Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pattern of birth defects at a university teaching hospital in Northern Nigeria: Retrospective review over a decade

Background: Major birth defects are common causes of perinatal morbidity and mortality which have become a global phenomenon. Its occurrence in the developing nations like Nigeria requires due consideration most especially to its pattern and risk factors. Objectives: This review was conducted to determine the pattern of birth defects and investigate the factors associated with birth defects and its outcome at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH), Kano. Methods: This was a 10-year retrospective study conducted in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and the Department of Paediatrics (Special Care Baby Unit) of AKTH, Kano, between April 2007 and March 2017. Data retrieved from patients' file were collected using a purpose-designed proforma to obtain information on the required parameters and analyzed using IBM SPSS version 20, 2009 software. Frequencies and percentages were calculated and the results were presented in tabular forms. Results: There were 6990 deliveries within the study period, out of which 305 babies had birth defects, giving a prevalence of 4.4%. Among women who delivered baby with birth defects, maternal age ranged from 16 to 45 years with a mean age of 30 ± 5 years. The highest incidence (48%) of birth defects occurred among the 26–35 years age group. Anomalies that affected single system are significantly higher than anomalies that affected multiple systems. A higher percentage (52.5%) of birth defects occurred in male neonates. The gastrointestinal system was the most commonly affected (32.5%), while musculoskeletal system was the least (3.75%) affected system. Drug intake among 120 mothers who delivered neonates with birth defects when considered as a risk factor was found to constitute 81% of traditional concoction/herbs; while 12.5% were orthodox and intake of social drug was found to be only 6.5%. Hypertension was found to be the highest chronic medical disorder, while chorioamnionitis following premature rupture of membrane was recorded as the most commonly occurring maternal infection. Sixty percent of these neonates with birth defects were managed conservatively, surgical treatment was given in 23.5%, while 16.5% underwent medical treatment. Discharge rate was 82.5%; 9% left against medical advice, while neonatal mortality rate was about 8.5% and a majority (91.8%) of the death occurred among the neonates with multiple birth defects. Conclusion: The prevalence of birth defect in AKTH was 4.4% of the total deliveries over the study period. Gastrointestinal system was found to be the most commonly affected system. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and ingestion of traditional herbs were found to be the most common medical disorder and drug intake, respectively, among the mothers who delivered neonates with birth defects. Although the outcome of the management was good, and the study could not establish direct causation, there is need to counsel mothers on the inherent dangers of traditional herbs ingestion and the need to pay adequate attention to medical conditions in pregnancy.
Unwanted pregnancy and induced abortion among female undergraduates in University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Objectives: To assess the prevalence of unwanted pregnancies and induced abortion among female undergraduates. Methodology: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among female undergraduates in University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The survey used a structured, self-administered questionnaire. Data analysis was conducted using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 20 with Chi-square and t-tests. Statistical significance was set at P < 0.05. Findings: The mean age of the participants was 20.3 (±2.7) years and 80% were single at the time of the study. The prevalence of induced abortion was 51%. The overall prevalence of unwanted pregnancy was 17%, and 92.7% of students who had ever been pregnant had considered the pregnancy unwanted. Only 7.3% reported willingness to be pregnant while engaged and 58.3% were unwilling to keep pregnancy if engagement ends. Unwanted pregnancy was less among those ever married (χ2 = 49.96, P < 0.001), and more of the induced abortions were found in the unmarried group albeit not statistically significant (χ2 = 0.21, P = 0.640). Unwanted pregnancy occurred more during the engaged period than any other time, which was statistically significant (χ2 = 20.24, P < 0.001), although no significant difference in induced abortion was found. Conclusion: The prevalence of unwanted pregnancy and induced abortion is high especially among university undergraduates. As it appears to happen more often while they are engaged, unprotected sex during the engagement period needs to be targeted.
Users in the loop: a psychologically-informed approach to similar item retrieval

Recommender systems (RS) often leverage information about the similarity between items' features to make recommendations. Yet, many commonly used similarity functions make mathematical assumptions such as symmetry (i.e., Sim(a, b) = Sim(b, a)) that are inconsistent with how humans make similarity judgments. Moreover, most algorithm validations either do not directly measure users' behavior or fail to comply with methodological standards for psychological research. RS that are developed and evaluated without regard to users' psychology may fail to meet users' needs. To provide recommendations that do meet the needs of users, we must: 1) develop similarity functions that account for known properties of human cognition, and 2) rigorously evaluate the performance of these functions using methodologically sound user testing. Here, we develop a framework for evaluating users' judgments of similarity that is informed by best practices in psychological research methods. Employing users' fashion item similarity judgments collected using our framework, we demonstrate that a psychologically-informed similarity function (i.e., Tversky contrast model) outperforms a psychologically-naive similarity function (i.e., Jaccard similarity) in predicting users' similarity judgments.
PDMFRec: a decentralised matrix factorisation with tunable user-centric privacy

