Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Do financial incentives increase mental health treatment engagement? A meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE Engagement in mental health treatment is low, which can lead to poor outcomes. We evaluated the efficacy of offering patients financial incentives to increase their mental health treatment engagement, also referred to as contingency management. METHOD We meta-analyzed studies offering financial incentives for mental health treatment engagement, including increasing treatment attendance, medication adherence, and treatment goal completion. Analyses were run within a multilevel framework. All study designs were included, and sensitivity analyses were run including only randomized and high-quality studies. RESULTS About 80% of interventions incentivized treatment for substance use disorders. Financial incentives significantly increased treatment attendance (Hedges' g = 0.49, [0.33, 0.64], k = 30, I2 = 83.14), medication adherence (Hedges' g = 0.95, [0.47, 1.44], k = 6, I2 = 87.73), and treatment goal completion (Hedges' g = 0.61, [0.22, 0.99], k = 5, I2 = 60.55), including completing homework, signing treatment plans, and reducing problematic behavior. CONCLUSIONS Financial incentives increase treatment engagement with medium to large effect sizes. We provide strong evidence for their effectiveness in increasing substance use treatment engagement and preliminary evidence for their effectiveness in increasing treatment engagement for other mental health disorders. Future research should prioritize testing the efficacy of incentivizing treatment engagement for mental health disorders aside from substance use. Research must also identify ways to incentivize treatment engagement that improve functioning and long-term outcomes and address ethical and systemic barriers to implementing these interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Morphological Changes of Frontal Areas in Male Individuals With HIV: A Deformation-Based Morphometry Analysis

Objective Previous studies on HIV-infected (HIV+) individuals have revealed brain structural alterations underlying HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders. Most studies have adopted the widely used voxel-based morphological analysis of T1-weighted images or tracked-based analysis of diffusion tensor images. In this study, we investigated the HIV-related morphological changes using the deformation-based morphometry (DBM) analysis of T1-weighted images, which is another useful tool with high regional sensitivity. Materials and Methods A total of 157 HIV+ (34.7 ± 8.5 years old) and 110 age-matched HIV-uninfected (HIV-) (33.7 ± 10.1 years old) men were recruited. All participants underwent neurocognitive assessments and brain scans, including high-resolution structural imaging and resting-state functional imaging. Structural alterations in HIV+ individuals were analyzed using DBM. Functional brain networks connected to the deformed regions were further investigated in a seed-based connectivity analysis. The correlations between imaging and cognitive or clinical measures were examined. Results The DBM analysis revealed decreased values (i.e., tissue atrophy) in the bilateral frontal regions in the HIV+ group, including bilateral superior frontal gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, and their neighboring white matter tract, superior corona radiata. The functional connectivity between the right superior frontal gyrus and the right inferior temporal region was enhanced in the HIV+ group, the connectivity strength of which was significantly correlated with the global deficit scores (r = 0.214, P = 0.034), and deficits in learning (r = 0.246, P = 0.014) and recall (r = 0.218, P = 0.031). Increased DBM indexes (i.e., tissue enlargement) of the right cerebellum were also observed in the HIV+ group. Conclusion The current study revealed both gray and white matter volume changes in frontal regions and cerebellum in HIV+ individuals using DBM, complementing previous voxel-based morphological studies. Structural alterations were not limited to the local regions but were accompanied by disrupted functional connectivity between them and other relevant regions. Disruptions in neural networks were associated with cognitive performance, which may be related to HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders.
Coordination of Autonomous Vehicles and Dynamic Traffic Rules in Mixed Automated/Manual Traffic

