Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The burden of HIV-associated cryptococcal disease.

In this issue Park et al. from the Centers for Disease Control University of Alabama and Johannesburg South Africa have made the first attempt to estimate the global burden of HIV-associated cryptococcal infection. As clearly stated by the authors the estimates are exactly that -estimates which rely on the quality of the data on which they are based. Nevertheless the results are striking especially for sub-Saharan Africa where the estimated number of deaths associated with cryptococcal disease at half a million per year is comparable with the number attributed to tuberculosis a much more frequent infection but one for which we have much more effective and widely available therapy. So are these results credible? The data are sparse with just three incidence studies driving the estimates for sub- Saharan Africa (ruling out the possibility of evaluating or taking account of possible intraregional differences in incidence); and the reported incidences are variable resulting in wide ranges for the estimates of cases and associated deaths. However biases are as possible on the downside as on the upside. As the authors acknowledge the relatively low incidence estimate from a South African study with which some of the same authors were involved was likely affected by incomplete case ascertainment. (excerpt)
Assessing chemokine co-receptor usage in HIV

Purpose of review HIV entry into cells is mediated through sequential interactions between HIV envelope proteins (Env) and two cellular molecules: CD4 and a co-receptor, typically either CCR5 or CXCR4. Co-receptor preference has been associated with other viral traits; specifically, CXCR4-tropic viruses have been associated with increased host cell pathogenicity and more rapid progression of disease. Recently, much attention has been focused on the development of CCR5 and CXCR4 antagonists as antiviral agents and several are set to enter phase III trials in 2004 and 2005. The development of assays to assess the co-receptor tropism of HIV populations is critical for the optimal design and performance of clinical trials to evaluate these agents. In addition, the use of these agents in a clinical setting is likely to benefit from a reliable methodology for tropism determination prior to the selection of an optimal antiviral therapy or to evaluate continued efficacy of a regimen. Recent findings Tropism assays that use recombinant viruses and pseudotyped HIV are becoming more commonly employed and comparative data with standard assays have begun to be accumulated. These assays are being used to expand on earlier studies of the epidemiology and natural history of HIV tropism. In addition, tropism assays have facilitated the study of co-receptor inhibitors in vitro and in phase I and II trials. Summary The development of rapid, reliable tropism assays has been useful in advancing the development of novel antiviral agents. Defining the role of these assays in routine clinical practice will be the next important step. Abbreviations NSI: non-syncytia-inducing; SI: syncytia-inducing.
Mislocalizations of Visual Elevation and Visual Vertical Induced by Visual Pitch: the Great Circle Model a

The elevation visually perceived as eye level (VPEL) changes linearly with the pitch of an illuminated visual field. The magnitude of influence is only slightly less when the visual field contains only two dim vertical lines in darkness than when it is complexly structured and normally illuminated. Pitching a visual field consisting of only a single line in darkness produces an influence that is only slightly smaller than the 2-line stimulus. The slopes of the VPEL-vs.-pitch functions for the complex room, 2-line stimulus, and 1-line stimulus are +0.63, +0.56, and +0.52 respectively. Although VPEL is systematically influenced by the pitch of the 2-line stimulus, the orientation of a small line within a frontal plane that is visually perceived as vertical is unaffected. However, when the two lines are pitched by equal amounts in opposite directions, the offset of VPV from true vertical changes linearly with pitch magnitude but VPEL is unaffected. These results are identical to those obtained when the two vertical lines are rolled within the frontal plane, a result that depends on some identities between roll and pitch: roll of two parallel lines in the same direction influences VPV but not VPEL; roll of the two lines in opposite directions influences VPEL but not VPV. The interaction between stimulus conditions and discriminations demonstrates that separate mechanisms are in control of VPEL and of VPV. The slope of the VPEL-vs.-pitch function increases exponentially with line length for the 1-line stimulus (space constant = 15.1 degrees). Summation of influences on VPEL for two lines horizontally separated by 50.3 degrees is as great as for two coextensive lines. The above results are predicted from the Great Circle Model which assumes (1) central projection on a spherical approximation to an erect stationary eye; (2) the sign and magnitude of influence of each line on VPEL and on VPV are determined by the direction and magnitude of the separation between the upper pole of the spherical eye and the intersection of the great circle containing the line's image with the central vertical retinal meridian and with the midfrontal retinal meridian, respectively; (3) the influence of individual nonparallel lines is determined by a weighted average of the influences of individual sets of parallel lines; (4) a generalized version of the Great Circle Model is indicated in which extraretinal signals from head and eye are taken into account.
Adolescent psychiatric in-patients. A high-risk group for premature death.

