Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prevalence of Nasal Colonization by Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus in Persons Using a Homeless Shelter in Kansas City

Nasal colonization of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) plays an important role in the epidemiology and pathogenesis of disease. Situations of close-quarter contact in groups are generally regarded as a risk factor for community-acquired MRSA strains due to transmission via fomites and person-to-person contact. With these criteria for risk, homeless individuals using shelter facilities, including showers and toilets, should be considered high risk for colonization and infection. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of nasal colonization of MRSA in a homeless population compared to established rates of colonization within the public and a control group of subjects from a neighboring medical school campus, and to analyze phylogenetic diversity among the MRSA strains. Nasal samples were taken from the study population of 332 adult participants and analyzed. In addition, participants were surveyed about various lifestyle factors in order to elucidate potential patterns of behavior associated with MRSA colonization. Homeless and control groups both had higher prevalence of MRSA (9.8 and 10.6%, respectively), when compared to the general population reported by previous studies (1.8%). However, the control group had a similar MRSA rate compared to health-care workers (4.6%), while the homeless population had an increased prevalence. Risk factors identified in this study included male gender, age over 50 years, and use of antibiotics within the past 3 months. Phylogenetic relationships between nine of the positive samples from the homeless population were analyzed, showing eight of the nine samples had a high degree of relatedness between the spaA genes of the MRSA strains. This indicates that the same MRSA strain might be transmitted from person-to-person among homeless population. These findings increase our understanding of key differences in MRSA characteristics within homeless populations, as well as risks for MRSA associated with being homeless, such as age and gender, which may then be a useful tool in guiding more effective prevention, treatment, and health care for homeless individuals.
SVD compression, unitary transforms, and computational complexity

The search for fast unitary transforms and the need for data compression in linear systems are complementary issues. Compression requires the definition of a threshold dependent on the condition number, which is invariant over the unitary group. With respect to this threshold, it is shown that the SVD is the optimal tool. Considerations in connection with the Kronecker product and direct sum of unitary matrices show that the computational complexity of unitary transforms is entropy-like in nature, thereby indicating that the O(n log n) complexity unitary transforms are dense over the unitary group.
Effect of chlorhexidine application on the bond strength of resin core to axial dentin in endodontic cavity

Objectives This study evaluated the influence of chlorhexidine (CHX) on the microtensile bonds strength (µTBS) of resin core with two adhesive systems to dentin in endodontic cavities. Materials and Methods Flat dentinal surfaces in 40 molar endodontic cavities were treated with self-etch adhesive system, Contax (DMG) and total-etch adhesive system, Adper Single Bond 2 (3M ESPE) after the following surface treatments: (1) Priming only (Contax), (2) CHX for 15 sec + rinsing + priming (Contax), (3) Etching with priming (Adper Single Bond 2), (4) Etching + CHX for 15 sec + rinsing + priming (Adper Single Bond 2). Resin composite build-ups were made with LuxaCore (DMG) using a bulk method and polymerized for 40 sec. For each condition, half of specimens were submitted to µTBS after 24 hr storage and half of them were submitted to thermocycling of 10,000 cycles between 5℃ and 55℃ before testing. The data were analyzed using ANOVA and independent t-test at a significance level of 95%. Results CHX pre-treatment did not affect the bond strength of specimens tested at the immediate testing period, regardless of dentin surface treatments. However, after 10,000 thermocycling, all groups showed reduced bond strength. The amount of reduction was greater in groups without CHX treatments than groups with CHX treatment. These characteristics were the same in both self-etch adhesive system and total-etch adhesive system. Conclusions 2% CHX application for 15 sec proved to alleviate the decrease of bond strength of dentin bonding systems. No significant difference was shown in µTBS between total-etching system and self-etching system.
Catmine : Computer assisted trade-mark infringement evaluation.

