Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Age-Related Changes in the Nasopharyngeal Microbiome Are Associated With Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection and Symptoms Among Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults

Abstract Background Children are less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and typically have milder illness courses than adults, but the factors underlying these age-associated differences are not well understood. The upper respiratory microbiome undergoes substantial shifts during childhood and is increasingly recognized to influence host defense against respiratory pathogens. Thus, we sought to identify upper respiratory microbiome features associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection susceptibility and illness severity. Methods We collected clinical data and nasopharyngeal swabs from 285 children, adolescents, and young adults (<21 years) with documented SARS-CoV-2 exposure. We used 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing to characterize the nasopharyngeal microbiome and evaluated for age-adjusted associations between microbiome characteristics and SARS-CoV-2 infection status and respiratory symptoms. Results Nasopharyngeal microbiome composition varied with age (PERMANOVA, P < .001; R2 = 0.06) and between SARS-CoV-2–infected individuals with and without respiratory symptoms (PERMANOVA, P = .002; R2 = 0.009). SARS-CoV-2–infected participants with Corynebacterium/Dolosigranulum-dominant microbiome profiles were less likely to have respiratory symptoms than infected participants with other nasopharyngeal microbiome profiles (OR: .38; 95% CI: .18–.81). Using generalized joint attributed modeling, we identified 9 bacterial taxa associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and 6 taxa differentially abundant among SARS-CoV-2–infected participants with respiratory symptoms; the magnitude of these associations was strongly influenced by age. Conclusions We identified interactive relationships between age and specific nasopharyngeal microbiome features that are associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection susceptibility and symptoms in children, adolescents, and young adults. Our data suggest that the upper respiratory microbiome may be a mechanism by which age influences SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and illness severity.
Building research capacity and culture: Exploring nurses' experience of implementing a nurse‐led clinical trial

Abstract Aim To explore the experiences of a nursing team who implemented an international nurse‐led clinical trial in practice and understand the facilitators to their involvement. Background The role and responsibilities of the clinical nurse are advancing to encompass research activity to help inform evidence‐based practice. However, several personal and organisational challenges can inhibit nurses' capacity to implement and undertake research within clinical practice. Methods Three focus groups were conducted with members of a nursing team (N = 18). Thematic analysis was employed, and themes were identified and agreed upon by the research team. Results Five themes were identified: ‘Previous experience of and attitudes to participation in clinical research’, ‘Decision‐making regarding participation in the clinical trial’, ‘Facilitators of participation in the clinical trial’, ‘Challenges of research in nursing practice’ and ‘Future orientation towards research’. Conclusion Through their experiences of implementing a nurse‐led clinical trial within practice, nurses recognized a number of facilitators and challenges to their participation. The perceived relevance of the clinical trial to the nurses' practice, potential to improve patient care and appreciation of the nurse leader's expertise and understanding of their context were key motivators. Reciprocal trust with the nurse leader who was encouraging, motivating, supportive and accessible resulted in the engagement and commitment of the nursing team. Implications for Nursing Management This paper offers a perspective that can inform senior nursing management teams when implementing and conducting evidence‐based research amongst nursing teams and in doing so meet the needs of developing research capacity amongst clinical nurses.
Sorbitan sesquioleate: a rare contact allergen that is also an important indicator of allergic contact dermatitis from crossreacting compounds as well as for false‐positive fragrance allergy

Controversy exists about the addition of sorbitan sesquioleate (SSO) to the European baseline series for concomitant patch testing, particularly with fragrance mix (FM) I and Myroxylone pereirae (MP), which both contain SSO as an emulsifier.
FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF QUALITY MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS

A model for assessing the quality of quality management programs is presented in this paper. The role of Strategic Gaps and Knowledge Gaps in evaluating the quality of quality management programs is discussed in this paper. In addition, the paper presents a method for identification of any possible Strategic Gaps and Knowledge Gaps which may exist in organisational quality management processes. The existence of such gaps may adversely affect the expected outcome from the implemented quality management programs. Furthermore, the paper explores the relationship between the perception of the developers or implementers of quality management programs and other related organizational attributes. Finally, the study seeks to identify other management characteristics associated with success or otherwise of quality management programs in HR departments. In so doing, the importance of addressing issues arising from Strategic Gaps and Knowledge Gaps is addressed.
Effects of Vitamin D Serum Level on Morbidity and Mortality in Patients with COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

