Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Asymptomatic carriage of Neisseria meningitidis in a randomly sampled population

To estimate the extent of meningococcal carriage in the Norwegian population and to investigate the relationship of several characteristics of the population to the carrier state, 1,500 individuals living in rural and small-town areas near Oslo were selected at random from the Norwegian National Population Registry. These persons were asked to complete a questionnaire and to volunteer for a bacteriological tonsillopharyngeal swab sampling. Sixty-three percent of the selected persons participated in the survey. Ninety-one (9.6%) of the volunteers harbored Neisseria meningitidis. The isolates were serogrouped, serotyped, tested for antibiotic resistance, and analyzed by multilocus enzyme electrophoresis. Eight (8.8%) of the 91 isolates represented clones of the two clone complexes that have been responsible for most of the systemic meningococal disease in Norway in the 1980s. Age between 15 and 24, male sex, and active and passive smoking were found to be independently associated with meningococcal carriage in logistic regression analyses. Working outside the home and having an occupation in transportation or industry also increased the risk for meningococcal carriage in individuals older than 17, when corrections for gender and smoking were made. Assuming that our sample is representative of the Norwegian population, we estimated that about 40,000 individuals in Norway are asymptomatic carriers of isolates with epidemic potential. Thus, carriage eradication among close contacts of persons with systemic disease is unlikely to have a significant impact on the overall epidemiological situation.
Number-Theoretic Sequence Design for Uncoordinated Autonomous Multiple Access in Relay-Assisted Machine-Type Communications

Terminal relaying is expected to offer an effective means for realizing machine-type communications (MTC) in wireless cellular networks. In the absence of channel quality indicators, the effective utilization of relaying terminals (RTs) requires a mechanism by which RTs can autonomously assign available resource blocks (RBs) to potentially large numbers of uncoordinated MTC devices with minimal conflicts. Unlike random RB assignments, which do not offer performance guarantees, using prescribed RB assignment sequences provides an opportunity for obtaining performance gains. However, realizing these gains requires optimizing RB assignments over a large set of lengthy sequences. One technique for selecting assignment sequences is based on an exhaustive search of exponential complexity over sequences generated by multiplicative cyclic groups. This technique restricts the number of RBs to be prime minus one and does not consider sequences generated using other group operations. In this paper, we use group isomorphism to eliminate the constraint on the number of RBs and to show that the optimal assignment sequences generated by a specific cyclic group are globally optimal over the set of all cyclically generated sequences. We develop a greedy algorithm with polynomial complexity for the sequential selection of RB assignment sequences in systems with large numbers of RTs and arbitrary device distributions. This algorithm is further simplified by invoking the graphical representation of cyclic groups. The resulting algorithm is more efficient and thus suitable for generating assignment sequences for relay-assisted massive multiple access Internet-of-Things systems. Numerical results show that the performance of the sequences generated by the greedy algorithms is comparable to that of those generated by exhaustive search, but with much less computational cost.
Seminiferous Cord Formation Is Regulated by Hedgehog Signaling in the Marsupial1

ABSTRACT The signaling molecule DHH, secreted by Sertoli cells, has essential regulatory functions in testicular differentiation. DHH is required for the differentiation of peritubular myoid cells that line the seminiferous cords and steroidogenic Leydig cells. The testicular cords in Dhh-null male mice lack a basal lamina and develop abnormally. To date, the DHH-signaling pathway has never been examined outside of any eutherian mammals. This study examined the effects of inhibition of DHH signaling in a marsupial mammal, the tammar wallaby, by culturing gonads in vitro in the presence of the hedgehog-signaling inhibitors cyclopamine and forskolin. Disruption of hedgehog signaling in the tammar testes caused highly disorganized cord formation. SOX9 protein remained strongly expressed in Sertoli cells, laminin distribution was highly fragmented, and germ cells were distributed around the cortical regions of treated testes in an ovarianlike morphology. This suggests that hedgehog signaling regulates cord formation in the tammar wallaby testis as it does in eutherian mammals. These data demonstrate that the hedgehog pathway has been highly conserved in mammals for at least 160 million years.
'Nigeria as a country of interest in terrorism': Newspaper framing of Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber

