Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“I am still negative”: Female sex workers’ perspectives on uptake and use of daily pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention in South Africa

Women remain highly vulnerable to HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, with female sex workers (FSWs) facing some of the highest rates of HIV. Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has the potential to reduce new infections among populations at highest risk and end-user perspectives of actual use in ‘real-world’ settings are critical to informing PrEP implementation. This paper presents findings from serial in-depth interviews (IDIs) conducted with FSW participants during the course of the Treatment And Prevention for Sex workers (TAPS) Demonstration Project in South Africa, exploring the lived experiences and perceptions of taking up and using PrEP. This research provides insight into risks and responsibilities facing FSWs perceived as prominent drivers in taking up and using PrEP, how PrEP was adopted to mitigate risk or ameliorate realities, and the characteristics of PrEP most valued, all of which are critical to consider in scale-up. Overall, distrust in the existence and/or efficacy of PrEP affected the motivation of women to come to the clinic and to maintain use. As one of the first reports of PrEP use among FSWs outside of a clinical trial setting, this research shows that it will be important to ensure accurate, relevant, and widespread messaging in communities to generate demand and support for PrEP.
Future time perspective: Dimensions of opportunities, life, and time are differentially associated with physical health, cognitive functioning, and well-being in old age

Abstract Objective: The present study investigated the multidimensional nature of the future time perspective scale and dimension-specific associations with measures of physical health, cognitive functioning, and well-being. Method: Using data from the Berlin Aging Study II (N = 1,038, M age = 71 years, range = 61–88 years, 52% women), different models of future time perspective were compared using confirmatory factor analyses, and the best-fitting model was then used to explore dimension-specific associations with physical health, cognitive functioning, and well-being measures. Results: A model of future time perspective composed of a focus on opportunities, a focus on life, and a focus on time was found to have the best fit. An extended focus on opportunities was associated with stronger grip strength, more accurate memory, as well as higher life satisfaction and positive affect. An extended focus on time was associated with less accurate memory, lower negative affect, and greater life satisfaction. A focus on life was unrelated to study measures. Discussion: Findings suggest that future time perspective is multidimensional and that these dimensions are differentially associated with physical health, cognitive functioning, and well-being in old age.
Identification and characterisation of anti - Pseudomonas aeruginosa proteins in mucus of the brown garden snail, Cornu aspersum

ABSTRACT Background: Novel antimicrobial treatments are urgently needed. Previous work has shown that the mucus of the brown garden snail (Cornu aspersum) has antimicrobial properties, in particular against type culture collection strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We hypothesised that it would also be effective against clinical isolates of the bacterium and that investigation of fractions of the mucus would identify one or more proteins with anti-pseudomonal properties, which could be further characterised. Materials and methods: Mucus was extracted from snails collected from the wild. Antimicrobial activity against laboratory and clinical isolates of Ps. aeruginosa was determined in disc diffusion assays. Mucus was purified using size exclusion chromatography and fractions containing anti-pseudomonal activity identified. Mass spectroscopy and high performance liquid chromatography analysis of these fractions yielded partial peptide sequences. These were used to interrogate an RNA transcriptome generated from whole snails. Results: Mucus from C. aspersum inhibited growth of type collection strains and clinical isolates of Ps. aeruginosa. Four novel C. aspersum proteins were identified; at least three are likely to have antimicrobial properties. The most interesting is a 37.4 kDa protein whilst smaller proteins, one 17.5 kDa and one 18.6 kDa also appear to have activity against Ps. aeruginosa. Conclusions: The study has identified novel proteins with antimicrobial properties which could be used to develop treatments for use in human medicine.
Joint Attentive Spatial-Temporal Feature Aggregation for Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) remains to be a promising but challenging computer vision task, suffering from a lack of discriminative features that better aggregate both the spatial and temporal information. In this paper, we propose a joint attentive spatial-temporal feature aggregation network (JAFN) for the video-based person Re-ID, simultaneously learning the quality- and frame-aware model to obtain attention-based spatial-temporal feature aggregation. Specifically, we utilize CNN to learn the spatial features, while introducing the LSTM to separately learn the temporal features. For the feature aggregation, we introduce two attention mechanisms respectively for generating the quality and frame significance score, where the quality score measures the quality of the images for attentive spatial feature aggregation, and the frame score measures the significance of the image frames contributing to the temporal feature. Then, we utilize the set-pooling for both the quality-aware spatial feature and the frame-aware temporal feature aggregation based on the attentive scores. The residual learning is also introduced to play between the LSTM and the CNN for adaptive spatial-temporal feature fusion. Furthermore, we adopt the data balance to alleviate the data disproportions existing in datasets of the video-based Re-ID. The extensive experimental results conducted on the PRID2011, i-LIDS-VID, and MARS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed JAFN. Furthermore, comparison results conducted on different modules and features in the JAFN show that our approach is of favorable generalization ability on attentively aggregating both the spatial and temporal features.
Reproductive biology of little tunny Euthynnus alletteratus (Rafinesque, 1810) in the southwest Gulf of Mexico

