Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Medical marijuana laws are associated with increases in substance use treatment admissions by pregnant women.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Between 2002 and 2014, past-month marijuana use among pregnant women in the United States increased 62%, nearly twice the growth of the general population. This growth coincides with the proliferation of state medical marijuana laws (MMLs) authorizing physicians to recommend marijuana for approved conditions. We estimated the association between MMLs and substance use treatment utilization among pregnant and non-pregnant women of reproductive age. We also examined whether the association varied across MML provisions, age groups and treatment referral sources to clarify potential pathways. DESIGN Nation-wide administrative data from the 2002-14 Treatment Episodes Data Set Admissions, and a difference-in-differences design that exploited the staggered implementation of MMLs to compare changes in outcomes before and after implementation between MML and non-MML states. SETTING Twenty-one MML and 27 non-MML US states. PARTICIPANTS Pregnant and non-pregnant women aged 12-49 admitted to publicly funded specialty substance use treatment facilities. MEASUREMENTS The primary outcome variable was the number of treatment admissions per 100 000 women aged 12-49, aggregated at the state-year level (n = 606). Admissions for marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and opioids were considered. The primary independent variable was an indicator of MML implementation in a state. FINDINGS Among pregnant women, the rate of marijuana treatment admissions increased by 4.69 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.32, 8.06] in MML states relative to non-MML states. This growth was accompanied by increases in treatment admissions involving alcohol (β = 3.19; 95% CI = 0.97, 5.410 and cocaine (β = 2.56; 95% CI = 0.34, 4.79), was specific to adults (β = 5.50; 95% CI = 1.52, 9.47) and was largest in states granting legal protection for marijuana dispensaries (β = 6.37; 95% CI = -0.97, 13.70). There was no statistically significant association between MMLs and treatment admissions by non-pregnant women. CONCLUSIONS Medical marijuana law implementation in US states has been associated with greater substance use treatment utilization by pregnant adult women, especially in states with legally protected dispensaries.
Development and validation of reverse phase HPLC method for determination of angiotensin receptor blocking agent irbesartan in plasma.

A sensitive, reproducible and modest analytical procedure was developed and validated for evaluation of irbesartan in human plasma. LLE (Liquid-Liquid extraction) of the drug was carried out with acetonitrile (1:1 v/v). Chromatographic separation of irbesartan was conducted by the help of 4.0mm × 25cm column having L1 packing from plasma and mobile phase utilizing HPLC. The mobile phase comprise of phosphate buffer and acetonitrile in a ratio of 67:33 v/v. The flow rate was set at 1ml/minute and the detector at a wavelength of 220 nm. The resolution of irbesartan was well performed from plasma components. This method was validated and demonstrated linearity with a concentration range of 0.1to 6μg/ml of irbesartan in plasma. Intra-day, inter-day accuracy was found 89.33% to 96.37% while intra-day, inter-day precision was found within the limit of 0.02 and 2.15 respectively. The mean recovery of irbesartan was 97.28%. The efficacy of extraction was proved by above-mentioned results. In plasma, the 0.05 and 0. 1μg/ml dilutions were exhibited as the LOD and LOQ of irbesartan. Stability studies disclosed that irbesartan showed stability at -20°C storage.
Fourier series in orthogonal polynomials on a cone of revolution

Orthogonal polynomials and the Fourier orthogonal series on a cone of revolution in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ are studied. It is shown that orthogonal polynomials with respect to the weight function $(1-t)^\gamma (t^2-\|x\|^2)^{\mu-\frac12}$ on the cone $\mathbb{V}^{d+1} = \{(x,t): \|x\| \le t \le 1\}$ are eigenfunctions of a second order differential operator, with eigenvalues depending only on the degree of the polynomials, and the reproducing kernels of these polynomials satisfy a closed formula that has a one-dimensional chacteristic. The latter leads to a convolution structure on the cone, which is then utilized to study the Fourier orthogonal series. This narrative also holds, in part, for more general classes of weight functions. Furthermore, analogous results are also established for orthogonal structure on the surface of the cone.
Are we missing a simple treatment for most adult sleep apnea patients? The avoidance of the supine sleep position

