Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diabetes Mellitus and Ovarian Cancer Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies

Objective The objective of this study was to evaluate the epidemiologic association between diabetes and risk of ovarian cancer. Methods We searched PubMed, EMBASE, and The Cochrane Library for observational studies on the association between diabetes and ovarian cancer. Cohort studies that reported relative risks (RRs) and case-control studies that showed odds ratios were included in the analysis. Summary RRs with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated with a random-effects model. Results A total of 19 studies from 18 articles (7 case-control studies and 11 cohort studies) met the inclusion criteria. Combining data from all studies, diabetes was associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer, compared with no diabetes (summary RR of ovarian cancer incidence, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.02–1.33). In cohort and nested case-control studies, patients with diabetes had statistically significant increased risk of ovarian cancer (RR, 1.16; 95% CI, 1.01–1.33), without significant heterogeneity (I2 = 27; P = 0.172). Among studies that control for age, body mass index, smoking, and alcohol, a prominent association between diabetes and ovarian cancer was found (RR, 1.55; 95% CI, 1.11–2.19). Conclusions This study suggests that women with diabetes have a moderately increased risk of ovarian cancer.
Uterotrophic assay of two concentrations of migrates from each of 23 polystyrenes administered orally (by gavage) to immature female Wistar rats.

The Styrene Steering Committee (SSC) of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) sponsored this work to address any concern that styrene dimers and trimers that might migrate from polystyrene containers into food could possess some estrogenic activity and thus possibly affect human health. All phases of the study were conducted in conformance with GLP regulations and without knowledge of the oligomer migrates tested. All activities were managed and audited under a third-party contract between the SSC and Argus International. Low and high doses of the styrene oligomer migrates of 23 polystyrene samples [i.e. 9 general purpose polystyrenes (GPPS), 8 high impact polystyrenes (HIPS) and 6 expandable polystyrenes (EPS)] were tested for estrogenicity in an in vivo uterotrophic assay (immature female rat model). This model is considered to be the "gold standard" for use in screening for estrogenic effects because it evaluates both direct and indirect potential effects. The two concentrations of migrates of each of the 23 polystyrenes tested were selected to simulate daily human consumption of a low and high amount of food. Representative dimer and trimer concentrations were obtained in conformance with EEC Council Directives and calculated to be at levels simulating human consumption of 0.5 or 5 kg of food for the GPPS and the HIPS samples and of 0.5 or 3.15 kg of food for the EPS samples, respectively. The study was conducted in a series of three blocks. Each block included concurrent untreated control (negative control), vehicle control (25% ethanol, 20 ml/kg/day) and positive control (diethylstilbestrol-dipropionate, DES-DP, 5 micrograms/kg/day) groups, and low and high doses of each of 7 (1 block) or 8 (2 blocks) polystyrene oligomer migrates. Each group in each block consisted of 10 immature Wistar (Chbb: THOM-SPF) female rats. Beginning when the rats were 22 +/- 1 days of age, each rat was appropriately handled (untreated control group) or administered twice daily oral (gavage) dosages of the vehicle, positive control agent or one of the two doses of the migrates of each polystyrene for 4 consecutive days and then sacrificed at 26 +/- 1 days of age. The uterus of each rat was weighed, and the uterine weight was compared with the terminal body weight. The positive control agent (DES-DP, 5 micrograms/kg/day) significantly increased both absolute and relative (to terminal body weight) uterine weights, as compared to the untreated and vehicle control group values in each block, demonstrating sensitivity and response of the animals to an estrogenic agent. None of the 23 polystyrene oligomer migrates tested at low and high doses demonstrated biologically important or statistically significant differences from the untreated or vehicle control group values for absolute or relative (to body weight) uterine weights. Based on these data, it is concluded that low and high doses of the 23 polystyrene oligomer migrates tested did not induce an estrogenic response.
Towards using relevant collegial contexts for academic development

Many academic development initiatives build on community-based approaches, such as communities of practice or learning communities. While these initiatives are largely successful for the individual academics involved, low participation rates prevent wide-reaching impact on learning about teaching. The research discussed in this article aims at reaching larger numbers of academics. It proposes to investigate ‘teaching groups’, which are defined as the already existing collegial contexts around academics based on shared teaching responsibilities. The teaching groups of focus group participants from a New Zealand university are identified; structure, interactions and atmosphere within these groups are explored. The research derives a scale of desirability for teaching groups, reaching from functioning to tight-knit groups. This scale is applied to the groups of study participants and reveals wide scope for improvement towards the development of stronger community characteristics. Future research into understanding why teaching groups show certain characteristics is recommended.
Mobile-Health Tool Use and Community Health Worker Performance in the Kenyan Context: A Task-Technology Fit Perspective

