Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nosocomial Infections Incidence Rates, Bulgaria, 1999-2011

The study presents an analysis in two parts of the officially registered NI in the country by the computerized information system (CIS-NI) in the course of a 13-year period (1999-2011). The system employs two types of indicesincidence rate (morbidity, recalculatred in the study per 1000 patients discharged) and percentage distribution (frequency distribution, relative frequency distribution) by infection sites and microbial agents. This part discusses the overall NI incidence rates by hospital and wards categories, accentuating upon pediatric and intensive care wards-anesthesiology and resuscitation, intensive therapy. The average incidence rate is 10% at the following distribution by infection sites: VAP-5%, surgical site infections (SSI) and pulmonary infections (the latter including bronchitis, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, non-associated with procedure of endotracheal intubation) of 16-18% each; urinary tract infections (UTI) 13-15%; sepsis 4-5%, enteric, skin infections, of the sense organs, intraabdominal and cardiovascular system infections-approximately 2% of each group, endometritis and other gynecologic infections-1%, mastitis in young mothers-0.1%. Microbiologically diagnosed are 50-60% ? f the infections as a total and in 40-50% unconfirmed and unexamined microbiologically. E. coli and S. aureus are identified in about one third of the total number of infections, the rest isolates pertain to opportunistic bacterial species, known for their multiresistence: Klebsiella spp, Pseudomonas spp, Acinetobacter spp etc. The incidence rate of infections ranges within low limits, e.g, LRTIs (pulmonary infections)-pediatric wards-upto 3%; VAP/ pulmonary infections-resuscitation (AR UTIs-resuscitation, urology-13%; SSIs-burn units-38%, septic surgery-23%, vascular surgery-11%; sepsis-burn units-22%, resuscitation-8%, cardiovascular surgery-6%, ICUs-5%. The official registration system provides reliable information on a national level for the purpose of NI surveillance and control. The system interpretes the original data of the wards in basic indices as incidence and microbial isolates‘ distribution. This official database reflects the efforts in the sphere of NI prevention and control. Possible additional links to the system would contribute to direct comparisons of indices regarding the care for patients undergoing risk procedures.
Stimulation of b-adrenergic receptors inhibits the release of tumor necrosis factor-a from the isolated rat heart

I n patients with severe congestive heart failure, both plasma and myocardial tissue levels of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-a are increased (1–4). The mechanisms driving this increase in expression of the cytokine are unknown. Studies of the regulation of TNF-a expression in macrophages and monocytes have shown that activation of the b-adrenergic receptor and the associated rise in intracellular cyclic AMP (cAMP) decreased bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated TNF-a production (5–7). In minced ventricular tissue from rat hearts, in papillary muscle, and in isolated myocytes, other agents that raise cAMP, such as phosphodiesterase inhibitors, adenosine, and forskolin, have also been shown to inhibit TNF-a release (8–10). Therefore, it seems possible that TNF-a production by the heart might be regulated, at least in part, by sympathetic nervous stimulation of cardiac b-adrenergic receptors and the consequent rise in myocardial cAMP. In 1977, we reported that dogs in heart failure had a decreased inotropic response to the b-adrenergic agonist, isoproterenol, as well as to the sympathetic neurotransmitter, norepinephrine (11). In 1983, similar results were obtained in papillary muscle isolated from failing human hearts (12). It has since been repeatedly demonstrated that in congestive heart failure, cardiac response to sympathetic stimulation is impaired. For a recent review of the sympathetic nervous system in heart failure, see Reference 13. If b-adrenergic stimulation inhibits cytokine production by the heart, then impairment of this inhibitory action could contribute to the elevated circulating levels of TNF-a in heart failure. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that the b-adrenergic receptor agonist, isoproterenol, would inhibit TNF-a production by the heart.
Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Education: Exploring Best Practices Used in the Dominican Republic

Advancements in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions have improved the health and well-being of communities globally. Despite this success, a major disease burden attributed to unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and improper hygiene practices remains. There was little evidence of adequate research pertaining to WASH interventions deployed in rural, socioeconomically at risk populations in Latin America. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore best practices used by the program leaders of a Midwestern University Latin American Studies Institute (MULASI) sponsored water quality program realized in collaboration with a Dominican Republic Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to educate adults about the importance of water supply integrity, sanitation, and hygiene to the health of the community. The study was guided by the research question: what are the most effective instructional techniques used to educate the communities served by the Program during a clean water project implementation and maintenance initiative. Qualitative data was collected using an interview protocol, document reviews, and observation. The population interviewed included several university and NGO program staff members. The aim of this study was to identify best practices in educating socioeconomically at risk populations about water supply integrity, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and then use those best practices to design a WASH education intervention model that could be implemented globally. As a result of the analysis of findings an Integrated WASH Education Intervention Model was developed to guide intervention leaders through the planning, implementation, and sustainment of the WASH intervention.
Oral communication strategies of pre-university Malaysian Chinese students / Liang Kaizhu

