Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Capsular Polysaccharide Synthesis Regions in Klebsiella pneumoniae Serotype K57 and a New Capsular Serotype

ABSTRACT Community-acquired pyogenic liver abscess caused by Klebsiella pneumoniae is an emerging infectious disease. We explored the capsular polysaccharide synthesis (cps) regions of three non-K1, non-K2 K. pneumoniae strains, A1142, A7754, and A1517, from Taiwanese patients experiencing pyogenic liver abscess. Two of the strains, A1142 and A7754, belonged to capsular serotype K57, while the third belonged to a new capsular serotype, different from the previously reported 77 serotypes. Deletion and complementation experiments suggested that a unique K57 gene, a homologue of wzy, was essential for K57 capsular synthesis and confirmed that this gene cluster was a genetic coding region for K57. Compared to K1 and K2 strains, the three strains were all serum sensitive, suggesting that host factors might also be involved in the three patients. PCR using primers from specific genes for K57 was more sensitive and specific than traditional serotyping. The remaining strain, A1517, did not react to the antisera from any of the 77 serotypes, and none of the 77 reference strains reacted to the serum against this strain. Moreover, PCR analyses using various primer pairs from the serotype-specific open reading frames did not reveal cross-reactivity to any of the 77 reference strains, suggesting that this strain likely represents a new capsular type. We conclude that sequences from these two cps regions are very useful in detecting K57 and the new cps genotype.
Japanese physicians' attitudes towards enteral nutrition treatment for pediatric patients with Crohn's disease: a questionnaire survey

Background/Aims Enteral nutrition (EN) is recommended for the treatment of pediatric Crohn's disease (CD) in Japan. However, the indications and treatment protocols for EN vary among hospitals. In the present study, we aimed to determine how EN was administered to pediatric patients and whether physicians followed treatment guidelines in their practices. Methods Two types of questionnaires were administered to 32 physicians who were involved in the treatment of pediatric CD. The consensus questionnaire evaluated the physicians' attitudes towards EN, whereas the efficacy questionnaire collected data on patients with CD, aged <17 years, who had undergone induction therapy between 2006 and 2011. Results A total of 23 physicians responded to the questionnaires. The results of the consensus questionnaire indicated that 82% and 59% of study participants recommended EN treatment for all newly diagnosed pediatric patients with CD and all relapsed patients, respectively. Exclusive EN (EEN) and elemental formula were recommended by 84% and 85% of physicians, respectively. The efficacy questionnaire revealed that 57 of the 58 patients received EN. Elemental formula was used in 39 of 40 patients who were treated with EEN. Of these 40 patients, 27 were treated with EEN alone; of these, 22 (81%) achieved remission without any other treatment. The mean duration of EEN was 15.9 days. Conclusions EN is widely recommended by physicians treating pediatric CD in Japan. In contrast to Western countries, clinicians used elemental formula more often and with a shorter EEN treatment duration.
An Attentional Mechanism for Selecting Appropriate Actions Afforded by Graspable Objects

An object may afford a number of different actions. In this article, we show that an attentional mechanism inhibits competing motor programs that could elicit erroneous actions. Participants made a speeded key press to categorize the second of two successively presented door handles that were rotated at varying orientations relative to one another. Their responding hand was compatible or incompatible with the graspable part of the door handles (rightward or leftward facing). Compatible responses were faster than incompatible responses if the two handles shared an identical orientation, but they were slower if the two handles were aligned at slightly dissimilar orientations. Such suppressive surround effects are hallmarks of attentional processing in the visual domain, but they have never been observed behaviorally in the motor domain. This finding delineates a common mechanism involved in two of the most important functions of the brain: processing sensory data and preparing actions based on that information.
Higher sika deer density is associated with higher local abundance of Haemaphysalis longicornis nymphs and adults but not larvae in central Japan

Abstract Haemaphysalis longicornis (Acari: Ixodidae) is one of the most common and important arthropod disease vectors in Japan, carrying Japanese spotted fever and bovine theileriosis. The recent expansion of sika deer (Cervus nippon, Artiodactyla: Cervidae) populations, the most common wild host of H. longicornis, has also caused concern about increasing the risk of vector-borne diseases in Japan. We used generalized linear mixed model analysis to determine the relative contribution of deer density and other biological and abiotic factors on the abundance of H. longicornis ticks questing at each developmental stage. A total of 6223 H. longicornis adults, nymphs, and larvae were collected from 70 sites in three regions of central Japan. The abundance of questing adult and nymphal ticks was associated with deer density and other biotic and abiotic factors. However, the abundance of questing larvae showed no association with deer density but did show an association with other biotic and abiotic factors. These findings show that a high density of deer along with other biotic and abiotic factors is associated with increased risk of vector-borne diseases through amplified local abundance of questing nymphal and adult H. longicornis. Further, questing larvae abundance is likely regulated by environmental conditions and is likely correlated with survival potential or the distribution of other host species.
Determinants of Relative Poverty in Advanced Capitalist Democracies

