Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implementing Evidence-Based Programs: Lessons Learned From the Field

Evidence-based programs (EBPs) are used in many health promotion efforts to ensure that the intended positive behavioral and health outcomes will be achieved. However, because EBPs are developed and tested in research settings, the contextual elements of real world implementation play an important role in their successful delivery in communities. As an intermediary charged with supporting the translation of research to practice for a statewide teen pregnancy prevention initiative, the ACT for Youth Center of Excellence conducted a mid-course evaluation to identify factors that contribute to the successful implementation of EBPs. The findings indicate that successful implementation involves systematic planning that addresses three critical contextual factors: community readiness, organizational capacity, and setting characteristics. By attending both to factors identified from local practice, and to theory and evidence identified through implementation science, practitioners can strengthen programming and enhance the quality of EBP delivery.
Staphylococcal IgM Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay for Diagnosis of Periprosthetic Joint Infections

ABSTRACT Delayed orthopedic joint prosthesis infections (DOJP-Is) due to staphylococci frequently result in prosthetic revision. Specific and noninvasive diagnostic tests are unavailable, and DOJP-Is are commonly diagnosed at advanced stages of disease. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was developed to detect serum antibodies against staphylococcal slime polysaccharide antigens. Using a cutoff of 0.35 ELISA units, the test showed a specificity of 95.1% (95% confidence interval [CI], 85.4 to 98.7%) and a sensitivity of 89.7% (71.5 to 97.3%) on a sample of 90 individuals.
Implications of Scientific Collaboration Networks on Studies of Aquatic Vertebrates in the Brazilian Amazon

The quantity of wildlife extracted from the Amazon has increased in the past decades as a consequence of an increase in human population density and income growth. To evaluate the spatial distribution of studies on subsistence and/or commercial hunting conducted in the Brazilian Amazon, we selected eight mid-sized and large-bodied aquatic vertebrate species with a history of human exploitation in the region. We used a combination of searches in the gray and scientific literature from the past 24 years to provide an updated distributional map of studies on the target species. We calculated the distances between the study sites and the locations of the research institutes/universities that the first and last authors of the same study were affiliated to. For the period of 1990 to 2014, we found 105 studies on the subsistence and/or commercial hunting of aquatic vertebrates in the Brazilian Amazon in 271 locations that involved 43 institutions (37 Brazilian and 6 international). The spatial distribution of the studies across the Brazilian Amazon varied, but over 80% took place in the northeast and central Amazon, encompassing three States of the Legal Brazilian Amazon (Amazonas, 51.42%; Pará, 19.05%; and Amapá, 16.19%). Over half of the research study sites (52.91%) were within 500 km of the research institute/university of the first or last authors. Some research institutes/universities did not have any inter-institutional collaborations, while others collaborated with eight or more institutes. Some research institutes/universities conducted many studies, had an extensive collaboration network, and contributed greatly to the network of studies on Amazonian aquatic vertebrates. Our research contributes to the knowledge of studies on the subsistence and/or commercial hunting of the most exploited aquatic vertebrates of the Brazilian Amazon, illustrates the impact that collaboration networks have on research, and highlights potential areas for improvement and the generation of new collaborations.
The "educationally disadvantaged" student : factors impacting upon conceptions of learning and perceptions of learning contexts

Utilising an individual-difference model of student learning, this study set out to explore the manifestations of qualitative differences in study behaviour at the individual level, amongst a group of educationally disadvantaged students enrolled in the Academic Support Programme in Engineering at Cape Town (ASPECT). The first aim of the study was to describe and conceptually categorise, within the concept of the study orchestration, the manifestation of these individual differences in study engagement, by means of a retrospective analysis of students' school-based study of Science. This process was undertaken when the students first arrived at the university. The quantitative process of classification, done independently of the author, was augmented by each student being individually interviewed by the author about his (retrospective) study behaviour. The second aim was to investigate the study orchestrations of these students in the transition between school and university. Stability over time, ir:i the absence of explicit intervention, of (in particular) students whose study orchestrations had been classified as "at risk" on entry to the university, confirmed the findings from previous studies (some of which had been conducted with groups of educationally disadvantaged students). In previous studies, it had been shown that students in this conceptual category were likely to fail or achieve poorly in conventional university examinations. An ongoing programme of intervention was then designed with the specific aim of enabling "at risk" students to 'reorchestrate' aspects of their study behaviour in qualitatively 'deeper' ways. Modelled in part on previous, more narrowly focused, intervention strategies, the intervention in this study set out to improve "at risk" students' qualitative levels of perceptions of their learning contexts, but it also focused more broadly on the whole ASPECT group without losing sight of the manifestations of qualitative differences in learning conceptions, student epistemologies, and so on, amongst this group. This was achieved by engaging all students in ongoing discourse about crucial learning processes, such as the development of metacognitive awareness and the . need to assume personal responsibility for learning. The study confirmed the findings of other studies: that it is possible to alter "at risk" students' contextualised perceptions in qualitatively 'deeper' ways. In addition, the study suggested lines for individual and subgroup intervention that (1) is possible within the context of everyday learning and teaching; (2) can be carried out by the average academic practitioner, and (3) is transferable to other contexts of academic support.
Towards the Effective Linking of Social Media Contents to Products in E-Commerce Catalogs