PURPOSE It has been shown that low Vitamin D serum concentration is associated with increased pneumonia and viral respiratory infections. Vitamin D is readily available, inexpensive, and easy to administer to subjects infected with COVID-19. If effective in reducing the severity of COVID-19, it could be an important and feasible therapeutic intervention. METHODS We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature to determine the effects of Vitamin D serum concentration on mortality and morbidity in COVID-19 patients. The primary objectives were to determine if Vitamin D serum concentration decrease mortality, ICU admissions, ventilator support, and length of hospital stay in COVID-19 patients. RESULTS A total of 3572 publications were identified. Ultimately, 20 studies are included. A total of 12,806 patients aged between 42 to 81 years old were analyzed. The pooled estimated RR for mortality, ICU admission, ventilator support and length of hospital stay were 1.49 (95% CI: 1.34, 1.65), 0.87 (95% CI: 0.67, 1.14), 1.29 (95% CI: 0.79, 1.84), and 0.84 (95% CI -0.45, 2.13). CONCLUSION There is no statistical difference in mortality, ICU admission rate, ventilator support requirement, and length of hospital stay in COVID-19 patients with low and high Vitamin D serum concentration.
Experiences of residents, family members and staff in residential care settings for older people during COVID‐19: A mixed methods study

Abstract Aim The aim of this study was to explore the COVID‐19 pandemic as it was experienced by people on the front line in residential care settings for older people in the Republic of Ireland (ROI). Background The COVID‐19 pandemic had a disproportionate effect in residential care settings for older people in Ireland. Methods A two‐phased mixed methods study was conducted, consisting of an online survey administered shortly after the first wave of the virus to staff, residents and family members and one‐to‐one interviews with family members shortly after wave 2 of the virus. Results Isolation, loss of connectedness as well as a reduction in the level/quality of care provision led to significant adverse impacts for both residents and their families. Staff reported high levels of stress, trauma and burnout. Family input to care was suspended, with adverse consequences. Conclusion The pandemic had an extremely adverse impact on residents, family members and staff in care settings for older people. Implications for Nursing Management Strategies to ensure that residents' physical, emotional and social needs and staffs' professional and personal needs are appropriately supported during future waves of the pandemic should now be implemented.
Unveiling structural breaks in long-run economic development-CO2 relationships

The paper assesses the e ect of the 1992 United Nations Rio Convention on environment and development and other unknown structural time breaks on the long-run carbon dioxide-economic development relationship for di erent groups of advanced countries. Using an interrupted time series approach, three patterns of the dynamics of carbon dioxide are obtained: one is market-led, one is market- and policy-led, and one is more development-oriented.
Malnutrition, anemia, micronutrient deficiency and parasitic infections among schoolchildren in rural Tanzania

Background Malnutrition, anemia, micronutrient deficiency and parasitic infections continue to impact the nutritional status and health of children in lower-income countries. However, not enough data concerning this issue is available. The aim of this study was to assess the distribution of nutritional indicators, anemia and micronutrient deficiency and their underlying risk factors among schoolchildren in south-eastern Tanzania. Methodology/Principal findings This cross-sectional study enrolled primary schoolchildren aged 6–12 years from Kikwawila and Kiberege wards, Tanzania. In total, 471 schoolchildren underwent a physical examination and provided blood, stool and urine samples for an assessment of the levels of different micronutrients, nutritional and anemia status, and parasitic infection status. We employed bivariate and multivariate logistic regression to determine the association between nutritional statuses, anemia, micronutrient deficiency and parasitic infections. We found that 23.90%, 12.60% and 16.20% of schoolchildren were stunted, underweight and wasted, respectively. About 14.0% of schoolchildren were found to be anemic. Children diagnosed with Plasmodium falciparum infection were more likely to have low levels of ferritin (aOR: 10.40, 95% CI: 2.88-40.53) and elevated levels of serum soluble transferrin receptor (aOR: 3.59, 95% CI: 1.27-11.23), respectively. Vitamin A (34.71%) and vitamin B12 (8.79%) were the most prevalent micronutrients found to be deficient in diagnosed children. Finally, we found that schoolchildren attending the most rural schools were five times more likely to be diagnosed with at least one micronutrient deficiency (aOR: 5.04, 95% CI: 2.38–11.44). Conclusions/Significance Malnutrition, anemia and micronutrient deficiency still pose a significant health burden among schoolchildren living in rural Tanzania. To effectively tackle this burden, health interventions such as deworming, micronutrient supplementation, vector control, health education and access to clean water and improved sanitation should be strengthened and made sustainable.
Pedestrian Crossing Behavior at Signalized Intersections in New York City

Crosswalks are vital links in a city’s pedestrian network. They provide a right-of-way for pedestrians and separate them from vehicular traffic to reduce conflicts. However, pedestrians must often compete for space with other road users. On a microlevel, an understanding of pedestrian behavior on the basis of use patterns is an important tool for transportation professionals as they identify improvement measures and best practices for the best design of pedestrian facilities. A study on the crossing behavior of pedestrians at signalized intersections was undertaken at five locations in New York City. The areas of focus were (a) pedestrian reaction times and (b) the effect of pedestrian characteristics and walking environments on walking speed. Reaction times were studied for two pedestrian groups: (a) those who waited on the sidewalk and (b) those who waited in the crosswalk. Hypothesis testing revealed no significant difference between these two pedestrian groups. The study found that a high percentage o.
Research-led education: challenges and experiences

