Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing the severity of intraabdominal Infections; the value of APACHE II Scoring System

Intra -abdominal infection continues to defy advances in surgical care with considerable mortality. It is characterized by a spectrum of presentations of varying disease severity. The need to ensure standards for comparing studies and antibiotic trials on intraabdominal infection led to the emergence of several scoring systems. There is paucity of information on this subject in local literature, even though a Nigerian scientist pioneered one of the earliest stratification systems. This is a review of literature on one of the scoring systems that has made an impact in the standardization of intraabdominal sepsis:the APACHE II scoring system. This study will review the genesis, bedside application, uses, limitations and alternatives as a scoring system for intraabdominal infection. Over two decades of use, it is simple and continues to be a reliable indicator of severity of intraabdominal infection.
Prevalence and Sensitivity Patterns of Candidal Infections in Various Tertiary Care Health Subunits of Karachi

Mostly candida resides as an opportunistic organism on epithelial surfaces of human being. However, under auspicious conditions can cause infections including serious life threatening invasive candidiasis with subsequent mortality particularly in immune deficit and hospitalized patients having co-morbids. Limited data are published on the prevalence of candidiasis, based on the researches conducted at few tertiary care settings which are not representing the overall disease burden in our country, Pakistan. Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the frequency and sensitivity patterns of candidiasis in our community. Methods: Out of total 1020 specimens, 130 clinical samples were identified as candidal positive, obtained from March to May 2018. These samples were isolated from vagina, oropharynx, urine, tracheal aspirates, pus, blood, tips of the intubations, wounds and fluids of the body cavities. Identification of candida, its species and antifungal sensitivity screening was done by Kirby Bauer’s disk diffusion method according to CLSI guide lines’ (M - 44 A2 series, 2009). Results: A significant majority, 80 (61.5%) of candidal strains were isolated from females with female to male ratio 8:5 and most of these isolates were obtained from high vaginal swabs (43.75%). Four candidal species (Candida albicans 80%, Candida tropicalis 10%, Candida glabrata 9.2% and Candida ciferrii 0.8%) were isolated from all positive specimens. Maximum number of the positive samples 52 (40%) were obtained from ICU patients. Sensitivity test of candidal positive samples revealed that commonly used azole antifungal drugs, fluconazole and voriconazole were highly resistant, with respective 57.7% and 70.8% resistance. Conclusion: Candidiasis is highly prevalent in our clinical set up and more frequently infecting females in comparison to males as most of the positive isolates were retrieved from HVS (high vaginal swabs). Still, C. albicans was found to be the most prevalent specie isolated among all candida samples. Our study also demonstrated that the resistance of most commonly prescribed antifungals, azoles have shown a rapid rise. Therefore, it is recommended that before prescription of antifungal drugs the clinicians should routinely recommend culture and sensitivity testing of samples taken from candida infected individuals.
Social Learning Interventions in a Developmental Disabilities Partial Hospital Program

Social learning interventions have been widely applied to the treatment of psychiatric symptoms. However, treatments for individuals with developmental disabilities and coexisting mental illness have routinely emphasized reinforcement-based contingency strategies rather than cognitive approaches. The slower rate of integrating cognitive strategies may be due to several factors including adherence to widely accepted behavior modification models, failure to acknowledge the coexistence of mental illness with mental retardation, and the difficulty of adapting social learning strategies for the developmentally delayed. Treatment outcomes following the application of social learning interventions were observed in a psychiatric partial hospital program for persons with developmental disabilities and mental illness. Three cases are presented to illustrate the application of social learning interventions and highlight specific adaptations of treatment strategies to the cognitive functioning level and developmental disability of the patients. These cases illustrate the employment of various combinations of cognitive and behavioral interventions in the treatment of depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and anxiety.
CloudSkulk: Design of a Nested Virtual Machine Based Rootkit-in-the-Middle Attack