Online social media has become an essential part of our life. This media is often characterized by its diverse content, which is produced by ordinary users. The potential to easily express ideas and opinions has made social media a source of valuable information on a variety of topics. In particular, information containing comments about consumer products has become prevalent. Here, we are interested in linking products mentioned in unstructured user-generated content, namely open discussion forums, to their respective entities in consumer product catalogs. Among the issues associated with this task, ambiguity is a particularly hard problem, as users typically refer to the same product using many different forms and different products may share the same form. We argue that this problem can be effectively solved using a set of evidences that can be easily extracted from social media content and product descriptions. To achieve this, we show which features should be used, how they can be extracted, and then how to combine them through machine learning techniques. Experiments in three different product categories and two different datasets demonstrate that all the sources of evidence here proposed are important, while contextual information is fundamental to achieve higher levels of precision. In fact, our method, although straightforward, was able to achieve an average improvement of 0.17 in precision and 0.13 in F1, when compared to the current state-of-the-art solution.
Slick: an intrusion detection system for virtualized storage devices

Cloud computing is rapidly reshaping the server administration landscape. The widespread use of virtualization and the increasingly high server consolidation ratios, in particular, have introduced unprecedented security challenges for users, increasing the exposure to intrusions and opening up new opportunities for attacks. Deploying security mechanisms in the hypervisor to detect and stop intrusion attempts is a promising strategy to address this problem. Existing hypervisor-based solutions, however, are typically limited to very specific classes of attacks and introduce exceedingly high performance overhead for production use. In this paper, we present Slick (Storage-Level Intrusion ChecKer), an intrusion detection system (IDS) for virtualized storage devices. Slick detects intrusion attempts by efficiently and transparently monitoring write accesses to critical regions on storage devices. The low-overhead monitoring component operates entirely inside the hypervisor, with no introspection or modifications required in the guest VMs. Using Slick, users can deploy generic IDS rules to detect a broad range of real-world intrusions in a flexible and practical way. Experimental results confirm that Slick is effective at enhancing the security of virtualized servers, while imposing less than 5% overhead in production.
Longitudinal Study of Social-environmental Predictors of Behavior: Children of Adolescent and Older Mothers Compared

Compared to older, more educated mothers, adolescent mothers are more prone to less than optimal parenting interactions with their children. Moreover, adolescents’ children are more likely to experience developmental challenges. In this study, effects of social-environmental factors in the first two years of life on children’s anxiety and hyperactivity from age 2 to 8 were examined by analyzing Canadian longitudinal data. Initial levels of anxiety and hyperactivity were higher for children of adolescent mothers, and anxiety increased with age for all children. Female children displayed lower initial levels of hyperactivity than males, and females of adolescent mothers showed a steeper decrease in hyperactivity while males of adolescent mothers showed a steeper increase in hyperactivity than their counterparts parented by older mothers. Parenting, social support and other demographic factors were controlled for and the effects of these predictor variables on trajectories of anxiety and hyperactivity are discussed.
Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience

The paper describes a system prototype that is aiming at the provision of an environment for flexible projectoriented collaboration of networked enterprises, so-called virtual business alliances. The system, which was developed within the FP7 project SPIKE, employs the technology of semantically enhanced service bus, supported by underlying semantic structures such as ontologies and abstract business process models. The focus of this approach is to achieve effective interoperability of possibly heterogeneous services provided and consumed by members of the collaboration environment. The architecture of the main system modules is presented and the processing of semantically annotated services orchestrated in a collaboration workflow is explained in more details.
Arousal regulation and affective adaptation to human responsiveness by a robot that explores and learns a novel environment

