Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Re-emergence of cholera in Haiti linked to environmentalV. cholerae O1 Ogawa strains

BACKGROUND: On September 25th, 2022, cholera re-emerged in Haiti. OBJECTIVES/METHODS: Toxigenic Vibrio cholerae O1 Ogawa were isolated on October 3rd & 4th, 2022, from cholera case patients in Port-au-Prince. The two new genomes were compared with genomes from 2,129 V. cholerae O1 isolated worldwide, including 292 Haitian strains from 2010-2018. RESULTS: Phylogenies conclusively show the 2022 strains clustering within the Haitian monophyletic clade dating back to the 2010 outbreak. Strains shared a most recent common ancestor with a 2018 Haitian Ogawa strain isolated from the aquatic ecosystem, and cluster with the Ogawa clade that was circulating in 2015-2016. CONCLUSIONS: Re-emergence of cholera in Haiti is the likely result of a spill-over event at the aquatic-human interface related to persistence of V. cholerae O1 in the environment.
Diabetic control and compliance using HbA1C testing guidelines in public healthcare facilities of Gauteng province, South Africa.

Objective: This study aimed at evaluating diabetic control and compliance with testing guidelines, across healthcare facilities of Gauteng Province, South Africa as well as factors associated with time to achieve control. South Africas estimated total unmet need for care for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus is 80%. Research design, methods and findings: The data of 511781 patients were longitudinally evaluated. Results were reported by year, age category, race, sex, facility and test types. HbA1c of <=7 was reported as normal, >7 - <=9 as poor control and >9% as very poor control. The chi-squared test was used to assess the association between a first-ever HbA1c status and variables listed above. The Kaplan Meier analysis was used to assess probability of attaining control among those who started with out-of-control HbA1C. The extended Cox regression model assessed the association between time to attaining HbA1C control from date of treatment initiation and several covariates. We reported hazard ratios, 95% confidence intervals and p-values. Data is reported for 511781 patients with 705 597 laboratory results. Poorly controlled patients constituted 51.5%, with 29.6% classified as very poor control. Most poorly controlled patients had only one test over the entire study period. Amongst those who started with poor control status and had at least two follow-up measurements, the likelihood of achieving good control was higher in males (aHR=1.16; 95% CI:1.12-1.20; p<0.001) and in those attending care at hospitals (aHR=1.99; 95% CI:1.92-2.06; p<0.001). Conclusion: This study highlights poor adherence to guidelines for diabetes monitoring.
The role of ambipolar diffusion in the fragmentation of condensations of the primordial gas

We consider the evolution and fragmentation of cylindrical filaments of the primordial gas. The filaments are formed following shock compression and heating, occurring subsequent to the gravitational collapse of condensations of the primordial medium. The role of ambipolar diffusion is studied, under circumstances where the magnetic energy density is comparable with the thermal energy density in the filaments, prior to their collapse. It is shown that ambipolar diffusion reduces the masses of the fragments by about an order of magnitude when the fractional ionization of the gas n(H + )/n(H) is of the order of 10 - 8 or less. Under these conditions, ambipolar diffusion is sufficiently rapid for the fragment masses to be similar to those computed neglecting the magnetic field. Attention is drawn to the importance of the H + (H 2 , hv) H + 3 reaction, whose rate coefficient is very uncertain.
A note on small gaps between nonzero Fourier coefficients of cusp forms

It is shown that there are infinitely many primitive cusp forms f of weight 2 with the property that for all X large enough, every interval (X, X + cX(1/4)), where c > 0 depends only on the form, contains an integer n such that the n-th Fourier coefficient of f is nonzero.
Heritage language learners of English: Linguistic gaps and cognitive strengths

