-gradient wait-free backpropagation (MG-WFBP) and implement it in our open-source deep learning platform B-Caffe. Our experimental results on an 8-node GPU cluster with 10GbE interconnect and trace-based simulation results on a 64-node cluster both show that the MG-WFBP algorithm can achieve much better scaling efficiency than existing methods WFBP and SyncEASGD.
The Continuum of Long Term Care

Introducing a new hobby for other people may inspire them to join with you. Reading, as one of mutual hobby, is considered as the very easy hobby to do. But, many people are not interested in this hobby. Why? Boring is the reason of why. However, this feel actually can deal with the book and time of you reading. Yeah, one that we will refer to break the boredom in reading is choosing continuum of long term care as the reading material.
An investigation of two date unsupervised classification in the context of a national program for Landsat based forest change mapping

A number of change mapping methods are being evaluated as part of a national program for monitoring Canada's forest cover, change and biomass (Earth Observation for Sustainable Development-EOSD). One approach being evaluated involves a simple two date multispectral unsupervised classification approach to map forest change at a national scale with Landsat data. Key factors are the types and consistency of change classes that emerge from the clustering algorithms and issues related to labelling these into desired change classes. The technique was investigated using two sites. Prince George in central British Columbia, Canada used 1990 and 1999 imagery. The second site of Petawawa in eastern Ontario, has fifteen images from a time period from 1984 to 2001 that were normalized and then analyzed in various image pairs. Utilizing the six visible and infrared Landsat bands from each of two dates in a K-means hyperclustering, classes of conifer, hardwood and mixedwood that had not changed were separated. Before any amalgamation, many clusters were associated with change, especially changes in vegetation on old cuts and open fields. Post-clearing ground vegetation density and type had a moderate influence on the clustering process. Pre-clearing forest type was only a factor in general terms, for example whether it was hardwood, softwood or mixedwood. Clearcuts often had several clusters associated with them, but were well detected when clusters were amalgamated. Partial cuts were only partly detected. The length of time after the cut was an important consideration in their detection. They were detectable for only 2 or 3 years after the cutting. The above approach is expected to be one of several tools used in the EOSD initiative.
Effect of polyethylene glycol surface charge functionalization of SWCNT on the in vitro and in vivo nanotoxicity and biodistribution monitored noninvasively using MRI

Abstract The current study evaluated in vitro and in vivo toxicity of carboxyl or amine polyethylene glycol (PEG) surface functionalization of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). Assessments of cytotoxicity, genotoxicity, immunotoxicity, and oxidative stress were performed in vitro and in vivo (in a 1-month follow-up study). The SWCNT biodistribution was investigated using noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Results confirmed the enhanced biocompatibility of PEG-functionalized SWCNTs compared to non-functionalized materials with significant decreases (p < 0.05) in the percentage of cell viability and increases in ROS generation, mitochondrial membrane potential, cell apoptosis, oxidative stress generation, and oxidative DNA damage in vitro. PEG-functionalized SWCNTs with amine terminals were found to induce prominent increases in ROS generation, mitochondrial membrane potential, and oxidative stress compared to carboxy functionalization. No significant difference in the biodistribution of either functionalized SWCNTs was observed in MRI. In vivo assessments revealed a statistically significant increase (p < 0.05) in oxidative stress as early as 24 h in serum and liver; however, all values normalized at 2 weeks’ investigation time point. DNA damage was minimal with either PEG-COOH or PEG-NH2 functionalized SWCNTs after 2 weeks’ exposure. The negatively charged SWCNTs caused lesser DNA damage compared to positively charged samples. Carboxy-functionalized SWCNTs did not cause substantial changes in inflammatory mediators and were found to be significantly safer than non-functionalized SWCNTs and may pave the way for novel biomedical applications in cancer diagnosis and therapy.
rpoB Targeted Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) Assay for Consensus Detection of Mycobacteria Associated With Pulmonary Infections

Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is a nucleic acid method which has been used to identify mycobacteria including Mycobacterium tuberculosis in clinical microbiology laboratory and point of care settings. Previously published LAMP protocols for detection of mycobacterial species used conventional specific primer and targeted the 16S rRNA, gyrB, and insertion sequence genes. We developed and evaluated a LAMP assay targeting a mycobacterial rpoB gene conserved sequence and incorporating degenerate primers. This assay allowed consensus detection of mycobacterial species from pure culture, clinical respiratory tract samples, and mycobacteria growth indicator tube (MGIT) liquid-based culture medium. A panel of twenty mycobacterial species were successfully detected at detection thresholds of 102 CFU/mL and 103 CFU/mL when respectively performed on pure culture suspension or sputum and MGIT broth. The inclusion of degenerate bases in LAMP primers increased the diversity of mycobacterial species identified by the assay without negatively affecting analytical sensitivity. LAMP-based consensus detection of multiple pathogens can be achieved with degenerate primers therefore allowing the design of rapid multi-disease screening assays. Despite high analytical sensitivity, species specificity and the advantageous operational characteristics of LAMP over PCR, challenges such as potential ambiguity in visual interpretation of results and occasional non-specific amplification precludes the implementation of novel LAMP assay in routine diagnostics both in centralized and point-of-care laboratory.
Modeling Local Geometric Structure of 3D Point Clouds Using Geo-CNN

Recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have motivated researchers to adapt CNNs to directly model points in 3D point clouds. Modeling local structure has been proven to be important for the success of convolutional architectures, and researchers exploited the modeling of local point sets in the feature extraction hierarchy. However, limited attention has been paid to explicitly model the geometric structure amongst points in a local region. To address this problem, we propose Geo-CNN, which applies a generic convolution-like operation dubbed as GeoConv to each point and its local neighborhood. Local geometric relationships among points are captured when extracting edge features between the center and its neighboring points. We first decompose the edge feature extraction process onto three orthogonal bases, and then aggregate the extracted features based on the angles between the edge vector and the bases. This encourages the network to preserve the geometric structure in Euclidean space throughout the feature extraction hierarchy. GeoConv is a generic and efficient operation that can be easily integrated into 3D point cloud analysis pipelines for multiple applications. We evaluate Geo-CNN on ModelNet40 and KITTI and achieve state-of-the-art performance.