We consider the coordination of multiple connected automated vehicles (CAVs) by a central coordinator (CC) in mixed traffic where also non-controlled vehicles (NCVs) are present. The CC directly provides motion target commands to the CAVs and affects the behavior of NCVs by controlling dynamic traffic rules, such as changing traffic lights. We model the traffic rules for these scenarios by mixed-logical constraints, and the response of the NCVs to the changing traffic rules by a switched system with switches triggered by logic conditions. The proposed approach is implemented as a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem to be solved in the central coordinator, which also handles timing constraints.
ReLAccS: A Multilevel Approach to Accelerator Design for Reinforcement Learning on FPGA-Based Systems

Reinforcement learning (RL), specifically <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-learning, with human-like learning abilities to learn from experience without any <italic>a priori</italic> data, is being increasingly used in embedded systems in the field of control and navigation. However, finding the optimal policy in this approach can be highly compute-intensive, and a software-only implementation may not satisfy the application’s timing constraints. To this end, we propose optimization methods at multiple levels of accelerator design for RL. Specifically, at the architecture-level, we exploit the instruction-level parallelism and the spatial parallelism in FPGAs to improve the throughput over state-of-the-art designs by up to 34%. Further, we propose lookup table-level optimizations to reduce the resource utilization and power dissipation of the accelerator. Finally, we propose algorithm-level approximation that can be used for acceleration of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-learning problems with more states and for reducing the peak power dissipation. We report up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> reduction in power dissipation with marginal degradation in quality of results.
Obtaining Nettle Extracts ( Urtica dioica ) by Means of Hydrocavitation

Stinging nettle ( Urtica dioica L.) is considered a great source of secondary metabolites of commercial interest and the extraction of this kind of metabolites is important for the process viability and scale-up. Different alternatives have been evaluated, including Soxhlet extraction and the use of supercritical fluids, mainly on laboratory scale. As an innovative approach, hydro-cavitation has emerged as an efficient alternative for extracting principles from plants at low temperatures and short operational times. This work presents the experimental extraction of ß-carotene from Stinging nettle employing hydro-cavitation. Ethanol was used as solvent at different concentrations (100%, 90%, 80% and 60%) and two w/v solute/solvent ratio (1:30 and 2:30). The concentration of chlorophyll A, B, total chlorophylls (A+B), carotenes, and ß-carotenes were determined. The best concentration of ß-carotenes was obtained at 2:30 solute/solvent ratio with ethanol at 100% and an operational time of 2 min, corresponding to 153.975 mg ß-carotenes/kg, with a power consumption of 0.7698 kJ/mg ß-carotene extracted. The results support the viability of the use of hydro-cavitation as fast and efficient process for obtaining of Stinging nettle extracts on a pilot scale and open the possibility for the design of process on an industrial scale.
The Ethnobiological Society of Indonesia

The international wildlife trade is a growing threat to an increasingly long list of species, with reptiles among the most heavily impacted. Indonesia is a major source of many reptile species traded internationally, live to meet the demand for pets. Among the many endemic reptile species sought after is the blue tree monitor Varanus macraei . This species is captured from the wild in violation of Indonesia’s harvest and trade quotas which are set annually in an attempt to allow for sustainable use and at the same time protect species from over-exploitation. As this species is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain from the wild, it is clear that not only is the removal of specimens from the wild illegal, but it also appears to be unsustainable.
Curriculum Reinforcement Learning via Constrained Optimal Transport

Curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) allows solving complex tasks by generating a tailored sequence of learning tasks, starting from easy ones and subsequently increasing their difficulty. Although the potential of curricula in RL has been clearly shown in a variety of works, it is less clear how to generate them for a given learning environment, resulting in a variety of methods aiming to automate this task. In this work, we focus on the idea of framing curricula as interpolations between task distributions, which has previously been shown to be a viable approach to CRL. Identifying key issues of existing methods, we frame the generation of a curriculum as a constrained optimal transport problem between task distributions. Benchmarks show that this way of curriculum generation can improve upon existing CRL methods, yielding high performance in a variety of tasks with different characteristics.
Transfer in L3 acquisition How does L2 aspectual knowledge in English influence the acquisition of perfective and imperfective aspect in L3 Spanish among German-speaking learners?

