Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors that Influence Teenage Antenatal Care Utilization in John Taolo Gaetsewe (JTG) District of Northern Cape Province, South Africa: Underscoring the Need for Tackling Social Determinants of Health

Background and Objectives: In resource-limited settings, the uptake of antenatal care visits among women, especially teenage pregnant women, is disturbingly low. Factors that influence the uptake of ANC services among teenage women is largely understudied and poorly understood in John Taolo Gaetsewe (JTG), a predominantly rural and poor district of South Africa. The aim of this study was to determine the factors that influence uptake of ANC services among teenage mothers in JTG district. Methods: A cross-sectional health facility-based study utilising mixed method was conducted in all public health facilities (n=44) at JTG district. Mother-infant pairs (n=383) who brought their infants for six-week first DPT immunisation during the study period were enrolled in the study. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data on demographic, socio-economic and uptake of ANC indicators. Results: Out of 272 respondent mothers, 18.68% were adolescent mothers (13-19 years). The logistic regression analysis shows that mother’s age (OR=2.11; 95%CI = 1.04 - 4.27); distance to the nearest health facility (OR=3.38; 95%CI = 1.45-7.87); and client service satisfaction (OR=8.58; 95%CI =2.10-34.95 are significantly associated with poor uptake of ANC services. Conclusion and Global Health Implications: There is a need to improve the quality of adolescent reproductive health services tailored to their health and developmental needs. Moreover, addressing the social determinants of health that affect individual’s healthy life style and health seeking behavior is critical.
A Gα12-specific Binding Domain in AKAP-Lbc and p114RhoGEF

AKAP-Lbc is a Rho-activating guanine nucleotide exchange factor (RhoGEF) important in heart development and pro-fibrotic signaling in cardiomyocytes. Heterotrimeric G proteins of the G12/13 subfamily, comprising Gα12 and Gα13, are well characterized as stimulating a specialized group of RhoGEFs through interaction with their RGS-homology (RH) domain. Despite lacking an RH domain, AKAP-Lbc is bound by Gα12 through an unknown mechanism to activate Rho signaling. We identified a Gα12-binding region near the C-terminus of AKAP-Lbc, closely homologous to a region of p114RhoGEF that we also discovered to interact with Gα12. This binding mechanism is distinct from the well-studied interface between RH-RhoGEFs and G12/13 α subunits, as demonstrated by Gα12 mutants selectively impaired in binding either this AKAP-Lbc/p114RhoGEF region or RH-RhoGEFs. AKAP-Lbc and p114RhoGEF showed high specificity for binding Gα12 in comparison to Gα13, and experiments using chimeric G12/13 α subunits mapped determinants of this selectivity to the N-terminal region of Gα12. In cultured cells expressing constitutively GDP-bound Gα12 or Gα13, the Gα12 construct was more potent in exerting a dominant-negative effect on serum-mediated signaling to p114RhoGEF, demonstrating coupling of these signaling proteins in a cellular pathway. In addition, charge-reversal of conserved residues in AKAP-Lbc and p114RhoGEF disrupted Gα12 binding for both proteins, suggesting they harbor a common structural mechanism for interaction with this α subunit. Our results provide the first evidence of p114RhoGEF as a Gα12 signaling effector, and define a novel region conserved between AKAP-Lbc and p114RhoGEF that allows Gα12 signaling input to these non-RH RhoGEFs.
Forest mapping using ENVISAT and ERS SAR data in Northeast of China

The need to monitor forest is dramatically increasing in China, particularly after the introduction of new laws against deforestation. The well known ERS-1/2 tandem mission provides a large mount of SAR for interferometric processing. As forests have special volume decorrelation mechanism, the Interferometric Land-Use (ILU) images were used to generate forest map in Northeast of China. The striped ILU images processed by ESRIN Interferometric Quick-Look (IQL) processor have been used to generate forest/nonforest map. The algorithms of long strip ILU data geo-reference and mosaic have been developed. Decision tree classifier was used to map forest/nonforest on a pixel basis. The algorithm depends primarily on interferometric coherence. The threshold levels are adapted to the radiometry of individual strips. The gaps among ERS are filled by Landsat TM data of the same phase. The limited quality of the ILU from IQL system and the partial coverage of China limited the generation of forest base maps for larger areas of China. Under the Dragon Forest project between China MOST and ESA, the ERS SLC SAR data will be processed and the SIBERIA-I methods will be adapted to generate a forest volume density base map of 1995-1996 in this region. The Envisat ASAR Alternating Polarisation (AP) data will be used to update the base map to 2004-2005. Several hundred scenes ASAR AP data have been received during the summer and winter of 2004. Three test sites have been used to develop methodologies, which located in Daxinganling, Xiaoxinganling and Changbaishan separately. The digitalized forest map and field plots are used as reference data. The results from test sites show: i) It is very potential and feasible to generate forest volume density map using winter ERS tandem data. ii) Forest can be well discriminated from non-forest with ASAR AP (HH/HV) data. iii) ASAR HV backscattering signals increase with forest canopy density. Keywords-ERS-1/2 Tandem SAR; ENVISAT ASAR; forest; China
Optimizing performance of reflectance-based organic Photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor

