Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty Analysis in Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Using Nonintrusive Polynomial Chaos Expansion

We propose a framework of nonintrusive polynomial chaos methods for transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the influence of the uncertainty in the electrical conductivity of biological tissues on the induced electric field. The conductivities of three different tissues, namely, cerebrospinal fluid, gray matter (GM), and white matter, are modeled as uniformly distributed random variables. The investigations are performed on a simplified model of a cortical gyrus/sulcus structure. The statistical moments are calculated by means of a generalized polynomial chaos expansion using a regression and cubature approach. Furthermore, the results are compared with the solutions obtained by stochastic collocation. The accuracy of the methods to predict random field distributions was compared by applying different grids and orders of expansion. An investigation on the convergence of the expansion showed that in the present framework, an order 4 expansion is sufficient to determine results with an error of <;1%. The results indicate a major influence of the uncertainty in electrical conductivity on the induced electric field. The standard deviation exceeds values of 20%-40% of the mean induced electric field in the GM. A sensitivity analysis revealed that the uncertainty in electrical conductivity of the GM affects the solution the most. This paper outlines the importance of exact knowledge of the electrical conductivities in TMS in order to provide reliable numerical predictions of the induced electric field. Furthermore, it outlines the performance and the applicability of spectral methods in the framework of TMS for future studies.
HIV, Cardiovascular Diseases, and Chronic Arsenic Exposure co-exist in a Positive Synergy

Recent epidemiological evidences indicate that arsenic exposure increases risk of atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases and microangiopathies in addition to the serious global health concern related to its carcinogenic effects. In experiments on animals, acute and chronic exposure to arsenic directly correlates cardiac tachyarrhythmia, and atherogenesis in a concentration and duration dependent manner. Moreover, the other effects of long-term arsenic exposure include induction of non-insulin dependent diabetes by mechanisms yet to be understood. On the other hand, there are controversial issues, gaps in knowledge, and future research priorities of accelerated incidences of CVD and mortalities in patients with HIV who are under long-term anti-retroviral therapy (ART). Although, both HIV infection itself and various components of ART initiate significant pathological alterations in the myocardium and the vasculature, simultaneous environmental exposure to arsenic which is more convincingly being recognized as a facilitator of HIV viral cycling in the infected immune cells, may contribute an additional layer of adversity in these patients. In this mini-review which have been fortified with our own preliminary data, we will discuss some of the key current understating of chronic arsenic exposure, and its possible impact on the accelerated HIV/ART induced CVD. The review will conclude with notes on recent developments in mathematical modeling in this field that probabilistically forecast incidence prevalence as functions of aging and life style parameters, most of which vary with time themselves; this interdisciplinary approach provides a complementary kernel to conventional biology.
Fractures after antiretroviral initiation

Background:Bone mineral density declines by 2–6% within 1–2 years after initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART); however, it is uncertain whether this results in an immediate or cumulative increase in fracture rates. Methods:We evaluated the incidence and predictors of fracture in 4640 HIV-positive participants from 26 randomized ART studies followed in the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) Longitudinal-Linked Randomized Trial study for a median of 5 years. Fragility and nonfragility fractures were recorded prospectively at semiannual visits. Incidence was calculated as fractures/total person-years. Cox proportional hazards models evaluated effects of traditional fracture risks, HIV disease characteristics, and ART exposure on fracture incidence. Results:Median (interquartile range) age was 39 (33, 45) years; 83% were men, 48% white, and median nadir CD4 cell count was 187 (65, 308) cells/&mgr;l. Overall, 116 fractures were reported in 106 participants with median time-to-first fracture of 2.3 years. Fracture incidence was 0.40 of 100 person-years among all participants and 0.38 of 100 person-years among 3398 participants who were ART naive at enrollment into ACTG parent studies. Among ART-naive participants, fracture rates were higher within the first 2 years after ART initiation (0.53/100 person-years) than subsequent years (0.30/100 person-years). In a multivariate analysis of ART-naive participants, increased hazard of fracture was associated with current smoking and glucocorticoid use but not with exposure to specific antiretrovirals. Conclusion:Fracture rates were higher within the first 2 years after ART initiation, relative to subsequent years. However, continuation of ART was not associated with increasing fracture rates in these relatively young HIV-positive individuals.
Budgets, Institutions, and Change: Criminal Justice Policy in America