Media coverage of the 'War on Terror' has generated different frameworks of understanding that have been shaped by meanings and images that emerged after September 11, 2001. These frameworks of meanings are routinely used to structure and contextualize news stories and events associated with terrorism. This article investigates news frames that four Nigerian newspapers applied to the coverage of an attempted suicide attack on a US-bound aircraft on Christmas Day in 2009. It analyses the newspapers' interpretation of the aborted act of terrorism by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man, which resulted in the United States categorizing Nigeria as a `country of interest in the context of terrorism'. The article outlines recurrent themes and issues that the newspapers primed for their audiences by interrogating a selection of editorial contents of the publications. It seeks to highlight how discursive fields in the coverage emphasized specific understanding of the event. The article argues that the constructed accounts of the foiled attack were framed and structured to create a distance between Abdulmutallab and his country and that the news frames the newspapers used narrowed public understanding of the significance of Abdulmutallab's radicalization and its possible implications for Nigeria.
Marginalisation by sexuality: report of an IDS workshop

Development agencies have conventionally viewed sexuality as a health issue. Sex has been regarded as a source of danger, harm and disease. The words ‘love’, ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’ are absent from the development lexicon. This article draws on discussions at a workshop at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, in September 2005, at which activists, practitioners and academics came together to debate the challenge of realising sexual rights, and to share experience of practical initiatives of working with a more positive, enabling approach to issues of sex and sexuality. It calls on development agencies to redress the marginalisation of sexuality in their policies and programmes, and recognise the significance of sexual well-being for all dimensions of development.
Teaching beliefs of medical educators: perspectives on clinical teaching in pediatrics

Background: Most who teach in clinical settings see themselves primarily as clinicians or physicians responsible for patient care and only secondarily as educators. The education literature suggests that teaching predominantly operates at a tacit level, where teachers rely on core beliefs to guide their practice, and actually spend little time in reflective practice. Given the lack of research on how medical educators in clinical settings view their teaching, the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the teaching beliefs of faculty in a pediatrics department in a college of medicine. Methods: Using a Teaching Perspectives Inventory, observations and in-depth interviews, a complex picture was revealed about teaching beliefs of medical educators. Results: Due to contextual constraints of the clinical setting (e.g., time, competing stakeholders) that requires primary attention to patient care, they describe ‘teaching on the fly’. There is a strong emphasis on: delivering content; encouraging thinking among students; providing questioning and engaging learning experiences; and respecting students as learners. Conclusions: The implications of these beliefs are significant and indicate that faculty can benefit from opportunities that make their beliefs about teaching more conscious, particularly in determining how best to prepare future physicians to teach in clinical settings.
Predicting performance under acute stress: The role of individual characteristics

This prospective study examined how differences in coping style, coping self-efficacy, and metacognitive awareness influence coping behavior and performance during a realistic acute stressful exercise in 2 military samples (n = 122 and n = 132). Results showed that coping self-efficacy and coping style affected coping behavior, and that, in turn, coping behavior affected performance. The findings of a post hoc analysis suggested that metacognitive awareness had an indirect relationship with coping behavior, through task-focused coping style and coping self-efficacy, instead of a predicted direct relationship. Together, these results indicate that coping style and coping self-efficacy are important predictors of performance under acute stress, and that this effect is mediated by coping behavior. © 2011 American Psychological Association.
Rebound Phenomena after Anticoagulant Therapy in Cerebrovascular Disease

Anticoagulant therapy did not reduce the incidence of further nonfatal cerebrovascular accidents in 90 patients who had already experienced one or more such accidents as compared with a control group. Following gradual withdrawal of therapy, however, there was a significantly increased incidence of nonfatal cerebrovascular accidents during the first three months after therapy. This suggests that following cessation of anticoagulant therapy there is a period of true “rebound” during which thrombo-embolic incidents are more likely to recur.
An Energy Efficient Regional Partitioned Clustering Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), one of the key issues to consider is low power consumption. Considering the characteristic of limited energy of sensor nodes, an energy efficient regional partitioned clustering routing algorithm (RPCR) is proposed in this paper. To resolve the problem that the clusters distribute unevenly in the networks, the whole network is compartmentalized to several regions through the initialization and partition algorithm. In the first round, through timing mechanism the sensor node nearest to the region center in each region is selected as the cluster head (CH) and other non-CH nodes in the region become the member nodes. Each CH node maintains a member node list and when a round finishes it selects the member node with the highest energy as the new CH for the next round. Simulation results show that our algorithm can make the clusters distribute evenly in the networks and provide higher performance in energy conservation and networks lifetime extension compared with the well known cluster-based protocol LEACH.
Estimating Poverty for Indigenous Groups in Chile by Matching Census and Survey Data