In forensic Machine Learning, information systems are not easy to use due to many constraints. Knowledge generally comes from laws and their use is represented by decisions. The whole data requires several parses in order to obtain a structured database on which decision tools can be applied. This study presents the use of machine learning tools to assist the lawyer in nominative trade-mark infringement evaluation. The domain formalism and database are obtained from the JURINPI database which regroups thousands of cases in the trade-mark domain. The use of a neural network and of Sammon’s non-linear mapping provides a development of datas with designed decision tools for trade-mark infringement evaluation : CATMInE (Computer Assisted Trade-Mark Infringement Evaluation). This web-oriented application requires little technical knowledge on machine learning and displays a readable and concise information.
Failure of the Law to Grant Access to Legal Abortion in Chile

Introduction: In 2017, Chile decriminalized abortion on three grounds: (i) if the pregnant person's life is at risk, (ii) fetal nonviability, and (iii) rape or incest. This multicase study explores the experiences of pregnant people legally entitled to but denied access to legal abortion in Chile. Methods: Through a snowball sampling approach, we recruited adult Chilean residents who sought, were eligible for, and were denied a legal abortion after September 2017. We conducted semistructured interviews with participants to explore their experiences in seeking and being denied legal abortions. We recorded and transcribed the interviews, then coded and analyzed the transcriptions to identify common themes. Results: We identified four women who met the eligibility criteria. The interviews revealed five common themes in their experiences: (i) disparate levels of social support in accessing abortion, (ii) abundant access barriers, (iii) forced pregnancy, (iv) abortion stigma, and (v) a failure of the law to provide access to abortion. Discussion and Health Equity Implications: Although the 2017 law expanded legal access to abortion in Chile, significant barriers remain. Compounded with social stigma, and the socioeconomic disparities in abortion access, pregnant people continue to face insurmountable obstacles in obtaining legal abortions, even when their lives are at risk and the pregnancy is not viable. The state must prioritize equity of access to legal abortions. Future studies should continue to explore the challenges people face accessing legal abortion care to inform strategies to ensure people are able to obtain the quality care that they are legally entitled to.
Establishing a georeferenced spatio-temporal database for Chinese coal mining accidents between 2000 and 2015

Abstract China is a major coal producing country, and also one of the countries which has the most serious coal mine accidents around the world. As a result of geological conditions, underground mining is the main way that coal is exploited in China; serious underground disasters and the corresponding fatality rate are much higher than is the case for surface mining. Although safer modern underground mining methods have been introduced across China, accidents still lead to fatalities and the loss of revenue in some mines. It is important to establish a georeferenced coal mine disasters (CMD) database to aid researchers and decision makers in better understanding the spatio-temporal distribution of such accidents across in China. This study has proposed a method to develop a georeferenced spatio-temporal CMD database via a geographic information system (GIS) platform based on statistical data released by the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety (SACMS) for the period between 2000 and 2015. The different levels and spatio-temporal characteristics of coal mining accidents were analyzed, and the space-time scan statistic permutation (STSSP) model was carried out to detect the CMD clusters; and finally, a spatio-temporal cluster analysis of Chinese coal mining accidents in 2000 and 2015 was conducted.
Experimental Designs for Political Communication Research