Virtualized cloud computing services are a crucial facet in the software industry today, with clear evidence of its usage quickly accelerating. Market research forecasts an increase in cloud workloads by more than triple, 3.3-fold, from 2014 to 2019 [33]. Integrating system security is then an intrinsic concern of cloud platform system administrators that with the growth of cloud usage, is becoming increasingly relevant. People working in the cloud demand security more than ever. In this paper, we take an offensive, malicious approach at targeting such cloud environments as we hope both cloud platform system administrators and software developers of these infrastructures can advance their system securities. A vulnerability could exist in any layer of a computer system. It is commonly believed in the security community that the battle between attackers and defenders is determined by which side can exploit these vulnerabilities and then gain control at the lower layer of a system [22]. Because of this perception, kernel level defense is proposed to defend against user-level malware [25], hypervisor-level defense is proposed to detect kernel-level malware or rootkits [36, 47, 41], hardware-level defense is proposed to defend or protect hypervisors [4, 51, 45]. Once attackers find a way to exploit a particular vulnerability and obtain a certain level of control over the victim system, retaining that control and avoiding detection becomes their top priority. To achieve this goal, various rootkits have been developed. However, existing rootkits have a common weakness: they are still v detectable as long as defenders can gain control at a lower-level, such as the operating system level, the hypervisor level, or the hardware level. In this paper, we present a new type of rootkit called CloudSkulk, which is a nested virtual machine (VM) based rootkit. While nested virtualization has attracted sufficient attention from the security and cloud community, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to reveal and demonstrate nested virtualization can be used by attackers for developing malicious rootkits. By impersonating the original hypervisor to communicate with the original guest operating system (OS) and impersonating the original guest OS to communicate with the hypervisor, CloudSkulk is hard to detect, regardless of whether defenders are at the lower-level (e.g., in the original hypervisor) or at the higher-level (e.g., in the original guest OS). We perform a variety of performance experiments to evaluate how stealthy the proposed rootkit is at remaining unnoticed as introducing one more layer of virtualization inevitably incurs extra overhead. Our performance characterization data shows that an installation of our novel rootkit on a targeted nested virtualization environment is likely to remain undetected unless the guest user performs IO intensive-type workloads.
Posterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries: A Practical Guide to Management.

Gregory C. Fanelli, editor. Foreword by M. Mike Malek. Illustrated by Joel Herring. New York: Springer; 2001. 320 pages. $165.00. This book is the single most useful text about the posterior cruciate ligament available to readers today. Dr. Fanelli has compiled an impressive group of contributing authors and has organized the book in a way that makes it very readable and particularly suitable for quick reference. The text is divided into four parts. In Part I, anatomy and biomechanics are reviewed. The opening chapter, by …
Nurses' Retention and Hospital Characteristics in New South Wales

Nursing shortages are commonly observed features of hospital systems in Australia, Europe and the United States. To date there has been very little research on the effects of hospital characteristics on the retention of the nursing staff. In this paper we match individual data on registered nurses (RNs) working in the public sector in NSW in 1996 to the hospital in which they work. We analyze the annual retention probability for these RNs using the nurses? personal characteristics as well as the characteristics of the hospitals. It is found that the type of hospital per se does not help explain the retention probability of the nurses employed in the premise but the hospital characteristics do. Hospital characteristics include measures of size, complexity, intensity, expenditures and staffing levels. The results suggest that the effects of these variables are complex. For example, complexity of the work as measured by admissions from emergency increase retention while high cost procedures and large ANDRG weights reduce retention. Higher levels of expenditures (at constant staffing levels) increase retention except for expenditures on visiting medical officers which reduce retention. The effects on the expected retention probability are very large and significant. One implication of our findings is that simply increasing staffing levels is unlikely to achieve much impact on nurses? retention levels unless problem areas of the job are also addressed.
Knowledge andawareness of Menopause Among Female Elementary School Teachers in Osun State, Nigeria

Menopause is a natural part of a woman's life, it is the phase when a woman no longer experience menstruation when her body begins to produce progressively lesser progesterone and estrogen and eventually her menstrual cycles cease.The study assessed awareness and knowledge of menopause and establish relationship between menarche, menopause, lifestyle modification and non communicable diseases with the view of encouraging positive healthy behavior. The study adopted a descriptive cross sectional design. Sample size was calculated using Leslie-Fisher's formula. Self-administered, structured questionnaires which were designed, piloted, and validated were used to collect data from 306 female teachers. Results were analyzed by Statistical Package for social sciences (SPSS) version 20 and P value was set as 0.05. Findings revealed that majority of the respondents (75.2%) perceived menopause as a time when women stops menstruation totally. The results also showed that (60.5%) of the respondents agreed that early menarche will cause early menopause while (52.9%) agreed that physical exercise reduces symptoms of menopause and prevents non communicable diseases. Concerning association of menopause to myths, half of the respondents (50%) believed that they should abstain from sexual intercourse during menopause owing to the fact that it can lead to storage of sperm in them by (33.3%). Multiple Regression analysis revealed that the age, marital status, educational status and knowledge about menopause are significantly related to onset of menopause with the p value of 0.035 which is < 0.05. This study concluded that female elementary school teachers were aware of menopause but have inadequate knowledge about nutrition and regular physical exercise during this phase of life.
Efecto de un programa HIIT versus entrenamiento continuo extensivo en individuos inexpertos

