Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ASSOCIATION BETWEEN LATENT AUTOIMMUNE DIABETES OF ADULTS (LADA) IN TYPE II DM IN IRAQ WITH Helicobacter pylori INFECTION

Background: Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) accounts for 2%-12% of all cases of diabetes. Patients are typically diagnosed after 35 years of age and are often misdiagnosed as type Ⅱ Diabetes Mellitus (DM). Glycemic control is initially achieved with sulfonylureas but patients eventually become insulin dependent more rapidly than with type Ⅱ DM patients. Although they have a type Ⅱ DM phenotype, patients have circulating beta (β) cell autoantibodies, a hallmark of type Ⅰ DM. Alternative terms that have been used to describe this condition include type 1.5 diabetes, latent type Ⅰ diabetes, slowly progressive Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus, or youth onset diabetes of maturity. With regards to its autoimmune basis and rapid requirement for insulin, it has been suggested that LADA is a slowly progressive form of type Ⅰ DM. Objective: The objective of the present study was to evaluate the ratio of Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adults (LADA) patients among Iraqi type II DM, To quantify the association between H. pylori infection and (LADA) patients and To detection of H. Pylori IgG and detection of its virulence factors (anti-CagA and anti-VacA) and which of them is more prevalence with H. pylori positive samples. Methods: A total of 350 patients with type II DM admitted to National Diabetes center of AL-Mustansiriyah University/ Al-Yarmouk/ Baghdad. Blood sample where collected from 350 patients and serum sample collected from these patients and 40 healthy persons. Radioimmunoassay technique using to identify the C-peptide serum levels of these patients, ELISA technique for detection of anti-GAD65, anti-H.pylori IgG, anti-CagA and anti-VacA, also the Blood HbA1c concentration were measured. Results: The diagnosis of LADA patients was based on clinical findings, immunological and chemical analysis of blood. Fifty-seven of patients were have low C-peptide serum level, from which, 40 patients were have autoantibody to Glutamic Acid Decarboxylase (Anti-GAD65 Ab) diagnosed as LADA patients and the other seventeen patients as classical type II (positive control). The mean C-peptide level in patients with LADA was 0.30 ng/ml, 1.94 ng/ml in control and 3.15 ng/ml in classical type II. It is clear from the range of serum C-peptide level that there are no overlapping values seen for serum C-peptide in groups. Conclusion: Serum C-peptide levels can be used in the early diagnosis of LADA patients; Also Anti-GAD65 is more valuable marker than the other predictive marker. Similarly, they may be may be useful in differential diagnosis among types of diabetes to assess treatment efficacy.
Evaluation of the Portable HealthWear Armband: a device to measure total daily energy expenditure in free-living type 2 diabetic individuals.

Lifestyle modifications involving diet and exercise are effective in reducing the incidence of type 2 diabetes (1–3). In particular, lifestyle changes targeted toward increasing daily energy expenditure are a cornerstone treatment of type 2 diabetes (2). In the Diabetes Prevention Research Group study (4), a goal of 150 min/week of physical activity was recommended, and 74% of the patients in this study group achieved this level by 24 weeks. This type of success in exercise modification is made possible in research protocols by intensive individual counseling (5), which may not be easily reproduced in primary care settings. Because of the critical importance of increasing daily energy expenditure and its central role in preventing and/or treating diabetes, one can surmise that instrumentation providing accurate and simple feedback to type 2 patients may have clinical utility. Therefore, we provide preliminary data on the accuracy of the HealthWear Armband (Roche Diagnostics, Indianapolis, IN), an instrument designed …
Maternal history of child abuse moderates the association between daily stress and diurnal cortisol in pregnancy: a pilot study

Abstract Previous research on the association between maternal daily stress and cortisol in pregnancy has yielded inconsistent findings. However, past studies have not considered whether stressful experiences in childhood impact maternal cortisol regulation in pregnancy. In this pilot study, we aimed to examine whether the association between maternal daily stress and cortisol differed according to maternal history of child abuse. Forty-one women provided salivary cortisol samples at wake-up, 30 min after wake-up, and bedtime for 3 days at three times over second and third trimesters of pregnancy. On each day of cortisol collection women reported their daily stress. Women reported child abuse experiences prior to age 18 years by completing 15 items from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale. Twenty-one percent (N = 9) of women reported a history of child sexual abuse (CSA), 44% (N = 18) reported a history of non-sexual child abuse and 34% (N = 14) reported no history of child abuse. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analyses revealed that stress in the day prior was associated with increases in morning cortisol in women with CSA histories compared to women with non-sexual abuse histories or no history of child abuse. Increases in evening cortisol were associated with increases in daily stress in women with CSA histories compared to women with non-sexual abuse histories or no history of child abuse. Results reveal a dynamic association between daily stress and cortisol in pregnancy and suggest that patterns differ according to maternal child abuse history.
Changing times and strategies: Shell's contribution to sustainable community development in the Niger Delta, Nigeria

