Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A trial of three antiretroviral regimens in HIV-1-infected children.

BACKGROUND Depletion of CD4 T-cell counts or progression of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease occurs rapidly in children, but few data address the efficacy of aggressive therapy for HIV-infected children. METHODS We evaluated the safety, tolerability, and activity of three regimens of antiretroviral therapy in a multicenter, open-label, phase 1-2 trial. Children infected with HIV type 1 (HIV-1) were stratified at entry according to age--three months or younger (early therapy) or older than three months (delayed therapy)--and assigned sequentially to one of three regimens. Children continued to receive treatment for up to 200 weeks if the plasma HIV-1 RNA level was less than 1000 copies per milliliter by 16 weeks. RESULTS Plasma HIV-1 RNA levels fell from a median of 5.3 log copies per milliliter (range, 3.3 to 6.4 log copies per milliliter) at baseline to less than 1000 copies per milliliter at 16 weeks in 32 of 52 infants (62 percent). Plasma HIV-1 RNA levels were below 400 copies per milliliter at 48 weeks in 26 infants (50 percent) and at 200 weeks in 23 infants (44 percent). An intention-to-treat analysis revealed that significantly more children who received stavudine, lamivudine, nevirapine, and nelfinavir had plasma HIV-1 RNA levels of less than 400 copies per milliliter at 48 weeks (83 percent) and 200 weeks (72 percent) than children who received reverse-transcriptase inhibitors alone (P=0.001 and P=0.01, respectively). Fewer infants in the delayed-therapy group than in the early-therapy group (30 percent vs. 60 percent) had plasma HIV-1 RNA levels of less than 400 copies per milliliter at 200 weeks (P=0.03). Treatment-associated adverse effects were infrequent. CONCLUSIONS In this phase 1-2 trial involving HIV-1-infected children, an age of three months or younger at the initiation of therapy and treatment with stavudine, lamivudine, nevirapine, and nelfinavir were associated with improved long-term viral suppression. Larger, randomized trials are required to define the optimal time to initiate therapy and the optimal regimen for these infants.
OntoPop: An Ontology Population System for the Semantic Web

The development of ontology at the instance level requires the extraction of the terms defining the instances from various data sources. These instances then are linked to the concepts of the ontology, and relationships are created between these instances for the next step. However, before establishing links among data, ontology engineers must classify terms or instances from a web document into an ontology concept. The tool for help ontology engineer in this task is called ontology population. The present research is not suitable for ontology development applications, such as long time processing or analyzing large or noisy data sets. OntoPop system introduces a methodology to solve these problems, which comprises two parts. First, we select meaningful features from syntactic relations, which can produce more significant features than any other method. Second, we differentiate feature meaning and reduce noise based on latent semantic analysis. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the OntoPop works well, significantly out-performing the accuracy of 49.64%, a learning accuracy of 76.93%, and executes time of 5.46 second/instance.
Transductive Zero-Shot Hashing via Coarse-to-Fine Similarity Mining

Zero-shot Hashing (ZSH) is to learn hashing models for novel/target classes without training data, which is an important and challenging problem. Most existing ZSH approaches exploit transfer learning via an intermediate shared semantic representations between the seen/source classes and novel/target classes. However, the hash functions learned from the source dataset may show poor performance when directly applied to the target classes due to the dataset bias. In this paper, we study the transductive ZSH, i.e., we have unlabeled data for novel classes. We put forward a simple yet efficient joint learning approach via coarse-to-fine similarity mining which transfers knowledges from source data to target data. It mainly consists of two building blocks in the proposed deep architecture: 1) a shared two-streams network to learn the effective common image representations. The first stream operates on the source data and the second stream operates on the unlabeled data. And 2) a coarse-to-fine module to transfer the similarities of the source data to the target data in a greedy fashion. It begins with a coarse search over the unlabeled data to find the images that most dissimilar to the source data, and then detects the similarities among the found images via the fine module. Extensive evaluation results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed hashing method achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
Regional Differences in Incidence and Management of Stroke – Is There Any Difference between Western and Japanese Guidelines on Antiplatelet Therapy?

Purpose: There have not been many discussions on the differences between the guidelines for the management of stroke used in eastern and western countries. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether or not there are substantial differences between western countries and Japan in the prevalence of stroke and the frequencies of stroke subtypes, as well as in the recommended therapy for secondary prevention of ischemic stroke. Results and Conclusions: Although there are racial differences and differences in approved drugs between the East and West, the prevalence of stroke and the frequencies of stroke subtypes tend to converge throughout the world. However, the ratio of stroke to ischemic heart disease is still different between the East and West. Comparison of various countries’ guidelines shows that recommendations on antiplatelet therapy for secondary prevention of ischemic stroke are fundamentally similar in the East and West, but the recommended doses of antiplatelets, especially aspirin and ticlopidine, are smaller in Japan. Furthermore, Japanese guidelines only recommend the use of antiplatelets (particularly cilostazol) for patients with lacunar infarction with evidence.
Carbapenemase-Producing Enterobacteriaceae in Spain in 2012