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder which has been gradually accepted as an important cause of increased morbidity and mortality. The treatment of moderate–severe OSA has improved dramatically since the introduction of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices; however, the adherence of patients to CPAP treatment is relatively low. Adherence appears to be even worse in patients with mild or asymptomatic OSA. The failure to identify and treat mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic OSA patients may be costly, as such patients comprise about 20% of the general adult population. OSA patients could be divided into positional and non‐positional patients. Positional patients show most of their breathing abnormalities while sleeping in the supine position. Simply, by sleeping in the lateral postures, they eliminate or reduce significantly the number of apneas and hypopneas. On the contrary, non‐positional patients suffer from breathing abnormalities in the supine and lateral postures, and as a consequence those are the most severe OSA patients for whom CPAP is the treatment of choice. In this paper we intend to argue that positional therapy, i.e. avoidance of the supine posture during sleep, could represent a valuable therapy mainly for mild–moderate OSA. Considering the fact that the vast majority of mild–moderate OSA patients are positional patients (between 65 and 87%), positional therapy may be a simple, cheap and effective solution for them. High‐quality research regarding this issue is needed to evaluate the real effectiveness of this mode of therapy.
Clinical usability of a compact high resolution detector for high resolution and quantitative SPECT imaging in a selected small ROI

SPECT using compact high resolution detector or pinhole collimator allows to image physiological functions with high spatial resolution. However, when field-of-view (FOV) is smaller than the object, the projection data are truncated by radioisotope outside FOV. The truncation causes artifact and overestimation, which decreases quantitative accuracy. Recently Defrise et al proposed a new truncation-compensated reconstruction method, that is, the truncated data can be successfully reconstructed by fulfilling following conditions. First, FOV contains zero or background counts outside the object as known value. Second, reconstructed image space is large enough to contain the whole support of the object. They demonstrated their theory by 2D X-ray CT simulation. This study was aimed at evaluating clinical-SPECT usability of a reconstructed image of a selected small region-of-interest (ROI) with the above Defrise’s method. This evaluation was performed by computer simulation with a numerical human brain phantom and a detector with 2-mm resolution, 48-mm FOV and a parallel collimator. The projection data were acquired including the area outside the brain. After adding Gaussian noise, the projection data were reconstructed by maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) method on the reconstruction matrix large enough to contain the whole support of the brain. This simulation showed that the truncation compensated reconstruction method could provide the image with high resolution and the counts almost equivalent to that of original image in the selected small ROI without the effect of truncation for human brain. In conclusion, this result suggests that a compact high resolution detector can be used for quantitatively reconstructing a selected small ROI with clinical SPECT camera. This technique can also use the pinhole collimator instead of the compact high resolution detector.
Predicting Annotation Difficulty to Improve Task Routing and Model Performance for Biomedical Information Extraction

Modern NLP systems require high-quality annotated data. For specialized domains, expert annotations may be prohibitively expensive; the alternative is to rely on crowdsourcing to reduce costs at the risk of introducing noise. In this paper we demonstrate that directly modeling instance difficulty can be used to improve model performance and to route instances to appropriate annotators. Our difficulty prediction model combines two learned representations: a ‘universal’ encoder trained on out of domain data, and a task-specific encoder. Experiments on a complex biomedical information extraction task using expert and lay annotators show that: (i) simply excluding from the training data instances predicted to be difficult yields a small boost in performance; (ii) using difficulty scores to weight instances during training provides further, consistent gains; (iii) assigning instances predicted to be difficult to domain experts is an effective strategy for task routing. Further, our experiments confirm the expectation that for such domain-specific tasks expert annotations are of much higher quality and preferable to obtain if practical and that augmenting small amounts of expert data with a larger set of lay annotations leads to further improvements in model performance.
Toxicity of differently sized and charged silver nanoparticles to yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae BY4741: a nano-biointeraction perspective

