Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantitative and qualitative analyses of clock drawing in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease

The clock drawing test (CDT) is a widely used cognitive screening test. It is useful in identifying focal lesions and cognitive deficits in dementia groups. Lately, several studies attempted its use to differentiate between dementia subtypes. Although many studies have examined the CDT in dementia populations, research into the use of clock drawing in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is limited. We examined quantitative (global) and qualitative (specific error type) differences on the CDT between FTD (n = 36) and Alzheimer's disease (AD; n = 25) patients and controls without dementia (n = 25). Results showed significantly lower overall scores in the dementia groups compared to the control group, whereas FTD patients scored significantly higher than the AD group. On qualitative analysis, the FTD group had fewer stimulus bound responses, conceptual deficits, and spatial or planning errors compared to the AD group. In conclusion, both global and error analysis of the CDT helped discriminate the FTD group from controls and AD patients. (JINS, 2006, 12, 159–165.)
Risk and resilience trajectories in war-exposed children across the first decade of life.

BACKGROUND Although the effects of early-onset trauma on susceptibility to psychopathology are well-acknowledged, no study to date has followed risk and resilience trajectories in war-exposed young children over lengthy periods and charted predictors of individual pathways. METHOD In this prospective longitudinal study, we followed 232 children, including 148 exposed to repeated wartime trauma and 84 controls, at three time points: early childhood (1.5-5 years), middle childhood (5-8 years), and late childhood (9-11 years). Children were diagnosed at each time point and four trajectories defined: children exhibiting no pathology at any time point, those displaying early pathology that later remitted, those showing initial resilience followed by late pathology, and children presenting chronic pathology across the entire first decade. Maternal behavioral containment during trauma evocation and child social engagement during free play were observed in early childhood and maternal emotional distress self-reported across time. RESULTS War-exposed children showed significantly higher rates of psychopathology, with 81% exhibiting pathology at some point during childhood. In middle childhood, exposed children displayed more posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD), anxiety disorders, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders (ADHD), and in late childhood more PTSD, conduct/oppositional defiant disorders, and ADHD. War-exposed children had more comorbid psychopathologies and number of comorbidities increased with age. Notably, war-exposure increased prevalence of chronic pathology by 24-fold. Maternal factors, including mother's uncontained style and emotional distress, increased risk for early and chronic psychopathology, whereas reduced child social engagement augmented risk for late pathology. CONCLUSIONS Early-onset chronic stress does not heal naturally, and its effects appear to exacerbate over time, with trauma-exposed children presenting a more comorbid, chronic, and externalizing profile as they grow older. Our findings demonstrate that responses to trauma are dynamic and variable and pinpoint age-specific effects of maternal and child factors on risk and resilience trajectories. Results highlight the importance of conducting long-term follow-up studies and constructing individually tailored early interventions following trauma exposure.
The determinants of audit report lag: a meta-analysis

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of the determinants of audit report lag, which is the number of days from a company’s fiscal year-end to the date of its auditor’s report, by synthesizing extant literature. Audit report lag has been a variable of interest in many studies due to its use as a proxy for the occurrence of auditor-client management negotiations and audit efficiency and because long audit report lags delay the release of earnings information to the market. Design/methodology/approach The author uses meta-analysis to examine commonly identified predictors of audit report lag to determine if the prior research provides a consistent portrayal of audit report lag drivers. Findings The author finds that a number of variables relating to client profitability and financial condition, client complexity and audit opinion modifications increase audit report lag. In addition, audit report lag decreases with client size, when clients have positive earnings news to report and when the auditor has long tenure and provides non-audit services. Several variables, such as those relating to corporate governance and various auditor characteristics, have been little explored and would benefit from future research. Originality/value These results will be useful to researchers when selecting control variables for future audit report lag studies and provide insights into the key factors that contribute to the delay in audit reporting.
Are instructivist pedagogies more appropriate for learning the sciences in South African low-quintile schools than western literature suggests?

Some research suggests that the use of instructivistic teaching strategies may be detrimental to learning, while other research asserts that such strategies can enhance learning under certain conditions. I argue that the conditions present in South African township schools and probably more broadly in schools typical of developing countries, correspond to the conditions for which such strategies are appropriate and may currently be the only strategies implementable on a large scale in the South African township context. I propose two kinds of instructivistic resources which may be effective in improving learning in this context by developing language competence, increasing feedback and reinforcement, and extending teaching and learning time; namely low-language-demand drill-and-practise worksheets and software. I discuss difficulties which could be encountered and caution against a simplistic interpretation of my argument. Discussions such as this are necessary as we search for appropriate and implementable solutions to the crisis of South African township underperformance in education.
Protocatechuic acid exerts a cardioprotective effect in type 1 diabetic rats.