The aim of this study was to analyse the effect of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and compare it with the effect of extensive continuous training (continuous running) on the variables of body weight, % fat and VO2max. 32 participants with no previous experience (mean ± SD: 22.37 ± 1.8 years of age, 65.52 ± 11.98 kg in weight, 170.66 ± 9.95 cm in height) were randomly assigned to a HIIT group or continuous running training group with three weekly sessions for 10 weeks. The HIIT sessions lasted 20-25 minutes using functional bodyweight exercises with a work/rest ratio of 20/10 seconds. The continuous running sessions lasted 60 minutes without exceeding 70% of personal VO2max. Both groups obtained significant improvements (p < .05) in the study variables: body weight, % fat and VO2max. However, the improvement in the HIIT group was higher in the three variables which suggests it is a more efficient and effective form of training in terms of total weekly volume/time than the extensive continuous method based on continuous running.
Gastroprotective effect of aqueous extract of neem azadirachta indica on induced gastric lesion in rats.

The objective of this study was to investigate the protective effect of aqueous neem extract on ethanol-induced gastric mucosal lesions in adult wistar rats. Adult male Wistar rats used in the study were divided into 3 groups; Group A received oral normal saline and served as control; group B received 1.0ml of 50% ethanol orally every 12 hour and group C received neem extract (300 mg/kg) orally 12 hour before ethanol (50%, 1.0 ml). The experiment lasted for seven days after which the animals were sacrificed following chloroform inhalation and the stomach excised. Ethanol treated rats showed marked gross mucosal lesions in the stomach and these were characterized by multiple red patches. Histologically, ethanol treated rats showed ulcerated mucosa with marked apoptotic bodies, mucosal haemorrhage and destruction of glandular elements. Pretreatment with neem extract showed protection against ethanol-induced gastric mucosal damage. Our data suggests that pretreatment with neem extract may be useful in preventing prolonged ethanol induced gastric ulcers.
RN Compliance With SLP Dysphagia Recommendations in Acute Care

The purpose of this study was to examine acute care registered nurses' (RNs') self-reported levels of compliance with speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') recommendations for safe feeding and swallowing techniques and proper oral hygiene care techniques in the care of adult with dysphagia. A survey was distributed to approximately 230 acute care RNs in which they were asked to respond to statements regarding their behaviors when treating adult with dysphagia. Seventy-seven responses were received. Results revealed that RNs report their compliance with SLPs' recommendations to be high. No significant differences between compliance with safe feeding, safe swallowing, and oral hygiene care techniques were observed. However, more than 80% of RNs report a desire for more education regarding dysphagia; the time necessitated to feed individuals with dysphagia was the most common frustration. Disparities between RNs' and SLPs' expectations are addressed, as is the need for multidisciplinary team care, especially as it relates to the care of the frail elderly in acute care settings.
Utility of the Clue. Formalisation of the decision to analyse a trace and insights into the evaluation of the investigative contribution of forensic science

Although providing significant contribution to the investigation and the prosecution, the effectiveness of forensic science has been challenged by several studies, indicating that it is either scarcely used and thus not relevant, or when it is used, its effects on case processing are minor. The majority of the studies focussed on an understanding of forensic science as the application of scientific techniques to the matters of court. Consequently, the contribution of forensic science was determined for judicial steps of the criminal justice process, such as suspect arrest, charging or conviction. The proposed remedies for its infrequent use or alleged ineffectiveness focussed mainly on technical developments or managerial guidelines. The concept of utility of the clue, defined as added value in terms of information gained through the analysis of the trace, is suggested to be used in two manners: 1) as decision factor in the decision to analyse a trace, and 2) as performance measurement indicator to assess the contribution of forensic science in the criminal investigation. Through the applied methodology, combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches, it was possible to formalise the decision-making process, with a particular focus on the decision to analyse a trace. In addition, the factors influencing this latter step could be determined. In a first study, the crime scene attendance strategies of burglaries in three Swiss cantons were determined to be very variable and depending on the organisation, the resources and the constraints in place (Neuchâtel, Genève et Vaud, study period 2012–2013). Then, the analysis rates for different types of traces were compared, and it could be concluded that, except for biological traces, most triaging occurs already at the crime scene based on visible, qualitative aspects, including the pertinence and the expected utility of the traces. Furthermore, an additional comparative study was carried out to determine the analysis strategies depending on the type of offence. Analysis rates of biological traces for burglary, robbery and homicide cases in the canton Vaud in the same study period were examined. In burglaries, the selection of
Epidemiological studies of Fasciola gigantica in cattle in Zaria, Nigeria using coprology and serology