It is widely held that indigenous Chileans experience greater rates of poverty and indigence than non-indigenous Chileans, yet the evidence to date has been based on surveys that are not representative by ethnicity. In this paper, we use poverty mapping methodologies that are typically applied to geography to develop statistically precise estimates of poverty, indigence, poverty gaps, and indigence gaps for each of the eight indigenous groups recognized by Chilean law. We find that indigenous people experience higher rates of poverty and indigence and greater depth of poverty and indigence than non-indigenous people. These results hold within individual regions, suggesting that the differential access to economic opportunities in different parts of the country cannot fully explain the results. We also find that the burden of poverty is not shared equally across indigenous groups. Instead, the Mapuche and Aymar? experience disproportionately high poverty rates. We argue that including ethnicity in criteria for identifying poor households may help policy-makers to improve antipoverty targeting.
A Large Scale Empirical Study on User-Centric Performance Analysis

Measuring the software performance under load is an important task in both test and production of a software development. In large scale systems, a large amount of metrics and usage logs are analyzed to measure the performance of the software. Most of these metrics are analyzed by aggregating across all users to get general results for the scenario, i.e., how individual users have perceived the performance is typically not considered in software performance research and practice. To analyze a software's performance, user's perception of software performance metrics should be considered along with the scenario-centric perspective of system tester or operator. In our empirical study, we analyzed the impact of performance on individual users to see if performance analysis results based on the user's perception is really different from the scenario-centric (aggregated) one. Case studies on common use case scenarios in two commercial large telecommunication systems and one open source performance benchmark show scenarios where user-centric software performance analysis was able to identify performance issues that would be invisible in a scenario-centric analysis. We find that the user-centric approach does not replace the existing scenario-centric performance analysis approaches, but complements them by identifying more performance issues.
Glyph sorting: Interactive visualization for multi-dimensional data

Glyph-based visualization is an effective tool for depicting multivariate information. Since sorting is one of the most common analytical tasks performed on individual attributes of a multi-dimensional dataset, this motivates the hypothesis that introducing glyph sorting would significantly enhance the usability of glyph-based visualization. In this article, we present a glyph-based conceptual framework as part of a visualization process for interactive sorting of multivariate data. We examine several technical aspects of glyph sorting and provide design principles for developing effective, visually sortable glyphs. Glyphs that are visually sortable provide two key benefits: (1) performing comparative analysis of multiple attributes between glyphs and (2) to support multi-dimensional visual search. We describe a system that incorporates focus and context glyphs to control sorting in a visually intuitive manner and for viewing sorted results in an interactive, multi-dimensional glyph plot that enables users to perform high-dimensional sorting, analyse and examine data trends in detail. To demonstrate the usability of glyph sorting, we present a case study in rugby event analysis for comparing and analysing trends within matches. This work is undertaken in conjunction with a national rugby team. From using glyph sorting, analysts have reported the discovery of new insight beyond traditional match analysis.
Is it darker? Improving density representation in 2D scatter plots through a user study

Density differences are one of the main features users perceive in 2D scatter plots. However, because of pixels' collisions, some areas become saturated and such differences are lost. To solve this problem, several proposals rely on sampling the dataset before visualizing it. Some of these introduce precise measures to understand the image degradation and use numerical differences in pixels to estimate density differences. It is our opinion that this issue deserves a deeper analysis, taking into account perceptual issues. In this paper we describe a study we conducted to understand the relationship between numerical pixel density and the perceived density. The results obtained were used to refine a sampling technique we developed to preserve relative densities in the context of 2D scatter plots.
From translational research to open technology innovation systems.

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to question whether the emphasis placed within translational research on a linear model of innovation provides the most effective model for managing health technology innovation. Several alternative perspectives are presented that have potential to enhance the existing model of translational research. A case study is presented of innovation of a clinical decision support system. The paper concludes from the case study that an extending the triple helix model of technology transfer, to one based on a quadruple helix, present a basis for improving the performance translational research. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH A case study approach is used to help understand development of an innovative technology within a teaching hospital. The case is then used to develop and refine a model of the health technology innovation system. FINDINGS The paper concludes from the case study that existing models of translational research could be refined further through the development of a quadruple helix model of heath technology innovation that encompasses greater emphasis on user-led and open innovation perspectives. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS The paper presents several implications for future research based on the need to enhance the model of health technology innovation used to guide policy and practice. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS The quadruple helix model of innovation that is proposed can potentially guide alterations to the existing model of translational research in the healthcare sector. Several suggestions are made for how innovation activity can be better supported at both a policy and operational level. ORIGINALITY/VALUE This paper presents a synthesis of the innovation literature applied to a theoretically important case of open innovation in the UK National Health Service. It draws in perspectives from other industrial sectors and applies them specifically to the management and organisation of innovation activities around health technology and the services in which they are embedded.
Context constraints for compositional reachability analysis