Oxidative stress has been shown to play an important role in the pathogenesis of diabetes-induced cardiac dysfunction. Protocatechuic acid (PCA) is a phenolic compound, a main metabolite of anthocyanin, which has been reported to display various pharmacological properties. We proposed the hypothesis that PCA exerts cardioprotection in type 1 diabetic (T1DM) rats. T1DM was induced in male Sprague-Dawley rats by a single i.p. injection of 50 mg/kg streptozotocin (STZ) and groups of these animals received the following treatments for 12 weeks: i) oral administration of vehicle, ii) oral administration of PCA at a dose of 50 mg/kg per day, iii) oral administration of PCA at a dose of 100 mg/kg per day, iv) s.c. injection of insulin at a dose of 4 U/kg per day, and v) a combination of PCA, 100 mg/kg per day and insulin, 4 U/kg per day. Metabolic parameters, results from echocardiography, and heart rate variability were monitored every 4 weeks, and the HbA1c, cardiac malondialdehyde (MDA), cardiac mitochondrial function, and cardiac BAX/BCL2 expression were evaluated at the end of treatment. PCA, insulin, and combined drug treatments significantly improved metabolic parameters and cardiac function as shown by increased percentage fractional shortening and percentage left ventricular ejection fraction and decreased low-frequency:high-frequency ratio in T1DM rats. Moreover, all treatments significantly decreased plasma HbA1c and cardiac MDA levels, improved cardiac mitochondrial function, and increased BCL2 expression. Our results demonstrated for the first time, to our knowledge, the efficacy of PCA in improving cardiac function and cardiac autonomic balance, preventing cardiac mitochondrial dysfunction, and increasing anti-apoptotic protein in STZ-induced T1DM rats. Thus, PCA possesses a potential cardioprotective effect and could restore cardiac function when combined with insulin treatment. These findings indicated that supplementation with PCA might be helpful for the prevention and alleviation of cardiovascular complications in T1DM.
Using Sound to Reduce Visual Distraction from In-vehicle Human–Machine Interfaces

Objective: Driver distraction and inattention are the main causes of accidents. The fact that devices such as navigation displays and media players are part of the distraction problem has led to the formulation of guidelines advocating various means for minimizing the visual distraction from such interfaces. However, although design guidelines and recommendations are followed, certain interface interactions, such as menu browsing, still require off-road visual attention that increases crash risk. In this article, we investigate whether adding sound to an in-vehicle user interface can provide the support necessary to create a significant reduction in glances toward a visual display when browsing menus. Methods: Two sound concepts were developed and studied; spearcons (time-compressed speech sounds) and earcons (musical sounds). A simulator study was conducted in which 14 participants between the ages of 36 and 59 took part. Participants performed 6 different interface tasks while driving along a highway route. A 3 × 6 within-group factorial design was employed with sound (no sound /earcons/spearcons) and task (6 different task types) as factors. Eye glances and corresponding measures were recorded using a head-mounted eye tracker. Participants’ self-assessed driving performance was also collected after each task with a 10-point scale ranging from 1 = very bad to 10 = very good. Separate analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted for different eye glance measures and self-rated driving performance. Results: It was found that the added spearcon sounds significantly reduced total glance time as well as number of glances while retaining task time as compared to the baseline (= no sound) condition (total glance time M = 4.15 for spearcons vs. M = 7.56 for baseline, p =.03). The earcon sounds did not result in such distraction-reducing effects. Furthermore, participants ratings of their driving performance were statistically significantly higher in the spearcon conditions compared to the baseline and earcon conditions (M = 7.08 vs. M = 6.05 and M = 5.99 respectively, p =.035 and p =.002). Conclusions: The spearcon sounds seem to efficiently reduce visual distraction, whereas the earcon sounds did not reduce distraction measures or increase subjective driving performance. An aspect that must be further investigated is how well spearcons and other types of auditory displays are accepted by drivers in general and how they work in real traffic.
A nation-in-the-making, in arms: control of force, strategy and the Ukrainian Volunteer Battalions

Abstract At the core of waging war and strategy is the creation, control and use of force. This article investigates the volunteer battalions that mobilized in Ukraine during the spring of 2014. It contextualizes the volunteer phenomenon and focuses on the state strategies to establish control over these militias. As ambiguous entities arising from a situation characterized by rapid social change – revolution and war – the volunteer battalions threatened existing hierarchies and questioned state authority. The situation was exacerbated by the war, which deviated from the expectations of Ukrainian combatants and Western military observers alike. The state nevertheless enjoyed a modicum of success in reining in the militias through four strategies of undermining, co-option, incorporation and coercion. While predominantly integrated into a more rigid category of paramilitary forces, the volunteers continue to play a role in both the Ukrainian society and security sector to the unforeseeable future.
DeLiGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Diverse and Limited Data