Wearable sensors enable the continuous monitoring of various physiological conditions of individuals without constraints on time and place. Primary vital signs of human body such as; heart rate (HR), Oxygen saturation (SpO2) and respiration rate, can be extracted from the PPG signal. In comparison to conventional inorganic based sensors, the use of organic semiconductor-based devices opens the possibility of devising inexpensive, lightweight, flexible sensors. Reflection-mode PPG sensors overcome the limitations posed by transmission-mode PPG sensor as it can be positioned anywhere on the body. The state of art has not exploited the reflection-mode of PPG sensors extensively, as opposed to transmission-mode. In this work, we have fabricated reflection mode PPG sensor, which comprises of a red (631 nm) organic light emitting diode (OLED) (EQE = 8%) and organic photodetector (OPD) (EQE =47 %) on the same substrate. With motivation to improve the existing PPG sensing technologies, OLED and OPD performances were optimized on a single substrate. Further, we have estimated the best pattern and optimal distance between OLED and OPD in order to maximize signalnoise ratio and lower the power consumption of the device. An analog circuit is designed to read out PPG signals. For realtime pulse monitoring, the signals were sent via a Bluetooth interface to the computer. In summary, a low cost, organic based sensor is developed to detect the heart rate with wireless enabled data monitoring. Our device displayed promising results with 1.5 % error in the heart rate measurement compared to the commercial reference.
Understanding a Tourist Destination: A Tourism History Approach

There are highly dynamic and interactive studies on host communities at different tourist destinations. Some studies focus primarily on a particular community as a case to study the implications of tourism development. Many are interested in a more holistic approach, tourist destination development concepts observed in various tourist destinations. However, most of those studies limit their attention only on communities during the period of tourism development. There is a lack of theoretical approaches to guide a researcher to develop an understanding of a tourist destination from an integrated, multiple, different timeframe. To this concern, this paper explores the theoretical foundations of a history by drawing on the aspect of tourism history. The tourism history concept in this paper takes a community in their pre-tourism development into the analysis on the community during its meeting through the tourism processes. Understanding the past will deepen and broaden our understanding of the community? s society through a continuous period of its tourism development.
Integration of Severely Handicapped Students and the Proportion of IEP Objectives Achieved

The study investigated the educational impact of integration of severely handicapped students in regular public schools. Thirteen school districts and one residential institution were selected on the basis of their efforts to integrate severely handicapped students. Six of these sites were federally funded model programs for integrating these students. Degree of integration was defined through systematic observation of the rate of integration between severely handicapped students and nonhandicapped students. Information on severely handicapped students’ functional level and rates of interaction with nonhandicapped students and other severely handicapped students was used to predict their achievement of Individual Education Plan (IEP) objectives. Findings revealed that over and above functional level, degree of integration, as measured by interaction with nonhandicapped students, was a significant predictor (p < .025) of educational progress, as measured by the proportion of IEP objectives met. Integration was discussed as an important aspect of curricula for severely handicapped students.
Incomplete Big Data Clustering Algorithm Using Feature Selection and Partial Distance

Incomplete data clustering plays an important role in the big data analysis and processing. Existing algorithms for clustering incomplete high-dimensional big data have low performances in both efficiency and effectiveness. The paper proposes an incomplete high-dimensional big data clustering algorithm based on feature selection and partial distance strategy. First, a hierarchical clustering-based feature subset selection algorithm is designed to reduce the dimensions of the data set. Next, a parallel k-means algorithm based on partial distance is derived to cluster the selected data subset in the first step. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves better clustering accuracy than the existing algorithms and takes significantly less time than other algorithms for clustering high-dimensional big data.
High-Power Radiation at 1 THz in Silicon: A Fully Scalable Array Using a Multi-Functional Radiating Mesh Structure

We introduce a highly scalable architecture of coherent harmonic oscillator array for high-power and narrow-beamwidth radiation in the mid-terahertz (THz) band. The array consists of horizontal and vertical slotlines (i.e., slot mesh) located at the boundaries between oscillator elements. Through such a structure, the following operations are achieved simultaneously: 1) maximum oscillation power at fundamental frequency <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$f_{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>; 2) precise synchronization of the oscillation phase among elements; 3) cancellation of the radiation at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$f_{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2f_{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3f_{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>; and 4) efficient radiation and power combining at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4f_{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The resultant compact design fits into the optimal radiator pitch of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\lambda _{4f_{0}}/2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> (half wavelength) for the suppression of sidelobes, hence enabling implementation of high-density THz arrays. In particular, an array prototype of 42 coherent radiators (with 91 resonant antennas) at 1 THz is presented using the IHP S13G2 130-nm SiGe process. The chip occupies only 1-mm<sup>2</sup> area and consumes 1.1 W of dc power. The measured total radiated power and the effective isotropically radiated power are 80 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and 13 dBm, respectively.
Non-contact blood pressure measurement based on pulse transit time