BACKGROUND Research has demonstrated increased mortality rates in adolescent psychiatric in-patients. AIMS To investigate this excess mortality by calculating standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) relative to cause of death, diagnosis, cohort and age. METHOD A nationwide Norwegian sample of 1095 former adolescent psychiatric in-patients were followed up 15-33 years after first hospitalisation by record linkage to the National Death Cause Registry. RESULTS The SMR was significantly increased for almost all causes of death investigated. In males, all psychiatric diagnoses had significantly increased SMRs, whereas in females, organic mental disorder, anxiety disorder and affective disorder had non-significantly increased SMRs. The SMR was significantly elevated for all age-spans and cohorts investigated. CONCLUSIONS A broad prevention strategy is needed to combat the increased mortality rates found in adolescent psychiatric in-patients.
Older Adults' Attitudes Toward Death: Links to Perceptions of Health and Concerns about End-of-Life Issues

The current study had two primary goals, to determine whether: 1) self-rated mental and physical health, pain, and experience with health problems were predictors of elderly adults' attitudes toward death; and 2) death attitudes predict end-of-life medical treatment concerns. Participants were 109 adults, 65 years of age and older (M=78.74 years), recruited from the local community. Regression analyses indicated that poorer perceived physical health predicted a greater likelihood of viewing death as an escape, and poorer perceived mental health predicted a greater fear of death. Viewing death as an escape and fearing death predicted end-of-life medical treatment concerns; a greater endorsement of either attitude predicted more concern. Possible explanations for the links between perceived health, attitudes toward death, and concern about end-of-life issues are suggested.
Antenna tilt and interaction with open loop power control in homogeneous uplink LTE networks

Antenna tilt is an effective inter-cell interference reduction technique which has been studied a lot previously in the CDMA-based systems. In this paper, we concentrate on the evaluations of the mechanical antenna downtilt in the uplink LTE networks. The SINR performance and the trade-off between the cell coverage and capacity are studied in a homogeneous scenario. Simulation results in Macro 1 show, downtilt angle at 12° to 16° has the optimal performance in terms of SINR and the cell coverage is maximized at downtilt angle 16°. The interaction of the antenna tilt with the open loop power control scheme defined in the 3GPP standard is also studied. Results show that, with certain ¿ value, there is no impact to the choice of optimal P0 value with different antenna downtilt angles. For the ¿ value equal to 0.6 and 1.0 respectively, there are about 75% and 37.5% increases in terms of cell coverage and about 47% and 39% increases in terms of cell capacity.
Fast Training for Large-Scale One-versus-All Linear Classifiers using Tree-Structured Initialization

We consider the problem of training one-versus-all (OVA) linear classiﬁers for multiclass or multilabel classiﬁcation when the number of labels is large. A naive extension of OVA to this problem, even with hundreds of cores, usually requires hours for training on large real world datasets. We propose a novel algorithm called OVA-Primal++ that speeds up the training of OVA by using a tree-structured training order, where each classiﬁer is trained using its parent’s classiﬁer as initialization. OVA-Primal++ is both theoretically and empirically faster than the naive OVA algorithm, and yet still enjoys the same highly parallelizability and small memory footprint. Extensive experiments on multiclass and multilabel classiﬁcation datasets validate the eﬀectiveness of our method.
Justice and Organizational Citizenship Behavior Intentions: Fair Rewards Versus Fair Treatment