Sustainable development and poverty are pervasive problems in the Niger Delta, mainly due to lack of significant Nigerian government commitment to the development of the region. As a corporate citizen, Shell has contributed in various ways to local community development in the area. Based on a critical analysis of the changes in its strategies and policies, the paper contends that Shell's previous approaches to community development in the Niger Delta encouraged unsustainable development and a culture of dependency. It concludes that the recently launched sustainable community development strategy has the potential to succeed where others failed, if it is implemented within a tri-sector partnership framework involving Shell, the Nigerian government and civil society. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Whither better regulation for the Lisbon agenda?

ABSTRACT The initiatives for regulatory reform known as ‘better regulation’ have become a priority in the recently reformulated ‘growth and jobs’ Lisbon agenda of the European Union. But what is better regulation and what can it deliver? In this article, better regulation is identified as a new type of meta-regulation, with its structural and discursive properties. Better regulation discourse has enabled policy-makers to address different objectives in their shifting regulatory reform agendas. The better regulation pendulum has swung between regulatory quantity (or deregulation) and quality across time and space. In terms of structural properties, there is diversity across Europe in terms of actors, contents, and processes, although an embryonic open method of co-ordination is emerging at the EU level. The Barroso Commission and a number of member states have redefined discourse and structure of better regulation to adapt it to the ‘growth and jobs’ priorities of Lisbon. This redefinition, however, has narrowed the scope, the range of stakeholders, and the ambitions in terms of governance. Diversity, task expansion and better regulation rhetoric make the relationship between this type of meta-regulation, the Lisbon agenda, and, looking at the long-term impact, the dynamics of the regulatory state problematic.
The ‘Price of Sin’ Aversion: Ivory Tower Illusion or Real Investable Alpha?

In their pioneering work, Hong & Kacperczyk [HK] (2009) document a significant outperformance of so- called sin stocks: publicly traded companies involved in producing alcohol, tobacco and gaming. Drawing on theories of neglected stocks and segmented markets, the authors suggest this outperformance to be due to a shunning effect caused by norm-constrained institutional investors who effectively pay a price for sin aversion. Motivated by a line of criticism against their research design, this study re-examines whether the sin stocks premium recorded by HK is actually investable for real world investors or derives from an ‘ivory tower style’ research design? We limit our analysis to only those stocks included in the global equity index benchmarks of institutional investors thereby excluding thousands of stocks usually considered too illiquid in practice. Among these stocks, we still document the sin stock premium in HK’s equal weighted sin-industry portfolios. Equal-weighted sub-industry portfolios are, however, practically barely investable for many institutional investors with their value-weighted benchmarks and are, if analysed in Fama-French models, exposed to a small cap bias in two ways. First, if small cap firms outperform large cap firms, then the equal-weighted portfolio is likely to outperform its value-weighted equivalent and a value-weighted market. Hence, we value-weight our sin-industry portfolios, which leads the premium for gambling firms to disappear. Second, Fama-French’s model controls for return differentials between small cap and large cap firms within all industrial sectors. The model is not designed to capture return differentials between small cap and large cap firms in a single sector such as consumer goods, which could drive the returns of sub-industries in this sector such as alcohol and tobacco. Hence, we add within sector control variables to our model which leads to a complete disappearance of any premium to sin stocks at the global level. When we conduct the same analysis in HK’s purely US universe, the sin stock premiums disappear even more convincingly. This implies that the sin stock premium and the price of sin aversion could be artefacts of an ivory tower research design and are not necessarily applicable to the real world.
On the Optimality of Decisions made by Hub-and-Spokes Monetary Policy Committees

Most monetary policy committees decide on interest rates using a simple majority voting rule. Given the inherent heterogeneity of committee members, this voting rule is suboptimal in terms of the quality of the interest rate decision, but popular for other (political) reasons. We show that a clustering of committee members into two subgroups, as is the case in hub-and-spokes systems of central banks (e.g. the Fed or the ESCB), can eliminate this inefficiency whilst retaining the simple majority voting rule.
Evolution of Poverty During the Crisis in Indonesia

