Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of tobacco warning labels in informing smokers about risks of smoking among bus drivers in Mangalore, India.

BACKGROUND Smoking tobacco is considered as a leading cause of preventable death, mostly in developing countries like India. One of the primary goals of international tobacco control is to educate smokers about the risks associated with tobacco consumption. Tobacco warning labels (TWLs) on cigarette packages are one of the most common statutory means to communicate health risks of smoking to smokers, with the hope that once educated, they will be more likely to quit the habit. MATERIALS AND METHODS The present survey was conducted to assess the effectiveness of TWLs in communicating health risks of tobacco usage among 263 adult smokers working as bus drivers in Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC), Mangalore, India. Information was collected on demographic details, exposure and response to health warnings on tobacco products, intention to quit and nicotine dependency. RESULTS The majority (79.5%) of the respondents revealed negative intentions towards quitting smoking. Nearly half of the participants had a 'low' nicotine dependency (47.5%) and 98.1% of the respondents had often noticed warning labels on tobacco packages. These health warnings made 71.5% of the respondents think about quitting smoking. Respondents who noticed advertisement or pictures about dangers of smoking had better knowledge, with respect to lung cancer and impotence as a consequence of tobacco. A higher exposure to warning labels was significantly associated with lower nicotine dependency levels of smokers among the present study population. A significantly higher number of respondents who noticed advertisement or pictures about the dangers of smoking thought about the risks of smoking and were more inclined to think about quitting smoking. As exposure increased, an increase in the knowledge and response of participants was also observed. CONCLUSIONS Exposure to tobacco warning labels helps to educate smokers about health risks of tobacco smoking. It may be possible to promote oral health among bus drivers by developing strategies to educate them about these risk factors.
Prevalence of nasopharyngeal antibiotic-resistant pneumococcal carriage in children attending private paediatric practices in Johannesburg.

OBJECTIVES To determine the nasopharyngeal carriage rate, serogroups/types, and antibiotic resistance of Streptococcus pneumoniae in children attending paediatric practices in the private sector in Johannesburg and to relate patterns of resistance to antimicrobial exposure and other demographic characteristics in individual children. DESIGN A total of 303 children aged from 1 month to 5 years were recruited from eight private paediatric practices in northern Johannesburg. Nasopharyngeal samples were taken and parent interviews were conducted. RESULTS Pneumococci were isolated from 121 children (40%). The most common serotypes were 6B, 19F, 6A, 23F, 14, and 19A. Carriage was significantly associated with prior hospital admission (odds ratio 1.89) and day care attendance (odds ratio 2.31) and was negatively associated with antibiotic use within the previous 30 days. Antibiotic resistance was found in 84 isolates (69.4%); 45 (37.2%) were multiply resistant. One-third of the pneumococci showed intermediate level resistance to penicillin and 12.4% were highly resistant. There was a high level erythromycin resistance in 38% of the isolates. A total of 94/214 children (42%) had recently used antibiotics and were four times more likely to carry antibiotic-resistant pneumococci (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION Pneumococcal resistance was significant in this group of children with easy access to paediatric services and antibiotic use. The implication of such high resistance for the treatment of pneumococcal diseases is that high-dose amoxicillin is the preferred empirical oral therapy for treatment of otitis media. Ceftriaxone or cefotaxime should be used in combination with vancomycin for the treatment of meningitis until a cephalosporin-resistant pneumococcal cause is excluded. Intravenous penicillin or ampicillin will successfully treat pneumococcal pneumonia in this population. Antimicrobial resistance among pneumococci colonising children in the private sector has increased dramatically in recent years.
Validity and Reliability of the MTI Photoscreener