Conventional approaches to matrix factorisation (MF) typically rely on a centralised collection of user data for building a MF model. This approach introduces an increased risk when it comes to user privacy. In this short paper we propose an alternative, user-centric, privacy enhanced, decentralised approach to MF. Our method pushes the computation of the recommendation model to the user's device, and eliminates the need to exchange sensitive personal information; instead only the loss gradients of local (device-based) MF models need to be shared. Moreover, users can select the amount and type of information to be shared, for enhanced privacy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by considering different levels of user privacy in comparison with state-of-the-art alternatives.
Candida albicans and Staphylococcus Species: A Threatening Twosome

Candida albicans and Staphylococcus species are, respectively, the most common fungal and bacterial agents isolated from bloodstream infections, worldwide. Moreover, it has been shown that 20% of all C. albicans bloodstream infections are polymicrobial in nature, with Staphylococcus epidermidis and Staphylococcus aureus being the first and third most common co-isolated organisms, respectively. These species are part of the commensal microbial flora but can cause hospital-acquired infections with an extreme ability to inhabit diverse host niches, especially in immunocompromised patients. They are well known for their ability to form persistent biofilms in the host or on abiotic surfaces such as indwelling medical devices. Interactions within these biofilm communities can lead to increased virulence, drug tolerance, and immune evasion. This can ultimately impact morbidity and infection outcome, often leading to an increased mortality. Therefore, characterizing the interactions between these species could lead to the development of novel therapeutic approaches that target polymicrobial infections. In this mini review, we briefly highlight the current knowledge and most recent insights into the complex interspecies interactions of C. albicans with Staphylococcus bacteria.
Pre-service Teachers' Beliefs About Inclusive Education Before and After Multi-Compared to Mono-professional Co-teaching: An Exploratory Study

Teacher beliefs are action guiding in the classrooms. Teacher beliefs about inclusive education are thus a crucial pre-requisite for its success. Therefore, those beliefs have to be addressed during the first phase of teacher training. Generally accepted concepts or operationalized definitions would be valuable guidelines for pre-service teachers and their educators. However, neither the ones nor the others are available at present. Therefore, pre-service teachers have to fall back on their own beliefs, a rather unexplored notion so far. Within the present study, pre-service teachers’ beliefs about inclusive education were assessed before and after an academic seminar. During this academic seminar, participants co-taught in either multi-professional (i.e. one pre-service teacher for special educational needs and one for general education) or mono-professional (i.e. both pre-service teachers for special educational needs or both for general education) teams in inclusive classes of secondary schools. Pre-service teachers’ beliefs were assessed with the help of concept-maps, which were created by the participants at two testing times. The concept-maps were analyzed employing graph-theoretical approaches as well as qualitative, summarizing content analysis methods. Results show that pre-service teachers who worked in multi-professional teams expanded their conceptualization of inclusive education to include facets like individualization and differentiation, while pre-service teachers who worked in mono-professional teams displayed no such expansion. Also, the conceptualization of pre-service teachers who worked in mono-professional teams contained a larger percentage of propositions addressing disadvantages and negative consequences of inclusive education. Therefore, it is concluded that multi-professional co-teaching during teacher training helps prepare teachers for successful inclusive education.
Multi-dataset-multi-task Neural Sequence Tagging for Information Extraction from Tweets

Multi-task learning is effective in reducing the required data for learning a task, while ensuring competitive accuracy with respect to single task learning. We study effectiveness of multi-dataset-multi-task learning in training neural models for four sequence tagging tasks for Twitter data, namely, part of speech (POS) tagging, chunking, super sense tagging, and named entity recognition (NER). We utilize -- 7 POS, 10 NER, 1 Chunking, and 2 super sense -- tagged publicly available datasets. We use a multi-dataset-multi-task neural model based on pre-trained contextual text embeddings and compare it against single-dataset-single-task, and multi-dataset-single-task models. Even within a task, the tagging schemes may differ across datasets. The model learns using this tagging diversity across all datasets for a task. The models are more effective compared to single data/task models, leading to significant improvements for POS (1-2% acc., 7 datasets), NER (1-10% F1, 9 datasets), and chunking (4%). For super sense tagging there is 2% improvement in F1 for out of domain data. Our models and tools can be found at https://socialmediaie.github. io/
Further Applications of Wireless Communication Systems over α-η-κ-μ Fading Channels