The economic crisis caused a clear deterioration in the welfare of the Indonesian people. In this paper, we examine the appropriate method to compare the change in poverty rates over time. We then piece together a consistent series of estimates of poverty rates during the crisis from various sources, covering a period from February 1996 to February 2002. The reconciliation of these various estimates paints a very reasonable picture and neatly tracks events. The poverty rate increased from the lowest point of approximately 15% at the onset of the crisis in the middle of 1997 to the highest point of approximately 33% nearing the end of 1998. This maximum increase in poverty rate during the crisis of 18 percentage points implies that approximately 36 million additional people were pushed into absolute poverty due to the crisis. After the peak point, the poverty rate started to decline again and reached the pre-crisis level of approximately 15% at the end of 1999, implying that the lost time in poverty reduction due to the crisis was approximately 2.5years. However, the poverty rate after this point appears to have fluctuated. During 2001 and early 2002, poverty was on the rise again.
Integrated arts as a transformational medium of instruction in KwaZulu-Natal schools : a narrative self study

South Africa’s dynamic post-Apartheid education climate is beset by a plethora of new policies designed to transform education. Our county’s educators are expected to be the alchemists of change to create the new and transformed society envisaged in these policies, albeit with insufficient logistical planning and support. Moreover, so many of our schools are operationally dysfunctional, with literacy and numeracy levels at an all time low. Under these daunting circumstances our Provincial Education Department Teacher Development Institution, Ikhwezi In-Service Training Institute, develops training materials and delivers courses aimed at implementing policy while at the same time modelling progressive, internationally recognized and democratic adult-based methodology. In this self-study project of my departmental work with a group of trained educators, I use action research to trace the potential of integrated arts to transform teaching and learning in under-resourced rural and township classrooms. An aspect of this self-study looks at the therapeutic potential of the arts in my own life and career as an arts educator. When my Masters research revealed the dramatic effect a project-like arts approach to teaching could engender, I was motivated by compassion to develop the work further to reach a broader base of learners. I also wished to educate the authorities into mainstreaming the default marginalising of the arts in schools by developing photographic, written and video evidence promoting the arts in schools, mainly to emphasize their holistic educational role, but also as an essential healing, a potential remedy for the ills of the past that continue to impact on the present.
The effect of remittances on gross domestic savings in Uganda (1999-2011)

This paper investigates the effect of remittances on gross domestic savings in Uganda using maximum likelihood framework. The results show that remittances have a significant negative effect on gross domestic savings. This contradicts the studies that show positive relationship between remittances and gross domestic savings but in agreement that remittances are mainly devoted to daily consumption needs and that foreign capital inflows have a negative and significant impact on domestic savings. The study also showed that other factors such as real effective exchange rate, per capita gross domestic product, and inflation rate and deposit interest rate affect remittances positively. It is therefore recommended, that government should establish agencies in countries to where most Ugandans migrate in order to capture their savings and help them channel those savings into productive projects in Uganda.
Income Inequality and Health: a review and explanation of the evidence

Whether the scale of a society’s income inequality is a determinant of population health is still regarded as a controversial issue. We decided to review the evidence and see if we could find a consistent interpretation of both the positive and negative findings. We identified 169 analyses in 155 papers reporting research findings on the association between income distribution and population health. We classified them according to how far their findings supported the hypothesis that greater income differences are associated with lower standards of population health. Analyses in which all adjusted associations between greater income equality and higher standards of population health were statistically significant and positive were classified as “wholly supportive”; if none were significant and positive they were classified as “unsupportive”; and if some but not all were significant and supportive they were classified as “partially supportive”. Of those classified as either wholly supportive or unsupportive, a large majority (70 percent) suggest that health is less good in societies where income differences are bigger. There were substantial differences in the proportion of supportive findings according to whether inequality was measured in large or small areas. We suggest that the studies of income inequality are more supportive in large areas because in that context income inequality serves as a measure of the scale of social stratification, or how hierarchical a
Fabrication and Characterization of Self-scrolling Si/Cr Micro- and Nanostructures

Based on self-scrolling of Si/Cr bilayer films on Si(001) wafers, various micro- and nanostructures including micro-claws, microtubes, helical nanobelts, nanorings and nanospirals are fabricated in a controllable way. The scrolling principles of the structures from Si/Cr bilayer films are discussed. The flexibility of individual Si/Cr nanospirals and nanorings has been investigated using a nanorobotic manipulator. It has been found that multiple-turn Si/Cr nanorings exhibit a "sticky force" between neighboring bilayers which is mainly attributed to the van der Waals force. Thus, multiple-turn Si/Cr or SiGe/Si/Cr tubes are self-closing and may be used as pipes for micro-fluidics. Moreover, the excellent elasticity and shape-memory effect of these structures may also be utilized for building MEMS/NEMS devices
Trends in India's Agricultural Growth and Its Determinants