The role of a university education in science is changing. In the new knowledge economy, the factcentred, narrowly-focussed education often acquired in a traditional science degree is no longer valued for its own sake, partly because such knowledge, and associated technical skills, can rapidly become outdated, but also because people entering the workforce can expect to have to change jobs and duties several times during their lifetimes. Instead, the skills that are most valued in the science graduate are the logical approach, the inquisitiveness and the adaptability that characterise a lifelong learner. This change is reflected in the new emphasis on training students in ‘research skills’ evident in the changing nature of science degrees in many Australian universities, since the skills of the lifelong learner are similar to those of the effective researcher.
ThunderGP: Resource-Efficient Graph Processing Framework on FPGAs with HLS

FPGA has been an emerging computing infrastructure in datacenters benefiting from fine-grained parallelism, energy efficiency, and reconfigurability. Meanwhile, graph processing has attracted tremendous interest in data analytics, and its performance is in increasing demand with the rapid growth of data. Many works have been proposed to tackle the challenges of designing efficient FPGA-based accelerators for graph processing. However, the largely overlooked programmability still requires hardware design expertise and sizable development efforts from developers. ThunderGP, a high-level synthesis based graph processing framework on FPGAs, is hence proposed to close the gap, with which developers could enjoy high performance of FPGA-accelerated graph processing by writing only a few high-level functions with no knowledge of the hardware. ThunderGP adopts the gather-apply-scatter model as the abstraction of various graph algorithms and realizes the model by a built-in highly parallel and memory-efficient accelerator template. With high-level functions as inputs, ThunderGP automatically explores massive resources of multiple super-logic regions of modern FPGA platforms to generate and deploy accelerators, as well as schedule tasks for them. Although ThunderGP on DRAM-based platforms is memory bandwidth bounded, recent high bandwidth memory (HBM) brings large potentials to performance. However, the system bottleneck shifts from memory bandwidth to resource consumption on HBM-enabled platforms. Therefore, we further propose to improve resource efficiency of ThunderGP to utilize more memory bandwidth from HBM. We conduct evaluation with seven common graph applications and 19 graphs. ThunderGP on DRAM-based hardware platforms provides 1.9× ∼ 5.2× improvement on bandwidth efficiency over the state of the art, whereas ThunderGP on HBM-based hardware platforms delivers up to 5.2× speedup over the state-of-the-art RTL-based approach. This work is open sourced on GitHub at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/ThunderGP .
An Optimized GIB Routing Architecture with Bent Wires for FPGA

Field-programmable gate arrays (FGPAs) are widely used because of the superiority in flexibility and lower non-recurring engineering cost. How to optimize the routing architecture is a key problem for FPGA architects because it has a large impact on FPGA area, delay, and routability. In academia, the routing architecture is mainly based on the connection blocks (CBs) and switch blocks (SBs), whereas most research has focused on SB architectures, such as Wilton, Universal, and Disjoint SB patterns. In this article, we propose a novel unidirectional routing architecture—general interconnection block (GIB)—to improve FPGA performance. With the GIB architecture, logic block (LB) pins can directly connect with the adjacent GIBs without programmable switches. Inside a GIB, LB pins can connect to the routing channel tracks on the four sides of a GIB. In particular, the logic pins from different neighboring LBs that connect to the same GIB can connect with each other with only one programmable switch. In addition, we enhance VTR to support the GIB with bent wires and develop a searching framework based on the simulated annealing algorithm to search for a near-optimal distribution of wire types. We evaluate the GIB architecture on VTR 8 with the provided benchmark circuits. The experimental results show that the GIB architecture with length-4 wires can achieve 9.5% improvement on the critical path delay and 11.1% improvement on the area-delay product compared to the VTR CB-SB architecture with length-4 wires. After exploring mixed wire types, the optimized GIB architecture can further improve the delay by 16.4% and area-delay product by 17.1% compared to the CB-SB architecture with length-4 wires.
Signatures of natural selection in a foundation tree along Mediterranean climatic gradients