Communication in a language other than a person’s mother tongue is difficult (Khan & Victori i Blaya, 2011; Kongsom, 2009; Somsai & Intaraprasert, 2011; Teng, 2012). Communication strategies play an important role in language acquisition as it could offer non-native speakers the ability to deliver effective communication while speaking in English (Dornyei & Scott, 1997; Oxford & Burry-Stock, 1995). The purpose of this study was to identify the most frequently used Oral Communication Strategies (henceforth OCSs) by pre-university Malaysian Chinese students and the relationship between oral English language proficiency (henceforth OP) and OCSs. Once the OCSs were identified, the possible reasons for using them by students with different OP were investigated. This study used a descriptive research method where it started with a quantitative approach (questionnaire survey) and followed by a qualitative approach (structured interview). The questionnaire of OCSI (Oral Communication Strategy Inventory) developed by Nakatani (2006) was adapted to collect data from 60 pre-university Malaysian Chinese students at a matriculation college, among whom 15% (n=9) were interviewed. MUET (Malaysian University English Test) was used to classify students into different proficiency levels, such as proficient level (Band 5), satisfactory level (Band 4) and modest level (Band 3) in the study. The results found that the participants are highly aware of the usage of OCSs in speaking and they can be regarded as high strategy users. Moreover, a significant and sizeable association between OP and students’ usage of OCSs was found by using Spearman correlation coefficients. Finally, students’ possible reasons for using certain existing OCSs were identified through structured interview. The suggestions for future research were put forward.
Determinants of exercise induced skeletal muscle injury following eccentric exercise

Multiple mechanical factors have been implicated in the initiation of exercise induced muscle injury. Muscle injury has been widely studied in humans, but little data exist examining the underlying cause of muscle injury in humans. This study sought to examine the role of specific force in muscle injury when peak eccentric force and total eccentric force were matched between two exercise bouts. Ten subjects (6 male, 4 female) performed 80 electrically stimulated (EMS) eccentric contractions of the right and left quadriceps femoris (QF) through a 90o arc at ≈45o/s. Specific force was manipulated by applying 25 Hz EMS to one thigh and 100 Hz EMS to the contralateral thigh, while force production was matched by lowering the EMS amplitude during the 100 Hz bout. T2 MR-images of the QF were collected before and 3 days after the eccentric exercise bouts. Injury was assessed via changes in isometric force and ratings of soreness in the QF over the course of 28 days after exercise, and by determining changes in T2 relaxation time and muscle volume 3 days after exercise. 100 Hz EMS induced greater force loss (P < 0. 05), soreness (P < 0.05), change in muscle volume (P = 0.03), and the volume of muscle demonstrating an increase in T2 (P = 0.005) compared to 25 Hz EMS. Our findings suggest that in humans, high specific force plays an important role in the initiation of exercise induced muscle injury.
Thyme: History, Applications, and Overview of Potential Health Benefits

Thyme is a perennial shrub with greenish-gray aromatic leaves. It originates from Southern Europe and countries bordering the Mediterranean but now can be found in many areas of the world with temperate climates. There are numerous varieties of the plant, which differ in their flavor profiles. Thyme essential oil is a commercial product prepared by distillation of its leaves used commercially in the manufacture of chewing gum, candy, and ice cream. Thymol, 1 of the principal constituents of this oil, is used in perfumes, food flavorings, mouthwashes, cosmetics, pharmaceutical products, and in feed additives and pesticides. Traditional remedies associated with thyme include alleviation of depression, epilepsy, nightmares, and headaches and treatment of coughs. The possible health effects of thyme and its constituents, particularly thymol and carvacrol, include antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, respiratory, and neurological benefits.
Cognitive Dysfunction in ICU Patients: Risk Factors, Predictors, and Rehabilitation Interventions