The present study discusses the trends in crop sector growth at national and sub-national levels in India. Data on important variables such as area, production, input use, and value of output were compiled for the periods 1967-1968 to 2007-2008 from published sources. The analysis reveals that the cropping pattern in India has changed significantly over time, with a marked shift from the cultivation of foodgrains to commercial crops. Among foodgrains, the area planted to coarse cereals that is generally cultivated in dry regions declined by 13.3 percent between triennium ending (TE) 1970-1971 and TE 2007-2008. Similarly, the performance of pulses in terms of area and output was not impressive during the study period and the technological breakthrough witnessed in other crops was not conspicuous in pulses. Nevertheless, increase in crop yield has been a major factor in accelerating crop production in the country since the late 1960s. Modern varieties, irrigation, and fertilizers were the important contributors of higher growth in crop production. However, technology and institutional support for a few crops such as rice and wheat have changed crop area and output composition significantly in some regions. The results of the crop output growth model indicate that enhanced capital formation, better irrigation facilities, normal rainfall, and improved fertilizer consumption will help increase crop output in the country.
PERMANENT GENETIC RESOURCES: Isolation and characterization of microsatellite loci from the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis (Hübner) (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Crambidae)

Few useful microsatellites are available for population studies of the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis (Hübner). An enrichment strategy was used to develop microsatellite markers for O. nubilalis, and over 500 positive clones were isolated. Seventy‐five contained unique microsatellites, 10 of which were polymorphic with discernable polymerase chain reaction products. The 10 loci were surveyed for variability in 72 wild individuals from central Iowa. Five loci showed no deviation from Hardy–Weinberg proportions, and all were successfully cross‐amplified in the related Asian corn borer, Ostrinia furnacalis. These loci represent a significant addition to microsatellites appropriate for population studies of O. nubilalis.
Acceptability of tenofovir gel as a vaginal microbicide by US male participants in a Phase I clinical trial (HPTN 050)

Abstract We studied the acceptability of tenofovir gel among HIV-infected and uninfected men who were exposed to it during vaginal intercourse. The gel was found to be highly acceptable to most men, the large majority indicating they would probably use it in the future if they were concerned about HIV and the product were available. Men liked the gel's transparency and odorless qualities, although reactions to its viscosity were more varied. Men acknowledged women's rights to self-determination concerning HIV-prevention, yet considered that women's covert use of the product was more acceptable in the context of ‘one-night-stands’ than in stable relationships, for which dialogue on protection measures was preferred. Restrictions to couples’ habitual sexual repertoire and the protocol requirement to use condoms resulted in complaints. Microbicide trials that do not require condom use from men who don't typically use them may provide a more accurate assessment of acceptability. Consistent microbicide use may be contingent on its ease of incorporation into typical sexual practices, type of sexual partnership and contextual issues.
Local Community Involvement in Tourism around National Parks: Opportunities and Constraints

National Parks are often major tourist attractions located in relatively remote and marginalised rural areas. The potential role of tourism in contributing to the costs of conservation and providing economic opportunities for communities living adjacent to natural heritage has long been recognised. Issues of access to tourists and capital, enclaves and bypasses and employment need to be addressed. The opportunities for local economic development through tourism at Komodo (Indonesia), Keoladeo (India), Gonarezhou (Zimbabwe) and Puerto Princesa (Palawan, Philippines) National Parks are explored, and the paper concludes with an agenda for action.
Detection of Stress-Induced Interface Trap Generation on High- $k$  Gated nMOSFETs in Real Time by Stress-and-Sense Charge Pumping Technique

A stress-and-sense charge pumping (SSCP) technique is proposed in this paper to measure the stress-induced interface trap (ΔN<sub>it</sub>) in real-time evolution without stress interruption. Results show that the ΔN<sub>it</sub> measured by this SSCP technique is much higher than that measured by the conventional method. This difference is resulted from the recovery induced by stress interruption during the sensing measurements. The ΔN<sub>it</sub> measured by SSCP method after interruption is approximately equal to that by the conventional one. The amount of recoverable ΔN<sub>it</sub> is almost constant and independent of permanent damage. The stress-induced threshold voltage shift (ΔV<sub>th</sub>) and ΔN<sub>it</sub> under various stress frequencies and duty cycles are also measured. The ΔV<sub>th</sub> seems to depend only on the total stress time of stress pulse. The ΔN<sub>it</sub> measured by SSCP with different frequencies and duty cycles is similar. The ΔN<sub>it</sub> also depends on the total stress time of stress pulse, but not the off time during the nonstress half cycle. In addition, it is found that the recovery induced by nonstress half cycle of ac stress is almost negligible as compared with that induced by stress interruption. Moreover, a two-stage phenomenon is observed on ΔN<sub>it</sub> evolution. Results in this paper indicate that the stressing indeed induces trap generation in the first stage.