A non-contact blood pressure measurement method was proposed and achieved based on theoretical deduction of the relationship among pulse transit time, heart rate and blood pressure. Pulse transit time was estimated using heart rate and phase difference of pulse wave which were obtained from color videos through imaging photoplethysmographic. Parameters of the functional relationship were determined through curve fitting with experiment data. Error analysis was processed with an Omron electronic sphygmomanometer as reference to verify the accuracy of blood pressure obtained using the proposed method. The error of acquired systolic blood pressure varied from -2.40 to 3.43 percent. The error of acquired diastolic blood pressure varied from -6.88 to 5.26 percent.
Zero-Resource Audio-Only Spoken Term Detection Based on a Combination of Template Matching Techniques

Spoken term detection is a well-known information retrieval task that seeks to extract contentful information from audio by locating occurrences of known query words of interest. This paper describes a zero-resource approach to such task based on pattern matching of spoken term queries at the acoustic level. The template matching module comprises the cascade of a segmental variant of dynamic time warping and a self-similarity matrix comparison to further improve robustness to speech variability. This solution notably differs from more traditional train and test methods that, while shown to be very accurate, rely upon the availability of large amounts of linguistic resources. We evaluate our framework on different parameterizations of the speech templates: raw MFCC features and Gaussian posteriorgrams, French and English phonetic posteriorgrams output by two different state of the art phoneme recognizers.
Quantum Neuron: an elementary building block for machine learning on quantum computers

Even the most sophisticated artificial neural networks are built by aggregating substantially identical units called neurons. A neuron receives multiple signals, internally combines them, and applies a non-linear function to the resulting weighted sum. Several attempts to generalize neurons to the quantum regime have been proposed, but all proposals collided with the difficulty of implementing non-linear activation functions, which is essential for classical neurons, due to the linear nature of quantum mechanics. Here we propose a solution to this roadblock in the form of a small quantum circuit that naturally simulates neurons with threshold activation. Our quantum circuit defines a building block, the "quantum neuron", that can reproduce a variety of classical neural network constructions while maintaining the ability to process superpositions of inputs and preserve quantum coherence and entanglement. In the construction of feedforward networks of quantum neurons, we provide numerical evidence that the network not only can learn a function when trained with superposition of inputs and the corresponding output, but that this training suffices to learn the function on all individual inputs separately. When arranged to mimic Hopfield networks, quantum neural networks exhibit properties of associative memory. Patterns are encoded using the simple Hebbian rule for the weights and we demonstrate attractor dynamics from corrupted inputs. Finally, the fact that our quantum model closely captures (traditional) neural network dynamics implies that the vast body of literature and results on neural networks becomes directly relevant in the context of quantum machine learning.
Maintenance of the human malarial parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, in scid mice and transmission of gametocytes to mosquitoes

The study of human malaria has been hampered by the lack of small animal models for the human-infecting malarial parasites. To approach this problem, the erythrocytic stages of the human malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum were adapted to in vitro growth in the presence of ascites fluid from mice homozygous for the severe-combined immunodeficiency (scid) mutation. Human red blood cells (hRBCs) infected with these adapted parasites were then injected i.p. into nonobese diabetic scid/scid (NOD/LtSz-scid) mice. With daily supplemental intraperitoneal boosts of uninfected hRBCs, parasites were detected in the peripheral circulation of these mice for an average of 7 d after injection. Splenectomy of NOD/LtSz-scid mice increased both the level and duration of parasitemia in the periphery, and it also promoted the circulation of mature sexual stage parasites (gametocytes). When Anopheline mosquitoes were allowed to feed on the splenectomized mice, the gametocytes were ingested by the mosquitoes and developed into oocysts in the mosquito midguts. To our knowledge, these results are the first demonstration of human malarial parasite propagation in mice and transmission of these parasites to the invertebrate vector.
Helper locks for fork-join parallel programming