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are often the only link to healthcare for millions of people in the developing world. There is growing interest in supporting CHWs at the point-of-care through the application of mobile-health or mHealth platforms. Despite the promise of these technologies, there is a lack of substantive evidence regarding the impacts of mHealth tools on healthcare service delivery and whether these tools are adequately designed to fit with the intended healthcare service tasks, thereby enhancing CHW workflow efficiencies. To address this gap, the study aims to (i) determine a relevant set of dimensions along which to evaluate healthcare service task and mHealth tool characteristics, and (ii) use these dimensions to theorize and test a Task-Technology Fit model to predict mHealth tool use and CHW performance. Data was collected from 312 CHWs in the counties of Siaya, Nandi, and Kilifi, in Kenya using a survey instrument. Findings show that "fit' as the covariation between healthcare service task and mHealth tool characteristics will result in increased mHealth tool use and enhanced CHW performance in the Kenyan context. Results thus confirm that by providing adequate functional support for CHW needs, mHealth tools may represent the most effective and cost-effective way to ultimately save lives and improve healthcare outcomes in the developing world.
One model for the learning of language

Significance It has long been hypothesized that language acquisition may be impossible without innate knowledge of the structures that occur in natural language. Here, we show that a domain general learning setup, originally developed in cognitive psychology to model rule learning, is able to acquire key pieces of natural language from relatively few examples of sentences. This develops a new approach to formalizing linguistic learning and highlights some features of language and language acquisition that may arise from general cognitive processes. A major goal of linguistics and cognitive science is to understand what class of learning systems can acquire natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue that learning is impossible without a highly constrained hypothesis space. Here, we describe a learning system that is maximally unconstrained, operating over the space of all computations, and is able to acquire many of the key structures present in natural language from positive evidence alone. We demonstrate this by providing the same learning model with data from 74 distinct formal languages which have been argued to capture key features of language, have been studied in experimental work, or come from an interesting complexity class. The model is able to successfully induce the latent system generating the observed strings from small amounts of evidence in almost all cases, including for regular (e.g., an, (ab)n, and {a,b}+), context-free (e.g., anbn, anbn+m, and xxR), and context-sensitive (e.g., anbncn, anbmcndm, and xx) languages, as well as for many languages studied in learning experiments. These results show that relatively small amounts of positive evidence can support learning of rich classes of generative computations over structures. The model provides an idealized learning setup upon which additional cognitive constraints and biases can be formalized.
Disproportionality in special education: identifying children with emotional behavioural difficulties in Irish primary schools

Within categories of special educational needs, emotional and behavioural difficulties have received much attention in recent years, particularly in relation to their definition and identification by parents and teachers. This paper stems from previous research which highlights how children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those attending schools designated as socio-economically disadvantaged are significantly more likely than their peers to be identified as having a special educational need of a non-normative type such as emotional behavioural difficulty (EBD). Using data from the Growing Up in Ireland study, it examines whether the EBD identified by teachers or within certain schools is matched by the child’s own performance on an internationally validated emotional and mental health measure – the Piers–Harris. Findings show that overall self-reported social emotional well-being bears a strong relationship to the probability of being identified with an EBD. However, boys, children from economically inactive and one-parent households and children attending the most disadvantaged school contexts are more likely to be identified with having an EBD, even after taking into account their social background characteristics and their scoring on the Piers–Harris measure. These findings suggest that the subjective nature of EBD identification is resulting in a disproportionate number of these children being identified with EBD. The implications of this study are explored for existing disability/SEN classification systems, school-wide intervention models and the impact on individual students labelled as EBD. Overall, the findings pose searching questions about the validity of employing SEN classification systems in deciding eligibility and types of appropriate provision.
Muscle Logic: New Knowledge Resource for Anatomy Enables Comprehensive Searches of the Literature on the Feeding Muscles of Mammals