Abstract In a sample of 114 employees from various industries, organizations, and positions, the likelihood of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) increased when employee perceptions of fair treatment by supervisors became more positive. Perceptions of fair rewards and fair formal procedures were not predictors of OCB intentions. After the authors controlled for established patterns of OCB and demographic characteristics, interactional justice perceptions were significantly related to the intention of performing specific organizationally beneficial activities.
Echocardiography as a guide for patent ductus arteriosus ibuprofen treatment and efficacy prediction*

Objective: To evaluate echocardiography criteria in predicting the response to ibuprofen treatment. Design: A prospective cohort study of preterm infants untreated or treated with ibuprofen for patent ductus arteriosus. Setting: Three academic neonatal intensive care units. Patients: Two hundred fifty-two preterm infants of 27–31 wks gestation. Interventions: Ibuprofen treatment within the first 5 days of life was indicated when at least two out of four conventional echocardiography criteria were observed: ductal diameter >2 mm, left-right ductal shunt maximum velocity <2 m/sec, mean flow velocity in left pulmonary artery >0.4 m/sec, and end-diastolic flow velocity in left pulmonary artery >0.2 m/sec. Measurements and Main Results: Of the infants analyzed, 135 had a closed ductus at an average age of 1.9 ± 0.9 days, and 43 had an open ductus but <2 predefined criteria. Seventy-four infants (29%) received ibuprofen on day 2.2 ± 1.1. Sixteen infants failed ibuprofen and nine had to undergo surgical ligation. The left-right ductal shunt maximum velocity criterion had the best negative predictive value for treatment response, while the ductal diameter criterion had the best positive predictive value. Conclusions: Echocardiography may be a useful tool to help patent ductus arteriosus management. A combined use of ductal diameter and left-right ductal shunt maximum velocity criteria allows a more accurate prediction of the response of infants with patent ductus arteriosus to ibuprofen treatment.
Effects of Ooplasm Manipulation on DNA Methylation and Growth of Progeny in Mice1

Abstract New techniques to boost male and female fertility are being pioneered at a rapid pace in fertility clinics to increase the efficiency of assisted reproduction methods in couples in which natural conception has not been achieved. This study investigates the possible epigenetic effects of ooplasm manipulation methods on postnatal growth and development using a mouse genetic model, with particular emphasis on the possible effects of intergenotype manipulations. We performed interstrain and control intrastrain maternal pronuclear transfers, metaphase-II spindle transfers, and ooplasm transfer between C57BL/6 and DBA/2 mice, and found no major, long-term growth defects or epigenetic abnormalities, in either males or females, associated with intergenotype transfers. Ooplasm transfer itself was associated with reduced viability, and additional subtle effects of ooplasm strain of origin were observed. Both inter- and intrastrain ooplasm transfer were associated with subtle, transient effects on growth early in life. We also performed inter- and intrastrain germinal vesicle transfers (GVTs). Interstrain GVT females, but not males, had significantly lower body weights at birth and thereafter compared with the intrastrain GVT and non-GVT controls. No GVT-associated changes were observed in DNA methylation of the Mup1, Rasgrf1, H19, Snrpn, or Peg3 genes, nor any difference in expression of the imprinted Rasgrf1, Igf2r, or Mest genes. These results indicate that some ooplasm manipulation procedures may exert subtle effects on growth early in life, while intergenotype GVT can result in significant growth deficiencies after birth.
Optimal stopping of Hunt and Lévy processes

Infinite horizon (perpetual) optimal stopping problems for Hunt processes on R are studied via the representation theory of excessive functions. In particular, we focus on problems with one-sided structure, that is, there exists a point x* such that the stopping region is of the form . The main result states that if it is possible to find a Radon measure such that the excessive function induced by this measure via the spectral representation has some very intuitive properties then the constructed excessive function coincides with the value function of the problem. Corresponding results for two-sided problems are also indicated. Specializing to Lévy processes, we obtain, by applying the Wiener–Hopf factorization, a general representation of the value function in terms of the maximum of the Lévy process. To illustrate the results, an explicit expression for the Green kernel of Brownian motion with exponential jumps is computed and some optimal stopping problems for Poisson process with positive exponential jumps and negative drift are solved.
The Effect of Planned Baby Care Education Given to Primiparous Mothers on Maternal Attachment and Self-Confidence Levels