ABSTRACT We report the epidemiological impact of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE) in Spain in 2012. Of the 237 carbapenemases detected, 163 were from the OXA-48 group, 60 were from VIM-1, 8 were from KPC-2, 5 were from IMP, and 1 was from NDM-1. Interhospital spread of carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae was due to a limited number of multilocus sequence types (MLST) and carbapenemase types, including ST15–VIM-1, ST11–OXA-48, ST405–OXA-48, ST101–KPC-2, and ST11–VIM-1. The number of CPE cases in Spain has increased sharply in recent years, due mainly to the emergence of OXA-48.
The knowledge enterprise : implementation of intelligent business strategies

Price and quality alone are no longer sufficient to gain competitive advantage. It is high quality knowledge which provides the opportunities for adding exclusive value to products and services. At the same time, the development of knowledge is gaining momentum. Knowledge is becoming obsolete more quickly and becomes more complex. The danger of this development is that organizations will continue to play the same competitive game and are often unaware that they are lagging behind.
Reliability and variability of bioimpedance measures in normal adults: effects of age, gender, and body mass.

This study aimed to analyze the reliability and evaluate the causes of variability of bioimpedance parameters. Direct measures were analyzed because they are not affected by inappropriate prediction models. Resistance (R), reactance (Xc), and phase angle (PA) were determined at three fixed frequencies (5, 50, and 100 kHz) in 653 normal Germans (244 males and 409 females), aged 20-90 years, using a phase-sensitive whole-body tetrapolar bioimpedance analyzer (BIA 2000-M, Data Input, Germany). From these values, six bioimpedance ratios were calculated (R(5)/R(50), R(5)/R(100), Xc(5)/Xc(50), Xc(5)/Xc(100), PA(5)/PA(50), and PA(5)/PA(100)). Reliability of duplicate measurements, as determined by technical error, is high. ANOVA for repeated measurements yields a significant frequency main effect (within-subjects factor) and significant effects of age and gender (between-subject factors) on variation of resistance, reactance, and phase angle. Multiple regression analyses indicate independent effects of age, gender, and body mass index on variability of resistance, reactance, and phase angle at the three frequencies. Gender primarily influences variation in resistance (smaller values in males), whereas age mainly affects variations in reactance and phase angle (smaller values in older adults). Obesity is associated with smaller resistance (at all frequencies) and smaller reactance (high frequencies), but larger phase-angle values (low frequency). The study shows that variability of direct bioimpedance measures depends on age, gender, and body mass characteristics of the study population. The potential benefit for using both low and high frequencies in R measures is to differentiate between extra- and intracellular fluid spaces, which may be altered during human growth and aging.
Cities Competition, Place Marketing And Economic Development In South Europe: The Barcelona Case As Fdi Destination

The aim of the article is to focus on the especially interesting area of South Europe and to present and points out the strategic development process, in one of the most representative examples of its successful implementation, which is the city of Barcelona. Barcelona, which in the last 20 years, managed to increase its competitiveness becoming one of the most attractive investment destinations on international level. The city? s economic dynamism, its strategic position in the South of Europe and a clearly-consolidated international projection have turned the economic area of Barcelona into an international platform of economic activities, a driving force behind development in Southern Europe, especially oriented towards new, emergent, competitive and international sectors with an uninterrupted growth of their foreign markets.
Base Band Data for Testing Interference Mitigation Algorithms

Abstract Digital signal processing is one of many valuable tools for suppressing unwanted signals or inter-ference. Building hardware processing engines seems to be the way to best implement some classes of interference suppression but is, unfortunately, expensive and time-consuming, especially if several miti-gation techniques need to be compared. Simulations can be useful, but are not a substitute for real data. CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility has recently commenced a ‘software radio telescope’ project designed to fill the gap between dedicated hardware processors and pure simulation. In this approach, real telescope data are recorded coherently, then processed offline. This paper summarises the current contents of a freely available database of base band recorded data that can be used to experiment with signal processing solutions. It includes data from the following systems: single dish, multi-feed receiver; single dish with reference antenna; and an array of six 22 m antennas with and without a reference antenna. Astronomical sources such as OH masers, pulsars and continuum sources subject to interfering signals were recorded. The interfering signals include signals from the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and its Russian equivalent (GLONASS), television, microwave links, a low-Earth-orbit satellite, various other transmitters, and signals leaking from local telescope systems with fast clocks. The data are available on compact disk, allowing use in general purpose computers or as input to laboratory hardware prototypes.
A first step toward integrating schema theory in geriatric psychiatry: a Delphi study

