Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AmpC beta-lactamase producing multidrug resistant strains of Klebsiella spp. & Escherichia coli isolated from children under five in Chennai.

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES AmpC beta-lactamases are Group I cephalosporinases that confer resistance to a wide variety of beta-lactam drugs. Plasmid mediated AmpC beta-lactamases has been discovered most frequently in isolates of Klebsiella pneumoniae, K. oxytoca, Salmonella, Proteus mirabilis and Escherichia coli. The present study was undertaken to study the occurrence of multidrug resistant and AmpC beta-lactamase producing Klebsiella spp. and Escherichia coli in children less than five years of age as this age group is very susceptible to intestinal and extraintestinal infections. METHODS A total of 116 isolates of Klebsiella species and 32 isolates of Esch. coli were tested for resistance to cephamycin such as cefoxitin, third generation cephalosporin (3GC) antibiotics (ceftazidime, cefotaxime, ceftriaxone), ampicillin, amikacin, cephaloridine, cefuroxime, co-trimoxazole, gentamycin, imipenem and tetracycline by disc diffusion method. Isolates found resistant to cefoxitin were tested for the production of AmpC beta-lactamases by three dimensional extract method. Transconjugation experiments were done to study the transfer of drug resistance and AmpC beta lactamase production from AmpC producing Klebsiella and Esch. coli isolates to a recipient Esch. coli strain (K12 J62-2). RESULTS Twenty eight isolates (24.1%) of Klebsiella spp. and 12 (37.5%) of Esch. coli were found to be AmpC beta-lactamase producers; 66.6 per cent and 81 per cent of Klebsiella and Esch. coli isolates respectively showed resistance to all the 3GCs. All the strains were found to be sensitive to imipenem. Eighty four (72%) of Klebsiella isolates and 20 (62.5%) of Esch. coli were found to be resistant to cefoxitin. Transfer of cefoxitin resistance to the recipient strain was observed in all the AmpC producing strains of Klebsiella spp. Of the 12 AmpC producing strains of Esch. coli, only 4 (33.3%) showed the transfer of cefoxitin resistance to the recipient strain. INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSION This study has shown the occurrence of AmpC beta-lactamase producing Klebsiella and Esch. coli strains in children in Chennai. Since AmpC beta-lactamase production is frequently accompanied by multiresistance to antibiotics, therapeutic options become limited resulting a need for new measures for the management of Klebsiella and Esch. coli infections. Also failure to identify AmpC beta-lactamase producers may lead to inappropriate antimicrobial treatment and may result in increased mortality. Detecting plasmid mediated AmpC beta-lactamase producing strains is technically difficult and the phenotypic tests for AmpC detection are not well defined. If an investigational AmpC beta-lactamase inhibitor was made available for diagnostic testing, it could be useful in combination with a suitable cephamycin to confirm AmpC production.
A procedure to achieve cost and performance optimization for recovery in cloud computing

This research discusses a system architecture that comes up with potentially better resiliency and faster recovery from failures based on the renowned genetic algorithm. Additionally, we aim to achieve a globally optimized performance as well as a service solution that can remain financially and operationally balanced according to customer preferences. The proposed methodology has undergone numerous and severe evaluations to be proclaimed of their effectiveness and efficiency, even when put under tight comparison with other existing work.
Keberkesanan kaedah hafazan di pusat tahfiz

The al-Quran or Quranic education is a fundamental division of knowledge for muslims. It covers the learning of reading and pronunciation (qiraat), memorization, the study of meanings and legislation and others. In this light, this study focusses in the techniques of memorizing the al-Quran and the effectiveness of the various techniques. Therefore it tries to discover the history and development of the learning of memorization techniques, its regulation, the importance as well as benefits according to the al-Quran and as-Sunnah. The study tries to compare the modern and traditional techniques of memorization used in Malaysia in the perspectives of learning process, infrastructure, location, communication, administration, enrolment, examination and certification as well as recognition for hafiz graduates both from public as well as private tahfiz institution. The effectiveness of the techniques such as the newly memorized (dars jadid), the sustain of memorization (sabiq) and repetition drills (taqrir/murajaâ€˜ah). Data was gathered from tahfiz students and teachers of the most effective technique and factors influencing students memory. It is hoped that results will help to build a module which will promote to the systematic and effective teaching of the tahfiz, both modern and methodical. This will encourage to the production of a quality and competent generation of hafiz and hafizah.
Efficient compositing strategies for automotive HMI systems