Background In recent years large bibliographic databases have made much of the published literature of biology available for searches. However, the capabilities of the search engines integrated into these databases for text-based bibliographic searches are limited. To enable searches that deliver the results expected by comparative anatomists, an underlying logical structure known as an ontology is required. Development and Testing of the Ontology Here we present the Mammalian Feeding Muscle Ontology (MFMO), a multi-species ontology focused on anatomical structures that participate in feeding and other oral/pharyngeal behaviors. A unique feature of the MFMO is that a simple, computable, definition of each muscle, which includes its attachments and innervation, is true across mammals. This construction mirrors the logical foundation of comparative anatomy and permits searches using language familiar to biologists. Further, it provides a template for muscles that will be useful in extending any anatomy ontology. The MFMO is developed to support the Feeding Experiments End-User Database Project (FEED, https://feedexp.org/), a publicly-available, online repository for physiological data collected from in vivo studies of feeding (e.g., mastication, biting, swallowing) in mammals. Currently the MFMO is integrated into FEED and also into two literature-specific implementations of Textpresso, a text-mining system that facilitates powerful searches of a corpus of scientific publications. We evaluate the MFMO by asking questions that test the ability of the ontology to return appropriate answers (competency questions). We compare the results of queries of the MFMO to results from similar searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. Results and Significance Our tests demonstrate that the MFMO is competent to answer queries formed in the common language of comparative anatomy, but PubMed and Google Scholar are not. Overall, our results show that by incorporating anatomical ontologies into searches, an expanded and anatomically comprehensive set of results can be obtained. The broader scientific and publishing communities should consider taking up the challenge of semantically enabled search capabilities.
Paralytic shellfish toxin content is related to genomic sxtA4 copy number in Alexandrium minutum strains

Dinoflagellates are microscopic aquatic eukaryotes with huge genomes and an unusual cell regulation. For example, most genes are present in numerous copies and all copies seem to be obligatorily transcribed. The consequence of the gene copy number (CPN) for final protein synthesis is, however, not clear. One such gene is sxtA, the starting gene of paralytic shellfish toxin (PST) synthesis. PSTs are small neurotoxic compounds that can accumulate in the food chain and cause serious poisoning incidences when ingested. They are produced by dinoflagellates of the genera Alexandrium, Gymnodium, and Pyrodinium. Here we investigated if the genomic CPN of sxtA4 is related to PST content in Alexandrium minutum cells. SxtA4 is the 4th domain of the sxtA gene and its presence is essential for PST synthesis in dinoflagellates. We used PST and genome size measurements as well as quantitative PCR to analyze sxtA4 CPN and toxin content in 15 A. minutum strains. Our results show a strong positive correlation between the sxtA4 CPN and the total amount of PST produced in actively growing A. minutum cells. This correlation was independent of the toxin profile produced, as long as the strain contained the genomic domains sxtA1 and sxtA4.
Relationship between perception of self‐competence and parenting attitudes of Asian Indian preschoolers

The purpose of the present study is to examine the relationship between parenting attitudes of Asian Indian mothers living in the United States and their preschool children’s perception of self‐competence. Twenty‐eight Asian Indian mothers and their preschool‐aged children living in the United States participated in the study. The parenting attitudes of the mothers were measured using the Adolescent–Adult Parenting Inventory. The participating preschoolers’ perceived self‐competence was measured using the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance. Correlation of the parenting attitudes subscales and the perception of self‐competence subscales indicated that there was significant correlation between cognitive competence and inappropriate expectations (r = 0.45, p < 0.05), corporal punishment (r = 0.46, p < 0.05), and role reversal (r = 0.59, p < 0.01). Role reversal was also significantly correlated with peer acceptance (r = 0.46, p < 0.05). The correlation between inappropriate expectations, corporal punishment, role reversal and cognitive competence among the Asian Indian children could be attributed to the values their parents place on cognitive skills.
A Survey on Geographic Load Balancing Based Data Center Power Management in the Smart Grid Environment

Power management is becoming an increasingly important issue for Internet services supported by multiple geo-distributed data centers. These data center's energy consumptions and costs are becoming unacceptably high, and placing a heavy burden on both energy resources and the environment. Emerging smart grid provides a feasible way for dynamic and efficient power management of data centers. Various power management methodologies based on geographic load balancing (GLB) have recently been proposed to effectively utilize several features of smart grid. In this paper, we summarize the motivations, current state of the art, approaches and techniques proposed in the recent research works in this discipline. In all of these works, many perspectives of power management have been addressed using various computer science principles. We specifically elaborate on how researchers are exploiting mathematical tools to address these perspectives. Finally, we point out subject matters that need more attentions from the research community and provide our vision on possible future works along this direction.
The Effectiveness of University-Level Management Consulting Courses