Objectives. The prevalence and necessity for early detection sion problems illustrate the need for improved methods of vision screening in preschool children. This study assessed the validity and reliability of a new device, the MTI Photoscreener in a cross-sectional field study. Methods. An appropriate sample size (>140) was calculated and recruited for the study. All children (N = 161) in a migrant workers summer education program were screened with the MTI Photoscreener. Simultaneously and in a masked design, disease status was determined by the odified Clinic Technique, a well established method for diagnosing the conditions which the MTI screener was designed to detect. Results. Validity measures revealed a sensitivity of 54%, specificity of 87%, Ø coefficient of 0.40, and positive predictive value of 52%. Repeatability was assessed by the k coefficient, by a test for effect modification by examiner, and by comparison of sensitivity and specificity across 12 masked examiners. The k coefficient was 0.38. A test for effect modification suggested that differences existed among the examiners. Variability of sensitivity was high, but variability of specificity was low. Conclusions. Methods for vision screening in preschool children are limited. The MTI Photoscreener is an easy and efficient method, but the validity and reliability is a concern. Comparison of our results with other studies suggests future potential for this instrument provided protocols are refined and further field studies reveal efficacy.
A prospective evaluation of the angiotensin‐converting enzyme D/I polymorphism and left ventricular remodeling in the ‘Healing and Early Afterload Reducing Therapy’ Study

The D/I (deletion, D, insertion, I) polymorphism of the angiotensin‐converting enzyme (ACE) gene has been extensively studied for its association with a number of cardiovascular and other disease states. However, its potential association with differential clinical efficacy of ACE inhibitors (ACE‐I) administered to patients who had suffered a myocardial infarction (MI), i.e. the prevention of left ventricular (LV) remodeling, has so far not been specifically studied. The aim of the study was to investigate whether the D/I polymorphism of the ACE gene is associated with the incidence of post‐MI LV remodeling in patients drawn from the ‘Healing and Early Afterload Reducing Therapy’ (HEART) Study. The ACE D/I polymorphism was characterized by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in 265 subjects from the ‘Healing and Early Afterload Reducing Therapy’ Study, a double‐blind, placebo‐controlled trial with the objective of determining whether early or delayed administration of the ACE‐I, ramipril, in patients with acute anterior wall MI would be optimal in reducing LV enlargement. Selected frequencies for the ACE D and I alleles were 0.59 and 0.41 (placebo–high dose group), 0.56 and 0.44 (low dose–low dose group), and, 0.60 and 0.40 (high dose–high dose group), respectively. All observed genotype frequencies were in Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium. There was no evidence for an association between genotype and outcome regarding LV size or function, nor with the initial blood pressure response after ACE‐I administration (adjusted for covariates). Our data provide no evidence for an association of the ACE D/I polymorphism with the risk of LV remodeling post‐MI in the presence of ACE‐I therapy, and therefore do not suggest that differential clinical efficacy of ACE‐inhibitors is related to this genetic marker.
Improving Mountainous Snow Cover Fraction Mapping via Artificial Neural Networks Combined With MODIS and Ancillary Topographic Data

A multilayer feedforward artificial neural network (ANN) is developed for mountainous fractional snow cover (FSC) mapping. This is trained with back propagation to learn the relationship between FSC and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products (reflectance at seven bands, normalized difference snow index, land surface temperature (LST), and FSC) and elevation. In this paper, images from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and MODIS products from three periods are chosen to test and validate the proposed method at the Heihe River Basin. Three binary snow cover maps derived from Landsat ETM+ images are used to calculate FSC. Two of these maps are first used to train, calibrate, and test the ANN. The other independent image is used to test the generalization ability of network. Results show that the ANN can easily incorporate auxiliary information to improve the accuracy of snow cover mapping effectively. It is also capable of mapping snow cover fraction in a complicated mountainous area with considerable generalization. For the nonindependent test set, the performance evaluation results show that the improvements of ANN-based methods are apparent compared with MODIS FSC products (higher correlation coefficient, lower root-mean-square error, and more accurate total snow cover area). For the temporal/temporal-spatial independent test set, ANN-based methods perform slightly worse than the nonindependent test set, but the accuracy of the ANN methods still shows some improvement. Elevation, LST, and FSC play more important roles in the training process of the ANN. Overall, experiment 8, which integrated all input information, is approved the best in all test sets.
Are Older Adult German Women Satisfied with Their Lives? On the Role of Life Domains, Partnership Status, and Self-Construal