Introduction As recently as three decades ago, the use of experimental methods was a rarity in the disciplines of political science, sociology, and communications. Beginning in the early 1980s, a surge of interest in the interdisciplinary field of political psychology set in motion a trickle of experimental methods into several sub-fields of political science, including political communication. But despite the increased interest, longstanding concerns over the artificiality of experimental settings, the unrepresentativeness of experimental subject pools and the questionable generalizability of experimental findings has continued to impede the further diffusion of experimental methods. In this chapter I describe the inherent strengths of the experiment as a basis for causal inference, using recent examples from political communication research. I argue that the technological advances associated with the rapid diffusion of the Internet have already gone a long way toward neutralizing the traditional weaknesses of experimentation. First, experiments administered online can prove just as realistic as conventional experiments. Second, issues of sampling bias-previously endemic to experiments-can be overcome through the greater " reach " of online experiments and, in addition, by the application of standard probability sampling techniques to the recruitment of online experimental participants. These developments significantly alleviate concerns over the generalizability of experimental research and as a result, experiments now represent a dominant methodology for political communication researchers. In the field of political communication, the principal advantage of the experiment over the survey-and the focus of the discussion that follows-is the researcher's ability to isolate and test the effects of specific components of political messages. Consider the case of political campaigns. At the aggregate level, campaigns encompass a concatenation of messages, channels, and sources, all of which may influence the audience, often in inconsistent directions. The researcher's task is to identify specific causal factors and delineate the range of their relevant attributes. Even at the relatively narrow level of campaign advertisements, for instance, there are virtually an infinite number of potential causal factors, both verbal and visual. What was it about the infamous "Willie Horton" advertisement that is thought to have moved so many American voters away from Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign? Was it, as widely alleged, Mr. Horton's race? Or was it the violent and brutal nature of his described behavior, the fact that he was a convict, the race of his victim, or something else entirely? Experiments make it possible to isolate the explanation, whether …
Circulating MicroRNA-30d Is Associated With Response to Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy in Heart Failure and Regulates Cardiomyocyte Apoptosis: A Translational Pilot Study

Background— Biomarkers that predict response to cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) in heart failure patients with dyssynchrony (HFDYS) would be clinically important. Circulating extracellular microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as novel biomarkers that may also play important functional roles, but their relevance as markers for CRT response has not been examined. Methods and Results— Comprehensive miRNA polymerase chain reaction arrays were used to assess baseline levels of 766 plasma miRNAs in patients undergoing clinically indicated CRT in an initial discovery set (n=12) with and without subsequent echocardiographic improvement at 6 months after CRT. Validation of candidate miRNAs in 61 additional patients confirmed that baseline plasma miR-30d was associated with CRT response (defined as an increase in left ventricular ejection fraction ≥10%). MiR-30d was enriched in coronary sinus blood and increased in late-contracting myocardium in a canine model of HFDYS, indicating cardiac origin with maximal expression in areas of high mechanical stress. We examined the functional effects of miR-30d in cultured cardiomyocytes and determined that miR-30d is expressed in cardiomyocytes and released in vesicles in response to mechanical stress. Overexpression of miR-30d in cultured cardiomyocytes led to cardiomyocyte growth and protected against apoptosis by targeting the mitogen-associated kinase 4, a downstream effector of tumor necrosis factor. In HFDYS patients, miR-30d plasma levels inversely correlated with high-sensitivity troponin T, a marker of myocardial necrosis. Conclusions— Baseline plasma miR-30d level is associated with response to CRT in HFDYS in this translational pilot study. MiR-30d increase in cardiomyocytes correlates with areas of increased wall stress in HFDYS and is protective against deleterious tumor necrosis factor signaling.
Placement of defect-tolerant digital microfluidic biochips using the T-tree formulation

Droplet-based microfluidic biochips have recently gained much attention and are expected to revolutionize the biological laboratory procedures. As biochips are adopted for the complex procedures in molecular biology, its complexity is expected to increase due to the need of multiple and concurrent assays on a chip. In this article, we formulate the placement problem of digital microfluidic biochips with a tree-based topological representation, called T-tree. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first work that adopts a topological representation to solve the placement problem of digital microfluidic biochips. We also consider the defect tolerant issue to avoid to use defective cells due to fabrication. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is more efficient and effective than the previous unified synthesis and placement framework.
Comparing Stochastic Approaches to Spoken Language Understanding in Multiple Languages