Abstract In the current study, we evaluated the modulatory effects of size and surface coating/charge of AgNPs on their toxicity to a unicellular yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae BY4741 – a fungal model. For that, the toxicity of a set of 10 and 80 nm citrate-coated (negatively charged) and branched polyethylenimine (bPEI) coated (positively charged) AgNPs was evaluated in parallel with AgNO3 as ionic control. Yeast cells were exposed to different concentrations of studied compounds in deionized water for 24 h at 30 °C and evaluated for the viability by the post-exposure colony-forming ability. Particle-cell interactions were assessed by SEM, TEM and confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) in the reflection mode. AgNPs toxicity to yeast was size and charge-dependent: 24-h IC50 values ranged from 0.04 (10nAg-bPEI) up to 8.3 mg Ag/L (80nAg-Cit). 10 nm AgNPs were 5–27 times more toxic than 80 nm AgNPs and bPEI-AgNPs 8–44 times more toxic than citrate-AgNPs. SEM and TEM visualization showed that bPEI-AgNPs but not citrate-AgNPs adsorbed onto the yeast cell’s surface. However, according to CLSM all the studied AgNPs, whatever the size and coating, ended up within the yeast cell. Toxicity of citrate-AgNPs was largely explained by the dissolved Ag ions but the bPEI-AgNPs showed mainly particle-driven effects leading to the cellular internalization and/or to more pronounced dissolution of AgNPs in the close vicinity of the cell wall. Therefore, the size, and especially the coating/charge of AgNPs can be efficiently used for the design of new more efficient antifungals.
Findings of Phlebotomy Practices in Kenya in 2010: Need for Action.

BACKGROUND Phlebotomy, a commonly performed medical procedure in healthcare, is essential for disease diagnosis and patient management. However, poorly performed phlebotomy can compromise patient safety, healthcare worker (HCW) safety, and specimen quality. We carried out a study between June and July 2010 to assess knowledge, quality and safety of phlebotomy before implementation of a public-private partnership between Becton, Dickinson and Company and the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. METHODS This was a cross-sectional observational study in 8 healthcare facilities within 4 regions of Kenya. HCWs were observed conducting venous and capillary blood collections, and pre- and posttests were offered during HCW training. RESULTS Of 283 blood samples obtained, 194 were venous draws conducted by 72 HCWs and 89 were capillary draws performed by 33 HCWs. Based on 12 preset quality-associated criteria, none of the 194 observed phlebotomies met the standard. In total, 91 HCWs were trained in phlebotomy. The mean knowledge increase between pre- and posttraining test was 41%, ranging from 39% to 45% (95% confidence interval, 29.3%-53.5%;P< .001). CONCLUSIONS Inadequate knowledge and imperfect phlebotomy procedures were noted. This formed the basis for the safe phlebotomy partnership to address these deficiencies. To ensure sustainability, safe phlebotomy practices were integrated into preservice training.
Learning to Memorize in Neural Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

In this thesis, we leverage the neural copy mechanism and memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) to address existing challenge of neural task-oriented dialogue learning. We show the effectiveness of our strategy by achieving good performance in multi-domain dialogue state tracking, retrieval-based dialogue systems, and generation-based dialogue systems. We first propose a transferable dialogue state generator (TRADE) that leverages its copy mechanism to get rid of dialogue ontology and share knowledge between domains. We also evaluate unseen domain dialogue state tracking and show that TRADE enables zero-shot dialogue state tracking and can adapt to new few-shot domains without forgetting the previous domains. Second, we utilize MANNs to improve retrieval-based dialogue learning. They are able to capture dialogue sequential dependencies and memorize long-term information. We also propose a recorded delexicalization copy strategy to replace real entity values with ordered entity types. Our models are shown to surpass other retrieval baselines, especially when the conversation has a large number of turns. Lastly, we tackle generation-based dialogue learning with two proposed models, the memory-to-sequence (Mem2Seq) and global-to-local memory pointer network (GLMP). Mem2Seq is the first model to combine multi-hop memory attention with the idea of the copy mechanism. GLMP further introduces the concept of response sketching and double pointers copying. We show that GLMP achieves the state-of-the-art performance on human evaluation.
Physical activity pre- and post-dementia: English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

