Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Natural history of Leishmania (Leishmania) chagasi infection in Northeastern Brazil: long-term follow-up.

Leishmania (Leishmania) chagasi produces a spectrum of clinical findings ranging from asymptomatic, self-resolving infection to progressive visceral leishmaniasis characterized by fever, hepatosplenomegaly, hypergammaglobulinemia, wasting, and death, if treatment is not instituted [1, 2]. Latent infection is well documented. Subclinical infections with isolated splenomegaly, weight loss, intermittent fever, or diarrhea have been reported [3]. On some occasions, visceral leishmaniasis has first become manifest many years after a person has moved away from an area of endemicity and then become immunocompromised [4, 5]. This current report is the first to describe the natural history of L. chagasi infection in a cohort of persons followed prospectively over a decade. L. chagasi is endemic in rural areas of the state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, where it produces substantial morbidity and mortality. In 1987, a prospective study was initiated near the town of Brotas to characterize the epidemiology and natural history of infection [1]. On the basis of a review of previously reported cases of visceral leishmaniasis in the state, an area of ∼100 km was identified for study. Preliminary data indicated that 24 of ∼800 children living there had been treated for visceral leishmaniasis during the previous 4 years. Chagas’ disease and cutaneous leishmaniasis were not endemic in the region. Children aged ! 11 years were enrolled in the study. Histories were obtained and physical examinations were performed, and blood was drawn 6 times from June 1987 through June 1989 [1]. A sensitive and specific ELISA using promastigotes from a local L. chagasi isolate was used to detect antileishmanial antibodies [6]. Each month, mothers or guardians were questioned about their children’s health and symptoms suggestive of visceral leishmaniasis. When indicators of disease were present [1], children were referred for medical evaluation and diagnostic studies for L. chagasi. Intensive surveillance continued until June 1990. The cohort was re-evaluated in September 1994 [7]. A total of 920 children ! 11 years of age were enrolled in the study. Seroconversion was documented in 108 children; the cu-
Algorithms and models for the web-graph : third international workshop, WAW 2004, Rome, Italy, October 16, 2004 : proceedings

IBM Invited Lecture. - The Phase Transition and Connectedness in Uniformly Grown Random Graphs. - Contributed Papers. - Analyzing the Small World Phenomenon Using a Hybrid Model with Local Network Flow (Extended Abstract). - Dominating Sets in Web Graphs. - A Geometric Preferential Attachment Model of Networks. - Traffic-Driven Model of the World Wide Web Graph. - On Reshaping of Clustering Coefficients in Degree-Based Topology Generators. - Generating Web Graphs with Embedded Communities. - Making Eigenvector-Based Reputation Systems Robust to Collusion. - Towards Scaling Fully Personalized PageRank. - Fast PageRank Computation Via a Sparse Linear System (Extended Abstract). - T-Rank: Time-Aware Authority Ranking. - Links in Hierarchical Information Networks. - Crawling the Infinite Web: Five Levels Are Enough. - Do Your Worst to Make the Best: Paradoxical Effects in PageRank Incremental Computations. - Communities Detection in Large Networks.
Multiform Adaptive Robot Skill Learning from Humans

Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile, technologies such as robot learning from demonstration have enabled humans to intuitively train robots. This paper discusses a new level of robotic learning-based manipulation. In contrast to the single form of learning from demonstration, we propose a multiform learning approach that integrates additional forms of skill acquisition, including adaptive learning from definition and evaluation. Moreover, going beyond state-of-the-art technologies of handling purely rigid or soft objects in a pseudo-static manner, our work allows robots to learn to handle partly rigid partly soft objects with time-critical skills and sophisticated contact control. Such capability of robotic manipulation offers a variety of new possibilities in human-robot interaction.
An Analysis of Test Data Selection Criteria Using the RELAY Model of Fault Detection

RELAY is a model of faults and failures that defines failure conditions, which describe test data for which execution will guarantee that a fault originates erroneous behavior that also transfers through computations and information flow until a failure is revealed. This model of fault detection provides a framework within which other testing criteria's capabilities can be evaluated. Three test data selection criteria that detect faults in six fault classes are analyzed. This analysis shows that none of these criteria is capable of guaranteeing detection for these fault classes and points out two major weaknesses of these criteria. The first weakness is that the criteria do not consider the potential unsatisfiability of their rules. Each criterion includes rules that are sufficient to cause potential failures for some fault classes, yet when such rules are unsatisfiable, many faults may remain undetected. Their second weakness is failure to integrate their proposed rules. >
The Impact of Strategic Planning on Growth of Small Businesses in Nigeria.