The relevance of graphical functions in vehicular applications has increased significantly during the last years. Modern cars are equipped with multiple displays used by different applications such as speedometer, navigation system, or media players. The rendered output of the applications is stored in so-called off-screen buffers and then bitblitted to the screen buffer at the respective window sizes and positions. To guarantee the visibility of the potentially overlapping windows, the compositing has to match the z-order of the windows. To this end, two common compositing strategies Tile compositing and Full compositing are used, each having performance issues depending on how windows overlap. Since automotive embedded platforms are restricted in power consumption, installation space, and hardware cost, their performance is limited which effectuates the need for highly efficient bitblitting. In order to increase the performance in compositing the windows, we propose Hybrid Compositing which predicts the required bitblitting time and chooses the most efficient strategy for each pair of overlapping windows. Using various scenarios we show that our approach is faster than the other strategies. In addition, we propose CacheHybrid Compositing which reduces the CPU execution time of our approach by up to 66 %. In case of an automotive scenario we show that our optimized approach saves up to 51% bitblitting time compared to existing approaches.
Interplay between Friends' Aggression and Friendship Quality in the Development of Child Aggression during the Early School Years

The aim of this study was to investigate the unique and combined role of friendship quality and friends' aggression in regard to the persistence of young children's physical aggression from kindergarten to grade 2. The sample included 1555 children (808 girls) assessed annually using teacher ratings. Two theoretical perspectives (i.e., the social learning and the social bonding perspectives) served as frameworks to guide the analyses and interpret the results. In line with the social learning perspective, friends' aggression was related to a significant increase in children's physical aggression. However, in line with the social bonding perspective, good friendship quality played both a compensatory and a protective role, by, respectively, reducing children's initial level of physical aggression and by mitigating, albeit marginally, the associations between friends' and children's physical aggression. These results suggest that fostering a positive relationship between friends in the early school years may decrease physical aggression even if the friends are aggressive.
Extending the frontiers of cardiac magnetic resonance.

Inflammation is a common reaction in biological systems, which develops, for example, to defend the body against infectious agents, to repair tissue, and to respond to ischemic insults. It can also be a disease process in itself, as in autoimmune diseases. Flogel et al1 describe a novel, elegant, and noninvasive approach to inflammatory mechanisms at a cellular level. The noninvasive nature of their strategy is of paramount importance. In particular, it allows for a series of repetitive measurements to be obtained from the same animal and thus yields information on the evolution of the inflammatory process without destruction of the system under investigation. This is almost impossible to achieve with invasive techniques. Article p 140 Flogel et al elegantly exploit a primary mode of action of inflammatory cells (ie, phagocytosis of potentially harmful agents), which in this case happens to be a magnetic resonance (MR)–active contrast medium. Another remarkable aspect of their work is the use of the naturally occurring stable fluorine isotope 19F as the MR-active nucleus for imaging. Why is this unique? This 19F-MR imaging strategy takes advantage of the fact that after administration of 19F-containing compounds, any signal detected in the body via MR imaging (MRI) is emanating from the injected contrast medium (ie, an extraordinary contrast-to-noise ratio [CNR] is present, because no background signal from the body is detected by 19F-MR imaging). If the MR scanner is thereafter tuned to the 1H resonance frequency, conventional MRI occurs, and all morphological and functional information on the organ can be acquired. Because this imaging is performed in the same location and with the same equipment, registration is ideal; this allows “fusion imaging” to be used to combine specific signals of inflammatory cells (19F imaging) with organ function and anatomy (conventional 1 …
The Experiences of Israeli Early Childhood Educators Working With Children of Ethiopian Background

This study offers an in-depth examination of the experiences of early childhood educators, focusing on their work with Ethiopian immigrant children and their families. We aim to describe and analyze the teachers’ insider views vis-à-vis the challenges faced by these children and their parents in the Israeli preschool system. Using narrative methodology, the analysis of findings is based upon 20 stories written by 10 early childhood educators. It reveals that for these teachers, the chief struggle is their relationship with the parents of their Ethiopian pupils, one characterized by difficulties, frustrations, and burdens. The engagement with parents of Ethiopian children exhibited a range of possibilities: from the expression of patronizing, hierarchical viewpoints, to a search for ad hoc ways of coping with a persistent cultural gap, to the attainment of genuine, successful partnerships. Lack of sufficient knowledge and understanding of the unique cultural attributes of the Ethiopian community appears to be the basis for the teachers’ view of the parents as lacking faith in them and in the educational system as a whole. In addition, suggestions are made about implications for educational practice and for policies that might assist teachers in ameliorating these challenges via the development of, and professional training in, skills which help coping with the problems and dilemmas unique to the multicultural classroom.
Compherensive Review Of Text Classification Using Machine Learning

Text Classification, also known as text categorization, is the task of automatically allocating unlabeled documents into predefined categories. Text Classification means allocating a document to one or more categories or classes. The ability to accurately perform a classification task depends on the representations of documents to be classified. Text representations transform the textural documents into a compact format. Text Classification plays an important role in information mining, summarization, text recovery and question-answering. It uses several tools from information retrieval (IR) and Machine Learning. Here we are reviewing the effectiveness of different supervised and unsupervised learning approaches in text classification. KeywordsText Mining, Text Classification, Feature Extraction,Term Weighting, Linear SVC, SGD,K-Mean with cosine similarity.
Iterative Filtering in Reputation Systems