In the context of our work in developmental robotics regarding robot–human caregiver interactions, in this paper we investigate how a “baby” robot that explores and learns novel environments can adapt its affective regulatory behavior of soliciting help from a “caregiver” to the preferences shown by the caregiver in terms of varying responsiveness. We build on two strands of previous work that assessed independently (a) the differences between two “idealized” robot profiles—a “needy” and an “independent” robot—in terms of their use of a caregiver as a means to regulate the “stress” (arousal) produced by the exploration and learning of a novel environment, and (b) the effects on the robot behaviors of two caregiving profiles varying in their responsiveness—“responsive” and “non-responsive”—to the regulatory requests of the robot. Going beyond previous work, in this paper we (a) assess the effects that the varying regulatory behavior of the two robot profiles has on the exploratory and learning patterns of the robots; (b) bring together the two strands previously investigated in isolation and take a step further by endowing the robot with the capability to adapt its regulatory behavior along the “needy” and “independent” axis as a function of the varying responsiveness of the caregiver; and (c) analyze the effects that the varying regulatory behavior has on the exploratory and learning patterns of the adaptive robot.
On the computational content of the axiom of choice

Abstract We present a possible computational content of the negative translation of classical analysis with the Axiom of (countable) Choice. Interestingly, this interpretation uses a refinement of the realizability semantics of the absurdity proposition, which is not interpreted as the empty type here. We also show how to compute witnesses from proofs in classical analysis of ∃-statements and how to extract algorithms from proofs of ∀∃-statements. Our interpretation seems computationally more direct than the one based on Gödel's Dialectica interpretation.
Workplace Behaviors

Few concepts in the social sciences have been more widely used than job satisfaction. Yet the concept of job satisfaction has yielded few profound insights into the nature of life at the workplace. This results partly from job satisfaction having few if any behavioral referents and the fact that job satisfaction ignores social and interactive aspects of the organization of work. New concepts more closely tied to behaviors are needed to understand the workplace and how people attempt to live within it. This article develops a preliminary model of workplace dynamics based on behaviors rather than attitudes and argues that the behavioral categories of good soldier, smooth operator, and saboteur are key modes of adaptation. These modes define a behavioral space which makes a wide range of workplace behaviors and events understandable. In addition, this behavioral model facilitates the integration of studies of the workplace with broader themes in the social sciences, such as group processes and the negotiated nature of behaviors, in a way not allowed by the concept of job satisfaction.
CXCL1/KC and CXCL5/LIX are selectively produced by corneal fibroblasts and mediate neutrophil infiltration to the corneal stroma in LPS keratitis

The severity of corneal inflammation depends on the activity of infiltrating neutrophils responding to chemotactic factors such as CXC chemokines. This study examines the relative contribution of CXCL1/keratinocyte‐derived chemokine (KC), CXCL2/monocyte‐inhibitory protein‐2 (MIP‐2), and CXCL5/LPS‐induced chemokine (LIX) in neutrophil recruitment to the corneal stroma during LPS keratitis, where neutrophils infiltrate the corneal stroma at 6 h after LPS injection and peak at 24 h. Consistent with this timeframe, KC was detected after 3 h, reached peak levels at 24 h, and decreased thereafter. In contrast, LIX production was not detected until 8 h after injection and peaked at 24 h. MIP‐2 was detected at 3 h but did not reach the levels of KC and LIX. Cell types associated with corneal inflammation produced markedly different chemokines in vitro: Murine corneal fibroblasts (MK/T‐1) produced LIX and KC in response to LPS but did not produce MIP‐2, whereas peritoneal macrophages and neutrophils produced MIP‐2 and KC but did not produce LIX. To determine the role of these chemokines in neutrophil recruitment to the cornea, anti‐LIX, anti‐KC, or anti‐MIP‐2 was injected into the corneal stroma of enhanced GFP chimeric mice prior to LPS, and total cell and neutrophil infiltration was examined. Antibody to LIX and KC, injected individually or in combination, significantly inhibited neutrophil recruitment to the cornea, whereas anti‐MIP‐2 had no inhibitory effect. Together, these findings demonstrate cell‐specific production of CXC chemokines and show that LIX and KC mediate neutrophil recruitment into the cornea during LPS keratitis.
Treatment of Juvenile Stroke Using Yamamoto New Scalp Acupuncture (Ynsa) – a Case Report

In Germany, stroke affects approximately 300 children each year. Treatment options for stroke patients, particularly for children, are limited. A case is described of an 18 month old girl with hemiparesis, who showed a considerable degree of recovery over the course of 21 months while receiving Yamamoto New Scalp Acupuncture using soft laser. This may represent a new option for the therapy of such patients.
Capability Assessment of Fully Polarimetric ALOS–PALSAR Data for Discriminating Wet Snow From Other Scattering Types in Mountainous Regions