Abstract Purpose This study examined whether Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) of English display profile effects in their performance on knowledge- and processing-dependent measures relative to the standardised mean scores of monolingual speakers. The study also investigated the influence of several experiential factors on HLL performance. Method Participants were 59 Arabic-speaking HLLs from six to nine years old. The children completed a battery of linguistic tests in their L1 and L2, as well as cognitive measures of short-term and working memory and non-verbal intelligence. Result Significantly lower standardised scores were observed for HLLs as compared to the standardised mean scores on all Arabic/English language tasks except L2 word reading. HLLs scored at or above age-level expectations on cognitive measures except the Arabic nonword repetition task. Stepwise regression analyses examining variance in HLLs' performance, age and richness of environment consistently explained HLLs' performance in L1 Arabic, but different factors accounted for HLLs' performance in English depending on the task. Age was the only variable that consistently explained variance in performance on the cognitive measures. Conclusion The results suggest that processing-dependent measures may be less sensitive to difference in language experience than traditional knowledge-based measures such as standardised measures of language and vocabulary.
An AS‐qPCR‐based method for the detection of Alzheimer's disease‐related SNPs

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most serious neurodegenerative diseases in the world and has a strong genetic predisposition. At present, there is still no effective method for the early diagnosis and prevention of AD. Accumulating evidence shows the association of several loci with AD risk, such as apolipoprotein E (APOE) and translocase of outer mitochondrial membrane 40 (TOMM40). However, for routine disease diagnosis in clinics, genotype detection methods based on gene sequencing technology are time‐consuming and excessively costly. Thus, in this study, we developed a high‐sensitivity, low‐cost, and convenient single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection assay method based on allele‐specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction (AS‐qPCR) technology, which can be used to determine the SNP genotype in APOE and TOMM40. A total of 40 patients were recruited from the outpatient department of the memory clinic of Dongzhimen Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. The SNP detection assay method includes three steps. First, positive plasmids with different genotypes (TT/CC/TC) in APOE rs429358, rs7412, and TOMM40 rs11556505 were prepared. Second, 3′‐T/3′‐C primers were designed to amplify these positive plasmids for each SNP site. Finally, we calculated the log10 of the copy number ratio for each positive plasmid, and the genotype interpretation interval was established. Based on this method, we investigated whether the SNPs in 40 patients could be accurately calculated using AS‐qPCR technology. The accuracy of SNP detection was verified by PCR‐Pooling sequencing. The results showed that SNP genotypes assessed by AS‐qPCR technology corresponded perfectly to the results obtained by conventional DNA sequencing. We have developed a genotype detection method for AD based on AS‐qPCR, which can be performed easily, rapidly, accurately, and at low cost. The method will contribute to the early diagnosis of patients with late‐onset Alzheimer's and the detection of large clinical samples in the future.
Exploring the underlying mechanisms of drug‐induced impulse control disorders: a pharmacovigilance‐pharmacodynamic study

Impulse control disorders (e.g. pathological gambling, hypersexuality) may develop as adverse reactions to drugs. Pathogenetic hypotheses have mainly focused on D3‐receptor agonism, and switching to alternatives with different pharmacologic mechanisms represents a common management strategy. Nonetheless, treatment failure is common and gaining pathophysiological insights is needed.
A magnetocaloric effect arising from a ferromagnetic transition in the martensitic state in Heusler alloy of Ni50Mn36Sb8Ga6

We report a magnetocaloric effect with nearly zero thermal hysteresis in Heusler alloy of Ni50Mn36Sb8Ga6 around room temperature due to a ferromagnetic transition in martensitic state (FTMS). The refrigerant capacity value of this ferromagnetic transition in the vicinity of onset temperature TCM can arrive at 163.8 J/kg, much higher than that of first-order magnetically martensitic transition in the same alloy. Such a magnetocaloric effect in FTMS is attributed to a second-order (or a weak first-order) transition from an antiferromagnetic phase with modulated 7 M orthorhombic structure to a ferromagnetic phase with modulated 4O orthorhombic structure.
Adherence to Mediterranean-Style Dietary Pattern and Risk of Bladder Cancer: A Case-Control Study in Iran