We present a class of voting systems that we call “iterative filtering” systems. These systems are based on an iterative method that assigns a reputation to $n+m$ items, $n$ objects, and $m$ raters, applying some filter to the votes. Each rater evaluates a subset of objects leading to an $n\times m$ rating matrix with a given sparsity pattern. From this rating matrix a formula is defined for the reputation of raters and objects. We propose a natural and intuitive nonlinear formula and also provide an iterative algorithm that linearly converges to the unique vector of reputations. In contrast to classical outlier detection, no evaluation is discarded in this method, but each one is taken into account with different weights for the reputations of the objects. The complexity of one iteration step is linear in the number of evaluations, making our algorithm efficient for large data sets. Experiments show good robustness of the reputation of the objects against cheaters and spammers and good detection properties of cheaters and spammers.
Identification and characterization of the interferon‐β‐mediated p53 signal pathway in human peripheral blood mononuclear cells

The relationship between the p53 signal pathway and the response of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) to interferon (IFN)‐β has hitherto not been examined. Using an oligonucleotide microarray, we found differential expression of at least 70 genes involved in the p53 signal pathway, including p53, which regulate cell proliferation and cell death following stimulation with IFN‐β. We verified our observations on a limited set of p53‐regulated genes at the transcriptional and translational levels. We also examined the consequences of the activation of the p53 signal pathway by IFN‐β in PBMC. When cultured in the presence of T‐cell mitogens, IFN‐β restricted the entry of lymphocytes from the G0/G1 phase to the S phase and reduced the number of cells in the G2 phase. The addition of IFN‐β alone did not increase apoptosis. However, in the presence of actinomycin D, a DNA‐damaging agent, addition of IFN‐β enhanced the susceptibility of PBMC to apoptosis. These observations suggest that, in spite of the activation of a number of mutually overlapping pathways mediating cell death, cell cycle arrest was the most evident consequence of IFN‐β signalling in PBMC.
Analysis of Biquad Filter and Hilbert Filter in a Noise Removal Simulink Model

Often some noise signals get interleaved with speech signals and owing to noisy surroundings the captured signal may not sound as desired. For such cases, a combination of Hilbert transform filter and Biquad filter in cascaded form might prove helpful. An arrangement in a simulink model demonstrates successful noise reduction in a voice signal recorded from a microphone. Both the filters used were of Direct Form structure, while the Hilbert filter was a Direct Form FIR, the Biquad was Direct Form II structure filter. The observations for speech signal as well as noise signals have been produced as results that show a significant noise removal.
Crystal Structure of the N-terminal Domain of the Yeast General Corepressor Tup1p and Its Functional Implications*

Background: The yeast Cyc8p-Tup1p protein complex is a general transcriptional corepressor. Results: The crystal structures of Tup1p N-terminal domain and its mutant were determined. Conclusion: Tup1p tetramerizes as a dimer of dimers via coiled coil interactions. Significance: Our data highlight the importance of the architecture of the Tup1p N-terminal domain for self-association. The yeast Cyc8p-Tup1p protein complex is a general transcriptional corepressor of genes involved in many different physiological processes. Herein, we present the crystal structure of the Tup1p N-terminal domain (residues 1–92), essential for Tup1p self-assembly and interaction with Cyc8p. This domain tetramerizes to form a novel antiparallel four-helix bundle. Coiled coil interactions near the helical ends hold each dimer together, whereas interdimeric association involves only two sets of two residues located toward the chain centers. A mutagenesis study confirmed that the nonpolar residues responsible for the association of the protomers as dimers are also required for transcriptional repression. An additional structural study demonstrated that the domain containing an Leu62 → Arg mutation that had been shown not to bind Cyc8p exhibits an altered structure, distinct from the wild type. This altered structure explains why the mutant cannot bind Cyc8p. The data presented herein highlight the importance of the architecture of the Tup1p N-terminal domain for self-association.
Cardiovascular Diseases and Decline in Cognitive Function in an Elderly Community Population: The Edinburgh Artery Study