A class of recent approaches for generating images, called Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), have been used to generate impressively realistic images of objects, bedrooms, handwritten digits and a variety of other image modalities. However, typical GAN-based approaches require large amounts of training data to capture the diversity across the image modality. In this paper, we propose DeLiGAN &#x2013; a novel GAN-based architecture for diverse and limited training data scenarios. In our approach, we reparameterize the latent generative space as a mixture model and learn the mixture models parameters along with those of GAN. This seemingly simple modification to the GAN framework is surprisingly effective and results in models which enable diversity in generated samples although trained with limited data. In our work, we show that DeLiGAN can generate images of handwritten digits, objects and hand-drawn sketches, all using limited amounts of data. To quantitatively characterize intra-class diversity of generated samples, we also introduce a modified version of inception-score, a measure which has been found to correlate well with human assessment of generated samples.
Demand for Lotteries: The Choice between Stocks and Options

We show that the availability of options to retail investors displaces lottery stocks. We also find that investors are willing to pay substantial premiums only for the lottery characteristics of out-of-the-money options. Moreover, OTM options displace other types of lottery securities in the stock and option markets when available. We find evidence that uninformed traders (e.g., gamblers) may drive lottery trading in OTM options. We also find that the lottery features of OTM options are likely unrelated to the underlying securities, as we observe systematic violations of arbitrage conditions. On the other hand, the payoffs of at-the-money lottery options seem to be driven by the lotteryness of the underlying securities.
Analysis of the Pre-S2 N- and O-Linked Glycans of the M Surface Protein from Human Hepatitis B Virus*

The surface antigen of hepatitis B virus comprises a nested set of small (S), middle (M), and large (L) proteins, all of which are partially glycosylated in their S domains. The pre-S2 domain, present only in M and L proteins, is furtherN-glycosylated at Asn-4 exclusively in the M protein. Since the pre-S2 N-glycan appears to play a crucial role in the secretion of viral particles, the M protein may be considered as a potential target for antiviral therapy. For characterization of the pre-S2 glycosylation, pre-S2 (glyco)peptides were released from native, patient-derived hepatitis B virus subviral particles by tryptic digestion, separated from remaining particles, purified by reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography, and identified by amino acid and N-terminal sequence analysis as well as matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS). Pre-S2 N-glycans were characterized by anion exchange chromatography, methylation analysis, and on target sequential exoglycosidase digestions in combination with MALDI-TOF-MS, demonstrating the presence of partially sialylated diantennary complex-type oligosaccharides. In addition, the pre-S2 domain of M protein, but not that of L protein, was found to be partially O-glycosylated by a Gal(β1–3)GalNAcα-, Neu5Ac(α2–3)Gal(β1–3)GalNAcα-, or GalNAcα-residue. The respective O-glycosylation site was assigned to Thr-37 by digestion with carboxypeptidases in combination with MALDI-TOF-MS and by quadrupole time-of-flight electrospray mass spectrometry. Analytical data further revealed that about 90% of M protein is N-terminally acetylated.
The Characteristics of African American Parental Influence on Academic Success in a Rural School District: A Collective Case Study

The purpose of this case study was to discover the characteristics of African American parental behavior regarding the importance of school, and its influence on their high school children’s academic success in a rural school district, for recent African American graduates in Mountain County, North Carolina. The research study utilized a collective case study approach and included five African American parents and, their children that had graduated from Mountain County High School and gained college acceptance. Guided by Ecological Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), and Risk and Resilience Theory (Catalano, Hawkins, 1996), data collection methods included interviews, document analysis and, focus groups. Methods of analysis included thick description, categorical aggregation, pattern checking, and coding. After data collection and coding, the following themes were developed: “woke”, parental expectations, parental friendship, pursuing future dreams, and parental encouragement. The study concluded that the behavioral characteristics of African America parents provided protective and promotive environment for their children. Recommendations for further research included case studies that examine different geographic regions that were part of the focus of this study or phenomenological studies that can exam African American parental behavior as a behavioral response to environmental conditions, utilizing risk and resilience theory as part of the theoretical frame work.
An inhibitor of glycosphingolipid metabolism blocks HIV-1 infection of primary T-cells