Purpose- There is a need to develop a framework that will improve the understandings of business planning and performance and its effects on growth particularly during the stages of small business development. The study attempted to fill in the gap stated. Design - The single case qualitative study relates small business growth with strategic planning where financial performance, market share, sales, and profits or instead return on investment is used to measure the growth. Existing literature fails to establish a concrete relationship between strategic planning and growth of small businesses which indicates a gap in the literature that will help understand the steps of managing the organizational transition of small business growth. Findings - The study fails to establish a significant relationship between formal planning and transitional growth, but instead found the influence of the planning process in communication the owner’s goals, vision, mission, and intentions to both internal and external stakeholders of small businesses. The study influence of the shared vision with customers on making them loyal and advertisers through word of mouth. The study revealed how customers’ word of mouth increased the customer base of small businesses thereby increasing the product demand and eventual expansion of capacity leading to the growth of small businesses. The growth of small businesses will result in an increased reduction in the unemployment rate which will reduce the poverty rate in the Nigerian economy. Practical Implications- Answering the primary and supporting questions will help small business owners to understand how strategic planning is essential in the transitional growth of their businesses.
Do public private partnership projects deliver value for money? An ex post Value for Money (VfM) Test on three road projects in Korea

ABSTRACT The fiscal efficiency of Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects has been subject to much debate since PPP proliferated in Korea since 1997. The paper aims to determine the fiscal efficiency of three major PPP road projects signed between 1997 and 2005 and currently in operation. We perform an ex post value for money (VfM) test on the three PPP road projects to evaluate their performance in terms of fiscal efficiency. The results show only one of the three attained value for money greater than zero while other two did not. The analysis shows that the key reasons for the failure to deliver VfM are: (1) discount rates fell between the time of contract signing and the time of evaluation and (2) Treasury bond interest rates also dropped during the same period, which together undermined the fiscal efficiency of PPP. This does not mean PPP is not a viable alternative to public procurement. Rather, the findings highlight the importance of effective contract management that can mitigate the risk arising from the changes in project environment during the whole of contract period, such as the changes in Treasury bond interest rates and discount rates.
A comprehensive review of mobile technology use in hospitality and tourism

ABSTRACT Mobile technology has become a necessity for tourists, both in their daily lives and during their travels. Considering the growing significance of mobile technologies, this study collected and analyzed 92 related articles published in hospitality and tourism journals to examine the state-of-the-art research in this field. The comprehensive review shows that most studies focus on the context of tourism experience and the hotel industry. These studies tend to adopt quantitative research methods and use theories from the field of information system as theoretical foundation. A few research themes are identified from the perspectives of both the suppliers and consumers. An overall disproportionate focus has been given by researchers, with more studies concentrating on consumers than on suppliers. In accordance with the findings of the literature review, a research agenda is proposed to guide future research on mobile technology use in the hospitality and tourism industry.
Randomized trial Randomized clinical trial of Lichtenstein ’ s operation versus mesh plug for inguinal hernia repair

Background: Two of the most commonly used open prosthetic tension-free techniques for inguinal hernia repair are Lichtenstein’s operation and the mesh plug repair. The technique of choice remains a subject of ongoing debate. The objective of the present investigation was to compare the two surgical procedures with respect to associated morbidity and recurrence rates. Methods: Five hundred and ninety-five patients with 700 primary or recurrent inguinal hernias were randomized to undergo either Lichtenstein’s operation or mesh plug repair. The primary endpoint of the investigation was the recurrence rate 1 year after surgery. Secondary endpoints were perioperative complications and reoperation rates. Results: At 12-month follow-up, 597 hernia repairs (85·3 per cent) were evaluated. There were no significant differences regarding recurrence rates and perioperative complications. However, there was a significant difference in the overall reoperation rate between the two treatment groups, with 13 reoperations (4·2 per cent) in the Lichtenstein group and four (1·4 per cent) in the mesh plug group (P = 0·047). Conclusion: Lichtenstein’s operation and the mesh plug repair are comparable with respect to perioperative complications and recurrence rates.
Factors Affecting Customer Switching Intentions in the Sharia Banking Industry in Malang (A Conceptual Framework)