Abstract Few dietary patterns are related to reduce the Bladder Cancer (BC) risk. One of the well-known dietary patterns is the Mediterranean diet (MD). This case-control study investigated the association between MD and the odds of BC among Iranian population. The present case-control study was performed on 103 eligible cases and 200 controls age 45 to 92 years. Diet of participants was assessed by a validated 168-item food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Adherence to MD was measured by Mediterranean-Style Dietary Pattern Score (MSDPS). Multivariate logistic regression was used to estimate the relationship between MSDPS and risk of BC. After controlling for potential confounders, a negative association was observed between MSDPS and risk of BC (OR = 0.22; 95%CI = 0.09–0.52; p trend = 0.001). Furthermore, significant negative associations were observed for dairy, fish and other seafood, whole-grain, bread intake and risk of BC (p for trend < 0.05). In contrast, the risk of BC increased for high intake of poultry (OR = 1.09; 95%CI = 1.03–1.15; p trend = 0.003), sweets (OR = 1.24; 95%CI = 1.03–1.48; p trend = 0.018) and egg (p for trend = 0.01). Our results suggested that dietary habit in concordance with the principles of the Mediterranean dietary pattern may protect against BC.
Setting up girls for success in fundamental motor skills: The role of balance in 8-10 year olds

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between postural control and fundamental motor skills in girls. An observational cross-sectional study was conducted in 47 girls, aged 8–10 years. Postural control (postural sway centre of pressure) was evaluated during tandem stance, leading with dominant and non-dominant limbs with eyes open and closed, using an AMTI force platform. Fundamental motor skills were assessed using the Test of Gross Motor Development 2nd Edition, examining total, locomotor and object control scores. Data were analysed using linear regression, adjusted for body mass index percentile and household income. For locomotor skills, significant relationships were found with a number of postural sway outcomes for adjusted and unadjusted analyses (r − 0.287 to r − 0.425, p ≤ 0.042). Total motor skill score was significantly related to postural sway in the tandem dominant eyes closed condition for unadjusted and adjusted analyses (r ≥ −0.294, p ≤ 0.04). In conclusion, our findings indicate that postural control may be important for fundamental motor skill proficiency and movement quality in pre-adolescent girls, particularly for locomotor skills. Our study provides evidence supporting the clinical practice of assessing postural control in girls presenting with motor skill deficits.
Communication between the multidisciplinary team and families regarding nutrition and hydration for people with severe dementia in acute hospitals: a qualitative study

Abstract Background When a person with severe dementia is in hospital and has eating and drinking difficulties, communication between the multidisciplinary team and families can be challenging and lead to suboptimal care. Objective To gain in-depth understanding about the experiences, views and needs of family carers and hospital staff, regarding communication and conversations about nutrition and hydration, for hospital patients with severe dementia. Design Qualitative semi-structured interview study. Setting Acute hospital in England. Methods From January to May 2021, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 29 family carers and hospital staff. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic methods. Results Four overarching themes were developed: (i) prerequisites to initiating communication about eating and drinking; (ii) communication aiming to develop agreed care plans; (iii) difficulty discussing palliative and end-of-life care; and (iv) needs of information and plans about future eating and drinking difficulties. Families tended to wait for hospital staff to initiate discussions but usually experienced frustration with delays and repeated conversations with different staff. Some staff felt unprepared to manage these conversations and found it challenging to work across the multidisciplinary team. During discharge processes, key information and care plans about eating and drinking were not regularly passed on to people involved to avoid unnecessary readmissions. Conclusions In acute hospitals, family carers and hospital staff can have disjointed communications and conversations about nutrition and hydration for persons with severe dementia. Timely reassurance, ongoing discussions and clear information sharing will support communication between those involved.
Two Lensed Star Candidates at z ≃ 4.8 behind the Galaxy Cluster MACS J0647.7+7015