: In contrast to other clinical outcomes, long-term cognitive function in critical care survivors has not been deeply studied. In this narrative review, we summarize the existing literature on the prevalence, mechanisms, risk factors, and prediction of cognitive impairment after surviving critical illness. Depending on the exact clinical subgroup, up to 100% of critical care survivors may suffer some degree of long-term cognitive impairment at hospital discharge; in approximately 50%, decrements in cognitive function will persist years later. Although the mechanisms of acquiring this impairment are poorly understood, several risk factors have been identified. Unfortunately, no easy means of predicting long-term cognitive impairment exists. Despite this barrier, research is ongoing to test possible treatments for cognitive impairment. In particular, the potential role of exercise on cognitive recovery is an exciting area of exploration. Opportunities exist to incorporate physical and cognitive rehabilitation strategies across a spectrum of environments (in the ICU, on the hospital ward, and at home, posthospital discharge). ( Crit Care Med 2013; 41:S81–S98)
Neuroprotection with phenylephrine in traumatic brain injury : Cerebral perfusion or beyond ? *

2515 protective effect. This group has highlighted the role of TLR signaling in the heart and the interrelationship between different TLRs. This work also brings to light the potential role of danger-associated molecular pattern signaling by TLRs and the potential for tissue damage to worsen and sustain an already destructive inflammatory response. Further research in delineating the specific downstream signaling pathways elicited by TLR signaling in the heart would be of interest. This would allow for the potential modulation of harmful inflammation in the heart with the preservation of the microbial clearance capacity of the innate immune system.
The Ups and Downs of Accreting X-Ray Pulsars: Decade-long Observations with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor

We review more than 10 yr of continuous monitoring of accreting X-ray pulsars with the all-sky Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Our work includes data from the start of GBM operations in 2008 August, through to 2019 November. Pulsations from 39 accreting pulsars are observed over an energy range of 10–50 keV by GBM. The GBM Accreting Pulsars Program performs data reduction and analysis for each accreting pulsar and makes histories of the pulse frequency and pulsed flux publicly available. We examine in detail the spin histories, outbursts, and torque behaviors of the persistent and transient X-ray pulsars observed by GBM. The spin period evolution of each source is analyzed in the context of disk-accretion and quasi-spherical settling accretion-driven torque models. Long-term pulse frequency histories are also analyzed over the GBM mission lifetime and compared to those available from the previous Burst and Transient Source Experiment all-sky monitoring mission, revealing previously unnoticed episodes in some of the analyzed sources (such as a torque reversal in 2S 1845−024). We obtain new, or update known, orbital solutions for three sources. Our results demonstrate the capabilities of GBM as an excellent instrument for monitoring accreting X-ray pulsars and its important scientific contribution to this field.
M2m: Imbalanced Classification via Major-to-Minor Translation

In most real-world scenarios, labeled training datasets are highly class-imbalanced, where deep neural networks suffer from generalizing to a balanced testing criterion. In this paper, we explore a novel yet simple way to alleviate this issue by augmenting less-frequent classes via translating samples (e.g., images) from more-frequent classes. This simple approach enables a classifier to learn more generalizable features of minority classes, by transferring and leveraging the diversity of the majority information. Our experimental results on a variety of class-imbalanced datasets show that the proposed method improves the generalization on minority classes significantly compared to other existing re-sampling or re-weighting methods. The performance of our method even surpasses those of previous state-of-the-art methods for the imbalanced classification.
Towards Achieving Adversarial Robustness by Enforcing Feature Consistency Across Bit Planes

As humans, we inherently perceive images based on their predominant features, and ignore noise embedded within lower bit planes. On the contrary, Deep Neural Networks are known to confidently misclassify images corrupted with meticulously crafted perturbations that are nearly imperceptible to the human eye. In this work, we attempt to address this problem by training networks to form coarse impressions based on the information in higher bit planes, and use the lower bit planes only to refine their prediction. We demonstrate that, by imposing consistency on the representations learned across differently quantized images, the adversarial robustness of networks improves significantly when compared to a normally trained model. Present state-of-the-art defenses against adversarial attacks require the networks to be explicitly trained using adversarial samples that are computationally expensive to generate. While such methods that use adversarial training continue to achieve the best results, this work paves the way towards achieving robustness without having to explicitly train on adversarial samples. The proposed approach is therefore faster, and also closer to the natural learning process in humans.
Strong correlations between power-law growth of COVID-19 in four continents and the inefficiency of soft quarantine strategies

In this work, we analyze the growth of the cumulative number of confirmed infected cases by a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) until March 27, 2020, from countries of Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. Our results show that (i) power-law growth is observed in all countries; (ii) by using the distance correlation, the power-law curves between countries are statistically highly correlated, suggesting the universality of such curves around the world; and (iii) soft quarantine strategies are inefficient to flatten the growth curves. Furthermore, we present a model and strategies that allow the government to reach the flattening of the power-law curves. We found that besides the social distancing of individuals, of well known relevance, the strategy of identifying and isolating infected individuals in a large daily rate can help to flatten the power-laws. These are the essential strategies followed in the Republic of Korea. The high correlation between the power-law curves of different countries strongly indicates that the government containment measures can be applied with success around the whole world. These measures are scathing and to be applied as soon as possible.
An assessment of services for adolescents in prevention of mother-to-child transmission programs.