ABSTRACT Background: Schematherapy (ST) is an effective therapy for personality disorders (PD's) in adults, however, empirical research into ST in older adults is limited. The manifestation of schemas over the life course is unclear. Besides, long-term patterns of schemas in old age and whether schemas change during the aging process remain unknown. Methods: We performed a Delphi study involving a group meeting of nine experts in the field of ST in older adults. Results: Full consensus was achieved that schemas vary later in life, and that this is due to biopsychosocial factors. The concepts of schema triggering (the chance that a maladaptive schema is activated) and schema coping (the psychological and behavioral effort a person makes to minimize the stress that comes with the schema) in the past are important in clinical practice. Understanding how schemas are triggered during the life course and how patients deal with their schemas throughout life will help the therapist to complete the diagnostic puzzle in older individuals and to choose appropriate interventions. Conclusion: Schemas are flexible and dynamic constructs that can fade or intensify due to multiple factors. This study is a first step toward advancing the state of knowledge regarding schema theory in an aging population. The results will contribute to improvements in ST in older adults by developing an understanding of the plasticity of schemas during the life course.
Homeostatic plasticity in human motor cortex demonstrated by two consecutive sessions of paired associative stimulation

Long‐term potentiation (LTP) and long‐term depression (LTD) underlie most models of learning and memory, but neural activity would grow or shrink in an uncontrolled manner, if not guarded by stabilizing mechanisms. The Bienenstock–Cooper–Munro (BCM) rule proposes a sliding threshold for LTP/LTD induction: LTP induction becomes more difficult if neural activity was high previously. Here we tested if this form of homeostatic plasticity applies to the human motor cortex (M1) in vivo by examining the interactions between two consecutive sessions of paired associative stimulation (PAS). PAS consisted of repeated pairs of electrical stimulation of the right median nerve followed by transcranial magnetic stimulation of the left M1. The first PAS session employed an interstimulus interval equalling the individual N20‐latency of the median nerve somatosensory‐evoked cortical potential plus 2 ms, N20‐latency minus 5 ms, or a random alternation between these intervals, to induce an LTP‐like increase in motor‐evoked potential (MEP) amplitudes in the right abductor pollicis brevis muscle (PASLTP), an LTD‐like decrease (PASLTD), or no change (PASControl), respectively. The second PAS session 30 min later was always PASLTP. It induced an moderate LTP‐like effect if conditioned by PASControl, which increased if conditioned by PASLTD, but decreased if conditioned by PASLTP. Effects on MEP amplitude induced by the second PAS session exhibited a negative linear correlation with those in the first PAS session. Because the two PAS sessions activate identical neuronal circuits, we conclude that ‘homosynaptic‐like’ homeostatic mechanisms in accord with the BCM rule contribute to regulating plasticity in human M1.
Delay-Constrained, Energy-Efficient Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks Through Topology Control

In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding energy-efficient paths for delay-constrained data in wireless sensor networks. This problem has been shown to be NP-complete and current solutions for this problem are inadequate, as they do not model the delays introduced by the channel access mechanisms. We present a heuristic solution for the aforesaid problem that employs topology control for sensor networks using 802.11 like channel access schemes. We propose a network architecture and a routing framework that enable us to model the access delays caused by the MAC layer. This in turn, allows us to obtain better estimates for the end-to-end delays along various paths. We identify a set of paths between the source and sink nodes, and index them in increasing order of their energy consumption. We then estimate the end-to-end delay along each of these ordered paths, and select the one with the lowest index that satisfies the delay constraint. Our studies show that the proposed framework achieves a good balance between latency introduced in the transfer and energy consumption, when compared with conventional solutions
A prospective study measuring penile length in men treated with radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer.

PURPOSE Some patients report that the penis is smaller after radical retropubic prostatectomy for prostate cancer. We performed a prospective study which measured penile length before and after radical retropubic prostatectomy. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 124 men consented to penile measurements before radical prostatectomy performed by the same surgeon. Repeat measurements were performed at 3-month intervals following surgery. Penile measurements (cm.) consisted of flaccid length, stretched length, depth of prepubic fat pad and circumference. Statistical analysis of penile measurements was performed using the paired samples and independent Student's t test, Pearson's correlation and analysis of variance. RESULTS Mean patient age was 59.1 (range 42 to 76). No patient had a penile abnormality, for example Peyronie's disease, or history of penile or urethral surgery. The size of the penis was significantly smaller after prostatectomy, and there was a significant difference for flaccid (p <0.001), stretched (p <0.001), prepubic fat pad (p = 0.02) and circumference measurements (p <0.01). Twelve patients (19%) had a 15% or greater decrease in stretched penile length. When dichotomizing groups at the cut point of 15% decrease, the independent t test of prostate size was not significant (t[df 36.7] = -1.83, p = 0.076). Nerve sparing was not significant in relation to change in penile stretched length, (F[df 2, 62] = 0.501, p = 0.609). CONCLUSIONS Our findings support observations of decreased penile length after radical prostatectomy. Men should be counseled before radical prostatectomy that penile shortening may occur.
Immunomagnetic Capture PCR for Rapid Concentration and Detection of Hepatitis A Virus from Environmental Samples

