Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two Distinct Hepatitis C Virus Genotype 1a Clades Have Different Geographical Distribution and Association With Natural Resistance to NS3 Protease Inhibitors

Background. Hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1 is the most prevalent worldwide. Subtype 1a, compared with 1b, shows lower response rates and higher propensity to select for drug resistance to NS3 and selected NS5A and nonnucleoside NS5B inhibitors. Two distinct clades of subtype 1a have been described. Methods. Using Bayesian methodology, we performed a time-scaled phylogeny reconstruction of clade separation and characterized the geographic distribution, phylodynamics, and association with natural resistance variants of NS3 sequences from 362 patients carrying subtype 1a HCV. Results. All sequences segregated in 2 clearly distinct clades. Clade I showed an earlier origin from the common ancestor compared with clade II. Clade I virus was more prevalent in non-European countries, represented mostly by United States, compared with European (75.7% vs 49.3%; P < .001). The prevalence of the natural NS3 variant Q80K, associated with resistance to the macrocyclic protease inhibitor simeprevir, was detected in 51.6% of clade I and 0% of clade II (P < .001); clade I showed a lower genetic barrier for Q80K, whereas no sign of selective pressure at any protease inhibitor resistance-associated codon was detected. Conclusions. Hepatitis C virus subtype 1a clades have a clearly different distribution in Europe and the United States, and the natural resistance mutation Q80K is exclusively associated with clade I.
Constraint- and synergy-based specification of manipulation tasks

This work aims to extend the application field of the constraint-based control framework called iTaSC (instantaneous task specification using constraints) toward manipulation tasks. iTaSC offers two advantages with respect to other methods: the ability to specify tasks in different spaces (and not only in Cartesian coordinates as for the Task Frame Formalism), and the treatment of geometric uncertainties. These properties may be very useful within a manipulation context, where tasks are executed by robots with many degrees of freedom, which calls for some degree of abstraction; by choosing a suitable set of coordinates, it is possible to reduce the complexity and the number of constraints that fully describe such tasks; in addition, controlling only the subspace that is needed to fulfil a task allows us to use the remaining degrees of freedom of the robot system to achieve secondary objectives. This paper discusses the instruments and techniques that can be employed in manipulation scenarios; in particular it focuses on aspects like the specification of a grasp and control of the stance of the robotic arm. iTaSC offers the possibility of specifying a grasp. While this approach allows for very fine control of a grasping task, in most cases a less fine-grain specification suffices to guarantee a successful execution of the grasping action. To this end synergy-based grasp specification is formulated within iTaSC. We also show how to take into account secondary objectives for the arm stance. In particular we consider, as an example, the manipulability index along a given direction. Such indexes are maximised by exploring the null space of the other tasks. The proposed approach is demonstrated by means of simulations, where a robotic hand grasps a cylindrical object.
Systematic review of ERP and fMRI studies investigating inhibitory control and error processing in people with substance dependence and behavioural addictions.

BACKGROUND Several current theories emphasize the role of cognitive control in addiction. The present review evaluates neural deficits in the domains of inhibitory control and error processing in individuals with substance dependence and in those showing excessive addiction-like behaviours. The combined evaluation of event-related potential (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings in the present review offers unique information on neural deficits in addicted individuals. METHODS We selected 19 ERP and 22 fMRI studies using stop-signal, go/no-go or Flanker paradigms based on a search of PubMed and Embase. RESULTS The most consistent findings in addicted individuals relative to healthy controls were lower N2, error-related negativity and error positivity amplitudes as well as hypoactivation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), inferior frontal gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These neural deficits, however, were not always associated with impaired task performance. With regard to behavioural addictions, some evidence has been found for similar neural deficits; however, studies are scarce and results are not yet conclusive. Differences among the major classes of substances of abuse were identified and involve stronger neural responses to errors in individuals with alcohol dependence versus weaker neural responses to errors in other substance-dependent populations. LIMITATIONS Task design and analysis techniques vary across studies, thereby reducing comparability among studies and the potential of clinical use of these measures. CONCLUSION Current addiction theories were supported by identifying consistent abnormalities in prefrontal brain function in individuals with addiction. An integrative model is proposed, suggesting that neural deficits in the dorsal ACC may constitute a hallmark neurocognitive deficit under lying addictive behaviours, such as loss of control.
Public Library Staff as Community Health Partners: Training Program Design and Evaluation