ABSTRACT Background: To inform public health interventions, further investigation is needed to identify: (1) frequency/intensity of everyday physical activity (PA) needed to reduce dementia risk; (2) whether post-diagnosis reduction in PA is associated with cognitive outcomes in people with dementia. Methods: Data from 11,391 men and women (aged ≥50) were obtained from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing cohort. Assessments were carried out at baseline (2002–2003) and at biannual follow-ups (2004–2013). Results: Older adults who carried out moderate to vigorous activity at least once per week had a 34%–50% lower risk for cognitive decline and dementia over an 8–10 year follow-up period. From pre- to post-dementia diagnosis, those who decreased PA levels had a larger decrease in immediate recall scores, compared to those who maintained or increased PA levels (analyses were adjusted for changes in physical function). Conclusion: PA was associated with cognitive outcomes in a dose-dependent manner. Reduction in PA after diagnosis was associated with accelerated cognitive decline and maintaining PA may reduce symptom progression in dementia.
User interface for bus operator information services

The paper describes a user interface (UI) development, TUTPIS, which is a passenger information system being developed at Tampere University of Technology. The developed UI and its services are targeted for bus operators. The main design objectives have been modifiability, reusability and support for different terminal types. The support for different terminal types is taken into the TUTPIS UI design by introducing a Web-based report architecture, where reports are composed of generic UI components. The abstract factory design pattern is used to provide the possibility of using the same reports independently of the selected presentation technology.
A systematic study in CIEF: Defining and optimizing experimental parameters critical to method reproducibility and robustness

A systematic study of two‐step CIEF analysis was completed to identify key components that could be optimized to enhance the performance of mAb analysis by CIEF. Resolution between mAb isoforms was increased by selecting a narrow detector aperture, utilizing chemical rather than pressure mobilization, and improving protein solubility by incorporating urea into the carrier ampholyte (CA) solutions. Loss of the extreme pI CAs and sample components by the bidirectional ITP inherent to IEF was avoided by setting the concentration of the phosphoric acid anolyte to 200 mM and sodium hydroxide catholyte to 300 mM and by adding sufficient amounts of an acidic (pI<3) and basic (10
Correlation Between Speech Outcomes and the Amount of Maxillary Advancement After Orthognathic Surgery (Le Fort I Conventional Osteotomy and Distraction Osteogenesis) in Patients With Cleft Lip and Palate.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to evaluate the factors affecting the speech outcome following Le fort I conventional osteotomy(CO) or Le Fort I distraction osteogenesis(DO) in patients with cleft lip and palate at a single institution. METHOD Records of cleft lip and palate patients who underwent orthognathic surgery between 2010 and 2015 were reviewed. Data included age at orthognathic surgery, sex, cleft lip and palate type, type of orthognathic surgery, the amount of maxillary advancement, and speech assessment. Speech outcomes were classified into 2 categories. Compared with the pre and post-operative Pittsburgh Weighted speech scale scores, in case that the post-operative total score is increased the authors define it as "Speech deterioration" and if not, the authors define it as "Speech preservation. " RESULT The 44 patients were identified, 33 patients underwent CO and 11 patients underwent DO. The mean age was 19.4 ± 1.4. The mean period time of speech evaluation after orthognathic surgery was 1.0 ± 0.46 year. The mean amount of maxillary advancement was 7.2 ± 3.2 mm and show significant correlation with speech outcomes. (P = 0.012) . In CO group, the patients who had the maxilla 1∼5 mm advancement maintained their speech completely and 44% of patients with 6∼8 mm deteriorated their speech. In DO group, patients with 9∼10 mm maintained their speech completely, 50% of patients with 11∼12 mm deteriorated their speech and 100% of patients with 13∼16 mm deteriorated their speech. According to the relationship between the amount of maxillary advancement and speech outcomes, there was a statistically significant correlation in both CO and DO groups. (P = 0.04, 0.029). CONCLUSION It was found that speech of the patients with more amount of maxillary advancement tended to get worse. Also, it was observed that there exist some stable ranges of maxillary advancement for speech safety which does not effect on speech. (1∼5 mm in CO group and 9∼10 mm in DO group).
On Changes of Global Wet-bulb Temperature and Snowfall Regimes