This paper assesses the budgetary responsiveness of American governmental and political institutions to the growth of crime over the last four decades. Several linear decision models are developed which posit that changes in budgetary requests and appropriations for seven criminal justice agencies are functions of changes in the level of criminal activity and of partisan control of the presidency. Tests of these decision models confirm a substantial degree of budgetary responsiveness to growth in the observed crime rate. A significant degree of that responsiveness occurs at the requestformulation stage. While in the short run Congress has actually treated the proposed budgets of the more responsive agencies more severely, it has nonetheless allowed appropriations for criminal justice agencies to grow over the long run in a pattern quite consistent with changes in the crime rate. Virtually all of that responsiveness has occurred, however, under Republican presidents. The statistical performance of the models is quite good-with, typically, over half of the variance accounted for, statistically significant longitudinal regression coefficients, and trivial levels of serial correlation.
Identification of Gene Products Involved in Biofilm Production by Moraxella catarrhalis ETSU-9 In Vitro

ABSTRACT Moraxella catarrhalis ETSU-9 was subjected to random transposon insertion mutagenesis to identify genes encoding products involved in the ability of the organism to form biofilms in vitro. Screening of approximately 3,000 transposon insertion mutants in the crystal violet-based biofilm assay system yielded six mutants that exhibited greatly reduced abilities to form biofilms. Three of these mutants had transposon insertions in the uspA2H gene, which encodes a surface protein previously shown to be involved in the ability of M. catarrhalis to both attach to human cell lines in vitro and resist killing by normal human serum. Random insertion mutagenesis of the uspA2H gene, involving the introduction of a 15-nucleotide fragment encoding 5 amino acids, was used to attempt to identify the domain(s) necessary for biofilm formation. Most of these insertions adversely affected biofilm formation, whereas the abilities of these same mutants to attach to Chang conjunctival epithelial cells in vitro were usually not reduced. Gain-of-function experiments showed that introduction of the M. catarrhalis ETSU-9 uspA2H gene into Escherichia coli conferred biofilm formation ability on this recombinant strain. Two of the other three M. catarrhalis ETSU-9 transposon insertion mutants that had greatly reduced abilities to form biofilms were shown to have insertions in genes encoding products predicted to be directly or indirectly involved in cell wall metabolism.
Catastrophic Health Expenditure in Households with Severe Mental Disorders Patients: Evidence After Iran's Health Transformation Plan

Background: The high cost of mental health services can be a great barrier to accessing healthcare for patients with mental disorders. Objectives: The present study aimed to measure the catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) for households with severe mental disorders (SMDs) patients. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 400 households with SMDs patients who referred to four psychiatric university centers located in Tehran for outpatient services from July 2017 to March 2018. We consecutively selected 100 participants from each hospital. Data were collected using the World Health Survey questionnaire through interviews. The method considered by the WHO was used to measure the CHE and a forced-entry logistic regression technique was applied to assess factors affecting the CHE using STATA version 14.0 software. Results: The results showed that 25.75% of the households with SMDs patients faced CHE. There was also a significant relationship between households facing CHE and variables including the age of the household head (40 - 59 years; OR: 0.283, P value = 0.049), education status of the household head (university; OR: 0.075, P value = 0.002), utilization of dental (OR: 12.38, P value = 0.000), rehabilitation (OR: 6.99, P value = 0.012), and medication (OR: 3.17, P value = 0.049) services, and the household expenditures quintile (the fifth quintile; OR: 0.111 P value = 0.000). Conclusions: It is suggested that the Health Transformation Plan financially covers outpatient healthcare services more sufficiently, especially for mental disorders.
Serpent encryption algorithm implementation on Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)

CUDA is a platform developed by Nvidia for general purpose computing on Graphic Processing Unit to utilize the parallelism capabilities. Serpent encryption is considered to have high security margin as its advantage; however it lacks in speed as its disadvantage. We present a methodology for the transformation of CPU-based implementation of Serpent encryption algorithm (in C language) on CUDA to take advantage of CUDA's parallel processing capability. The proposed methodology could be used to quickly port a CPU-based algorithm for a quick gain in performance. Further tweaking, as described in this paper through the use of a profiler, would further increase the performance gain. Result based on the integration of multiple block encryption in parallel shows throughput performance of up to 100 MB/s or more than 7X performance gain.
Prevalence of Recurrent Vulvovaginal Candidiasis in 5 European Countries and the United States: Results From an Internet Panel Survey