The development of sharia banks in Indonesia is quite good in general, but many people’s perception of a sharia bank is still negative, and public participation and awareness are still low. This fact may be as a result of public confidence in sharia banks still being low, customer attitudes toward product service being still negative, the cost being relatively high and contribution to profit-sharing still being low. The results of previous empirical studies also showed that community loyalty to Islamic banks is still low compared with conventional banks. Many studies have been conducted by previous researchers in the field of both banking and non-banking sectors as to why customers have switching behavior. In addition, there is a gap between the results of research quality of service to customer loyalty. Based on the phenomenon, problems, and previous empirical studies, the researchers seek to build a research concept framework about customers’ switching intention in the sharia banking industry in Malang. The purpose of this study is to confirm the factors that affect customers in the intention of switching to a conventional bank. The unit of analysis in this study is respondents (customers) who have not made a move or customers who are still active in Islamic banks.
Disease implications of animal social organization and network structure - a quantitative analysis

1. Previous studies examining the disease costs of sociality have largely focused on the link between group size and transmission. However, infectious disease spread is driven by the structure of infection-spreading interactions between individuals. 2. We used statistical tools to review the organization of the interaction networks of 47 species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and insects by categorizing each species into one of four social systems, relatively solitary , fission-fusion , gregarious and socially hierarchical . Additionally, using computational experiments of infection spread, we determined the disease costs of each social system. 3. Our analysis predicts consistent structural differences across social systems, regardless of species or interaction type. We find that solitary species have large variation in numbers of interactions, that socially hierarchical species are the least clustered in their interactions, and that fission-fusion species tend to be the most fragmented. However, these structural differences are primarily driven by low weighted edges, which suggests that different social systems have evolved unique strategies to organize weak ties. 4. Disease simulations show that the organization of interaction networks can mitigate the disease costs of group living for certain social systems under certain conditions. In particular, the low clustered and fragmented interactions networks of socially hierarchical species are expected to cause frequent outbreaks of lowly transmissible pathogens, but a reduced risk of epidemic outbreaks of fast spreading infections. In contrast, the network structure of fission-fusion and gregarious species predict frequent and prolonged epidemic outbreaks of highly transmissible pathogens. 5. By evaluating the implications of network organization across social systems, our finding offers new perspective on the debate about the disease costs of group living. Additionally, this study demonstrates the scope of meta-analytic methods in social network analysis, which in future could be used to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses on cooperation, group-living, communication, and resilience to extrinsic pressures.
Automatic repairing of web wrappers

We study the problem of automatic repairing of wrappers for Web information providers. Majority of Web wrappers use "hooks'' or "landmarks'' to find and extract relevant information from Web pages and such wrappers often become inoperable when the page structure is changed. The solution we propose in this paper extends conventional forward wrappers with alternative classifiers built using content features of extracted information and wrappers processing pages backward. We report some preliminary results of the information extraction recovery and wrapper repairing for a set of real Web provider changes.
Evaluation of the Determinants of the NigerianManufacturing Sector Ability to benefit from theNigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development BillUsing Vector Auto Regressive Model (VAR)

On March 2010, The Nigerian government has introduced the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Bill, which aims at supporting local providers of goods and services as well as giving the first and the top priority in employment to the Nigerian workers. This Bill provides many opportunities for the Nigerian Manufacturing sector. However, the question is whether the Nigerian business climate can enable this sector to seize this chance. This paper is an addition to previous studies that were conducted to determine the factors affecting Capacity Utilization (CU) in Nigeria. The paper depended on SWOT analysis for the Nigerian manufacturing sector as well as literature review, and then followed by applying the Vector Auto Regressive Model (VAR) to determine the most influential factors affecting Nigerian Manufacturing sector ability to benefit from Local Content Development Bill. The results show that the most influential factors are Electricity Generation (ELEC), Capital Goods Imports (IM) and Interest Rates (IR). The paper recommends the Nigerian government to focus on modernizing the efficiency of existing power stations and establishing new power stations, There is also an importance to decrease the applied tariffs and apply drawback regimes on capital goods imports to support the Nigerian manufacturing sector to modernize production equipment so as to be able to produce competitive goods complying with the high technology specifications of oil and gas sector. In addition, the sum of one percent of every contract awarded to any operator in the oil and gas sector is inadequate for the Nigerian content development fund. Therefore, the government must support the fund with annual sufficient budget.
Prescribed performance tracking of uncertain nonlinear systems with input quantization

In networked control systems, the presence of input quantization is a major source of destabilization and performance deterioration of the closed-loop system. In this paper, a continuous state-feedback controller is designed to guarantee not only the stability of the closed-loop system under input quantization but additionally the enforcement of prescribed performance attributes on the output tracking error in terms of maximum overshoot, minimum convergence rate and maximum steady-state error, irrespectively of the quantization density. The proposed controller is model-free and of low complexity (analytic-numerical), making its implementation straightforward. To avoid chattering, a hysteretic quantizer is incorporated. Simulation studies clarify all design aspects and illustrate its effectiveness.
Student Evaluations of the Courses in Medical Psychology at the Medical Department of the RWTH Aachen: A Three-Year Report