We report the discovery of two extremely magnified lensed star candidates behind the galaxy cluster MACS J0647.7+015 using recent multiband James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NIRCam observations. The star candidates are seen in a previously known, z phot ≃ 4.8 dropout giant arc that straddles the critical curve. The candidates lie near the expected critical curve position, but lack clear counter-images on the other side of it, suggesting these are possibly stars undergoing caustic crossings. We present revised lensing models for the cluster, including multiply imaged galaxies newly identified in the JWST data, and use them to estimate background macro-magnifications of at least ≳90 and ≳50 at the positions of the two candidates, respectively. With these values, we expect effective, caustic-crossing magnifications of ∼[103–105] for the two star candidates. The spectral energy distributions of the two candidates match well the spectra of B-type stars with best-fit surface temperatures of ∼10,000 K, and ∼12,000 K, respectively, and we show that such stars with masses ≳20 M ⊙ and ≳50 M ⊙, respectively, can become sufficiently magnified to be observable. We briefly discuss other alternative explanations and conclude that these objects are likely lensed stars, but also acknowledge that the less-magnified candidate may alternatively reside in a star cluster. These star candidates constitute the second highest-redshift examples to date after Earendel at z phot ≃ 6.2, establishing further the potential of studying extremely magnified stars at high redshifts with JWST. Planned future observations, including with NIRSpec, will enable a more detailed view of these candidates in the near future.
Schwarzian derivative for convex mappings of order alpha

The main purpose of this paper is to obtain sharp bounds of the norm of Schwarzian derivative for convex mappings of order $alpha$ in terms of the value of $f''(0)$, in particular, when this quantity is equal to zero. In addition, we obtain sharp bounds for distortion and growth for this mappings and we generalized the results obtained by Suita and Yamashita for this particular case.
Dependence of Chemical Abundance on the Cosmic-Ray Ionization Rate in IC 348

Ions (e.g., H3+ , H2O+) have been used extensively to quantify the cosmic-ray ionization rate (CRIR) in diffuse sightlines. However, measurements of the CRIR in low-to-intermediate density gas environments are rare, especially when background stars are absent. In this work, we combine molecular line observations of CO, OH, CH, and HCO+ in the star-forming cloud IC 348, and chemical models to constrain the value of the CRIR and study the response of the distribution of chemical abundances. The cloud boundary is found to have an A V of approximately 4 mag. From the interior to the exterior of the cloud, the observed 13CO line intensities drop by an order of magnitude. The calculated average abundance of 12CO (assuming 12C/13C=65) is (1.2 ± 0.9) × 10−4, which decreases by a factor of 6 from the interior to the outside regions. The average abundance of CH (3.3 ± 0.7 × 10−8) is in good agreement with previous findings in diffuse and translucent clouds (A V < 5 mag). However, we did not find a decline in CH abundance in regions of high extinction (A V ≃ 8 mag) as previously reported in Taurus. By comparing the observed molecular abundances and chemical models, we find a decreasing trend of the CRIR as A V increases. The inferred CRIR of ζ cr = (4.7 ± 1.5) × 10−16 s−1 at low A V is consistent with H3+ measurements toward two nearby massive stars.
A Garbled Circuit Accelerator for Arbitrary, Fast Privacy-Preserving Computation

—Privacy and security have rapidly emerged as priorities in system design. One powerful solution for providing both is privacy-preserving computation, where functions are computed directly on encrypted data and control can be provided over how data is used. Garbled circuits (GCs) are a PPC technology that provide both conﬁdential computing and control over how data is used. The challenge is that they incur signiﬁcant performance overheads compared to plaintext. This paper proposes a novel garbled circuit accelerator and compiler, named HAAC, to mitigate performance overheads and make privacy-preserving computation more practical. HAAC is a hardware-software co-design. GCs are exemplars of co-design as programs are completely known at compile time, i.e., all dependence, memory accesses, and control ﬂow are ﬁxed. The design philosophy of HAAC is to keep hardware simple and efﬁcient, maximizing area devoted to our proposed custom execution units and other circuits essential for high performance (e.g., on-chip storage). The compiler can leverage its program understanding to realize hardware’s performance potential by generating effective instruction schedules, data layouts, and orchestrating off-chip events. In taking this approach we can achieve ASIC performance/efﬁciency without sacriﬁcing generality. Insights of our approach include how co-design enables expressing arbitrary GC programs as streams, which simpliﬁes hardware and enables complete memory-compute decoupling, and the development of a scratchpad that captures data reuse by tracking program execution, eliminating the need for costly hardware managed caches and tagging logic. We evaluate HAAC with VIP-Bench and achieve a speedup of 608 × in 4.3mm 2 of area.
UV-Based 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction with Grasp Optimization