Objective This study aimed to estimate prevalence of vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) and recurring VVC (RVVC). Materials and Methods An online omnibus survey was administered to 6,010 women aged 16 and older in 6 countries. Results We analyzed surveys from 6,000 women. Depending on the country, between 29% and 49% of participating women reported having a health care provider–diagnosed vaginal yeast infection during their lifetime. More than one fifth of women reporting one vaginal yeast infection also reported a 12-month period with 4 or more infections (RVVC) (overall 9%). The cumulative probability of RVVC after an initial vaginal yeast infection was very high. By age 25 years, the probability was 10% for women having had 1 initial yeast infection. By age 50 years, it was 25%. Conclusions The overall rates of VVC and RVVC were high and consistent with previous findings. Results were consistent across countries with the exception of France, which had a lower rate of VVC. This may reflect differences in risk behavior, response to infection, or sampling biases. Recurring VVC is a significant health problem in western countries, and the probability that VVC will progress to RVVC is high.
Night work and health status of nurses and midwives. cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to assess the association between night shift work and the prevalence of diseases and conditions among nurses and midwives. MATERIAL AND METHODS The study included 725 subjects (354 working on night shifts and 371 working only during the day). The data were collected via an interview based on the "Standard Shiftwork Index". We analyzed the frequency of diseases and conditions and the relative risk expressed as the odds ratio (adjusted for important confounding factors). RESULTS The most common diseases in the study population were chronic back pain (47.2%), hypertension (24.5%) and thyroid diseases (21.2%). We found no statistically significant increased relative risk of any diseases and conditions among the night shift nurses, compared to the day shift ones. The duration of the work performed on night shifts was significantly associated with the relative risk of thyroid diseases--increased almost two times in the women working for 15 or more years in such system (p for trend: 0.031). The analysis showed the significantly increased (more than eight times higher) relative risk of feet swelling in the women with 8 or more night duties per month, compared to the women having fewer night shifts. CONCLUSIONS We did not observe a higher frequency of diseases in the night shift nurses, compared to the day shift nurses. These results may be related to the so-called "Healthy Worker Effect". There is a need for further long-term observational studies in the populations of nurses.
Major membrane surface proteins of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae selectively modified by covalently bound lipid

Surface protein antigens of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae were identified by direct antibody-surface binding or by radioimmunoprecipitation of surface 125I-labeled proteins with a series of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs). Surface proteins p70, p65, p50, and p44 were shown to be integral membrane components by selective partitioning into the hydrophobic phase during Triton X-114 (TX-114)-phase fractionation, whereas p41 was concomitantly identified as a surface protein exclusively partitioning into the aqueous phase. Radioimmunoprecipitation of TX-114-phase proteins from cells labeled with [35S]methionine, 14C-amino acids, or [3H] palmitic acid showed that proteins p65, p50, and p44 were abundant and (with one other hydrophobic protein, p60) were selectively labeled with lipid. Covalent lipid attachment was established by high-performance liquid chromatography identification of [3H]methyl palmitate after acid methanolysis of delipidated proteins. An additional, unidentified methanolysis product suggested conversion of palmitate to another form of lipid also attached to these proteins. Alkaline hydroxylamine treatment of labeled proteins indicated linkage of lipids by amide or stable O-linked ester bonds. Proteins p65, p50, and p44 were highly immunogenic in the natural host as measured by immunoblots of TX-114-phase proteins with antisera from swine inoculated with whole organisms. These proteins were antigenically and structurally unrelated, since hyperimmune mouse antibodies to individual gel-purified proteins were monospecific and gave distinct proteolytic epitope maps. Intraspecies size variants of one surface antigen of M. hyopneumoniae were revealed by a MAb to p70 (defined in strain J, ATCC 25934), which recognized a larger p73 component on strain VPP11 (ATCC 25617). In addition, MAb to internal, aqueous-phase protein p82 of strain J failed to bind an analogous antigen in strain VPP11. These studies establish that a highly restricted set of distinct, lipid-modified hydrophobic membrane proteins are major surface antigens of M. hyopneumoniae and that structural variants of surface antigens occur within this species.
The origins and evolution of military Keynesianism in the United States

Abstract From after World War II until late 1971, the U.S. economy demonstrated new capacities in terms of macroeconomic stability during the so-called Golden Age: recessions were brief and shallow while growth was strong, generating shared returns for the working class, a burgeoning middle class, as well as for capital-owners. Neither then nor up to now has there been sufficient recognition of the key role played by military expenditures in this dynamic process. These enormous outlays at times accounted for as much as 25 percent of gross domestic product—including their induced multiplier effects. This article examines the origins of what has been termed “military Keynesianism” during the Golden Age, emphasizing the little-known leading role played by Leon Keyserling. Keyserling exercised behind-the-scenes power in order to convert Keynesian theory into a macroeconomic policy that would be both consistent with the U.S. institutional context and sufficiently large to promote long-term conditions for full employment. With a degree of audacity, at a historically opportune moment given the socioeconomic resonance of the foundational document known as “NSC-68” promulgated by the “state within the state”—the National Security State—Keyserling successfully challenged the fallacious neoclassical “law” of guns or butter.
Is There a Crisis of Democracy