Using relative poverty measures based on micro-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study, in conjunction with pooled time-series data for 14 advanced capitalist democracies between 1970 and 1997, the authors analyze separately the rate of pretax/transfer poverty and the reduction in poverty achieved by systems of taxes and transfers. Socioeconomic factors, including de-industrialization and unemployment, largely explain pre-tax/transfer poverty rates of the working-age population in these advanced capitalist democracies. The extent of redistribution (measured as poverty reduction via taxes and transfers) is explained directly by welfare state generosity and constitutional structure (number of veto points) and the strength of the political left, both in unions and in government.
Aggression Among Children in Four Cultures

Behavioral aggression was observed among 192 3- to 9-year-old children in naturalistic settings in Belize, Kenya, Nepal, and American Samoa. Results showed that (a) boys exhibited aggression in approximately 10% of their social behaviors, girls in 6%, and in all four cultures the aggression of boys was more frequent than that of girls at a marginally significant level or better; (b) the aggression of boys occurred in the presence of large numbers (and proportions) of same-sex peers; (c) aggression declined with age; (d) only 5% of children’s aggressive interaction was directed toward adults (individuals aged 17 years or older), whereas 30% of their other, nonaggressive interaction was directed toward adults; (e) the presence of either parent tended to be associated with less aggression; and (f) aggression was displayed more frequently in the two patrilineal cultures (Kenya and Nepal) and less frequently in the other two cultures.
‘Non-racialism’ in the struggle against apartheid

Abstract This article examines the movement of South African society from a racialised past to a racialised present. It argues that an important opportunity, arising out of the transitional conjuncture, seriously to come to grips with the racist and racialised categories of apartheid, is rapidly being lost. Racism and a racially-ordered system is founded on the soft bed(rock) of race-thinking, and continues to draw on the banal perpetuation of notions of race in everyday life, as well as in political practice in a democratic South Africa. The author proposes that the undoubted commitment of the African National Congress to ‘non-racialism’ has remained unrealisable because there was no serious theoretical investigation of the status of race categories, either how they operated within apartheid South Africa or within the struggle for democracy itself. For this reason, it seems clear that the ANC's ‘non-racialism’ more appropriately should be read as ‘non-racism’, as the notion of the existence of ‘races’ as socially meaningful categories have remained pivotal political categories and continue to operate as everyday common sense.
Generalized Maximally Selected Statistics

Summary Maximally selected statistics for the estimation of simple cutpoint models are embedded into a generalized conceptual framework based on conditional inference procedures. This powerful framework contains most of the published procedures in this area as special cases, such as maximally selected χ2 and rank statistics, but also allows for direct construction of new test procedures for less standard test problems. As an application, a novel maximally selected rank statistic is derived from this framework for a censored response partitioned with respect to two ordered categorical covariates and potential interactions. This new test is employed to search for a high‐risk group of rectal cancer patients treated with a neo‐adjuvant chemoradiotherapy. Moreover, a new efficient algorithm for the evaluation of the asymptotic distribution for a large class of maximally selected statistics is given enabling the fast evaluation of a large number of cutpoints.
An Evidential Model for Estimating the Salience of Attributes in Classification Schemes

In inexact information retrieval, it is often necessary to know the importance of the various descriptive features of the objects to be retrieved for appraising the extent to which they fit a query. Elegant solutions to this problem have been developed for documents with textual, flat formats but not for objects with complex, structural representations, highly interrelated and organised according to classification schemes that change frequently. Information structured according to this latter object-oriented form is normally found in engineering databases, such as software repositories. This paper presents a model for estimating the importance of the various descriptive features of such objects on the basis of their modelling in classification schemes. The model does not require any sort of importance related information from the user, is computationaly effective and has been applied successfully, as a constituent of a computational model of similarity, to the retrieval of software artifacts for reuse.
What is it like to be the wife of an addicted man in Iran? A qualitative study