Public libraries are free and open to all—and accessed at high rates by vulnerable populations—which positions them to be key public health allies. However, library staff themselves often feel ill-equipped to address the health and social concerns of their patrons. To fill this gap, we developed a case-based training curriculum to help library staff recognize, engage, and refer vulnerable patrons to appropriate resources. Topics addressed in the training, including homelessness, mental health and substance use disorders, immigration, and trauma, were selected based on findings from a prior community needs assessment. Using a modified measure of self-efficacy, participants (n = 33) were surveyed before and after each session. Several participants (n = 7) were also interviewed 4 months after the training was completed. Overall, staff reported significant increases in comfort, confidence, and preparedness in assisting vulnerable patrons across all topic areas. Qualitative findings reflected positive perceived impact and value of the trainings. Staff felt training resources should be made more readily accessible. Improving library staff capacity to address the health and social needs of their patrons can further establish public libraries as partners in improving population health.
Exercise Training in Older Patients With Heart Failure and Preserved Ejection Fraction: A Randomized, Controlled, Single-Blind Trial

Background—Heart failure (HF) with preserved left ventricular ejection fraction (HFPEF) is the most common form of HF in the older population. Exercise intolerance is the primary chronic symptom in patients with HFPEF and is a strong determinant of their reduced quality of life (QOL). Exercise training (ET) improves exercise intolerance and QOL in patients with HF with reduced ejection fraction (EF). However, the effect of ET in HFPEF has not been examined in a randomized controlled trial. Methods and Results—This 16-week investigation was a randomized, attention-controlled, single-blind study of medically supervised ET (3 days per week) on exercise intolerance and QOL in 53 elderly patients (mean age, 70±6 years; range, 60 to 82 years; women, 46) with isolated HFPEF (EF ≥50% and no significant coronary, valvular, or pulmonary disease). Attention controls received biweekly follow-up telephone calls. Forty-six patients completed the study (24 ET, 22 controls). Attendance at exercise sessions in the ET group was excellent (88%; range, 64% to 100%). There were no trial-related adverse events. The primary outcome of peak exercise oxygen uptake increased significantly in the ET group compared to the control group (13.8±2.5 to 16.1±2.6 mL/kg per minute [change, 2.3±2.2 mL/kg per minute] versus 12.8±2.6 to 12.5±3.4 mL/kg per minute [change, −0.3±2.1 mL/kg per minute]; P=0.0002). There were significant improvements in peak power output, exercise time, 6-minute walk distance, and ventilatory anaerobic threshold (all P<0.002). There was improvement in the physical QOL score (P=0.03) but not in the total score (P=0.11). Conclusions—ET improves peak and submaximal exercise capacity in older patients with HFPEF. Clinical Trial Registration—URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT01113840.
Fast Instance Search Based on Approximate Bichromatic Reverse Nearest Neighbor Search

In the TRECVID Instance Search (INS) task, it is known that use of BM25, which is an improvement of the TFIDF,greatly improves retrieval performance. Its calculation, however, requires tremendous amount of computational cost and this fact makes its use intractable. In this paper, we present its efficient computational method. Since the BM25 is obtained by solving the bichromatic reverse nearest neighbor (BRNN)search problem,we propose an approximate method for the problem based on the state-of-the-art approximate nearest neighbor search method, bucket distance hashing (BDH). An experiment using the TRECVID INS 2012 dataset showed that the proposed method reduced computational cost to less than 1/3500 of the brute-force search with keeping the accuracy.
Transplantation of canine umbilical cord blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells in experimentally induced spinal cord injured dogs

This study was to determine the effects of allogenic umbilical cord blood (UCB)-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and recombinant methionyl human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (rmhGCSF) on a canine spinal cord injury model after balloon compression at the first lumbar vertebra. Twenty-five adult mongrel dogs were assigned to five groups according to treatment after a spinal cord injury: no treatment (CN); saline treatment (CP); rmhGCSF treatment (G); UCB-MSCs treatment (UCB-MSC); co-treatment (UCBG). The UCB-MSCs isolated from cord blood of canine fetuses were prepared as 106 cells/150 µl saline. The UCB-MSCs were directly injected into the injured site of the spinal cord and rmhGCSF was administered subcutaneously 1 week after the induction of spinal cord injury. The Olby score, magnetic resonance imaging, somatosensory evoked potentials and histopathological examinations were used to evaluate the functional recovery after transplantation. The Olby scores of all groups were zero at the 0-week evaluation. At 2 week after the transplantation, the Olby scores in the groups with the UCB-MSC and UCBG were significantly higher than in the CN and CP groups. However, there were no significant differences between the UCB-MSC and UCBG groups, and between the CN and CP groups. These comparisons remained stable at 4 and 8 week after transplantation. There was significant improvement in the nerve conduction velocity based on the somatosensory evoked potentials. In addition, a distinct structural consistency of the nerve cell bodies was noted in the lesion of the spinal cord of the UCB-MSC and UCBG groups. These results suggest that transplantation of the UCB-MSCs resulted in recovery of nerve function in dogs with a spinal cord injury and may be considered as a therapeutic modality for spinal cord injury.
Distribution grid security management with high DG penetration rate: Situation in France and some future trends