One of the first steps in building a spoken language understanding (SLU) module for dialogue systems is the extraction of flat concepts out of a given word sequence, usually provided by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. In this paper, six different modeling approaches are investigated to tackle the task of concept tagging. These methods include classical, well-known generative and discriminative methods like Finite State Transducers (FSTs), Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), Maximum Entropy Markov Models (MEMMs), or Support Vector Machines (SVMs) as well as techniques recently applied to natural language processing such as Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) or Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs). Following a detailed description of the models, experimental and comparative results are presented on three corpora in different languages and with different complexity. The French MEDIA corpus has already been exploited during an evaluation campaign and so a direct comparison with existing benchmarks is possible. Recently collected Italian and Polish corpora are used to test the robustness and portability of the modeling approaches. For all tasks, manual transcriptions as well as ASR inputs are considered. Additionally to single systems, methods for system combination are investigated. The best performing model on all tasks is based on conditional random fields. On the MEDIA evaluation corpus, a concept error rate of 12.6% could be achieved. Here, additionally to attribute names, attribute values have been extracted using a combination of a rule-based and a statistical approach. Applying system combination using weighted ROVER with all six systems, the concept error rate (CER) drops to 12.0%.
A new primate species record for Cambodia: Pygathrix nemaeus

Currently three species of douc (Genus: Pygathrix) are recognized; the black-shanked douc (P. nigripes), the grey-shanked douc (P. cinerea), and the red-shanked douc (P. nemaeus) (Groves, 2001; Roos & Nadler, 2001; Nadler et al., 2003; Roos, 2004). This genus is restricted to Indochina east of the Mekong River, with P. nigripes typically ascribed to occur in Cambodia and Southern Vietnam, P. cinerea in central Vietnam, and P. nemaeus in Laos (south of N18°40’) and central and north-central Vietnam (Fooden, 1996; Nadler et al., 2003). These species largely replace each other from south to north, but there are instances of local sympatry recorded and, in some areas, the species are thought to hybridise (Nadler et al., 2003).
Docent: A Document-Level Decoder for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation

We describe Docent, an open-source decoder for statistical machine translation that breaks with the usual sentence-bysentence paradigm and translates complete documents as units. By taking translation to the document level, our decoder can handle feature models with arbitrary discourse-wide dependencies and constitutes an essential infrastructure component in the quest for discourse-aware SMT models. 1 Motivation
The Landscape of the AHRQ Health Information Technology Portfolio

A major agenda item of the President and Congress is widespread adoption of health information technology (health IT) to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of health care. This has allowed federal agencies to invest additional money into health IT research. The distribution and potential impact of research dollars spent by one agency supporting this agenda is examined here.
Shape changes in human erythrocytes induced by replacement of the native phosphatidylcholine with species containing various fatty acids

Phosphatidylcholine-specific transfer protein from beef liver has been used to replace native phosphatidylcholine (PC) molecules from intact human erythrocytes by a variety of PC species differing in fatty acid composition. These replacements changed neither the total phospholipid content of the membrane, nor the composition of this fraction in terms of the various phospholipid classes. The morphology of the erythrocyte was not modified when native PC was replaced by 1-palmitoyl,2-oleoyl PC, 1-palmitoyl,2-linoleoyl PC, egg PC, or PC isolated from rat liver microsomes. Replacement with the disaturated species 1,2-dimyristoyl PC, 1,2-dipalmitoyl PC, and 1,2-distearoyl PC resulted in the formation of echinocytes and, at higher levels of replacement, in spheroechinocytes. Echinocyte-like erythrocytes were also observed after replacement with 1-palmitoyl,2-arachidonoyl PC, whereas stomatocytes were formed upon replacement with PC species containing two unsaturated fatty acids, e.g., 1,2-dioleoyl PC and 1,2-dilinoleoyl PC. The observations show that the erythrocyte membrane structure and the overall discoid cell shape of the human erythrocyte are optimally stabilized by PC species that contain one saturated and one mono- or diunsaturated fatty acid, and that the cell tolerates only limited variations in the species composition of its PC.
An Rb family–independent E2F3 transcription factor variant impairs STAT5 signaling and mammary gland remodeling during pregnancy in mice