Abstract Drug misuse is increasing and diversifying in Iran. This study is the first to explore in detail the impact on, and ways of coping used by, spouses of addicted men in Iran. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 spouses. Four main themes were identified in the data: heart-breaking news of the husband’s addiction; coping alone; progressive deterioration and suffering; and disruption of family relationships and finances. Reactions upon learning of the husband’s addiction involved shock and collapse, and/or fear, disbelief and confusion. Spouses tried to hide the problem and to solve the problem alone, feeling for a long time as if they were “walking in the dark” without any social support and exposed to stigma. As time had gone on they had experienced distress and turmoil, and mixed feelings towards, and loss of trust and confidence in, their husbands, whose behaviour was increasingly unreliable. This had led to impairment in the relationship, and financial stress, and a general degradation and disruption of normal family life, leading to strain for spouses, akin to a state of burnout. Present findings confirm the conclusions of similar research conducted in other countries, that substance misuse in the family can have devastating effects for spouses, on children and all aspects of family life. The situation for Iranian wives may be compounded by the relatively closed nature of family life, and the existence of culturally based attitudes, including shame, towards “family defects” such as addiction. More information and support is needed for Iranian families of addicted individuals.
Awareness and Use of Surgical Checklist among Theatre Users at Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria

Background: Surgical checklist was introduced by the World Health Organization to reduce the number of surgical deaths and complications. During a surgical conference on “safety in surgical practice,” it was noticed that the awareness and the use of surgical checklist are poor in Nigerian hospitals. This study was aimed at determining the awareness and use of surgical checklist among the theater users in our hospital, factors militating against its implementation, and make recommendations. Methods: This is a prospective study at Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital, Ado-Ekiti; questionnaires were distributed to three groups of theater users – surgeons, anesthetists, and perioperative nurses. The responses were collated by the lead researcher, entered into Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, exported, and analyzed with SPSS. Results: Eighty-five questionnaires were distributed, 70 were returned, and 4 were discarded due to poor filling. The studied 66 comprised 40, 12, and 14 surgeons, anesthetists, and perioperative nurses, respectively. Fifty-five (83.3%) of the responders indicated awareness of the checklist but only 12 (21.8%) correctly stated that the main objective is for patients' safety and for safe surgery. Major barriers to its use include lack of training 58.2%, lack of assertiveness of staff 58.2%, and that its delays operation list 47.2%. Conclusion: The study demonstrated high level of awareness of surgical checklist in our hospital; however, this awareness is based on wrong premises as it is not reflected in the true aim of the checklist. Majority of the responders would want to be trained on the use of checklist despite the highlighted barriers.
Otx2 regulates the extent, identity and fate of neuronal progenitor domains in the ventral midbrain

The specification of distinct neuronal cell-types is controlled by inducing signals whose interpretation in distinct areas along the central nervous system provides neuronal progenitors with a precise and typical expression code of transcription factors. To gain insights into this process, we investigated the role of Otx2 in the specification of identity and fate of neuronal progenitors in the ventral midbrain. To achieve this, Otx2 was inactivated by Cre recombinase under the transcriptional control of En1. Lack of Otx2 in the ventrolateral and posterior midbrain results in a dorsal expansion of Shh expression and in a dorsal and anterior rotation of the midbrain-hindbrain boundary and Fgf8 expression. Indeed, in this mutant correct positioning of the ventral site of midbrain-hindbrain boundary and Fgf8 expression are efficiently controlled by Otx1 function, thus allowing the study of the identity and fate of neuronal progenitors of the ventral midbrain in the absence of Otx2. Our results suggest that Otx2 acts in two ways: by repressing Nkx2.2 in the ventral midbrain and maintaining the Nkx6.1-expressing domain through dorsal antagonism on Shh. Failure of this control affects the identity code and fate of midbrain progenitors, which exhibit features in common with neuronal precursors of the rostral hindbrain even though the midbrain retains its regional identity and these neuronal precursors are rostral to Fgf8 expression. Dopaminergic neurons are greatly reduced in number, red nucleus precursors disappear from the ventral midbrain where a relevant number of serotonergic neurons are generated. These results indicate that Otx2 is an essential regulator of the identity, extent and fate of neuronal progenitor domains in the ventral midbrain and provide novel insights into the mechanisms by which neuronal diversity is generated in the central nervous system.
Brief Interventions for Anxiety Disorders: Clinical Outcome Studies

While the number of well-designed controlled clinical outcome studies is not large, brief psychotherapeutic interventions appear to play a useful role in the treatment of anxiety spectrum disorders. Such interventions not only appear to be effective in their own right, but also add a significant component to the benefits of medication. This article summarizes and describes the time-limited interventions and outcomes of more than 50 studies, including a number that measured the effectiveness of crisis intervention and brief therapy approaches with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) precipitated by gunshot injuries, sexual assaults, terrorist attacks, vehicular accidents, and violent crimes. [Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention 2:325–339 (2002)]
DCU Participation in WMT2013 Metrics Task