The major change in the last decade concerning distribution network is related to the penetration of distributed generation (DG). The current practice in France concerning the connection of DG was to fit the network to the worse case of use of DG to avoid any problem. This approach will reach his limits and many developments will be necessary to optimize the network operation, taking the presence of DG into account. In this document, we introduce some research topics going on in our team as voltage control, management of load and generation, stability analysis of networks with DG, optimization of use of fault indicator, choice of optimal configuration and automatic post fault restoration, distribution system availability assessment. We also stress on the problem of interdependency between power and ICT infrastructures.
Source-side Syntactic Reordering Patterns with Functional Words for Improved Phrase-based SMT

Inspired by previous source-side syntactic reordering methods for SMT, this paper focuses on using automatically learned syntactic reordering patterns with functional words which indicate structural reorderings between the source and target language. This approach takes advantage of phrase alignments and source-side parse trees for pattern extraction, and then filters out those patterns without functional words. Word lattices transformed by the generated patterns are fed into PBSMT systems to incorporate potential reorderings from the inputs. Experiments are carried out on a medium-sized corpus for a Chinese–English SMT task. The proposed method outperforms the baseline system by 1.38% relative on a randomly selected testset and 10.45% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score. Furthermore, a system with just 61.88% of the patterns filtered by functional words obtains a comparable performance with the unfiltered one on the randomly selected testset, and achieves 1.74% relative improvements on the NIST 2008 testset.
Special Education Services and Response to Intervention: What, Why, and How?

Recently there has been an ongoing, at times acrimonious, discussion about the newest incarnation of the federal law that mandates special services for children with disabilities. At the heart of the controversy is a relatively new evaluation model referred to as Response to Intervention (RTI). Advocates and stakeholders have been very vocal in their opinions, leaving those down on the frontlines puzzled and confused. Teachers in particular are feeling frustration over yet another, seemingly arbitrary change in the red tape of special education, about which no one has consulted them or even really bothered to explain. Historically, teachers have felt, not unreasonably, a bit victimized by special education law. In 1975, they were told to step aside, that they were not skilled enough to teach children with special needs. Teachers were given a clear message that their role was to keep alert for disabled children and send them on to the experts. Over time, that message has transformed into something quite different; now they hear that they are evading their responsibility by pushing children onto the special education rolls. In addition, procedures for referrals have modified almost yearly; just when they understand the process, it changes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the circumstances that led up to the conception of RTI, and why many people believe it is a significant but necessary change to special education law. In order to understand the rationale behind RTI, it must be examined in the context of the federal laws which necessitated its creation, beginning with Public Law 94-142 (also known as the Education for Handicapped Act, or EHA, passed in 1975), and its subsequent reauthorizations, the most recent of which is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, or IDEIA. For purposes of brevity in this paper, the original act and its descendants will be collectively referred to as IDEIA, unless an issue specific to one particular version is under discussion.
Rethinking Gender, Men and Masculinity: Representations of Men in the South Asian Reproductive and Sexual Health Literatures

In global public health and international development, there is a growing emphasis on engaging with and addressing men in relation to gender and health. In the reproductive and sexual health arena, however, relatively little research to date has focused on men in South Asian contexts. In this paper we explore this issue in the context of South Asia with the aim of moving beyond somewhat stereotypical and essentialist representations of men to suggest more productive modes of engagement— both in the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) literature and with respect to policy and programs within the region. To do this, we draw on the work of Raewyn Connell and Judith Butler among others to advance new understandings of men and masculinity in relation to SRH in South Asian contexts. We contrast these against recurrent patterns in representations of men in the existing literature and interrogate some of the assumptions underpinning such representations. We argue that there is a need to re-think men, gender and sexual health in South Asian contexts, and highlight some profitable ways of doing so, drawing on international experience to date.
Occupancy detection by multi-power bluetooth low energy beaconing

Indoor environments are becoming more and more sensorized. Technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and RFID are commonly used to provide connectivity to people living in such spaces. However, these technologies can also be exploited to automatically detect empty/occupied indoor areas and who is occupying that area. Our work goes toward such direction proposing an occupancy detection strategy based on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) stack. We designed our solution by considering two fundamental challenges: costs and power-efficiency. We tested our system in several offices of our research institute by deploying few Bluetooth receivers and assigning to people a Bluetooth tag integrated with the institute's badge. We analyzed the performance of our solution with Bluetooth tags emitting at one single power first, and then we further refined our solution by considering the possibility of using beacons emitting simultaneously at different powers. The obtained results show a high accuracy without significantly affecting the energy consumption of the tags.
Generalized Character-Level Spelling Error Correction