Objective: HIV-1 uses CD4 and chemokine receptors to enter cells. However, other target membrane components may also be involved. This study examines the role of glycosphingolipids (GSL) in HIV-1 entry into primary lymphocytes and its modulation by an inhibitor of GSL biosynthesis. Methods: CD4 lymphocytes purified from normal or the p-group subtype individuals that were defective in Gb3 synthesis were treated with a GSL biosynthesis inhibitor, 1-phenyl-2-hexadecanoylamino-3-morpholino-1-propanol (PPMP). The PPMP-treated cells were tested for HIV-1 replication by measuring p24 antigen production for 7–14 days post-infection and for susceptibility to HIV-1 Env-mediated fusion monitored by a fluorescent dye transfer assay. The effects of PPMP treatment on HIV-1 binding to CD4 lymphocytes were also examined by measuring HIV-1 p24. Results: CD4 lymphocytes from p donors that are devoid of Gb3, but have elevated levels of GM3 were highly susceptible to HIV-1 fusion/entry. Pre-treatment of primary human CD4 lymphocytes from normal or p-sub-group type with PPMP, significantly reduced HIV-1 replication with no change in CD4 and CXCR4 levels. Inhibition of HIV-1 infection was due to the block in HIV-1 Env-mediated plasma membrane fusion. Binding of HIV-1 to CD4 lymphocytes was not affected by PPMP treatment. Conclusion: Manipulation of glycosphingolipid metabolic pathways may alter susceptibility of CD4 lymphocytes to HIV-1 entry.
Technology-Based Employability Curriculum and Culturally Diverse Learners With Disabilities

As technology continues to permeate our culture and society, K–12 educators search for strategies to build student capacity and engagement with technology. Although the digital divide around access to technology has been decreasing, there is still a significant gap in the utilization of technology for educational purposes by culturally diverse learners. Even more vulnerable to unequal access to technology for educational use are culturally diverse students with a documented disability. TechNow is a promising transition-focused technology training class for high school students with disabilities. A three-factor analysis of variance revealed significant improvements in perceptions of technology skill acquisition and use of software by Latino and Native American high school students with disabilities enrolled in TechNow compared to the control group. Implications of these results suggest acquisition of critical transition skills for culturally diverse learners are enhanced through the TechNow program.
Trunk and neck kinematics during overground manual wheelchair propulsion in persons with tetraplegia

Abstract Purpose: To test the hypothesis that movement of the head and trunk increases as a consequence of speed during manual wheelchair propulsion over the ground in individuals with tetraplegia. Methods: Seven adult participants with tetraplegia who used manual wheelchairs (5 men and 2 women, aged 33.0 ± 10.2) were selected for the study. Participants propelled over the ground at three different speeds while video motion capture methods collected kinematic data. Variables investigated were forward flexion, lateral flexion and axial rotation for both the head and trunk. Repeated measures ANOVA were used to determine effects of speed on head and trunk movements. Results: Both neck and trunk forward flexion significantly increased as a result of speed (p = 0.034, p = 0.031), with a large effect size (r = 0.6, r = 0.6) between slow and fast speeds. Lateral flexion and axial rotation were minimal for the neck and trunk and did not significantly increase with speed. Conclusions: Results suggest that manual wheelchair users with tetraplegia compensate for trunk muscle weakness by flexing the upper trunk and neck forward during manual wheelchair propulsion and that these movements increase with speed. Further studies should examine if these movements relate to overuse injuries and interventions that focus on improving manual wheelchair biomechanics of individuals with tetraplegia. Implications for Rehabilitation Individuals who use manual wheelchairs utilize their upper extremities almost exclusively for both everyday mobility and participation in daily life activities which can often lead to overuse injuries and pain. Despite having a lack of trunk muscle innervation, manual wheelchair users with tetraplegia are able to compensate for this weakness by using the upper trunk and neck. The way in which force is translated from the trunk through the upper extremities to the pushrim may impact propulsion biomechanics, and ultimately the extent in which upper extremity pain and injury develops. A better understanding of how individuals with trunk impairments propel a manual wheelchair will help clinicians determine optimal wheelchair positioning and training during rehabilitation for individuals with tetraplegia. Clinicians can determine ways in which they can support manual wheelchair users to allow for most efficient biomechanics.
Introduction of an Enhanced Recovery after Surgery Protocol for Robot-Assisted Laparoscopic Radical Prostatectomy

Introduction: No studies have shown whether the enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocol is superior to the conventional protocol after robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RALP). We compared intestinal function and perioperative parameters of patients with prostate cancer after the ERAS and conventional protocols to determine the superior protocol for recovery of intestinal function. Material and Methods: A retrospective analysis of 198 consecutive patients who underwent RALP between August 2013 and June 2015 was conducted. Our study design included 2 cohorts. Patients underwent conventional care in one group (n = 123) and the ERAS protocol in the other group (n = 75). The primary outcome was the time to first defecation. Secondary outcomes were perioperative parameters and the complication rate. Results: The ERAS group showed a significantly shorter time to first defecation than did the conventional group (p = 0.006). Multivariate analysis showed that selection of the ERAS protocol was significantly associated with the number of days for first time to defecation. Conclusions: Successful application of an ERAS protocol was applied to our patients who underwent RALP and did not have major complications. The ERAS protocol included enhanced intestinal recovery. The ERAS group showed a significantly shorter time to first defecation than did the conventional group.