The aim of this study was to describe the reproductive dynamic of Euthynnus alletteratus in the southwest Gulf of Mexico. The annual variation of the volume fraction occupied by gametes and tissues in gonads were related with main body indexes, such as the gonadosomatic index (IG), the hepatosomatic index (IH), and the nutrition index (IN), and compared with the sea surface temperature. A total of 951 E. alletteratus individuals were sampled, where a sex ratio of 1:1 and a size interval strongly skewed towards organisms with a fork length (LF) of 36–40 cm were observed. The IG showed an increase from March to September with maximum values in April and July. Two clearly defined peaks were observed, and they were consistent with the histological analysis, where the percentage of ripe gametes predominated from April to September. The optimum thermal window for reproductive activity was from 24 to 28 °C. The size of first sex maturity was 34.35 cm of LF for males and 34.60 (LF) for females, without significant difference between sexes.
Knowledge and attitude towards exclusive breast feeding among postnatal mothers in a tertiary care teaching hospital-an institution based cross sectional study

Background: Exclusive breast feeding (EBF) is termed as an optimal strategy for feeding newborns and as per WHO should start within the first one hour of delivery and must continue up to 6 months of infant’s age, as the only source of nutrition and fluids for babies at that age. Unfortunately, a report estimated in 2012 that, only 35% of infants were exclusively breastfed globally. This stresses the need to educate and motivate mothers to exclusively breastfeed their babies for the first six months of life.Methods: Knowledge and attitude towards EBF, of postnatal mothers admitted to a tertiary care teaching hospital was assessed using a self-administered questionnaire and their responses analysed using statistics software.Results: From our study we found that, based on knowledge score, 88 (69.8%) of the respondents had good knowledge and 38 (30.2%) of the study participants were categorized as having poor knowledge. Based on the attitudinal score, 17 (14%) of the study participants were categorized as having negative attitude towards EBF and 108 (86%) were categorized as having positive attitude towards EBF. Conclusions: Health care providers working in the areas of maternal and child health (MCH), should evaluate mothers’ knowledge and attitude for EBF, every visit by asking questions related to EBF. IEC activities related to EBF should be promoted to disseminate knowledge regarding EBF. Breast feeding support groups should be established to help motivate mothers to exclusively breast feed their babies for the first six months of life.
Multipath Cluster Fading Statistics and Modeling in Millimeter-Wave Radio Channels

The second-order statistics of indoor directional channels are investigated using millimeter-wave (mmWave) band (30.4–37.1 GHz) ultrawideband (UWB) channel measurements. Considering two main mmWave system assumptions (high bandwidth and high beamforming gain), this paper aims to investigate the validity of the Rayleigh–Rice fading models for the cluster fading envelope. The results from the mmWave band study are compared to an already well-studied lower frequency FCC band (3.4–10.1 GHz). During the measurements, only selective objects (emulated multipath clusters in the propagation channel) are illuminated in a small lecture room. The experiments show that for both UWB channels, the complex received (Rx) signal is a circularly symmetric non-Gaussian random variable with highly correlated inphase (I) and quadrature (Q) components. These properties demonstrate that the intracluster multipath components (MPCs) structure is sparse. Consequently, modeling the cluster fading envelope with Rayleigh–Rice distribution is not realistic. Therefore, the sum-of-cisoids principle is used for intracluster multipath modeling which inherently considers a correlation between I and Q components. It has been established that a reasonably good approximation of the cluster fading envelope can be obtained with $N=3-6$ equal amplitude cisoids. However, we remark that Rayleigh–Rice models may become realistic cluster fading envelopes for narrowband mmWave systems.
Differences in Eysenck’s Personality Dimensions between a Group of Breast Cancer Survivors and the General Population

Cancer may influence personality in patients and survivors. However, the possible relations between the treatments that the patients have undergone and the personality in survivors are not clear. This study aimed to establish the differences in personality between a group of breast cancer survivors and a control group, and to test the predictive utility of the treatments on the personality traits in survivors. Thirty breast cancer survivors and thirty participants from the general population completed the Eysenck personality questionnaire-revised (EPQ-R) and a socio-demographic questionnaire. Survivors had lower scores on extraversion and higher scores on neuroticism than the control group, but these differences were not significant. However, differences in psychoticism were significant, with higher scores in the survivor group. Breast-conserving therapy predicted extraversion while breast reconstruction predicted psychoticism. These results suggest that the physical consequences of surgery may lead to social and psychological impairments in this group of patients.
Self-Reported Reasons for Abstinence from Illicit Drugs