ABSTRACT We studied the concentration of hepatitis A virus (HAV) from environmental samples by membrane filter-based urea-arginine phosphate buffer and its detection by using immunomagnetic capture (IC) reverse transcription (RT)-PCR (IC PCR). Magnetic beads coated with anti-HAV rabbit antibodies were used for enrichment and concentration of HAV from environmental samples. IC PCR is sensitive enough to detect as few as 0.04 PFU of cell culture-adapted HAV in inoculated water and sewage samples. IC PCR is specific and does not yield positive reactions with poliovirus 1, HAV RNA, or selected bacteriophages. IC concentrates viruses suspended in small volumes to microliter volumes that can be used directly in RT-PCR. IC concentration of viruses from sewage samples without concentration of inhibitory substances is important for successful RT-PCR detection. In a field trial, 2 of 18 raw sewage samples tested by IC PCR were positive for HAV.
Board Diversity and the Demand for Higher Audit Effort

We examine whether female corporate board membership affects the board's demand for audit effort measured by audit fees. After correcting for selectivity bias and controlling for other known board, firm and industry characteristics, we find significantly higher audit fees in firms that have at least one female director and in firms with a higher proportion of female directors on the board. The effect is also significant for female non-executive director presence and their proportion. Our findings suggest that boards with female directors are more likely to demand higher monitoring in the form of more audit effort, ceteris paribus. Exploratory analysis of the differential effect of female board membership suggests that such boards demand incremental audit effort in situations of high information asymmetry, complexity and ethical dilemma.
Executive Compensation, Firm Performance and Corporate Governance: An Empirical Analysis

This paper investigates the determinants of executive compensation using the most recent data on firm performance, corporate governance and managerial compensation for a large sample of Indian firms. A linear regression model is used to develop explanations for total CEO compensation and the proportion of incentive pay that forms a part of the CEO's compensation. It is found that firm size is a significant determinant of both these aspects of CEO compensation. The results also show that CEOs who are promoters of their firms earn significantly more than ordinary CEOs. Such individuals also earn a much larger component of their compensation as incentive pay. In addition, this study also quantifies the significant divergences in compensation policies that are followed at firms in the public sector when compared to private sector firms.
QueryFind: search ranking based on users' feedback and expert's agreement

A novel ranking method named as QueryFind, based on learning from historical query logs, is proposed to predict users' information needs and reduce the seeking time from the search result list. Our method uses not only the users' feedback but also the recommendation of a source search engine. Based on this ranking method, we utilize users' feedback to evaluate the quality of Web pages implicitly. We also apply the meta-search concept to give each Web page a content-oriented ranking score. Therefore, the time users spend for seeking out their required information from search result list can be reduced and the more relevant Web pages can be presented. We also propose a novel evaluation criterion to verify the feasibility of our ranking method. The criterion is to capture the ranking order of Web pages that users have clicked from the search result list. Finally, our experiments show that the time users spend on seeking out their required information can be reduced significantly.
Frailty and polypharmacy in elderly patients are associated with a high readmission risk.

INTRODUCTION Many acutely ill elderly people are frail and suffer from polypharmacy. They often present with nonspecific symptoms at hospital admission and are therefore often under-triaged and insufficiently treated resulting in adverse health outcomes. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of polypharmacy and frailty and to identify if frailty and polypharmacy may predict adverse health outcomes in elderly patients who are acutely admitted to hospital. METHODS The study was a descriptive cohort study including patients ≥ 65 years acutely admitted to hospital during a 14-day period, n = 250. The included patients were assessed for frailty, and the total number of health problems requiring treatment, geriatric problems and medication were registered. RESULTS Frail patients suffering from polypharmacy had significantly more health problems, 13-fold longer hospital stays, they were more often discharged to nursing homes and had a five times greater risk of readmission than patients without frailty and polypharmacy. Polypharmacy was present in 62% and hyper-polypharmacy in 20% of the patients, and frailty was present in 85% of the patients with polypharmacy and in 40% of those without polypharmacy. CONCLUSION Compared with non-frail patients without polypharmacy, frail elderly patients with polypharmacy belong to a high-risk group and should receive an immediate geriatric assessment and treatment including long-term planning by the Mobile Geriatric Team. FUNDING none. TRIAL REGISTRATION The study was approved and registered with the Danish Data Protection Agency under the Capital Region of Denmark's joint notification of health research (j. no.: 2007-58-0015, AMH-2013-003, I-Suite no: 02495).