Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does the Janani Suraksha Yojana cash transfer programme to promote facility births in India ensure skilled birth attendance? A qualitative study of intrapartum care in Madhya Pradesh

Background Access to facility delivery in India has significantly increased with the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) cash transfer programme to promote facility births. However, a decline in maternal mortality has only followed secular trends as seen from the beginning of the decade well before the programme began. We, therefore, examined the quality of intrapartum care provided in facilities under the JSY programme to study whether it ensures skilled attendance at birth. Design 1) Non-participant observations (n=18) of intrapartum care during vaginal deliveries at a representative sample of 11 facilities in Madhya Pradesh to document what happens during intrapartum care. 2) Interviews (n=10) with providers to explore reasons for this care. Thematic framework analysis was used. Results Three themes emerged from the data: 1) delivery environment is chaotic: delivery rooms were not conducive to safe, women-friendly care provision, and coordination between providers was poor. 2) Staff do not provide skilled care routinely: this emerged from observations that monitoring was limited to assessment of cervical dilatation, lack of readiness to provide key elements of care, and the execution of harmful/unnecessary practices coupled with poor techniques. 3) Dominant staff, passive recipients: staff sometimes threatened, abused, or ignored women during delivery; women were passive and accepted dominance and disrespect. Attendants served as ‘go-betweens’ patients and providers. The interviews with providers revealed their awareness of the compromised quality of care, but they were constrained by structural problems. Positive practices were also observed, including companionship during childbirth and women mobilising in the early stages of labour. Conclusions Our observational study did not suggest an adequate level of skilled birth attendance (SBA). The findings reveal insufficiencies in the health system and organisational structures to provide an ‘enabling environment’ for SBA. We highlight the need to ensure quality obstetric care prior to increasing coverage of facility births if cash transfer programmes like the JSY are to improve health outcomes.
Whole-Chain Tick Saliva Proteins Presented on Hepatitis B Virus Capsid-Like Particles Induce High-Titered Antibodies with Neutralizing Potential

Ticks are vectors for various, including pathogenic, microbes. Tick saliva contains multiple anti-host defense factors that enable ticks their bloodmeals yet also facilitate microbe transmission. Lyme disease-causing borreliae profit specifically from the broadly conserved tick histamine release factor (tHRF), and from cysteine-rich glycoproteins represented by Salp15 from Ixodes scapularis and Iric-1 from Ixodes ricinus ticks which they recruit to their outer surface protein C (OspC). Hence these tick proteins are attractive targets for anti-tick vaccines that simultaneously impair borrelia transmission. Main obstacles are the tick proteins´ immunosuppressive activities, and for Salp15 orthologs, the lack of efficient recombinant expression systems. Here, we exploited the immune-enhancing properties of hepatitis B virus core protein (HBc) derived capsid-like particles (CLPs) to generate, in E. coli, nanoparticulate vaccines presenting tHRF and, as surrogates for the barely soluble wild-type proteins, cysteine-free Salp15 and Iric-1 variants. The latter CLPs were exclusively accessible in the less sterically constrained SplitCore system. Mice immunized with tHRF CLPs mounted a strong anti-tHRF antibody response. CLPs presenting cysteine-free Salp15 and Iric-1 induced antibodies to wild-type, including glycosylated, Salp15 and Iric-1. The broadly distributed epitopes included the OspC interaction sites. In vitro, the anti-Salp15 antibodies interfered with OspC binding and enhanced human complement-mediated killing of Salp15 decorated borreliae. A mixture of all three CLPs induced high titered antibodies against all three targets, suggesting the feasibility of combination vaccines. These data warrant in vivo validation of the new candidate vaccines´ protective potential against tick infestation and Borrelia transmission.
The neural correlates of consciousness in sleep : A no-task , within-state paradigm

1 Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53519, USA. 2 Medical Scientist Training Program and Neuroscience Training Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53519, USA. 3 Laboratory of Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Pisa 56126, Italy. 4 Clinical Psychology Branch, University of Pisa, AOUP Santa Chiara, Pisa 56126, Italy. 5 Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53519, USA. *Correspondence to: gtononi@wisc.edu
Nonlinear image reconstruction in block-based compressive imaging

A block-based compressive imaging (BCI) system with sequential architecture is presented in this paper. Feature measurements are collected using the principal component analysis (PCA) projection vectors. Then, we discuss an object prior learning framework based on the Field-of-Expert (FoE) model, and provide its implementation in the BCI reconstruction problem. Experimental results are used to demonstrate the reconstruction performance of the FoE-based method.
Body-shadowing effects in indoor MIMO-OFDM channel capacity