E2F transcription factors are regulated by binding to the retinoblastoma (Rb) tumor suppressor family of proteins. Previously, we reported an E2FLQ mutation that disrupts the binding with Rb proteins without affecting the transcriptional activity of E2F. We also showed that mouse embryonic fibroblasts with an E2F3LQ mutation exhibit increased E2F activity and more rapid cell proliferation. In this report, we analyzed E2F3LQ mice to further characterize the in vivo consequences of Rb family–independent E2F3 activity. We found that homozygous E2F3LQ mice were viable and had no obvious developmental defects or tumor growth. Our results also indicated that E2F3LQ cells largely retain normal control of cell proliferation in vivo. However, female E2F3LQ mice had partial nursing defects. Examination of the E2F3LQ mammary glands revealed increased caveolin-1 (CAV1) expression, reduced prolactin receptor/Stat5 signaling, and impaired pregnancy-induced cell proliferation and differentiation. Of note, ChIP experiments disclosed that E2F3 binds the CAV1 promoter. Furthermore, E2F3 overexpression induced CAV1 expression, and CRISPR/CAS9-mediated E2F3 knockout reduced CAV1 levels and also increased prolactin receptor–induced Stat5 signaling in mammary epithelial cells. Our results suggest that the Rb family–independent E2F3LQ variant inhibits pregnancy-induced mammary gland cell proliferation and differentiation by up-regulating CAV1 expression and inhibiting Stat5 signaling.
Universal forgery on Sekhar's signature scheme with message recovery

Owing to the abundance of electronic applications of digital signatures, many additional properties are needed. Recently, Sekhar [Sekhar, M. R. (2004). Signature scheme with message recovery and its application. Int. J. Comput. Math., 81(3), 285–289. ] proposed three signature schemes with message recovery designed to protect the identity of the signer. In this setting, only a specific verifier can check the validity of a signature, and he can transmit this conviction to a third party. In this note, we show that this protocol is totally insecure, as it is universally forgeable under a no-message attack. In other words, we show that anyone can forge a valid signature of a user on an arbitrary message. The forged signatures are unconditionally indistinguishable (in an information theoretical sense) from properly formed signatures. E-mail: vergnaud@math.unicaen. fr E-mail: jacques.traore@francetelecom.com
The human peripheral lymph node vascular addressin is a ligand for LECAM-1, the peripheral lymph node homing receptor

The trafficking of lymphocytes from the blood and into lymphoid organs is controlled by tissue-selective lymphocyte interactions with specialized endothelial cells lining post capillary venules, in particular the high endothelial venules (HEV) found in lymphoid tissues and sites of chronic inflammation. Lymphocyte interactions with HEV are mediated in part by lymphocyte homing receptors and tissue-specific HEV determinants, the vascular addressins. A peripheral lymph node addressin (PNAd) has been detected immunohistologically in mouse and man by monoclonal antibody MECA-79, which inhibits lymphocyte homing to lymph nodes and lymphocyte binding to lymph node and tonsillar HEV. The human MECA-79 antigen, PNAd, is molecularly distinct from the 65-kD mucosal vascular addressin. The most abundant iodinated species by SDS- PAGE is 105 kD. When affinity isolated and immobilized on glass slides, MECA-79 immunoisolated material binds human and mouse lymphocytes avidly in a calcium dependent manner. Binding is blocked by mAb MECA- 79, by antibodies against mouse or human LECAM-1 (the peripheral lymph node homing receptor, the MEL-14 antigen, LAM-1), and by treatment of PNAd with neuraminidase. Expression of LECAM-1 cDNA confers PNAd binding ability on a transfected B cell line. We conclude that LECAM-1 mediates lymphocyte binding to PNAd, an interaction that involves the lectin activity of LECAM-1 and carbohydrate determinants on the addressin.