The present study examines the influence of L2 English on the acquisition of perfective and imperfective aspect in L3 Spanish among German-speaking learners. We will argue that English will be activated as the default transfer source due to principles of acquisition, which are similar for both the L2 and the L3, and because of structural similarities between both languages. The analysis is based on data from 36 German-speaking learners with varying levels of knowledge of aspect in English, their L2, and learning Spanish. For data elicitation, two semantic interpretation tasks were used. The findings show that aspectual knowledge in L2 English affects the acquisition of L3 Spanish past tenses. However, the positive effect is not comprehensive, but rather, restricted to certain semantic contexts (e.g., past/ perfective contexts). The discussion points to the possible effects of over-simplified one-to-one-mappings of form and meaning between L2 English and L3 Spanish.
OligodendrocytesExpressing the CC Chemokine CCL21 in Neurological Disease in Transgenic Mice Central Nervous System Inflammation and

To study the biological role of the chemokine ligands CCL19 and CCL21, we generated transgenic mice expressing either gene in oligodendrocytes of the CNS. While all transgenic mice expressing CCL19 in the CNS developed normally, most (18 of 26) of the CCL21 founder mice developed a neurological disease that was characterized by loss of landing reﬂex, tremor, and ataxia. These neurological signs were observed as early as postnatal day 9 and were associated with weight loss and death during the ﬁrst 4 wk of life. Microscopic examination of the brain and spinal cord of CCL21 transgenic mice revealed scattered leukocytic inﬁltrates that consisted primarily of neutrophils and eosinophils. Additional ﬁndings included hypomyelination, spongiform myelinopathy with evidence of myelin breakdown, and reactive gliosis. Thus, ectopic expression of the CC chemokine CCL21, but not CCL19, induced a signiﬁcant inﬂammatory response in the CNS. However, neither chemokine was sufﬁcient to recruit lymphocytes into the CNS. These observations are in striking contrast to the reported activities of these molecules in vitro and may indicate speciﬁc requirements for their biological activity in vivo. The Journal of Immunology, 2002, 168: 1009–1017.
Optimistic Initialization for Exploration in Continuous Control

Optimistic initialization underpins many theoretically sound exploration schemes in tabular domains; however, in the deep function approximation setting, optimism can quickly disappear if initialized naively. We propose a framework for more effectively incorporating optimistic initialization into reinforcement learning for continuous control. Our approach uses metric information about the state-action space to estimate which transitions are still unexplored, and explicitly maintains the initial Q-value optimism for the corresponding state-action pairs. We also develop methods for efficiently approximating these training objectives, and for incorporating domain knowledge into the optimistic envelope to improve sample efficiency. We empirically evaluate these approaches on a variety of hard exploration problems in continuous control, where our method outperforms existing exploration techniques.
Geothermal Potential Mapping Using Landsat 8 OLI and TIR Data in Northern Sector of Main Ethiopian Rift

: Ethiopia has a significant amount of geothermal resources distributed throughout the Main Ethiopian Rift. However, the potential areas of exploration have not been yet supported through geospatial technology for geothermal power-plant development. Hence this study assess geothermal potential areas using remote sensing technology over the northern segment of the Main Ethiopian Rift. Emissivity Modulation method (EM) was adopted to retrieve surface kinetic temperature anomalies using Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). The surface kinetic temperature resulted with a minimum and maximum value of 21 and 45.9 0 C respectively. Furthermore, the surface kinetic temperature is reclassified into categories to identify geothermal fields. The spatial distribution of surface kinetic temperature was computed with hydrothermally altered grounds derived from atmospherically corrected surface reflectance images using band ratio analysis. The highest surface temperature anomalies were found in the region of highly faulted areas, active volcanic landforms, hot springs, mud pools, fumaroles, steaming grounds and hydrothermally altered grounds. Based on the result of this study and field investigation economically feasible geothermal resource areas were found mainly in the location of Fantale volcano. Less pronounced geothermal potential areas were found near to Kone volcanic complex and Boseti volcano.
THE AWARENESS OF INTEGRATED PROJECT DELIVERY AND BUILDING INFORMATION MODELLING - FACILITATING CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