In this letter, some applications of wireless communication systems over $\alpha-\eta-\kappa-\mu$ fading channels are analysed. More specifically, the effective rate and the average of both the detection probability and area under the receiver characteristics curve of energy detection based spectrum sensing are studied. Furthermore, highly accurate method to truncating the infinite summation of the probability density function of $\alpha-\eta-\kappa-\mu$ fading conditions for a certain number of terms is provided. To this end, novel mathematically tractable exact expressions are derived in terms of the Fox's $H$-function (FHF). The asymptotic behaviour is also explained to earn further insights into the effect of the fading parameters on the system performance. A comparison between the numerical results and Monte Carlo simulations is presented to verify the validation of our analysis.
Human-Food Interaction

Food is not only fundamental to our existence, its consumption, handling or even the mere sight of its also brings us immense joy. Over the years, technology has played a crucial part in supporting and enriching food-related practices, beginning from how we grow, to how we cook, eat and dispose of food. All these practices have a significant impact not only on individuals but also on the surrounding ecologies and infrastructures, often discussed under the umbrella term of Human-Food Interaction (HFI). This article aims to offer the reader an overview of the existing research in this space and to guide further its exploration. We illustrate how HFI builds on recent trends within HCI. We position this growth across four phases of HFI, namely, Growing, Cooking, Eating and Disposal. We categorize and disseminate the existing works across each of these phases to reveal a rich design space and to highlight the underexplored areas that interaction designers might find intriguing to investigate. Using the design space, we articulate a set of opportunities that emphasize particular features the technology, especially hardware, has yet to offer to drive the human-food interaction field forward. We highlight the design space for designing novel interactions with technologies by taking motivation from traditional food practices related to cooking and eating food. Finally, we introduce "Human Food Practices" (HFP) an emerging field of investigation that concerns itself with the formation and transformation of practices as they are enacted within the dynamics, motivations and perceptions of societal norms associated with food.
Novel SAMD9 Mutation in a Patient With Immunodeficiency, Neutropenia, Impaired Anti-CMV Response, and Severe Gastrointestinal Involvement

Mutations in the Sterile alpha motif domain containing 9 (SAMD9) gene have been described in patients with severe multisystem disorder, MIRAGE syndrome, but also in patients with bone marrow (BM) failure in the absence of other systemic symptoms. The role of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in the management of the disease is still unclear. Here, we present a patient with a novel mutation in SAMD9 (c.2471 G>A, p.R824Q), manifesting with prominent gastrointestinal tract involvement and immunodeficiency, but without any sign of adrenal insufficiency typical for MIRAGE syndrome. He suffered from severe CMV (cytomegalovirus) infection at 3 months of age, with a delayed development of T lymphocyte functional response against CMV, profound T cell activation, significantly reduced B lymphocyte counts and impaired lymphocyte proliferative response. Cultured T cells displayed slightly lower calcium flux and decreased survival. At the age of 6 months, he developed severe neutropenia requiring G-CSF administration, and despite only mild morphological and immunophenotypical disturbances in the BM, 78% of the BM cells showed monosomy 7 at the age of 18 months. Surprisingly, T cell proliferation after CD3 stimulation and apoptosis of the cells normalized during the follow-up, possibly reflecting the gradual development of monosomy 7. Among other prominent symptoms, he had difficulty swallowing, requiring percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG), frequent gastrointestinal infections, and perianal erosions. He suffered from repeated infections and periodic recurring fevers with the elevation of inflammatory markers. At 26 months of age, he underwent HSCT that significantly improved hematological and immunological laboratory parameters. Nevertheless, he continued to suffer from other conditions, and subsequently, he died at day 440 post-transplant due to sepsis. Pathogenicity of this novel SAMD9 mutation was confirmed experimentally. Expression of mutant SAMD9 caused a significant decrease in proliferation and increase in cell death of the transfected cells. Conclusion: We describe a novel SAMD9 mutation in a patient with prominent gastrointestinal and immunological symptoms but without adrenal hypoplasia. Thus, SAMD9 mutations should be considered as cause of enteropathy in pediatric patients. The insufficient therapeutic outcome of transplantation further questions the role of HSCT in the management of patients with SAMD9 mutations and multisystem involvement.
Android Pretending to Have Similar Traits of Imagination as Humans Evokes Stronger Perceived Capacity to Feel