Abstract Objective: To provide a more balanced understanding of the initiation and restraint of substance use, educators, clinicians, and researchers would benefit from a review of research assessing the reasons nonusers report for having abstained from drugs. Method: Based on searches of computerized databases and the reference sections of relevant articles, we identified 15 relevant studies that assessed and quantified participants’ expressed reasons for having abstained from (a) one or more named substances or (b) drugs (or alcohol and drugs) with little or no further specification. We defined as more salient those 25% of reasons in each study that were endorsed most frequently, ranked highest, or rated most influential. Results: Five reasons – concerns about physical health, lack of interest, harmful psychological consequences, personal beliefs/morals, and peer/family disapproval – were most frequently identified as salient across studies and substances. Conclusion: These salient reasons are consistent with outcome expectancy and social learning models that have been proposed to explain drug initiation. To enhance the value of future research, we recommend testing whether importance ratings differ across contexts; repeatedly assessing within-subject variability of reasons across time; evaluating the association of psychological characteristics with reasons for abstaining; and continuing to evaluate which reasons for abstaining vary by type of drug, gender, ethnicity, and religiosity. We also recommend additional research comparing which reasons predict continued abstinence and which predict initiation of use during follow-up.
Are Critics Right About Quarterly Earnings Guidance? An Examination of Quarterly Earnings Guidance and Managerial Myopia.

I examine the claim that managers who issue quarterly earnings guidance sacrifice long-term value to enhance short-term performance, i.e., that quarterly earnings guidance encourages myopic behavior. I find that quarterly guiders are more likely to meet quarterly earnings expectations and tend to use more short-term language in their 10-Ks, supporting the view that quarterly earnings guidance shifts a manager’s attention to the short term. However, quarterly earnings guidance does not appear to have a negative impact on a firm’s long-term performance. Using an entropy-balanced sample, I find that quarterly guiders outperform nonguiders over the next three and five years across a variety of performance measures. Also inconsistent with the claims of critics, I find no evidence that quarterly earnings guidance is associated with more earnings management or underinvestment. Taken together, my results do not support the view that quarterly earnings guidance leads to managerial myopia. In addition to having policy implications, my research contributes to the literatures on earnings guidance and the real effects of disclosure.
Cytological differences between invasive and noninvasive or minimally invasive lung adenocarcinomas diagnosed in Japanese patients using needle biopsy specimens of pulmonary lesions ≤3 cm in diameter

According to the WHO classification for lung cancer, adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS) and minimally invasive adenocarcinoma (MIA) have a better prognosis than invasive adenocarcinoma (IAD). However, detecting the foci of invasion in lung adenocarcinomas radiologically remains difficult. The present study examined whether or not differences in the cytological characteristics between IAD and AIS or MIA (noninvasive or minimally invasive adenocarcinomas [NMIAD]) plays a role in the differential diagnosis.
Restricting carbohydrates at breakfast is sufficient to reduce 24-hour exposure to postprandial hyperglycemia and improve glycemic variability.

BACKGROUND The breakfast meal often results in the largest postprandial hyperglycemic excursion in people with type 2 diabetes. OBJECTIVE Our purpose was to investigate whether restricting carbohydrates at breakfast would be a simple and feasible strategy to reduce daily exposure to postprandial hyperglycemia. DESIGN Adults with physician-diagnosed type 2 diabetes [n = 23; mean ± SD age: 59 ± 11 y; glycated hemoglobin: 6.7% ± 0.6%; body mass index (kg/m2): 31 ± 7] completed two 24-h isocaloric intervention periods in a random order. Participants consumed one of the following breakfasts: 1) a very-low-carbohydrate high-fat breakfast (LCBF; <10% of energy from carbohydrate, 85% of energy from fat, 15% of energy from protein) or 2) a breakfast with dietary guidelines-recommended nutrient profile (GLBF; 55% of energy from carbohydrate, 30% of energy from fat, 15% of energy from protein), with the same lunch and dinner provided. Continuous glucose monitoring was used to assess postprandial glucose responses over 24 h, and visual analog scales were used to assess ratings of hunger and fullness. RESULTS The LCBF significantly reduced postprandial hyperglycemia after breakfast (P < 0.01) and did not adversely affect glycemia after lunch or dinner. As such, overall postprandial hyperglycemia (24-h incremental area under the glucose curve) and glycemic variability (mean amplitude of glycemic excursions) were reduced with the LCBF (24-h incremental area under the glucose curve: -173 ± 361 mmol/L; P = 0.03; mean amplitude of glycemic excursions: -0.4 ± 0.8 mmol/L · 24 h; P = 0.03) compared with the GLBF. Premeal hunger was lower before dinner with the LCBF than with the GLBF (P-interaction = 0.03). CONCLUSIONS A very-low-carbohydrate high-fat breakfast lowers postbreakfast glucose excursions. The effects of this simple strategy appear to be sufficient to lower overall exposure to postprandial hyperglycemia and improve glycemic variability. Longer-term interventions are warranted. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02982330.
What are the main areas of focus to prevent or treat non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease?