Construction projects are complex undertakings, which involve many different parties striving towards successful completion. Effective and efficient processes are based on collaboration with an integrated project delivery approach, the project team working together as a cohesive unit towards a common goal. However, the current procurement system adopted creates fragmentation of the design and construction teams, which results in projects being delivered late, constructability issues, final project cost exceeding the approved budget, and variation orders. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to various built environment professionals within the Eastern Cape construction industry to determine the current awareness with respect to Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) and Building Information Modelling (BIM). The findings showed that these systems have many benefits, which can assist in mitigating the aforementioned issues. The respondents indicated that they were aware of IPD and BIM and the related benefits; however, there are barriers preventing the adoption of these systems, such as clients not identifying the advantages, clients being resistant to change, as well as a lack of the requisite-related knowledge and skills. Conclusions include that collaboration within the construction industry is imperative toward the successful completion of projects and that further information with respect to IPD and BIM is required to raise awareness and promote the adoption of these models. Recommendations include: all stakeholders need to commit to the ideology behind these concepts and develop an understanding of the concepts and related benefits, and industry associations need to publish information regarding IPD and BIM, as this will increase awareness.
as early to beta peptide

Title: Auditory evoked potentials might have the potential to serve as early indicators related to amyloid Title: Auditory evoked potentials might have the potential to serve indicators related amyloid toxicity Abstract Purpose: Accumulation of amyloid beta (A  ) is thought to be the major cause of the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The aim of this study is to elucidate the effects of Aβ 1-42 at increasing concentrations on auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) and to determine possible changes relevant to the accumulation of Aβ 1-42 . Materials and Methods: In this study, rats were randomized to following groups (n= 10 rats per each group): Sham (0.9% NaCl) and Aβ-1(1µg/µl), Aβ-2(2µg/µl), Aβ-3(3µg/µl), Aβ-4(4µg/µl), Aβ-5(6µg/µl), Aβ-6(8µg/µl) and Aβ-7(10µg/µl) groups obtained by injection of 5 μl per ventricle. Then, AEPs were recorded in freely-moving rats. Latencies and amplitudes of AEPs, evoked power, inter-trial phase synchronization, and auditory evoked gamma responses were obtained in response to auditory stimulus. Furthermore, Aβ 1-42 levels were determined in the temporal cortex. Results : Aβ 1-42 levels were significantly higher in the temporal cortex in Aβ groups compared to the Sham. In frontal and parietal regions, P1N1 amplitudes were significantly decreased in A  -3, 4, 5 and 6 groups, and N1P2 amplitudes were significantly decreased in all A  groups, whereas in temporal regions, P1N1 and N1P2 amplitudes were decreased in A  -2, 3,4,5,6 and 7 compared to the Sham. In the evoked gamma power and phase synchronization of gamma responses, we detected significant decrement after A  -4 group, whereas a significant decrement in the filtered gamma responses was observed in Aβ groups compared to the Sham. Conclusions: AEPs might be used as a biomarker to determine the Aβ 1-42 related neuronal on the subject of Auditory evoked potentials might have the potential to serve as early indicators related to amyloid beta peptide toxicity
H2O vapor excitation in dusty AGB envelopes