Along with increased life expectancy, successful aging and possibilities for increasing well-being in old age have become important research topics in recent years. The present study (a) examines the relationship between satisfaction in several life domains (with respect to family, friendships, and health) and general life satisfaction of older adult women in Germany, and (b) determines which factors moderate the importance of satisfaction in these different life domains for the evaluation of general life satisfaction. More precisely, we examine the role of partnership status and self-construal. The sample consisted of 98 German women between the age of 58 and 83 years (M = 69.6 years; SD = 5.9 years) who were interviewed in the framework of the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural Value of Children Study. Results showed that for women living with a partner, satisfaction with family was most important for their general life satisfaction, whereas for women without a partner, satisfaction with friendships a.
Cloud attenuation time series synthesizer for earth-space links operating at optical frequencies

This paper provides a new stochastic model for the calculation of cloud attenuation time series for Earth-space links at optical frequencies. The presented methodology is based on the employment of stochastic differential equations for the generation of time series of cloud fields. More specifically, we propose a dynamic stochastic model for the evaluation of Integrated Liquid Water Content (ILWC) that reproduces the first order statistics and afterwards we calculate the attenuation due to clouds. In the Numerical Results Section we present first order statistics for the ILWC for various regions generated by the model and also some snapshots of cloud attenuation time series examples. Some useful conclusions are drawn.
Human PaPillomaviruses Human papillomaviruses were considered by a previous

The HPV genome is divided into three regions: the long control region (LCR), which regulates viral gene expression and replication; the early (E) region, which encodes proteins required for viral gene expression, replication and survival; and the late (L) region, which encodes the viral structural proteins. The designations E and L refer to the phase in the viral life cycle when these proteins are first expressed.
HOME-RANGE SIZE AND SPACING PATTERNS OF MACROPHYLLUM MACROPHYLLUM (PHYLLOSTOMIDAE) FORAGING OVER WATER

Abstract We studied home-range size and patterns of range use of long-legged bats, Macrophyllum macrophyllum (Phyllostomidae), at Barro Colorado Nature Monument, Panama, by using radiotelemetry. Movements of 4 males and 5 females fitted with radiotransmitters were monitored for 4–7 entire nights each between April and July 2002. M. macrophyllum had an extensive range compared to other similar-sized phyllostomid bats. Median home-range size for the 9 individuals tracked was 23.9 ha (range 7.3–150.7 ha). With a median of 17.3 ha (range = 7.3–24.9 ha), home ranges of males were somewhat, but not significantly, smaller than those of females (44.4 ha, range = 16.3–150.7 ha). The bats foraged exclusively over water, whereby hunting activity was restricted to the immediate shoreline of Gatun Lake. Foraging areas ranged from 2.7 to 96.1 ha, with a median of 12.3 ha for both sexes. In general, there was high night-to-night consistency in the use of foraging areas. Most bats had multiple foraging and core areas. Core-use areas corresponded to approximately 35% of the bats' foraging areas and were larger in females (median = 5.3 ha, range = 1.1–54.1 ha) than in males (3.3 ha, range = 2.6–8.7 ha). Maximum range span varied from 0.5 to 7.5 km, whereby males in general and 1 tracked harem male in particular foraged much closer to the day roost than did females. Individual M. macrophyllum traveled an estimated 35–47 km on a nightly basis, and females moved significantly greater distances than did males. Our results do not provide support for the proposition that small bats typically have small home ranges. In contrast, we conclude that foraging strategy, diet, dispersion of food resources, and wing morphology are generally better predictors of home-range size. Furthermore, reproductive condition, as well as intraspecific competition linked to colony size or social status, also strongly affect the spacing behavior and movement patterns of these bats. Our results suggest that, although M. macrophyllum employs a gleaning foraging strategy, it closely parallels aerial insectivorous bats in terms of range size and movement distances.
Persistence for the masses: RRB-vectors in a systems language