We investigate Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems behavior in indoor populated environments that have line-of-site (LoS) between transmitter and receiver arrays. The in-house built MIMO-OFDM packet transmission demonstrator, equipped with four transmitters and four receivers, has been utilized to perform channel measurements at 5.2 GHz. Measurements have been performed using 0 to 3 pedestrians with different antenna arrays (2 × 2, 3 × 3 and 4 × 4). The maximum average capacity for the 2×2 deterministic Fixed SNR scenario is 8.5 dB compared to the 4×4 deterministic scenario that has a maximum average capacity of 16.2 dB, thus an increment of 8 dB in average capacity has been measured when the array size increases from 2×2 to 4×4. In addition a regular variation has been observed for Random scenarios compared to the deterministic scenarios. An incremental trend in average channel capacity for both deterministic and random pedestrian movements has been observed with increasing number of pedestrian and antennas. In deterministic scenarios, the variations in average channel capacity are more noticeable than for the random scenarios due to a more prolonged and controlled body-shadowing effect. Moreover due to the frequent Los blocking and fixed transmission power a slight decrement have been observed in the spread between the maximum and minimum capacity with random fixed Tx power scenario.
Recent progresses of accelerated MRI using annihilating filter-based low-rank interpolation

Recently, an annihilating filter based low-rank Hankel matrix approach (ALOHA) was proposed as a general framework for sparsity-driven k-space interpolation method for compressed sensing MRI (CS-MRI). The principle of ALOHA framework is based on the fundamental duality between the transform domain sparsity in the primary space and the low-rankness of weighted Hankel matrix in Fourier domain, which converts CS-MRI to a k-space interpolation problem using structured matrix completion. In this review, we explain the theory behind ALOHA. Experimental results with in vivo data for multi-coil dynamic imaging, parametric mapping as well as Nyquist ghost correction confirmed that the proposed method has potential to be a general solution of various MR imaging problems.
Study of users aggregation algorithm based on static social tags

Nowadays the core of social aggregation service is still about polymerization and recommendation of content. Yet, the mining of the user association behind the shared information is unsatisfactory. Based on static social tags, a new algorithm clustering users is proposed, which clusters users by their similarity. Firstly, relevant concepts are defined to be used in the algorithm. And then, by analyzing existing clustering algorithms, K-means is chosen to be improved. The improved K-means algorithm is proposed and the basic flow of the algorithm is represented. Next, data from a Folksonomy site is used to conduct our empirical study, comparing the clustering effects of the two algorithms by experiment. As a result, the improved K-means algorithm shows better clustering effects than that of original algorithm and is suitable for clustering users.
Effectiveness of Psychoeducational Interventions for Improving Symptoms, Health-Related Quality of Life, and Psychological well Being in Patients with Stable Angina

Several primary trials report the adjunctive value of psychoeducational interventions for improving stable angina symptoms, health-related quality of life (HRQL) and psychological well-being; however, few high-quality meta-analyses have examined the overall effectiveness of these interventions. We used meta-analysis in order to determine the effectiveness of psychoeducational interventions for improving symptoms, HRQL and psychological well-being in stable angina patients. Seven trials, involving 949 participants total were included. Those who received psychoeducation experienced nearly 3 less angina episodes per week, delta (Δ)= -2.85, 95% CI, -4.04 to -1.66, and used sublingual (SL) nitrates approximately 4 times less per week, Δ= -3.69, 95% CI -5.50 to -1.89, post-intervention (3-6 months). Significant HRQL improvements (Seattle Angina Questionnaire) were also found for physical limitation, Δ= 8.00, 95% CI 4.23 to 11.77, and disease perception, Δ= 4.46, 95% CI 0.15 to 8.77, but CIs were broad. A pooled estimate of effect on psychological well-being was not possible due to heterogeneity of measures. Psychoeducational interventions may significantly reduce angina frequency and decrease SL nitrate use in the short-term. These encouraging results must be interpreted with caution due to heterogeneity in methods and small samples. Larger, robust trials are needed to further determine the effectiveness of psychoeducation for stable angina management.
NATURAL RETREATS AND HUMAN WELL-BEING: READING THE SONG OF SONGS THROUGH THE LENS OF ATTENTION RESTORATION THEORY

Working within the field of environmental psychology, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan developed their Attention Restoration Theory (ART) to address the problem of directed attention fatigue. ‘Involuntary’ attention can put the voluntary or directed attention mechanism at rest, to enable it to function effectively again. This happens markedly (but not solely) within natural settings that are both wild (e.g. reserves) and domesticated (e.g. gardens). Notions such as ‘being away,’ ‘‘soft’ fascination,’ ‘extent’ and ‘compatibility’ aptly describe the human nature relationship, and function as descriptive properties that natural settings require to enhance the restorative experience. ART has lately become extended to many fields to explain more than just focus, but overall human well-being and the facilitating role nature plays in this ‘healing’ process. Shining the light of these insights onto the Song of Songs, it was determined that this ancient book had an (intuitive) appreciation for nature’s healing/restorative powers. The focus was especially on the natural retreats of which the two young lovers often avail themselves (e.g. 1:15-17; 2:8 ff.; 6:11-12; 7:11-13; 8:5; 8:13-14) to escape their inhibiting society, and on how these retreats (unknowingly) comply with the mentioned restorative requirements.
A Performance Study of Virtual Machines on Multicore Architectures