In this paper, we propose a novel syntactic based MT evaluation metric which only employs the dependency information in the source side. Experimental results show that our method achieves higher correlation with human judgments than BLEU, TER, HWCM and METEOR at both sentence and system level for all of the four language pairs in WMT 2010.
Revelation of New ICT Domains for Upcoming Kazakhstan's Participation

Rapid changes in ICT affect the field of communication, information processing and the devices that collect and process the data. It seems relevant to assess the interest of researchers to the various sub-domains of ICT, such as Big Data, Cloud computing, Human-machine systems, Mobile computing, Machine Learning, Multi agent systems, Neural Networks, Robotics, Visualization, and etc. The paper is devoted to selection of the most important directions of research in ICT domain which could be implemented in the Republic of Kazakhstan. In the paper we evaluated the dynamics of annual changes in the number of publications and convergence of ICT sub-domains based on data of Scopus, EBSCO and Google Scholar. To analyze the place of the Republic of Kazakhstan we considered indexes shown in the Global Competitiveness Report. As a result of analysis, the most rapidly developing areas of research were revealed. The semantic network of the most modern concepts of the ICT domain was constructed that visualizes the binary relationship between the components and their relative importance. By using comparative analysis of the number of publication in different countries we selected some key domains that need to be seriously improved onto the way of science development in RK.
Did the 2012 World Series positively impact the image of Detroit?: sport as a transformative agent in changing images of tourism destinations

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of sport in Detroit as a tool for shaping the image of the downtown area as a tourist destination. We utilized two different sources of data collection: we interviewed a panel of local experts representing sport and tourism stakeholders in Detroit, and we also examined local and national media reports published during the World Series in 2002. Results indicated that efforts are placed on broadening the scope of events the city hosts to attract more visitors and improve the image of the downtown area, but at the same time, the major problems the city is currently experiencing send a rather dual message of the role sport plays in this city's image. Additionally, results from the media analysis produced three key themes: (1) Recovery of the city; (2) Negative image of the city; and (3) Financial woes. Overall, our findings provide mixed evidence about the role of sport as a vehicle for building a positive image of Detroit. Sport could be an image-booster for Detroit, yet any image increase is superseded by the city's other major problems (e.g. economics, population decrease).
Predictors of Completion of a Driving Under the Influence (DUI) Court for Repeat Offenders

Driving under the influence (DUI) courts are a somewhat recent adaptation of the widely popular drug courts.1 As such there is a need for more research on these specialty courts that target DUI offenders. An important area of research is program completion and determining what factors may be related to participant dropout. The current study presents findings on a 3-year admissions cohort of participants in the Waukesha Alcohol Treatment Court (WATC) for third-time DUI offenders. This program has been in operation for over 6 years and is a court-based intervention program specifically designed by local stakeholders to address the serious DUI problem in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. Results indicate that variables related to pretrial and case processing, including having participated in substance abuse treatment prior to DUI court entry, were related to WATC completion status. Patterns emerged for the sociodemographic and substance use and health variables, although these relationships did not reach statistical significance. DUI court planners can utilize this information when applying The Ten Guiding Principles of DWI Courts to their courts such as identifying subsets of DUI offenders and refining program components to improve participant completion and subsequent successful outcomes.
Rural–urban spatial interaction in the global south: long‐distance mobility changes, desires and restrictions over two decades in rural philippines

Abstract. The spatial interaction between rural and urban areas is intense in the Global South. While research into how this interaction influences livelihood opportunities is extensive, longitudinal identification and analysis of rural people's long‐distance mobility is rudimentary. This is problematic given the possible repercussions of a greater flow of people for transport system management (congestion, emissions, investments, social exclusion, etc.). Based on longitudinal survey data from 1990 to 2008/2009, this article addresses this gap by exploring how the long‐distance mobility behaviour of households and individuals has changed over a period of intensified rural–urban interaction in a rural Philippine area. The article furthermore addresses the individuals' mobility desires and restrictions related to long‐distance travel. The results indicate that both accessibility effects and effects related to information and communication technology (ICT), concentration of activities and opportunities towards major cities, age, labour market, and economic situation. Over time, particularly since improved accessibility conditions have enabled much faster travelling, more people have come to travel more frequently (although a suppressed demand is still present and inequalities are considerable) to more distant destinations, major cities in particular, for mainly social motives. A recent countertrend is evident, partly arising from mobile phones replacing physical movement. The increase in private vehicle ownership has so far been slow, so modal choice is still highly sustainable. Overall, the findings support core ideas derived from the new economic geography, but also notes, with earlier studies in transport geography, that travel time is a prime consideration.