The perception of robots as mindful enriches how humans relate to them. Given that congruence in perceived representations of the world enable humans to experience commonality in mental states (a shared reality), we propose that congruence between humans, and robots will encourage humans to attribute humanlike mental capacities to robots. To investigate this, we assessed the mental perceptions of a robot in a visual imagination task using Gray et al. mind perception scale, which evaluates experience (capacity to feel), and agency (capacity to plan and do). For each ambiguous picture in the designed task, humans, and a robot imagined an animal. The task was performed under six conditions (2 × 3: Lead/Follow for Low/Medium/High). In the Lead condition, the robot records its perceived animal first; in the Follow condition, the robot records after the human participant. The experiment had three different degrees of congruence: Low (0%), Medium (60%), and High (100%). The results showed that perceived experiences were higher in the Lead condition, suggesting that the robot is perceived to be empathetic. It is probable that the Follow condition was perceived as mimicry rather than shared reality. Therefore, the order of response may have played an important role in commonality in mental states. No differences were observed in the perceived agency across all conditions. These results suggest that the order of response affects how humans perceive the minds of robots. Additionally, we assessed a post-task questionnaire to evaluate the interpersonal closeness that the humans felt toward the android. The main effect was observed in the degrees of congruence. This result is in line with those of previous studies that report relationships across sharing of similarities and friendliness.
Nonverbal synchrony in virtual reality

How might nonverbal synchrony naturally evolve in a social virtual reality environment? And how can avatar embodiment affect how participants coordinate nonverbally with each other? In the following pre-registered between-subjects experiment, we tracked the movements of pairs of users during a collaborative or competitive task in immersive virtual reality. Each conversational partner controlled either a customized avatar body or an abstract cube that responded to their movements. We compared the movements of the actual user pairs between the two conditions, and to an artificial “pseudosynchrony” dataset composed of the movements of randomly combined participant pairs who did not actually interact. We found stronger positive and negative correlations between real pairs compared to pseudosynchronous pairs, providing evidence for naturally occurring nonverbal synchrony between pairs in virtual reality. We discuss this in the context of the relationships between avatar appearance, task success, social closeness and social presence.
Humpback whale song occurrence reflects ecosystem variability in feeding and migratory habitat of the northeast Pacific

This study examines the occurrence of humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) song in the northeast Pacific from three years of continuous recordings off central California (36.713°N, 122.186°W). Song is prevalent in this feeding and migratory habitat, spanning nine months of the year (September–May), peaking in winter (November–January), and reaching a maximum of 86% temporal coverage (during November 2017). From the rise of song in fall through the end of peak occurrence in winter, song length increases significantly from month to month. The seasonal peak in song coincides with the seasonal trough in day length and sighting-based evidence of whales leaving Monterey Bay, consistent with seasonal migration. During the seasonal song peak, diel variation shows maximum occurrence at night (69% of the time), decreasing during dawn and dusk (52%), and further decreasing with increasing solar elevation during the day, reaching a minimum near solar noon (30%). Song occurrence increased 44% and 55% between successive years. Sighting data within the acoustic detection range of the hydrophone indicate that variation in local population density was an unlikely cause of this large interannual variation. Hydrographic data and modeling of acoustic transmission indicate that changes in neither habitat occupancy nor acoustic transmission were probable causes. Conversely, the positive interannual trend in song paralleled major ecosystem variations, including similarly large positive trends in wind-driven upwelling, primary productivity, and krill abundance. Further, the lowest song occurrence during the first year coincided with anomalously warm ocean temperatures and an extremely toxic harmful algal bloom that affected whales and other marine mammals in the region. These major ecosystem variations may have influenced the health and behavior of humpback whales during the study period.
Characterization of a nontoxic pyomelanin pigment produced by the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica

In this study, we report on the ability of the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica W29 to produce an extracellular melanin‐like brown pigment at high yield (0.5 mg/ml) in culture medium supplemented with L‐tyrosine. This pigment has been characterized as pyomelanin and its synthesis was found to occur by the so‐called HGA‐melanin pathway. The purified pyomelanin was found embedded with antioxidant properties as it exhibited a radical scavenging activity toward 1,1‐diphenyl‐2‐picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) with IC50 of 230 μg/ml. It was also characterized as noncytotoxic toward two mammalian cell lines, namely the mouse fibroblast NIH3T3 and human keratinocytes HaCaT. When blended with different commercial sunscreens, the purified pyomelanin increased significantly the sun protection factor (SPF) value, highlighting its potential utilization as UV‐filter in cosmetic preparations.