Relaxed Radix Balanced Trees (RRB-Trees) is one of the latest members in a family of persistent tree based data-structures that combine wide branching factors with simple and relatively flat structures. Like the battle-tested immutable sequences of Clojure and Scala, they have effectively constant lookup and updates, good cache utilization, but also logarithmic concatenation and slicing. Our goal is to bring the benefits of persistent data structures to the discipline of systems programming via generic yet efficient immutable vectors supporting transient batch updates. We describe a C++ implementation that can be integrated in the runtime of higher level languages with a C core (Lisps like Guile or Racket, but also Python or Ruby), thus widening the access to these persistent data structures. In this work we propose (1) an Embedding RRB-Tree (ERRB-Tree) data structure that efficiently stores arbitrary unboxed types, (2) a technique for implementing tree operations orthogonal to optimizations for a more compact representation of the tree, (3) a policy-based design to support multiple memory management and reclamation mechanisms (including automatic garbage collection and reference counting), (4) a model of transience based on move-semantics and reference counting, and (5) a definition of transience for confluent meld operations. Combining these techniques a performance comparable to that of mutable arrays can be achieved in many situations, while using the data structure in a functional way.
Ancient texts and archaeology revisited – radiocarbon and Biblical dating in the southern Levant

The Iron Age sequence in the southern Levant is one of the most evocative and provocative in ancient history, since it coincides with events remembered in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The authors show how a scientific chronological framework can be created and contribute an independent voice to the historical debate. They also show that, if archaeology is to complement history, such a framework requires an especially rigorous application of precision, in context definition, data handling and Bayesian radiocarbon dating, and urge such application to forthcoming work at the key Biblical site of Megiddo.
Child Care Quality in Different State Policy Contexts.

Using data from the Child Care Supplement to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we test associations between the quality of child care and state child care policies. These data, which include observations of child care and interviews with care providers and mothers for 777 children across 14 states, allow for comparisons across a broader range of policy regimes and care settings than earlier research on this topic. Using multilevel linear and logistic models, we found that more generous subsidy policies (that is, greater investment, higher income eligibility) were positively associated with the quality of care in nonprofit child care centers, as well as with the use of center care. The stringency of regulations (that is, teacher education requirements, teacher-child ratios|thresholds) was also associated with both quality and type of care, but in more complex ways. Higher teacher training requirements were positively associated with the quality of both family child care and nonprofit centers, while more stringent regulations decreased the number of children attending center care. No links were found between state policies and the quality of for-profit center care. The implications for policy makers, advocates, and policy analysts are discussed. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management
Generating ‘tiger’ as an animal name or a word beginning with T: differences in brain activation

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate differences in regional cerebral activity during word retrieval in response to different prompts. The contrast of semantic category fluency and initial letter fluency resulted in selective activation of left temporal regions; the reverse contrast yielded activation in left frontal regions (BA44/6). A further comparison between types of category fluency demonstrated a more anterior temporal response for natural kinds and more posterior activation for manipulable manmade objects. These results support behavioural data suggesting that category fluency is relatively more dependent on temporal-lobe regions, and initial letter fluency on frontal structures; and that categorical word retrieval is not a uniformly distributed function within the brain. This is compatible with the category-specific deficits observed after some focal lesions.
Design approaches for timber-glass beams

This paper relates to the mechanical performance of timber-glass composite beams, which take exceptional advantage of the combination of the materials involved. Beam bending tests were performed with beams made from float glass and heat-strengthened glass. Three different adhesive types were used: silicone, acrylate and epoxy. The test results show that, with a proper design, the timber is able to transfer load after glass failure and hence collapse is delayed and a ductile behavior can be obtained. The results from the tests were compared with an analytical method using the gamma-method and the agreement between the analytical method and the tests are shown to be excellent.
Isolation of a CD8αα+ CD4– tumour T‐cell clone with cytotoxic activity from a CD4+ CD8– cutaneous T‐cell lymphoma

Background We have previously established tumour T‐cell lines, both from the skin and from the blood of patients with a cutaneous T‐cell lymphoma (CTCL). In one patient, the tumour cells and the derived cell lines had a CD3+ CD4+ CD8– phenotype and a trisomy of chromosome 7. They expressed three T‐cell receptor (TCR) β‐chain transcripts, but only one was productively rearranged and expressed at the cell membrane.
Role of the beta(3)-adrenoceptor in urine storage in the rat: comparison between the selective beta(3)-adrenoceptor agonist, CL316, 243, and various smooth muscle relaxants.