Recently, a growing body of information has accumulated to suggest that nutritional status and food compounds impact on the development or progression of non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The best strategy to prevent and treat NAFLD is to modify diet and lifestyle by maintaining a healthy weight, following a well‐balanced diet with appropriate energy intake and increasing physical activity or strength training. Here we review the literatures and discuss existing and potential therapeutic strategies for the prevention and management of NAFLD, emphasizing the description of nutritional status and its clinical impact on the outcomes of NAFLD.
Filtering Spam Text Messages by Using Twitter-LDA Algorithm

Recently, the usage of short messaging service (SMS) or text messages have been changed gradually to product or service promotion, and even fraud. The mobile phone users in Indonesia also experience the same condition. A simple approach to address this issue is creating black list of phone numbers or certain keywords and phrases. However, this approach is inefficient because the spammer might change the phone number or change the content of the text message. Meanwhile, another approach is utilizing text classification such as Naive Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to recognize pattern of the text messages. This research proposes Twitter-LDA algorithm to identify spam text messages in Bahasa Indonesia. There are total 985 text messages divided to 774 text messages for training dataset and 211 text messages for testing dataset. These datasets consist of 860 spam and 125 ham text messages. All the text messages should be pre-processed before the training and testing process are applied. This research conducts five experiments which yield the average of f-score is 94.26% and accuracy is 96.49%. According to this result, the Twitter-LDA algorithm has demonstrated a good performance in identifying spam text messages in Bahasa Indonesia.
Estimation of Transformers Health Index Based On Condition Parameter Factor and Hidden Markov Model

This paper presents a study to estimate future Health Index (HI) of transformer population based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM). In this paper, HI was represented as hidden state and the condition parameter factors in the HI algorithm namely Dissolved Gas Analysis Factor (DGAF), Oil Quality Analysis Factor (OQAF) and Furfural Analysis Factor (FAF) were represented as the observable states. A case study of 1130 oil samples from 373 oil-typed distribution transformers (33/11 kV and 30 MVA) were examined. First, the mean for HI in each year was computed and the transition probabilities for the condition data were obtained based on non-linear optimization technique. Next, the emission probabilities for each of the condition parameter factors were derived based on frequency of occurrence method. Subsequently, the future states probability distribution was computed based on the HMM prediction model and viterbi algorithm was applied to find the best optimal path sequence of HI for the respective observable condition. Finally, the predicted and computed HI were compared to the hypothesized distribution. Majority of the predicted HI agrees with computed HI. Predicted HI based on OQAF records the most accurate estimation throughout the sampling years. Inconsistencies are observed in year 2 and between year 7 and 10 for the predicted HI based on FAF. The predicted HI based on DGAF is in line with the computed HI during the first 2 years and deviates at the later stage of the sampling period.
Workshops on diagnosis and management of dementia for general practitioners: a pre–post intervention study of dementia knowledge

Objectives To assess improvements in dementia knowledge among general practitioner (GP) registrars and supervisors following their participation in dementia workshops. Design Pre–post intervention study. Setting General practice education in Australia. Participants 296 GP registrars and 91 GP supervisors. Interventions Registrars participated in a 3-hour face-to-face workshop on diagnosing and managing dementia. Supervisors participated in a 2-hour modified version of the workshop designed to support them in teaching registrars. Main outcome measures The Dementia Knowledge Assessment Scale (DKAS) was used to assess overall dementia knowledge as well as knowledge on four subscales (causes and characteristics; communication and behaviour; care considerations; risks and health promotion). Changes in mean scores and the proportion of participants obtaining a threshold score (90th percentile score preworkshop) were used as measures of improvement. Results Few registrars and supervisors identified previous experience of formal dementia education. At baseline, mean dementia knowledge scores were 36 for registrars and 37 for supervisors of a total score of 50. Both groups had significantly improved overall dementia knowledge following the workshop with a mean score of 43. Improvements in knowledge were observed for all four DKAS subscales. Between preworkshop and postworkshop periods, there was an increase in the proportion of registrars and supervisors obtaining the threshold score for total DKAS as well as the four subscales. A significantly higher proportion of registrars compared with supervisors obtained the threshold score postworkshop in the areas of causes and characteristics and risks and health promotion. Conclusions Prior to the workshop, no differences in overall dementia knowledge were observed between registrars and supervisors. While knowledge improved in all areas for both groups postworkshop, findings from this study suggest the need to include foundational content such as the causes and characteristics of dementia in educational workshops for both trainee and experienced GPs.