Behavior analysis of complex distributed systems has led to the search for enhanced reachability analysis techniques which support modularity and which control the state explosion problem. While modularity has been achieved, state explosion in still a problem. Indeed, this problem may even be exacerbated, as a locally minimized subsystem may contain many states and transitions forbidden by its environment or context. Context constraints, specified as interface processes, are restrictions imposed by the environment on subsystem behavior. Recent research has suggested that the state explosion problem can be effectively controlled if context constraints are incorporated in compositional reachability analysis (CRA). Although theoretically very promising, the approach has rarely been used in practice because it generally requires a more complex computational model and does not contain a mechanism to derive context constraints automatically. This article presents a technique to automate the approach while using a similar computational model to that of CRA. Context constraints are derived automatically, based on a set of sufficient conditions for these constraints to be transparently included when building reachability graphs. As a result, the global reachability graph generated using the derived constraints is shown to be observationally equivalent to that generated by CRA without the inclusion of context constraints. Constraints can also be specified explicitly by users, based on their application knowledge. Erroneous constraints which contravene transparency can be identified together with an indication of the error sources. User-specified constraints can be combined with those generated automatically. The technique is illustrated using a clients/server system and other examples.
Efficient implementation of sorting on multi-core SIMD CPU architecture

Sorting a list of input numbers is one of the most fundamental problems in the field of computer science in general and high-throughput database applications in particular. Although literature abounds with various flavors of sorting algorithms, different architectures call for customized implementations to achieve faster sorting times. This paper presents an efficient implementation and detailed analysis of MergeSort on current CPU architectures. Our SIMD implementation with 128-bit SSE is 3.3X faster than the scalar version. In addition, our algorithm performs an efficient multiway merge, and is not constrained by the memory bandwidth. Our multi-threaded, SIMD implementation sorts 64 million floating point numbers in less than0.5 seconds on a commodity 4-core Intel processor. This measured performance compares favorably with all previously published results. Additionally, the paper demonstrates performance scalability of the proposed sorting algorithm with respect to certain salient architectural features of modern chip multiprocessor (CMP) architectures, including SIMD width and core-count. Based on our analytical models of various architectural configurations, we see excellent scalability of our implementation with SIMD width scaling up to 16X wider than current SSE width of 128-bits, and CMP core-count scaling well beyond 32 cores. Cycle-accurate simulation of Intel's upcoming x86 many-core Larrabee architecture confirms scalability of our proposed algorithm.
Avalanche dynamics of human brain oscillations: Relation to critical branching processes and temporal correlations

Human brain oscillations fluctuate erratically in amplitude during rest and exhibit power‐law decay of temporal correlations. It has been suggested that this dynamics reflects self‐organized activity near a critical state. In this framework, oscillation bursts may be interpreted as neuronal avalanches propagating in a network with a critical branching ratio. However, a direct comparison of the temporal structure of ongoing oscillations with that of activity propagation in a model network with critical connectivity has never been made. Here, we simulate branching processes and characterize the activity propagation in terms of avalanche life‐time distributions and temporal correlations. An equivalent analysis is introduced for characterizing ongoing oscillations in the alpha‐frequency band recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG) during rest. We found that models with a branching ratio near the critical value of one exhibited power‐law scaling in life‐time distributions with similar scaling exponents as observed in the MEG data. The models reproduced qualitatively the power‐law decay of temporal correlations in the human data; however, the correlations in the model appeared on time scales only up to the longest avalanche, whereas human data indicate persistence of correlations on time scales corresponding to several burst events. Our results support the idea that neuronal networks generating ongoing alpha oscillations during rest operate near a critical state, but also suggest that factors not included in the simple classical branching process are needed to account for the complex temporal structure of ongoing oscillations during rest on time scales longer than the duration of individual oscillation bursts. Hum Brain Mapp 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.