Cloud computing has promoted the widespread use of virtualized machines. A question arises: How does virtualization influence the performance of running applications? The answer must be a common interest of application developers and users. This paper describes the results of our performance evaluation on a virtualized multicore machine. We tested a set of benchmark applications and detected some general features that should be considered when running applications on a virtualized multicore machine. We also studied the application execution behavior using profiling tools. We found the reason for unexpectedly poor performance of an OpenMP application in a virtualized setting and optimized the program. The optimization resulted in a significant performance gain.
Designing and implementing a measurement program for Scrum teams: what do agile developers really need and want?

Agile developers are generally reluctant to non-agile practices. Promoted by senior software practitioners, agile methods were intended to avoid traditional engineering practices and rather focus on delivering working software as quickly as possible. Thus, the unique measure in Scrum, a well known framework for managing agile projects, is velocity. Its main purpose is to demonstrate the progress in delivering working software. In software engineering (SE), measurement programs have more in depth purposes and allow teams and individuals to improve their development process along with providing better product quality and control over the project. This paper will describe the experience and the approach used in an agile SE company to design and initiate a measurement program taking into account the specificities of their agile environment, principles and values. The lessons learned after five months of investigation are twofold. The first one shows how agile teams, in comparison to traditional teams, have different needs when trying to establish a measurement program. The second confirms that agile teams, as many other groups of workers, are reluctant and resistant to change. Finally, the preliminary results show that agile people are more interested in value delivery, technical debt, and multiple aspects related to team dynamics and will cooperate to the collection of data as soon as there tools can do it for them. It is believed that this research could suggest new guidelines for elaborating specific measurement programs in other agile environments.
MiRNAs Predict the Prognosis of Patients with Triple Negative Breast Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

Purpose miRNAs are stable and can be extracted from tissues, blood and other body fluid without degradation. miRNAs are abnormally expressed in the presence of a pathological status, including cancer. Therefore, miRNAs are ideal biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Patients with triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) suffer the worst prognosis, although great efforts have been made. Many studies have investigated the role of miRNAs in predicting the outcomes of TNBC patients for better adjustment of treatment. However, results were inconsistent. Thus, we performed a meta-analysis to summarize the published studies for conclusive results. Methods Eligible studies from different database were retrieved from the online databases, and we used STSTA 12.0 to analysis the prognostic role of miRNAs in triple negative breast cancer. Results Overall high miRNA expression indicated a worse survival with HR value of 1.78 (95% CI: 0.97–3.25). However, subtotal HRs of oncogenic miRNAs and tumor suppressive miRNAs were 2.73 (95% CI: 2.08–3.57; P<0.001) and 0.44 (95% CI: 0.21–0.90; P = 0.024), respectively, and no heterogeneity was observed within the subgroups. Conclusions The miRNAs showed a slightly stronger prognostic value for disease-free survival, relapse-free survival and distant metastasis-free survival compared to the overall survival of TNBC patients. Circulating miRNAs could serve as potential biomarkers for the prognosis of TNBC patients and need further investigation.
Solar oblateness from Archimedes to Dicke

The non-spherical shape of the Sun has been invoked to explain the anomalous precession of Mercury. A brief history of some methods for measuring the solar diameter is presented. Archimedes was the first to give upper andlower values for the solar diameter in the third century before Christ. Then there followed the method of total eclipses, used after Halley's observative campaign of 1715 eclipse. We will also discuss the variant of partial eclipses, useful to measure different chords of the solar disk and the method of Dicke, which correlates oblateness with luminous excess in the equatorial zone.
Advances in software inspections

Software inspection is a method of static testing to verify that software meets its requirements. It engages the developers and others in a formal process of investigation that usually detects more defects in the product-and at lower cost-than does machine testing. Studies and experiences are presented which enhance the use of the inspection process and improve its contribution to development of defect-free software on time and at lower cost. Examples of benefits are cited followed by descriptions of the inspection process and some methods of obtaining the enhanced results. Users of the method report very significant improvements in quality that are accompanied by lower development costs and greatly reduced maintenance efforts. Excellent results have been obtained by small and large organizations in all aspects of new development as well as in maintenance. There is some evidence that developers who participate in the inspection of their own product actually create fewer defects in subsequent work. Because inspections formalize the development process, productivity-enhancing and quality-enhancing tools can be adopted more easily and rapidly.
A Corpus of Annotated Irish Traditional Dance Music Recordings: Design and Benchmark Evaluations