Temperature and precipitation regimes are rapidly changing, resulting in forest dieback and extinction events, particularly in Mediterranean‐type climates (MTC). Forest management that enhance forests’ resilience is urgently required, however adaptation to climates in heterogeneous landscapes with multiple selection pressures is complex. For widespread trees in MTC we hypothesized that: patterns of local adaptation are associated with climate; precipitation is a stronger factor of adaptation than temperature; functionally related genes show similar signatures of adaptation; and adaptive variants are independently sorting across the landscape. We sampled 28 populations across the geographic distribution of Eucalyptus marginata (jarrah), in South‐west Western Australia, and obtained 13,534 independent single nucleotide polymorphic (SNP) markers across the genome. Three genotype‐association analyses that employ different ways of correcting population structure were used to identify putatively adapted SNPs associated with independent climate variables. While overall levels of population differentiation were low (FST = 0.04), environmental association analyses found a total of 2336 unique SNPs associated with temperature and precipitation variables, with 1440 SNPs annotated to genic regions. Considerable allelic turnover was identified for SNPs associated with temperature seasonality and mean precipitation of the warmest quarter, suggesting that both temperature and precipitation are important factors in adaptation. SNPs with similar gene functions had analogous allelic turnover along climate gradients, while SNPs among temperature and precipitation variables had uncorrelated patterns of adaptation. These contrasting patterns provide evidence that there may be standing genomic variation adapted to current climate gradients, providing the basis for adaptive management strategies to bolster forest resilience in the future.
Topical tacrolimus for the treatment of external eye inflammation in children

ABSTRACT Purpose To show our results with the use of topical tacrolimus in pediatric patients with anterior segment inflammatory disorders. Methods Retrospective case series review of pediatric patients treated with 0.03% topical tacrolimus ointment into the conjunctival sac once a day. All patients treated between 2015 and 2020 were included. Primary outcome was clinical improvement defined as a reduction in the clinical sign score in the last visit. Secondary outcome was a reduction in the topical steroidal treatment. Results A total of 12 patients with a mean age of 9 years were included. The average follow-up time was 23 months. The mean duration of tacrolimus use was 19.6 months. Clinical improvement was seen in 11 patients (92%) with a significant reduction in the mean clinical score from 4.5 baseline to 0.6 (P= 0.0002) and steroid reduction was achieved in all cases. Two patients stopped tacrolimus during the follow-up period for poor effect. Conclusion The use of topical conjunctival dermatological tacrolimus 0.03% ointment is an effective and safe treatment in children with external eye inflammation. Most of the patients presented clinical improvement and all steroid reduction with its use. The main side effect reported was discomfort with the application.
With concreteness details fade: dissociative effect of labelling of concrete and abstract stimuli on memory

ABSTRACT The current study sought to assess false memory formation in both immediate and delayed recognition for two different perceptually similar images: concrete images and abstract images. To test this, we adopted a modified version of the classical DRM task to study categorised pictures. Experiment 1 instructed participants to study sets of perceptually similar images, solve a math equation, and engage in a short-term memory (STM) recognition test. Following a delay, participants were given a long-term memory (LTM) recognition test. Experiments 2 and 3 were methodologically similar, however, excluded the distraction task allowing more time between encoding and retrieval (Experiment 2) and encouraged verbalisation of stimuli (Experiment 3). In three experiments, participants were more accurate in recognising images in STM than LTM and labelling images had a dissociative effect on LTM depending on the type of stimuli. Our results help identify the susceptibilities individuals experience while detecting changes in similar images.
Dancer Education Beyond The Conservatory:The Health Education Benefits of Pre-season Screens for a Professional Ballet Company

ABSTRACT Traditional ballet classes teach dancers how to perform long-established vocabulary and choreographed roles within a time-honoured hierarchical structure that provides constant direction and methods for physical training. When the dancers proceed to professional companies, some of this structure remains in the form of daily ballet classes. However, the autonomy that the dancers are expected to have, with reference to their own physical and mental health, may challenge some young professional dancers if they are not educated in self-care or do not have individualized conditioning programs. Findings in this study with a Toronto-based professional ballet company, align with recent qualitative studies and literature supporting the physical and psychological benefits of screening including dancer education, optimizing performance, and developing rapport between dancers and physiotherapists/health care teams.
A pioneer of corrosion science

Robert Melchers is an Australian engineer who has specialised in structural engineering, structural reliability and in the last 25 years in corrosion research. He has been developing mathematical models for corrosion loss and pitting that can be used by structural engineers and naval architects for the design and management of infrastructure assets including ships and offshore structures. He has been involved in a number of major practical projects related to shipping and offshore facilities. He has given some 35 keynote presentations at numerous international conferences, both for structural reliability research and for corrosion research. His 1968 book ‘Structural Reliability Analysis and Prediction’ is the ‘best-seller’ in the subject area and is now in its 3rd edition. He has received numerous awards and was elected to the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering in 2004 and became an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia in 2014. He has held two Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowships, a Discovery Outstanding Research Fellowship, two UK EPSRC fellowships, as well as gaining more than $A16 million in research grants. He continues to be very active in research at The University of Newcastle, Australia and to provide advice to industry.