This study was conducted to examine the effect of planned baby care education on maternal attachment and self-confidence levels in primiparous mothers. The research was carried out using a pre-test, post-test, quasi-experimental design with a control group. In the intervention group, mothers were given planned baby care education and an education booklet. Both the median maternal attachment score and the mean self-confidence score increased by statistically significant levels in the intervention group, whereas there were no significant differences in the control group. It is recommended that primiparous mothers in particular should receive education regarding baby care.
What Drives the Demand for Temporary Agency Workers?

Temporary agency employment has grown steadily in most European countries over the past three decades as part of the general trend towards increased employment flexibility. Yet to this day, it remains an open question what drives the demand for temporary agency workers. The paper examines, first, whether the deregulation of temporary agency employment is responsible for the growth of the flexible staffing industry. Second, we investigate the cyclical behavior of temporary agency employment. Using monthly data for Germany covering the period 1973-2008, we show that the continuous liberalization of this sector is not responsible for the surge in temporary agency employment. Our analysis reveals, moreover, that temporary agency employment exhibits strong cyclical behavior and correlates with main economic indicators in real time. Since most European countries promoted the use of temporary agency employment in a similar way, we believe that our results may be interesting from an international perspective as well.
Semi-supervised lexical acquisition for wide-coverage parsing

State-of-the-art parsers suffer from incomplete lexicons, as evidenced by the fact that they all contain built-in methods for dealing with out-of-lexicon items at parse time. Since new labelled data is expensive to produce and no amount of it will conquer the long tail, we attempt to address this problem by leveraging the enormous amount of raw text available for free, and expanding the lexicon offline, with a semi-supervised word learner. We accomplish this with a method similar to self-training, where a fully trained parser is used to generate new parses with which the next generation of parser is trained. This thesis introduces Chart Inference (CI), a two-phase word-learning method with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), operating on the level of the partial parse as produced by a trained parser. CI uses the parsing model and lexicon to identify the CCG category type for one unknown word in a context of known words by inferring the type of the sentence using a model of end punctuation, then traversing the chart from the top down, filling in each empty cell as a function of its mother and its sister. We first specify the CI algorithm, and then compare it to two baseline wordlearning systems over a battery of learning tasks. CI is shown to outperform the baselines in every task, and to function in a number of applications, including grammar acquisition and domain adaptation. This method performs consistently better than self-training, and improves upon the standard POS-backoff strategy employed by the baseline StatCCG parser by adding new entries to the lexicon. The first learning task establishes lexical convergence over a toy corpus, showing that CI’s ability to accurately model a target lexicon is more robust to initial conditions than either of the baseline methods. We then introduce a novel natural language corpus based on children’s educational materials, which is fully annotated with CCG derivations. We use this corpus as a testbed to establish that CI is capable in principle of recovering the whole range of category types necessary for a wide-coverage lexicon. The complexity of the learning task is then increased, using the CCGbank corpus, a version of the Penn Treebank, and showing that CI improves as its initial seed corpus is increased. The next experiment uses CCGbank as the seed and attempts to recover missing question-type categories in the TREC question answering corpus. The final task extends the coverage of the CCGbank-trained parser by running CI over the raw text of the Gigaword corpus. Where appropriate, a fine-grained error analysis is also undertaken to supplement the quantitative evaluation of the parser performance with deeper reasoning as to the linguistic points of the lexicon and parsing model.
Sensitivity to diaminodiphenylmethane