Programs designed to prevent mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV are usually part of the care pregnant women receive. These services typically include HIV counseling and testing during antenatal care and if they test HIV-positive provision of antiretroviral drugs to prevent transmission of HIV to the baby (called vertical transmission). Another critically important service that could be offered as part of PMTCT activities--but rarely is--is the provision of contraceptive information during the antenatal period and methods in the postpartum period. PMTCT services are relatively new additions to antenatal programs and little information exists about young womens access to and use of these services. Moreover because adolescents and young women are early in their reproductive years they are likely to want children in the future. How family planning services and messages are integrated into PMTCT services for these younger women requires particular attention. To better understand these issues a study was conducted to identify and evaluate strategies for meeting youths HIV and reproductive health needs within PMTCT services. The study assessed youth clients patterns of use and content of PMTCT services. Among youth clients young women in the community and supervisors and providers the study assessed HIV/AIDS PMTCT and contraceptive related knowledge awareness and attitudes and perceptions of factors influencing service use. Contraceptive experiences and fertility desires of youth clients and of young women in the community were also studied. (excerpt)
Unification-based Reconstruction of Explanations for Science Questions

The paper presents a framework to reconstruct explanations for multiple choices science questions through explanation-centred corpora. Building upon the notion of unification in science, the framework ranks explanatory facts with respect to question and candidate answer by leveraging a combination of two different scores: (a) A Relevance Score (RS) that represents the extent to which a given fact is specific to the question; (b) A Unification Score (US) that takes into account the explanatory power of a fact, determined according to its frequency in explanations for similar questions. An extensive evaluation of the framework is performed on the Worldtree corpus, adopting IR weighting schemes for its implementation. The following findings are presented: (1) The proposed approach achieves competitive results when compared to state-of-the-art Transformers, yet possessing the property of being scalable to large explanatory knowledge bases; (2) The combined model significantly outperforms IR baselines (+7.8/8.4 MAP), confirming the complementary aspects of relevance and unification score; (3) The constructed explanations can support downstream models for answer prediction, improving the accuracy of BERT for multiple choices QA on both ARC easy (+6.92%) and challenge (+15.69%) questions.
The paraxial approximation fails to describe the interaction of atoms with general vortex light fields

Neglecting the electric field component along the light's propagation direction is a common practice, known as paraxial approximation. However, experimental evidence and theory on the head-on excitation of atoms by Laguerre-Gaussian beams reveal that the full vector character of the light field has to be taken into account. Optical vortices are a large family of fields, being Laguerre-Gaussian only one particular case. Now we extend the study of the applicability of the paraxial approximation to a broader set of optical vortices by considering the interaction of atoms with generalized Laguerre-Gaussian and generalized Bessel beams. We demonstrate that all vortex beams here considered look the same close to the beam axis, where the atom is placed. From this, we conclude that the paraxial approximation fails for the large set of vortex beams, and that a full understanding of the interaction of optical vortices with atoms requires the inclusion of all vector components of the electric field.
Research of Caller ID Spoofing Launch, Detection, and Defense

Caller ID parodying produces the valid Caller character, in this manner deciding seem to start from another client. This apparently basic assault strategy has been utilized in the developing communication fake and trick calls, bringing about significant financial trouble. Unfortunately, callerID spoofing is easy to implement but yet it is difficult to have protection against it. In addition, there are not effective and defense solutions available right now. In this research it is suggested the CIVE (Callee Inference & VErification), a compelling and viable guard against Caller ID spoofing. This way it is described how it’s possible to lunch call spoofing and between line describe how CIVE approach method can help to prevent somehow this kind of attacks. Caller ID Spoofing could cause huge financial and political issues special nowadays, when many things even sometimes authentication and verification are available by phone call, like banks approving transactions or two factor authentications and many other things. We believe critical industries specially banks and payment service providers should be protected against such vulnerabilities with their system and make an approach to prevent it, also it is very important to learn people specially who has special social place like politicians or celebrities to know such kind of attack are already exist. For this paper we implemented a call from white house to show there is no limitation and no matter whom you try to spoof, but destination which is the victim receive the call and that make this attack vector dangerous. And even modern communication and even devices like 4G and smart phones are not able to prevent or even detect this kind of attack. This study is a demonstration of the vulnerabilities available. All experiments were conducted on isolated mock-ups.