This paper examines the capability assessment of fully polarimetric L-band data for the snow and nonsnow-area classifications. The data sets used are the fully polarimetric Advanced Land Observation Satellite-Phased Array-Type L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar data, optical Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS)-advanced visible and near-infrared radiometer-2 data close to the radar acquisition, and environmental satellite-advanced synthetic aperture radar data. Several parameters are used to discriminate the snow-covered areas from nonsnow-covered areas in the Indian Himalayan region, including backscattering coefficients, the ratio of cross/copolarized backscattering power and polarization fraction (PF) value. Supervised classification schemes are employed using polarimetric decomposition methods based on the complex Wishart classifier. The accuracy of the classification was found to be 97.95% for the Wishart-supervised classification. Among various parameters and methods, it was found that the alternative newly proposed PF scheme, based on the implementation of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data, yielded the best classification result in the absence of the training samples. The PF value has been effective for discrimination of the snow-covered areas from nonsnow-covered areas, debris-covered glacier, and vegetation. The results of this investigation show that L-band fully polarimetric SAR data provide considerable improvement but may not possess the optimal capability to discriminate snow from other inherent natural and man-made scatterers in heavy snow-laden mountainous scenarios, which may require fully polarimetric S-band or C-band PolSAR measurements.
Achieving differential privacy of data disclosure in the smart grid

The smart grid introduces new privacy implications to individuals and their family due to the fine-grained usage data collection. For example, smart metering data could reveal highly accurate real-time home appliance energy load, which may be used to infer the human activities inside the houses. One effective way to hide actual appliance loads from the outsiders is Battery-based Load Hiding (BLH), in which a battery is installed for each household and smartly controlled to store and supply power to the appliances. Even though such technique has been demonstrated useful and can prevent certain types of attacks, none of existing BLH works can provide probably privacy-preserving mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate the privacy of smart meters via differential privacy. We first analyze the current existing BLH methods and show that they cannot guarantee differential privacy in the BLH problem. We then propose a novel randomized BLH algorithm which successfully assures differential privacy, and further propose the Multitasking-BLH-Exp3 algorithm which adaptively updates the BLH algorithm based on the context and the constraints. Results from extensive simulations show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method over existing BLH methods.
Real-time detection of speed-limit traffic signs on the real road using Haar-like features and boosted cascade

Along with the development of the intelligent vehicle, the Advanced Driver Assistance System(ADAS) has recently become an important issue. Traffic signs on the road provide crucial information to the driver. Recognizing all the traffic signs on the side of the road can be a difficult task for a driver who should watch the road ahead. To solve this problem, this paper proposes real-time detection methods using Haar-like features in a real road driving environment. We implement a reliable reduction method of the search area to improve the detection speed, masking methods and histogram equalization to improve the detection rate. The proposed method has shown higher detection rate and two times faster performance time than previous works.
Nicotinic Acid Activates the Capsaicin Receptor TRPV1: Potential Mechanism for Cutaneous Flushing

Objective—Nicotinic acid (also known as niacin or vitamin B3), widely used to treat dyslipidemias, represents an effective and safe means to reduce the risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease. Nonetheless, a substantial fraction of patients discontinue treatment because of a strong side effect of cutaneous vasodilation, commonly termed flushing. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that nicotinic acid causes flushing partially by activating the capsaicin receptor TRPV1, a polymodal cellular sensor that mediates the flushing response on consumption of spicy food. Approach and Results—We observed that the nicotinic acid–induced increase in blood flow was substantially reduced in Trpv1–/– knockout mice, indicating involvement of the channel in flushing response. Using exogenously expressed TRPV1, we confirmed that nicotinic acid at submillimolar to millimolar concentrations directly and potently activates TRPV1 from the intracellular side. Binding of nicotinic acid to TRPV1 lowers its activation threshold for heat, causing channel opening at physiological temperatures. The activation of TRPV1 by voltage or ligands (capsaicin and 2-aminoethoxydiphenyl borate) is also potentiated by nicotinic acid. We further demonstrated that nicotinic acid does not compete directly with capsaicin but may activate TRPV1 through the 2-aminoethoxydiphenyl borate activation pathway. Using live-cell fluorescence imaging, we observed that nicotinic acid can quickly enter the cell through a transporter-mediated pathway to activate TRPV1. Conclusions—Direct activation of TRPV1 by nicotinic acid may lead to cutaneous vasodilation that contributes to flushing, suggesting a potential novel pathway to inhibit flushing and to improve compliance.