The authors analyze the effectiveness of consulting courses in raising the self-efficacy of participants to cope with the kinds of tasks typically faced by entry-level management consultants. Using data from self-evaluation questionnaires completed by 130 students in three types of consulting courses, the authors find that these courses are significantly more effective than a nonconsulting course used for control purposes. Prior research has shown self-efficacy to be positively related to task performance and to other desirable outcome measures. Therefore, academic institutions can make an important contribution to preparing their graduates for their later roles as managers and consultants by raising self-efficacy through course offerings in relevant areas.
Identity as an analytic lens for research in education

n today's fast changing and interconnected global world, researchers in a variety of areas have come to see identity as an important analytic tool for understanding schools and society. A focus on the contextually specific ways in which people act out and recognize identities allows a more dynamic approach than the sometimes overly general and static trio of "race, class, and gender. " However, the term identity has taken on a great many different meanings in the literature. Rather than survey this large literature, I will sketch out but one approach that draws on one consistent strand of that literature. This is not to deny that other, equally useful approaches are possible, based on different selections from the literature.
Caregivers reflecting on the early days of childhood cancer

Much research examining primary caregivers of children with cancer has focused on their distress levels and coping strategies. Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 38 Australian primary caregivers, this article examines their experiences through their child's cancer diagnosis and early treatment period. However, it does so retrospectively with their child in remission (a minimum of 5 years post diagnosis). This methodology gave caregivers the time to evaluate and reflect on their experiences through their child's cancer. Interviews with caregivers were recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using a grounded constant comparison approach. The concept of neo-normal was developed to represent caregivers' responses to having a child with cancer - characterised by the existential threat of cancer, the shattering of notions of control and certainty in their capacity to protect their child's well-being and reliance on medical intervention. Paradoxically, conceding to this disempowered position facilitated new ways to be a caregiver of a child with cancer. The findings illustrate the social processes and cultural context in which caregivers construct new normalising strategies as they transition through their child's illness. The study also gives recognition to the vital care, advocacy and pseudo-nursing contributions that caregivers bring to the paediatric oncology setting.
Throughput maximization and interference power analysis based on sequential energy detector

One of the main challenges in cognitive communication is to minimize the interference to the primary user and maximize the throughput of second user. Sequential energy detection (SED) is a faster and lower complexity spectrum sensing technology. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem to design the sensing parameter and optimize the transmitting power based on SED in order to maximize the second user throughput while avoiding the interference to the primary user under a threshold constraint. Through theoretical and numerical simulation analysis, we find that optimizing the transmit power and the sensing parameter play an important role in maximizing the second user throughput.
Distributed Scheduling in Multihop Wireless Networks with Maxmin Fairness Provisioning

Fair allocation of resources is an important consideration in the design of wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the setting of multihop wireless networks with multiple routing paths and develop an online flow control and scheduling algorithm for packet admission and link activation that achieves high aggregate throughput while providing different data flows with a fair share of network capacity. For fairness provisioning, we seek to maximize the minimum throughput provided to flows in the network. To cope with different degrees of data reliability among the different links in the network, we use different channel code rates as appropriate. While we expect performance improvement using channel coding and multipath routing, the main contribution of our work is a joint treatment of network stability, multipath routing and link-level reliability in meeting the overarching goal of maxmin fairness. We develop a decentralized, and hence practical, scheduling policy that addresses various concerns and demonstrate, via simulations, that it is competitive with respect to an optimal centralized rate allocator. We also evaluate the fairness provisioning under the proposed algorithm and show that channel coding improves the performance of the network significantly. Finally, we show through simulations that the proposed algorithm outperforms a class of existing approaches on fairness provisioning, which are developed based on utility maximization.
Online Classification of Single EEG Trials During Finger Movements

Many offline studies have explored the feasibility of EEG potentials related to single limb movements for a brain-computer interface (BCI) control signal. However, only few functional online single-trial BCI systems have been reported. We investigated whether inexperienced subjects could control a BCI accurately by means of visually-cued left versus right index finger movements, performed every 2 s, after only a 20-min training period. Ten subjects tried to move a circle from the center to a target location at the left or right side of the computer screen by moving their left or right index finger. The classifier was updated after each trial using the correct class labels, enabling up-to-date feedback to the subjects throughout the training. Therefore, a separate data collection session for optimizing the classification algorithm was not needed. When the performance of the BCI was tested, the classifier was not updated. Seven of the ten subjects were able to control the BCI well. They could choose the correct target in 84%-100% of the cases, 3.5-7.7 times a minute. Their mean single trial classification rate was 80% and bit rate 10 bits/min. These results encourage the development of BCIs for paralyzed persons based on detection of single-trial movement attempts.