Helper locks allow programs with large parallel critical sections, called parallel regions, to execute more efficiently by enlisting processors that might otherwise be waiting on the helper lock to aid in the execution of the parallel region. Suppose that a processor <i>p</i> is executing a parallel region <i>A</i> after having acquired the lock <i>L</i> protecting <i>A</i>. If another processor <i>p</i>′ tries to acquire <i>L</i>, then instead of blocking and waiting for <i>p</i> to complete <i>A</i>, processor <i>p</i>′ joins <i>p</i> to help it complete <i>A</i>. Additional processors not blocked on <i>L</i> may also help to execute <i>A</i>. The HELPER runtime system can execute fork-join computations augmented with helper locks and parallel regions. HELPER supports the unbounded nesting of parallel regions. We provide theoretical completion-time and space-usage bounds for a design of HELPER based on work stealing. Specifically, let <i>V</i> be the number of parallel regions in a computation, let <i>T</i><sub>1</sub> be its work, and let <i>T</i>∞ be its "aggregate span" --- the sum of the spans (critical-path lengths) of all its parallel regions. We prove that HELPER completes the computation in expected time <i>O</i>(<i>T</i><sub>1</sub>/<i>P</i>P + <i>T</i>∞+ <i>PV</i> on <i>P</i> processors. This bound indicates that programs with a small number of highly parallel critical sections can attain linear speedup. For the space bound, we prove that HELPER completes a program using only <i>O</i>(<i>P</i>S<sub>1</sub> stack space, where S<sub>1</sub> is the sum, over all regions, of the stack space used by each region in a serial execution. Finally, we describe a prototype of HELPER implemented by modifying the Cilk multithreaded runtime system. We used this prototype to implement a concurrent hash table with a resize operation protected by a helper lock.
Filamentous fungal characterizations by matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry

Matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization time‐of‐flight intact cell mass spectrometry (MALDI‐TOF ICMS) is coming of age for the identification and characterization of fungi. The procedure has been used extensively with bacteria. UV‐absorbing matrices function as energy mediators that transfer the absorbed photoenergy from an irradiation source to the surrounding sample molecules, resulting in minimum fragmentation. A surprisingly high number of fungal groups have been studied: (i) the terverticillate penicillia, (ii) aflatoxigenic, black and other aspergilli, (iii) Fusarium, (iv) Trichoderma, (iv) wood rotting fungi (e.g. Serpula lacrymans) and (v) dermatophytes. The technique has been suggested for optimizing quality control of fungal Chinese medicines (e.g. Cordyceps). MALDI‐TOF ICMS offers advantages over PCR. The method is now used in taxonomic assessments (e.g. Trichoderma) as distinct from only strain characterization. Low and high molecular mass natural products (e.g. peptaibols) can be analysed. The procedure is rapid and requires minimal pretreatment. However, issues of reproducibility need to be addressed further in terms of strains of species tested and between run variability. More studies into the capabilities of MALDI‐TOF ICMS to identify fungi are required.
Clustered calculation of worst-case execution times

Knowing the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of a program is necessary when designing and verifying real-time systems. A correct WCET analysis method must take into account the possible program flow, such as loop iterations and function calls, as well as the timing effects of different hardware features, such as caches and pipelines.A critical part of WCET analysis is the calculation, which combines flow information and hardware timing information in order to calculate a program WCET estimate. The type of flow information which a calculation method can take into account highly determines the WCET estimate precision obtainable. Traditionally, we have had a choice between precise methods that perform global calculations with a risk of high computational complexity, and local methods that are fast but cannot take into account all types of flow information.This paper presents an innovative hybrid method to handle complex flows with low computational complexity, but still generate safe and tight WCET estimates. The method uses flow information to find the smallest parts of a program that have to be handled as a unit to ensure precision. These units are used to calculate a program WCET estimate in a demand-driven bottom-up manner. The calculation method to use for a unit is not fixed, but could depend on the included flow information and program characteristics.
Glycosaminoglycan composition changes with MG‐63 osteosarcoma osteogenesis in vitro and induces human mesenchymal stem cell aggregation

Osteogenic differentiation is coordinated by the exposure of cells to temporal changes in a combination of growth factors and elements within the extracellular matrix (ECM). Many of the key proteins that drive these changes share the property of being dependent on ECM glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) for their activity. Here, we examined whether GAGs isolated from proliferating, differentiating and mineralizing MG‐63 osteosarcoma cells differed in their physical properties, and thus in their capacities to coordinate the osteogenic cascade both in human MG‐63 osteosarcoma cells and primary human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs). Our results show that the size distribution of GAGs, the expression of GAG‐carrying proteoglycan cores and the expression of enzymes involved in their modification systematically change as MG‐63 cells mature in culture. When dosed back onto cells exogenously in soluble form, GAGs regulated MG‐63 survival and growth in a dose‐dependent manner, but not differentiation in either cell type. In contrast, hMSCs aggregated into distinct colonies when grown on GAG‐coated substrates, while MG‐63 cells did not. Heparin‐coated substrates improved hMSC viability without inducing aggregation. These results suggest a complex role for GAGs in coordinating the emergence of the osteoblast phenotype, and provide further evidence for the use of heparans in bone tissue repair applications. J. Cell. Physiol. 218: 501–511, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.