The objective of this study was to compare the effects of a beta(3)-adrenoceptor (beta(3)-AR) agonist on bladder function and cardiovascular parameters in rats with those of several drugs that act on smooth muscle. CL316,243 (beta(3)-AR agonist), isoproterenol (nonselective beta-AR agonist), procaterol (beta(2)-AR agonist), verapamil (Ca(2+) antagonist), and papaverine (antispastic drug) each evoked a concentration-dependent relaxation of the detrusor in vitro. They also reduced bladder pressure in anesthetized rats, the beta-AR agonists apparently being more potent than the other drugs. Atropine (muscarinic antagonist) neither relaxed detrusor strips nor reduced bladder pressure. In anesthetized rats, CL316,243 and atropine each had only a slight influence on blood pressure and heart rate, but isoproterenol, procaterol, verapamil, and papaverine significantly affected cardiovascular function at the same dose range as that required to reduce bladder pressure. In cystometry experiments, CL316,243 (10 microg/kg i.v.), verapamil (1 mg/kg i.v.), and papaverine (1 mg/kg i.v.) all significantly prolonged micturition interval and increased bladder capacity, but did not change the residual urine volume after a micturition contraction. Procaterol (100 microg/kg i.v.) prolonged the micturition interval and increased both bladder capacity and residual urine volume (all significantly). Atropine (100 microg/kg i.v.) reduced micturition pressure and increased residual urine volume (both significantly). Because the human detrusor, like the rat detrusor, relaxes on beta(3)-AR stimulation, we conclude that this beta(3)-AR agonist may have potential in pollakiuria (frequent urination) as a therapeutic agent without cardiovascular side effects.
Correlation Between MR Imaging and Discography With Provocative Concordant Pain in Patients With Low Back Pain

ObjectiveThis study aimed to correlate magnetic resonance (MR) findings and discography with pain response at provocative discography in patients with low back pain. MethodsNinety-three patients who underwent MR imaging of the lumbar spine and subsequent provocation discography as part of a clinical evaluation of low back pain were enrolled in the study. MR images were then evaluated for disc degeneration, high-intensity zone (HIZ), and endplate abnormalities. In the procedure of discography, concordant pain was denoted as positive, whereas discordant pain and no pain were denoted as negative. Finally, MR and discographic findings were analyzed by &khgr;2 test based on results of concordant pain. ResultsDiscography was conducted on 256 discs successfully, 116 discs of which presented with concordant pain, and the others presented with discordant pain. There were 141 discs were evaluated as Grade I-III on MR images, 17 of which presented with concordant pain; 115 were evaluated as Grade IV-V, 99 of which presented with concordant pain. HIZ was found in 60 discs, 52 of which had concordant pain. The endplate abnormalities were observed in 58 discs, 51 of which manifested concordant pain. Concordant pain was significant correlated with Type IV-V discs on discography (&khgr;2=144.08, r=0.60, P<0.01), Grade IV-V disc degeneration on MR image (&khgr;2=137.11, r=0.59, P<0.01), the presence of HIZ (&khgr;2=51.93, r=0.41, P<0.01), and endplate abnormalities (&khgr;2=52.76, r=0.41, P<0.01). DiscussionDisc degeneration grades on MR imaging showed an association with discographic grades. Type IV-V discs on discography, Grade IV-V disc on MR images, the presence of HIZ, and endplate abnormalities might indicate discogenic pain in patients with chronic low back pain.