Context. AGB stars lose a large percentage of their mass in a dust-driven wind. This creates a circumstellar envelope, which can be studied through thermal dust emission and molecular emission lines. In the case of high mass-loss rates, this study is complicated by the high optical depths and the intricate coupling between gas and dust radiative transfer characteristics. An important aspect of the physics of gas-dust interactions is the strong influence of dust on the excitation of several molecules, including H2O. Aims. The dust and gas content of the envelope surrounding the high mass-loss rate OH/IR star OH 127.8+0.0, as traced by Herschel observations, is studied, with a focus on the H2O content and the dust-to-gas ratio. We report detecting a large number of H2O vapor emission lines up to J = 9i n theHerschel data, for which we present the measured line strengths. Methods. The treatments of both gas and dust species are combined using two numerical radiative transfer codes. The method is illustrated for both low and high mass-loss-rate sources. Specifically, we discuss different ways of assessing the dust-to-gas ratio: 1) from the dust thermal emission spectrum and the CO molecular gas line strengths; 2) from the momentum transfer from dust to gas and the measured gas terminal velocity; and 3) from the determination of the required amount of dust to reproduce H2O lines for a given H2O vapor abundance. These three diagnostics probe different zones of the outflow, for the first time allowing an investigation of a possible radial dependence of the dust-to-gas ratio. Results. We modeled the infrared continuum and the CO and H2O emission lines in OH 127.8+0.0 simultaneously. We find a dust
Guide to monitoring and evaluating knowledge management in global health programs.

This newly-updated Guide offers comprehensive guidance including a unique logic model and 42 common indicators to measure the process reach usefulness and learning / action outcomes of knowledge management (KM) activities in the context of global health and development programs. It is the successor to the 2007 Guide to Monitoring Health Information Products and Services.
University of Birmingham COVID-19

Since the first cases in December 2019, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has rapidly spread across the globe, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. Early clinical experiences have demonstrated the wide spectrum of SARS- CoV-2 presentations, including various reports of atypical presentations of COVID-19 and possible mimic conditions.This article summarises the current evidence surrounding atypical presentations of COVID-19 including neurological, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, otorhinolaryngology and geriatric features. A case from our hospital of pneumocystis pneumonia initially suspected to be COVID-19 forms the basis for a discussion surrounding mimic conditions of COVID-19. The dual- process model of clinical reasoning is used to analyse the thought processes used to make a diagnosis of COVID-19, including consideration of the variety of differential diagnoses. While SARS- CoV-2 is likely to remain on the differential diagnostic list for a plethora of presentations for the foreseeable future, clinicians should be cautious of ignoring other potential diagnoses due to availability bias. An awareness of atypical presentations allows SARS- CoV-2 to be a differential so that it can be appropriately investigated. A knowledge of infectious mimics prevents COVID-19 from overshadowing other diagnoses, hence preventing delayed diagnosis or even misdiagnosis and consequent adverse outcomes for patients.
University of Birmingham The tribulations of trials

Background: Challenges of recruitment to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and successful strategies to overcome them should be clearly reported to improve recruitment into future trials. REtirement in ACTion (REACT) is a United Kingdom-based multicenter RCT recruiting older adults at high risk of mobility disability to a 12-month group-based exercise and behavior maintenance program or to a minimal Healthy Aging control intervention. Methods: The recruitment target was 768 adults, aged 65 years and older scoring 4–9 on the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB). Recruitment methods include the following: (a) invitations mailed by general practitioners (GPs); (b) invitations distributed via third-sector organizations; and (c) public relations (PR) campaign. Yields, efficiency, and costs were calculated. Results: The study recruited 777 (33.9% men) community-dwelling, older adults (mean age 77.55 years ( SD 6.79), mean SPPB score 7.37 ( SD 1.56)), 95.11% white ( n = 739) and broadly representative of UK quintiles of deprivation. Over a 20-month recruitment period, 25,559 invitations were issued. Eighty-eight percent of the participants were recruited via GP invitations, 5.4% via the PR campaign, 3% via word-of-mouth, and 2.5% via third-sector organizations. Mean recruitment cost per participant was £78.47, efforts could achieve more ethnically diverse cohorts. All trials should be required to provide recruitment data to enable evidence-based planning of future trials.