We propose a novel framework for 3D hand shape reconstruction and hand-object grasp optimization from a single RGB image. The representation of hand-object contact regions is critical for accurate reconstructions. Instead of approximating the contact regions with sparse points, as in previous works, we propose a dense representation in the form of a UV coordinate map. Furthermore, we introduce inference-time optimization to fine-tune the grasp and improve interactions between the hand and the object. Our pipeline increases hand shape reconstruction accuracy and produces a vibrant hand texture. Experiments on datasets such as Ho3D, FreiHAND, and DexYCB reveal that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Generative Joint Source-Channel Coding for Semantic Image Transmission

Recent works have shown that joint source-channel coding (JSCC) schemes using deep neural networks (DNNs), called DeepJSCC, provide promising results in wireless image transmission. However, these methods mostly focus on the distortion of the reconstructed signals with respect to the input image, rather than their perception by humans. However, focusing on traditional distortion metrics alone does not necessarily result in high perceptual quality, especially in extreme physical conditions, such as very low bandwidth compression ratio (BCR) and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. In this work, we propose two novel JSCC schemes that leverage the perceptual quality of deep generative models (DGMs) for wireless image transmission, namely InverseJSCC and GenerativeJSCC. While the former is an inverse problem approach to DeepJSCC, the latter is an end-to-end optimized JSCC scheme. In both, we optimize a weighted sum of mean squared error (MSE) and learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) losses, which capture more semantic similarities than other distortion metrics. InverseJSCC performs denoising on the distorted reconstructions of a DeepJSCC model by solving an inverse optimization problem using the pre-trained style-based generative adversarial network (StyleGAN). Our simulation results show that InverseJSCC significantly improves the state-of-the-art DeepJSCC in terms of perceptual quality in edge cases. In GenerativeJSCC, we carry out end-to-end training of an encoder and a StyleGAN-based decoder, and show that GenerativeJSCC significantly outperforms DeepJSCC both in terms of distortion and perceptual quality.
Spatial Mixture-of-Experts

Many data have an underlying dependence on spatial location; it may be weather on the Earth, a simulation on a mesh, or a registered image. Yet this feature is rarely taken advantage of, and violates common assumptions made by many neural network layers, such as translation equivariance. Further, many works that do incorporate locality fail to capture fine-grained structure. To address this, we introduce the Spatial Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) layer, a sparsely-gated layer that learns spatial structure in the input domain and routes experts at a fine-grained level to utilize it. We also develop new techniques to train SMoEs, including a self-supervised routing loss and damping expert errors. Finally, we show strong results for SMoEs on numerous tasks, and set new state-of-the-art results for medium-range weather prediction and post-processing ensemble weather forecasts.
Discursive Voter Models on the Supercritical Scale-Free Network

The voter model is a classical interacting particle system, modelling how global consensus is formed by local imitation. We analyse the time to consensus for a particular family of voter models when the underlying structure is a scale-free inhomogeneous random graph, in the high edge density regime where this graph features a giant component. In this regime, we verify that the polynomial orders of consensus agree with those of their mean-field approximation in [Moinet et al., 2018]. This"discursive"family of models has a symmetrised interaction to better model discussions, and is indexed by a temperature parameter which, for certain parameters of the power law tail of the network's degree distribution, is seen to produce two distinct phases of consensus speed. Our proofs rely on the well-known duality to coalescing random walks and a control on the mixing time of these walks, using the known fast mixing of the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi giant subgraph. Unlike in the subcritical case [Fernley and Ortgiese, 2022] which requires tail exponent of the limiting degree distribution $\tau=1+1/\gamma>3$ as well as low edge density, in the giant component case we also address the"ultrasmall world"power law exponents $\tau \in (2,3]$.