To properly interpret the observed shrinkage of the Earth's cryosphere it is important to understand global changes of snowfall dominant regimes. To document these changes, three different reanalysis products of wet-bulb temperature together with observationally-based data sets are processed from 1979 to 2017. It is found that over the Northern Hemisphere (NH), the annual mean wet-bulb temperature has increased at a rate of 0.34$^\circ$C per decade (pd) over land and 0.35$^\circ$C pd over ocean, resulting in a reduction of the annual mean potential areas of snowfall dominant regimes by 0.52/0.34 million km$^2$pd over land/ocean. However, the changes in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) are less conclusive and more uncertain. Among the K$o$ppen-Geiger climate classes, the highest warming trend is observed over the NH polar climate regimes. Over studied mountain regions, the Alps are warming at a faster rate compared to the Rockies, Andes and High Mountain Asia (HMA). Due to such warming, potential snowfall areas over the Alps is reducing at 3.64% pd followed by Rockies at 2.81 and HMA at 1.85% pd. On average, these mountain ranges have lost 0.02 million km$^2$pd of potential snowfall areas. The NH potential snowfall areas is retracting towards the North pole over the Central Asia and Europe at a rate of 0.45 and 0.7 degree pd. Furthermore, terrestrial regions over the NH including the Great Plains in the United States, Canadian provinces around the Hudson Bay, Central Siberian and Tibetan Plateaus, are losing as much as 4% of the solid proportion of the annual precipitation amount pd.
Character-based Surprisal as a Model of Reading Difficulty in the Presence of Errors

Intuitively, human readers cope easily with errors in text; typos, misspelling, word substitutions, etc. do not unduly disrupt natural reading. Previous work indicates that letter transpositions result in increased reading times, but it is unclear if this effect generalizes to more natural errors. In this paper, we report an eye-tracking study that compares two error types (letter transpositions and naturally occurring misspelling) and two error rates (10% or 50% of all words contain errors). We find that human readers show unimpaired comprehension in spite of these errors, but error words cause more reading difficulty than correct words. Also, transpositions are more difficult than misspellings, and a high error rate increases difficulty for all words, including correct ones. We then present a computational model that uses character-based (rather than traditional word-based) surprisal to account for these results. The model explains that transpositions are harder than misspellings because they contain unexpected letter combinations. It also explains the error rate effect: upcoming words are more difficultto predict when the context is degraded, leading to increased surprisal.
Semantic flow in language networks

In this study we propose a framework to characterize documents based on their semantic flow. The proposed framework encompasses a network-based model that connected sentences based on their semantic similarity. Semantic fields are detected using standard community detection methods. as the story unfolds, transitions between semantic fields are represent in Markov networks, which in turned are characterized via network motifs (subgraphs). Here we show that the proposed framework can be used to classify books according to their style and publication dates. Remarkably, even without a systematic optimization of parameters, philosophy and investigative books were discriminated with an accuracy rate of 92.5%. Because this model captures semantic features of texts, it could be used as an additional feature in traditional network-based models of texts that capture only syntactical/stylistic information, as it is the case of word adjacency (co-occurrence) networks.