Fasciolosis is an important helminth disease of livestock and other ruminants. A cross sectional study to determine the prevalence of Fasciola gigantica in cattle was carried out in 9 randomly selected farms and 1 slaughter house between February and May 2012. Faecal and blood samples were collected from 186 cattle in the farms and 200 cattle at slaughter. The faecal samples were analysed using the formol ether sedimentation technique and the blood by Indirect ELISA kit (Bio-X-Diagnostic, ID VET Jemelle-Belgium) to detect F. gigantica eggs and antibodies to F. gigantica antigens respectively. Of the 200 faecal samples collected at slaughter, 39(19.5%) had F. gigantica eggs; as compared to 27 (14.5%) positives out of the 186 samples collected from the farms; giving an overall prevalence rate of 66 (17.1%). There was no significant difference (P>0.05) between prevalence of infection of cattle sampled in the farms and slaughter house. 23 (11.5%) of the sera prepared from the 200 blood samples obtained at slaughter had antibodies to F. hepatica antigens, as against 5(2.6%) for sera from 186 blood samples collected in the farms; giving an overall seroprevalence of 28(7.3%). There was significant difference (P 0.05). No statistical difference was observed in breed prevalence. This study has established F. gigantica prevalence of 17.1% and 7.3% by coprological and serological examinations of faeces and blood of cattle in Zaria. It is recommended that cattle should be dewormed regularly and further serological screening be embarked in other Local Government Areas of Kaduna State, so as to know the current status of F. gigantica infection in cattle.
The Population Aging Effect on Pattern of Export (Case of Major Trade Partners of Iran)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of population aging effect on trade in major trade partners of Iran during the period 2000-2015. In this paper, we show that demographic differences between countries are a source of comparative advantage in international trade. Since many skills are age-dependent, population aging decreases the relative supply and increases the relative price of skills, which depreciate with age. Thus, industries relying on skills in which younger workers are relatively more efficient will be more productive in countries with a younger labor force and less productive in countries with an older population. The results indicated that the secondary education group and the average age of people between the ages of 20-40 and 41-65 years had a positive and significant effect on the exports compared to the elementary and excellent education groups. The results showed that human capital in more experienced age groups by improving job skills leads to comparative advantage and increases in exports of countries.
Agglomeration, Adjustment, and State Policies in the Location of Foreign Direct Investment in the United States

Using U.S. state-level data we show that agglomeration externalities influence the level of foreign-invested capital in a location. Our empirical model allows the separation of agglomeration effects from the rate of capital stock adjustment, two forces that previous research has conflated. We estimate an agglomeration elasticity of investment of 0.11 to 0.15 with respect to same-source-country investment, lower than previous estimates. We also investigate the influence of state policies and find that although general investment incentives do not affect the location of FDI, targeted policies such as unitary taxation and state foreign offices influence investment.
The Cost of Grade Retention

Abstract This paper uses administrative longitudinal microdata on junior high school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils with more than three failed subjects, I show that grade failure leads to substantial dropout and lower educational attainment even four to five years after grade failure occurred.
Markov-Switching Models with Evolving Regime-Specific Parameters: Are Postwar Booms or Recessions All Alike?

Abstract In this paper, we relax the assumption of constant regime-specific mean growth rates in Hamilton's (1989) two-state Markov-switching model of the business cycle. We introduce a random walk hierarchy prior for each regime-specific mean growth rate and impose a cointegrating relationship between the mean growth rates in recessionary and expansionary periods. By applying the proposed model to postwar U.S. real GDP growth (1947:Q4–2011:Q3), we uncover the evolving nature of the regime-specific mean growth rates of real output in the U.S. business cycle. Additional features of the postwar U.S. business cycle that we uncover include a steady decline in the long-run mean growth rate of real output over the postwar sample and an asymmetric error-correction mechanism when the economy deviates from its long-run equilibrium.
Alcohol Advertising and Motor Vehicle Fatalities

The purpose of this paper is to estimate empirically the effect of alcohol advertising on motor vehicle fatalities. The data indicate that if a ban on broadcast alcohol advertising did not also include bans on other types of alcohol marketing, the effect on motor vehicle fatalities might be in the range of 2000 to 3000 lives saved per year. The data also indicate that the elimination of the tax deductibility of alcohol advertising could reduce alcohol advertising by about 15, reduce motor vehicle fatalities by about 1300 deaths per year, and raise about 300 million a year in new tax revenue.
The Consequences of China's WTO Accession for Its Neighbors

Our simulations of a global macroeconomic model suggest that China's WTO accession could create significant welfare losses in the ASEAN-4 if foreign direct investment (FDI) is significantly redirected away from these countries toward China, and if the ASEAN-4 countries are unable to implement policies to make up for the slower rate of technological diffusion from the reduced FDI inflow. If the ASEAN-4 do not fall behind technologically, then they will be able to find lucrative niches within the lengthened international manufacturing production chains. The ASEAN-4 must therefore strengthen their abilities to absorb new foreign technologies quickly and to engage in indigenous technical innovations.