We present a generalized discriminative model for spelling error correction which targets character-level transformations. While operating at the character level, the model makes use of wordlevel and contextual information. In contrast to previous work, the proposed approach learns to correct a variety of error types without guidance of manuallyselected constraints or language-specific features. We apply the model to correct errors in Egyptian Arabic dialect text, achieving 65% reduction in word error rate over the input baseline, and improving over the earlier state-of-the-art system.
Phlebotomy Tube Dealing and Test Ordering Pattern: An Experience -

Objective: To describe filling patterns and associated transcriptional aspects in phlebotomy tubes received at PNS Rahat laboratory. Material and Methods: This descriptive study was carried out from November 2006 to August 2007 at Department of Pathology, PNS Rahat, Karachi. Phlebotomy related data was collected from various blood collection tubes and associated request/authorization forms from our in door departments including wards, intensive care units and emergency. Phlebotomy tube filling pattern, presence of clinical details/information on lab request Performa, category of doctor signing/authorizing requests, combined phlebotomy error rate from different wards, and combined phlebotomy error rate in urgent and routine requests were noted. Results: Inappropriate filling was demonstrated in almost half of the collection tubes examined. Only 14 % of the requests actually showed reasons for request. Majority (42.3 %) did not have any mention of clinical details. Almost 69 % of requests were signed by an indirectly concerned doctor. Percentage wise combined phlebotomy error rate possibility from different departments was demonstrated at a maximum from emergency (56.9 %) followed by different wards (49.2 %) and intensive care units (27.3 %). Similarly, percentage 2 wise combined phlebotomy error rate possibility was higher in urgent (48.1 %) than routine investigations (34.2 %). Conclusion: Phlebotomy related errors constitute a major burden in our hospitals. The errors increase with urgent and non-professional workers dealing with phlebotomy. A motivated and educated approach is required to improve phlebotomy practices in our medical set ups. (Rawal Med J 2008;33:62-66).
Secrecy Outage Minimization for Wireless Powered Communication Networks with an Energy Harvesting Jammer

In this work, we consider a wireless powered communication network (WPCN) with an energy harvesting (EH) jammer where an eavesdropper tries to wiretap the communication between a user and a hybrid access-point (H-AP). In our system, the H-AP first transmits an energy signal to recharge the batteries of the EH user and the EH jammer in the energy transfer (ET) phase. Then, in the subsequent information transfer (IT) phase, the user sends its information signal to the H-AP, while the jammer generates the jamming signal to interfere the eavesdropper utilizing the harvested energy in the ET phase. Assuming only the channel distribution information (CDI) of the eavesdropper is available at the legitimate nodes, we analyze and minimize the secrecy outage probability by optimizing the time allocation between the two phases. To reduce the complexity, we also provide a simple closed-form solution, and the simulation results verify that its performance approaches the optimum.
Physical activity is increased by a 12-week semiautomated telecoaching programme in patients with COPD: a multicentre randomised controlled trial

Rationale Reduced physical activity (PA) in patients with COPD is associated with a poor prognosis. Increasing PA is a key therapeutic target, but thus far few strategies have been found effective in this patient group. Objectives To investigate the effectiveness of a 12-week semiautomated telecoaching intervention on PA in patients with COPD in a multicentre European randomised controlled trial. Methods 343 patients from six centres, encompassing a wide spectrum of disease severity, were randomly allocated to either a usual care group (UCG) or a telecoaching intervention group (IG) between June and December 2014. This 12-week intervention included an exercise booklet and a step counter providing feedback both directly and via a dedicated smartphone application. The latter provided an individualised daily activity goal (steps) revised weekly and text messages as well as allowing occasional telephone contacts with investigators. PA was measured using accelerometry during 1 week preceding randomisation and during week 12. Secondary outcomes included exercise capacity and health status. Analyses were based on modified intention to treat. Main results Both groups were comparable at baseline in terms of factors influencing PA. At 12 weeks, the intervention yielded a between-group difference of mean, 95% CI (lower limit – upper limit; ll-ul) +1469, 95% CI (971 to 1965) steps/day and +10.4, 95% CI (6.1 to 14.7) min/day moderate PA; favouring the IG (all p≤0.001). The change in 6-min walk distance was significantly different (13.4, 95% CI (3.40 to 23.5) m, p<0.01), favouring the IG. In IG patients, an improvement could be observed in the functional state domain of the clinical COPD questionnaire (p=0.03) compared with UCG. Other health status outcomes did not differ. Conclusions The amount and intensity of PA can be significantly increased in patients with COPD using a 12-week semiautomated telecoaching intervention including a step counter and an application installed on a smartphone. Trial registration number: NCT02158065.