On patch testing 1633 consecutive patients with contact dermatitis with diaminodiphenylmethane (methylenedianiline), we obtained positive reactions in 27 patients (1.7%: no statistically significant sex difference). We had difficulty in advising the patients. 2 were positive to diaminodiphenylmethane and to the Polish epoxy resin Epidian 5, and a 3rd was positive to diaminodiphenylmethane and triethylenetetramine. None of these 3 patients had ever heard the words "diaminodiphenylmethane" or "methylenedianiline", although they reported at least I year of occupational exposure to epoxy resins. In these 3 patients, primary allergy to this hardener is possible although not proven. All 27 patients positive to diaminodiphenylmethane were tested with a standard series containing 3 aromatic amines, and 8 were tested also with p-toluidine and aniline. All those tested with p-toluidine were positive to it, and 62.5% of those tested with aniline. II out of 27 hypersensitive to diaminodiphenylmethane (40.7%) patients were not positive to any of the aromatic amines in the standard series. Of the remaining 16 patients, 13 (that is, 48.1% of all those positive to diaminodiphenylmethane) were positive top-phenylenediamine, 7 to benzocaine (25.9%) and 4 to IPPD (14.8%). We think that, in some of these patients, positive patch tests to diaminodiphenylmethane were due to cross-reactions with other aromatic amines.
Immunohistochemical Investigation of BRAF p.V600E Mutations in Thyroid Carcinoma Using 2 Separate BRAF Antibodies

Background:Approximately 45% of papillary thyroid carcinomas harbor BRAF p.V600E mutations and current practice algorithms endorse molecular testing for BRAF p.V600E. We assessed the utility of immunohistochemistry to detect BRAF p.V600E mutations in thyroid carcinomas using 2 separate BRAF monoclonal antibodies: one that detects both mutant and wild-type protein (pan-BRAF) and another that detects only the mutant protein (mut-BRAF). Methods:We selected 41 formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded thyroid carcinomas (29 papillary, 1 follicular, 7 medullary, and 4 anaplastic) from 37 thyroidectomies and 4 fine-needle aspirations. Immunohistochemistry was performed using a pan-BRAF (clone EP152Y) or a mut-BRAF (clone VE1) monoclonal antibody. Tumors were considered positive if >10% of neoplastic cells showed moderate (2+) or strong (3+) cytoplasmic staining. BRAF p.V600E mutations were confirmed by molecular pyrosequencing, the gold standard for statistical analysis. Results:pan-BRAF reactivity was observed in 80.5% (n=33) of cases: 34.1% (n=14) harbored BRAF p.V600E mutations and 46.3% (n=19) were wild type. mut-BRAF reactivity was observed in 46.3% (n=19) of cases: 34.1% (n=14) harbored BRAF p.V600E mutations and 12.2% (n=5) were wild type. The pan-BRAF antibody detected 14 more false positives (specificity: 29.6%, PPV: 42.4%) compared with the mut-BRAF antibody (specificity: 61.5%, PPV: 73.7%), but both antibodies detected the same 5 false positives. No false negatives were detected with either antibody (sensitivity and NPV 100.0% for both). Conclusions:The suboptimal specificity and PPV limits the diagnostic utility of both antibodies to reliably detect BRAF p.V600E mutations in thyroid carcinoma. However, both antibodies provide excellent sensitivity and NPV and either could be used to exclude BRAF wild-type thyroid carcinomas before molecular testing.
Nebivolol: An Endothelium-Friendly Selective &bgr;1-Adrenoceptor Blocker

Abstract Nebivolol is a highly selective &bgr;1-adrenoceptor blocker, which also stimulates endothelial nitric oxide synthase and scavenges reactive oxygen species (ROS). These characteristics endow nebivolol, compared with conventional &bgr;-blockers, with a favorable hemodynamic profile for the treatment of hypertension, chronic heart failure, and possibly other cardiovascular diseases. Nebivolol is a racemic mixture of d- and l-isomers. Its &bgr;1-antagonistic properties reside primarily with d-nebivolol although both isomers are capable of increasing the release of NO from the endothelium after binding to &bgr;2- or &bgr;3-adrenergic receptors. The latter action results in vasodilatation and reduced vascular resistance. Nebivolol also scavenges ROS in a receptor-independent manner by direct interaction with free radicals. By scavenging ROS nebivolol not only reduces oxidant stress but also augments NO bioavailability. The endothelial nitric oxide synthase –stimulating and ROS scavenging effects of nebivolol act synergistically to provide cardiovascular protection in addition to its &bgr;1-antagonistic action.