An emerging trend in music information retrieval (MIR) is the use of supervised machine learning to train automatic music transcription models. A prerequisite of adopting a machine learning methodology is the availability of annotated corpora. However, different genres of music have different characteristics and modelling these characteristics is an important part of creating state of the art MIR systems. Consequently, although some music corpora are available the use of these corpora is tied to the specific music genre, instrument type and recording context the corpus covers. This paper introduces the first corpus of annotations of audio recordings of Irish traditional dance music that covers multiple instrument types and both solo studio and live session recordings. We first discuss the considerations that motivated our design choices in developing the corpus. We then benchmark a number of automatic music transcription algorithms against the corpus.
PHYTOCHEMICAL ANALYSIS AND ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITY OF METHANOLIC SEED EXTRACT OF MEMECYLON UMBELLATUM BURM

The present study was carried out to evaluate the antibacterial activity of methanolic extract of Memecylon umbellatum seeds using cup plate method against five strains of bacterial species, viz., Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhi, Bacillus subtilis, Klebsiella pneumonia and Staphylococcus aureus. The methanolic extract of plant seeds showed minimum to moderate activity against both Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria indicating a broad spectrum of activity. A preliminary phytochemical screening was conducted on plant extract using standard qualitative procedures that revealed the presence of two (tannins, phenolic compounds and fats and oils) secondary metabolites. The study concludes that the methanolic seed extract of plant possesses potent antibacterial property and justifies the need for further investigations and characterization of the bioactive compounds present in it.
On Properties of Geodesic η-Preinvex Functions

The present paper deals with the properties of geodesic 𝜂-preinvex functions and their relationships with 𝜂-invex functions and strictly geodesic 𝜂-preinvex functions. The geodesic 𝜂-pre-pseudo-invex and geodesic 𝜂-pre-quasi-invex functions on the geodesic invex set are introduced and some of their properties are discussed.
Classification performance of reduced color band hyperspectral imagery from JPEG2000 decompressed data

This paper presents a study of the impact of the compression of a hyperspectral image (HSI) using the JPEG2000 standard. The impact measure was the accuracy of the classification. The goal of this study is to present an approach that proposes to reduce the computational and memory costs of processing this type of data. The results presented show a savings of storage and savings in the computational time by decompressing only a small portion of the color-bands.
Automation of Customer Needs Forecasting

This paper considers the automated system for customer needs forecasting. We consider the basic system implementation concept, describe the process of client identification and provide a list of the most current technical support identification. This paper examines the key functions of an automated system and its architecture is presented. Due to the fact that the system distinguishing feature is that the forecast is made for the trading hall customer, special attention is given to the forecasting method of trading hall client needs. Forecasting algorithm is described and illustrated by the algorithm example. In conclusion we list the possible difficulties in the implementation of the automated system and provide a list of statistical data, needed to evaluate its effectiveness.
Adaptive ray tracing for radiative transfer around point sources

We describe a novel adaptive ray tracing scheme to solve the equation of radiative transfer around point sources in hydrodynamical simulations. The angular resolution adapts to the local hydrodynamical resolution and hence is of use for adaptive meshes as well as adaptive smooth particle hydrodynamical simulations. Recursive creation of rays ensures ease of implementation. The multiple radial integrations needed to solve the time-dependent radiative transfer are speeded up significantly using a quad-tree once the rays are cast. Simplifications advantageous for methods with one radiation source are briefly discussed. The suggested method is easily generalized to speed up Monte Carlo radiative transfer techniques. In summary, a nearly optimal use of long characteristics is presented and aspects of its implementation and comparison with other methods are given.
Real Time Machine Vision System for Quality Assurance of Canned Tuna

We describe a PC-based real time machine vision system for the quality assurance of canned tuna at a tin rate over 1,000 tins per minute, allowing the inspection of the tin and its contents, with two main purposes: preventing defective tins from damaging the closure equipment or from reaching the market with a defective closure, and deviating from the production line tins with low quality content: bruised or darkened areas, excessive percentage of crumb, presence of strange bodies, or partially filled tins, such that they may be fixed and reintroduced in the line without wasting any oil or sauce. The system comprises a iPentium PC with frame grabber, a greyscale line scan CCD camera, a fibre optic halogen lighting system, and a compressed air system for the deviation of the rejected tins, and has been entirely programmed in C++.
A digital bandpass/bandstop complementary equalization filter with independent tuning characteristics

A discrete-time realization of first-order (shelving) and second-order equalization filters is developed, providing bandpass/bandstop magnitude-complementary transfer functions. The bandpass transfer function is turned into a complementary one, and vice versa, switching between two structures that share a common allpass section containing the state variables of the equalizer. The present realization is an alternative to existing solutions, particularly in applications where the equalization parameters are dynamically varied.