Introduction: With the introduction of a new curriculum “Modellstudiengang Medizin” in Aachen, the education in medical psychology was also restructured. This paper presents data from the students’ evaluations of the Basic Course in Medical Psychology and the new teaching format “Systemblock Psyche” over a three-year time span. Method: All students were asked to evaluate the courses anonymously online. Effect sizes [1] were calculated to compare acceptance of the different course types and also changes across time. Results: Both the Basic Course in Medical Psychology and the Systemblock Psyche were rated as “good” to “satisfactory” and were in their overall acceptance comparable to other courses and system blocks. Continuous improvement in acceptance was found for the Basic Course (d = 0.30 - 0.57). The Systemblock Psyche received varying evaluations but achieved higher scores on comprehensibility (d = 0.20) and communication among teachers (d = 0.34) than other system blocks. On the other hand, students rated the education in medical psychology as less relevant than other courses (d = 0.28 and 0.77, respectively). Conclusion: Overall, the acceptance rating was satisfactory and comparable to other evaluation studies conducted in earlier curricula. However, ratings of the relevance of the courses in medical psychology were disappointing and indicate the difficulty of teaching a biopsychosocial model to medical students.
Thermal and Financial Evaluations of Municipal Solid Waste from Erbil City-Iraq

This work was aimed to study municipal solid waste (MSW) disposal problems and energy income from it. Open dumpsite and only buried of MSW causes risks to the people and the environment. Burring mixed MSW (without separation, leachate and gas collection) at Erbil Landfill Site (ELS) leads to leftover income and energy. Recyclable materials such as plastic, metals, glass, paper and cartons at ELS are income sources. Results revealed that average amount of daily disposed plastic, food waste, corrugated paper, other organics, wood, diapers, other inorganics, ferrous, and glass at ELS were 34%, 27%, 14%, 7%, 6%, 5%, 2%, 2%, 2%, and 1%, respectively. Additionally, thermal solution is required to convert the MSW and natural emitted gas from ELS to be a great source for the energy. Currently, produced methane gas and electricity from ELS are estimated to be 3,839,669.265 m and 18,000.762 Kw for 1,223,834 populations, respectively. Expected annual income from recyclable materials is 97.528 *10 $. Finally, proper solution for disposed of MSW in Erbil City results in decreasing risks and environmental pollution, attainment of income by recyclable materials and release energy from gas and electricity.
Using Philosophy to Help Manage the fear of Death

The existential task of managing the fear of, or apprehension toward, death is a challenge for palliative care health professionals. This paper aims to build on current strategies that professionals in this field use to explore their own fear of death and, by logical extension, to engage with and understand their patients, and to benefit them as well. We draw on ideas from the history of philosophy and our own experience in a discussion of six possible reasons to fear death less or not at all. We argue not for the logical correctness of these reasons but, pragmatically, for their potential usefulness as ways to support professionals and patients. However, our partial approach is non-evidence-based. Professionals have unmet educational needs relevant to putting our ideas into practice, and there will likely be situations in which our approach is not applicable.
Molecular and Morphological Supertrees for Eutherian (Placental) Mammals

A large body of diverse comparative data now exists for a major phylogenetic synthesis of the higher-level relationships among eutherian (placental) mammals. We present such a phylogenetic synthesis using the composite trees or supertrees from the combined and separate analyses of their published molecular and morphological source phylogenies. Our combined and separate supertrees largely support the same suprafamilial taxa and orders, but different interordinal clades. These similarities and differences reinforce the continuing contributions of morphological studies, while highlighting the growing influence of molecular information on the field. As current summaries of past research, our supertrees emphasize opportunities for future work, while providing a step toward the eventual integration of the data and characters themselves.
An 1.4Gbps/ch LVDS Receiver with Jitter-Boundary-Based Digital De-skew Algorithm

This paper introduces jitter-boundary-based (JBB) digitally controlled de-skewing algorithm for high-speed link such as flat panel display (FPD) and memory system. It tracks data sampling points by way of finding the boundaries of jitter probability density function (JPDF). This boundary-based tracking algorithm offers lower bit error rate (BER) under the asymmetric jitter distribution as well as symmetric one. In addition, it lowers the accumulated jitter through the delay adjustment of data path. Test chip was fabricated with 0.25 mum 5-metal CMOS technology. When 87.9 ps rms jitter is applied with the data rate of 1.4 Gbps as an input data, it recovers data with the BER of less than 10-11. When the transition maximized pattern is applied, the receiver dissipates 381 mW.