Objective: To investigate cognitive performance and 4-year change in cognitive function in relation to different clinical manifestations of atherosclerotic disease in an elderly community population. Methods: The Edinburgh Artery Study is a population cohort study of men and women who were recruited to a baseline survey in 1987 and 1988. From the time of study entry, the participants have been invited to two follow-up clinical examinations and continuously monitored for major fatal and nonfatal vascular events. All alive and eligible subjects were invited for cognitive testing in two study years when the mean age of the sample was 73.1 (standard deviation = 5.0) years. A follow-up cognitive assessment was performed in 2002 and 2003 on 452 survivors. Results: In multivariate analyses controlling for demographic characteristics, depression, and major atherosclerotic risk factors, stroke was associated with a significantly worse performance on tests of verbal memory (p = .02) and letter fluency (p = .002). In addition, stroke was related to a significantly steeper 4-year decline in verbal memory performance (p = .04). Among the subjects who had not had an overt stroke, those with symptomatic peripheral arterial disease experienced a significantly greater 4-year decline in verbal memory functioning (p = .04). Conclusions: In older people, stroke is associated with both worse performance on cognitive tests and progressive verbal memory decline. Elderly individuals with vascular diseases other than stroke may also be vulnerable to a greater decline in verbal memory function. A relationship between vascular diseases and verbal memory decline may exist independently of depressed mood and major atherosclerotic risk factors. CVD = cardiovascular disease; PAD = peripheral arterial disease; IC = intermittent claudication; MI = myocardial infarction; WHO = World Health Organization; ECG = electrocardiogram; MRI = magnetic resonance imaging; LMT = logical memory test; RPM = Raven’s progressive matrices; VFT = verbal fluency test; DST = digit symbol test; NART = national adult reading test; GCF = general cognitive factor; SD = standard deviation; MMSE = mini-mental state examination; CHD = coronary heart disease; SBP = systolic blood pressure.
Identification of Belgian mosquito species (Diptera: Culicidae) by DNA barcoding

Since its introduction in 2003, DNA barcoding has proven to be a promising method for the identification of many taxa, including mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae). Many mosquito species are potential vectors of pathogens, and correct identification in all life stages is essential for effective mosquito monitoring and control. To use DNA barcoding for species identification, a reliable and comprehensive reference database of verified DNA sequences is required. Hence, DNA sequence diversity of mosquitoes in Belgium was assessed using a 658 bp fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene, and a reference data set was established. Most species appeared as well‐supported clusters. Intraspecific Kimura 2‐parameter (K2P) distances averaged 0.7%, and the maximum observed K2P distance was 6.2% for Aedes koreicus. A small overlap between intra‐ and interspecific K2P distances for congeneric sequences was observed. Overall, the identification success using best match and the best close match criteria were high, that is above 98%. No clear genetic division was found between the closely related species Aedes annulipes and Aedes cantans, which can be confused using morphological identification only. The members of the Anopheles maculipennis complex, that is Anopheles maculipennis s.s. and An. messeae, were weakly supported as monophyletic taxa. This study showed that DNA barcoding offers a reliable framework for mosquito species identification in Belgium except for some closely related species.
Does Clustering Affect the Usual Test Statistics of no Treatment Effect in a Randomized Clinical Trial

In many clinical trials, such as those undertaken by large cooperative cancer groups (CALGB, ECOG, SWOG, EORTC), patients are randomized to one of two treatments within an institution (a hospital or clinic). In such clinical trials, it has often occurred that outcomes of patients within institutions tend to be similar (correlated), due, possibly, to unmeasured variables such as quality of staff or quality of hospital equipment. We discuss when, in the presence of random hospital effects, the usual test statistics for no treatment effect, which do not take these hospital effects into account, are (asymptotically) unbiased.
A Direction Based Geographic Routing Scheme for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

In delay tolerant network, a complete routing path from a source to a destination can not be guaranteed at most of the time. Therefore, traditional routing method for ad hoc network is not applicable in these situations. Current approaches for such networks are primarily based on redundant transmissions and single copy direct routing. However, they incur either high overhead due to excessive transmissions or long delays due to the incorrect path choices during forwarding. In this paper, we propose a direction based geographic routing scheme (DIG) for the intermittently connected network. Relying on the geographic location information, the packets are routed in a approximate ideal path to the destination, which significantly reduces the resource required in flooding-based algorithm and lead to decreased delay compared to the direct routing. Theoretical analyzes and simulations show that compared to the epidemic routing and direct routing, DIG provides nearly optimal delay with very low overhead.
An Experiment on Using Temporal Ontologies to Reason about Localization and Transport of Fungal Proteins

The same protein has been observed, through methods of direct assay, to localize to various compartments of the cell. Finding the order in which such subcellular localizations take place contributes toward elucidation of protein pathways and protein-protein interactions. On the other hand, incorporation of the hierarchy of cellular compartments organized as a tree allows a more clear reasoning in terms of the paths taken by proteins that localize to multiple overlapping subcellular sites. In this work, we build an ontology to serve as a knowledge repository for localization of fungal proteins to a hierarchy of major subcellular sites and the order in which such localizations take place. We use this ontology to automatically classify fungal proteins as per their localizations or according to their speciflc characteristics. Finally, we develop a menu-driven user interface to interact with the constructed ontology. Based on a template of application scenarios, user selections are translated into executable queries to be posed to the system.