Democracy seems to be inextricably linked to crisis. This is true since the ancient writings of Plato and Aristotle. More recently, the de- bate over the crisis of democracy goes on under the heading of "postdemoc- racy. " This article addresses the question of whether the crisis of democracy is an invention of theoretically complex but empirically ignorant theorists who adhere to an excessively normative ideal of democracy, on three levels: fi rst, on the level of quality of democracy indices developed by experts; sec- ond, on the basis of the survey reports on the opinion of the demos; third, on a deeper analyses of crucial spheres of democracy. The results hint in different directions. According to expert indices and polls, the message is: there is no crisis of democracy. However, the partial analyses on participa- tion, representation, and effective power to govern reveal unresolved dem- ocratic challenges, such as an increasing level of exclusion of the lower third of the demos from participation, an inferior representation of their interests, and a loss of democratic sovereignty in policy making.
Character education in teacher education programs

This study examined the extent to which character education has a place in teacher education programs in Saskatchewan. Teacher educators (faculty and sessional lecturers) from two teacher education programs in Saskatchewan and new teachers (those with five years of teaching experience or less) from two urban school divisions in Saskatchewan were surveyed. The survey explored how participants felt about three facets of character education within teacher education programs: the teaching of character education methodology, the enhancement of pre-service teachers’ character, and the responsibility for character education. The results showed that both teachers and teacher educators felt that character education should be taught in publicly funded schools (K-12) and that character education methodology should be taught within teacher preparation programs. Survey results showed that even though the majority of participants felt that character education should be taught in public schools and that character education methodology should be taught within teacher education programs, pre-service teachers, for the most part, were not being given instruction in character education.
CYP2C19 Genotype Is a Major Factor Contributing to the Highly Variable Pharmacokinetics of Voriconazole

In vitro data on the metabolism of the antifungal voriconazole suggest that its pharmacokinetics might be influenced by the activity of CYP2C19, CYP2C9, and CYP3A. To elucidate the genetic influence of polymorphic enzymes on voriconazole metabolism, the authors pooled the pharmacokinetic data from 2 interaction studies in which 35 participants were enrolled according to their CYP2C19 genotype to receive a single 400‐mg oral dose of voriconazole. Nine participants were homozygous for CYP2C19*1/*1, 8 heterozygous for *1/*17, 11 heterozygous for*1/*2, 2 heterozygous for *2/*17, 4 homozygous for *2/*2, and 1 with a double mutation CYP2C19*2/*2*17. Nine (heterozygous) individuals were carriers of the CYP2C9*2 or *3 variant alleles. Twenty‐five participants did not express the CYP3A5 isozyme (*3/*3), whereas in 5 individuals, the *1/*3 combination was present (active enzyme). In addition, the CYP2D6 genotype and 2 variants of the drug transporter MDR1 (C3435T and G2677T) were determined. Multiple regression analysis of voriconazole apparent oral clearance revealed that 49% of its variance can be explained solely by the CYP2C19 polymorphism (P < .0001). Including the other polymorphisms into the regression model did not show any significant contribution. The number of variant CYP2C19 alleles therefore explains a substantial part of the wide variability of voriconazole pharmacokinetics, whereas the presence of functional CYP3A5 and the CYP2C9 genotype had no significant impact on voriconazole exposure. Some minor contribution results from the MDR1 C3435T genotype.
Backscattering from a spatial random permittivity plate: a statistical approach

This paper presents a way of finding a correlation between a scattering plate with spatial random permittivity and its far field diffraction diagram when illuminated by a plane wave. The random permittivity plate profile is generated using a pseudo 2D-Markov process. Far fields are processed with the fast multipole method. Similarities have been found between the distribution of permittivity on the plate and the associated far fields.
Comparative study of effect of different coupling agent on mechanical properties and water absorption on wheat straw-reinforced polystyrene composites

The present work deals with the effect of various treatments on the mechanical properties and water absorption of wheat straw (WS)-reinforced polystyrene (PS) composites. Four different surface treatments of the filler, that is, alkali treatment of WS by 20% sodium hydroxide (NaOH) solution, maleic anhydride (MA) treatment of WS by 2% MA solution, WS treatment with 1% silane (ATS) and WS treatment with 20% NaOH and 1% silane, with 5–25% filler loading were carried out. There is an enhancement in tensile modulus, impact strength and water absorption and a decrease in tensile strength of WS fiber-filled PS composite with an enhancement in fiber loading when it is treated with 20% NaOH, 2% MA, and 1% silane. There is an enhancement in tensile strength, tensile modulus, Izod impact strength, and water absorption value when the WS fiber is treated with 20% NaOH and 1% silane, with an enhancement in fiber loading. Treatment with 20% NaOH and 1% silane exhibits better results as compared to the rest of the surface treatments.