Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Bayesian Approach to Net Health Benefits: An Illustration and Application to Modeling HIV Prevention

Purpose. To conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of HIV prevention when costs and effects cannot be measured directly. To quantify the total estimation of uncertainty due to sampling variability as well as inexact knowledge of HIV transmission parameters. Methods. The authors focus on estimating the incremental net health benefit (INHB) in a randomized trial of HIV prevention with intervention and control conditions. Using a Bernoulli model of HIV transmission, changes in the participants’ risk behaviors are converted into the number of HIV infections averted. A sampling model is used to account for variation in the behavior measurements. Bayes’s theorem and Monte Carlo methods are used to attain the stated objectives. Results. The authors obtained a positive mean INHB of 0.0008, indicating that advocacy training is just slightly favored over the control condition for men, assuming a $50,000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) threshold. To be confident of a positive INHB, the decision maker would need to spend more than $100,000 per QALY.
Use of an invertebrate animal model (Aplysia californica) to develop novel neural interfaces for neuromodulation

New tools for monitoring and manipulating neural activity have been developed with steadily improving functionality, specificity, and reliability, which are critical both for mapping neural circuits and treating neurological diseases. This review focuses on the use of an invertebrate animal, the marine mollusk Aplysia californica, in the development of novel neurotechniques. We review the basic physiological properties of Aplysia neurons and discuss the specific aspects that make it advantageous for developing novel neural interfaces: First, Aplysia nerves consist only of unmyelinated axons with various diameters, providing a particularly useful model of the unmyelinated C fibers in vertebrates that are known to carry important sensory information, including those that signal pain. Second, Aplysia’s neural tissues can last for a long period in an ex vivo experimental setup. This allows comprehensive tests such as the exploration of parameter space on the same nerve to avoid variability between animals and minimize animal use. Third, nerves in large Aplysia can be many centimeters in length, making it possible to easily discriminate axons with different diameters based on their conduction velocities. Aplysia nerves are a particularly good approximation of the unmyelinated C fibers, which are hard to stimulate, record, and differentiate from other nerve fibers in vertebrate animal models using epineural electrodes. Fourth, neurons in Aplysia are large, uniquely identifiable, and electrically compact. For decades, researchers have used Aplysia for the development of many novel neurotechnologies. Examples include high-frequency alternating current (HFAC), focused ultrasound (FUS), optical neural stimulation, recording, and inhibition, microelectrode arrays, diamond electrodes, carbon fiber microelectrodes, microscopic magnetic stimulation and magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT). We also review a specific example that illustrates the power of Aplysia for accelerating technology development: selective infrared neural inhibition of small-diameter unmyelinated axons, which may lead to a translationally useful treatment in the future. Generally, Aplysia is suitable for testing modalities whose mechanism involves basic biophysics that is likely to be similar across species. As a tractable experimental system, Aplysia californica can help the rapid development of novel neuromodulation technologies.
Tari⁄ Bindings and the Dynamic Formation of Preferential Trade Agreements

We show that multilateral tari⁄ binding liberalization substantially impacts the nature and extent of Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) formation. First, it shapes the nature of forces constraining expansion of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The constraining force is a free riding incentive of FTA non-members under relatively high bindings but an exclusion incentive of FTA members under relatively low bindings. Second, multilateral tari⁄ binding liberalization shapes the role played by PTAs in the attainment of global free trade. Initially, tari⁄ binding liberalization leads to Custom Union (CU) formation in equilibrium but in a way that undermines the pursuit of global free trade. However, further tari⁄ binding liberalization leads to FTA formation in equilibrium and in a way that facilitates the attainment of global free trade. Our theoretical analysis also has implications regarding recent empirical discussions over the relative merits of FTAs versus CUs.
Probing the deployment of peripheral visual attention during obstacle-crossing planning

Gaze is directed to one location at a time, making peripheral visual input important for planning how to negotiate different terrain during walking. Whether and how the brain attends to this input is unclear. We developed a novel paradigm to probe the deployment of sustained covert visual attention by testing orientation discrimination of a Gabor patch at stepping and non-stepping locations during obstacle-crossing planning. Compared to remaining stationary, obstacle-crossing planning decreased visual performance (percent correct) and sensitivity (d’) at only the first of two stepping locations. Given the timing of the first and second steps before obstacle crossing relative to the Gabor patch presentation, the results suggest the brain uses peripheral vision to plan one step at a time during obstacle crossing, in contrast to how it uses central vision to plan two or more steps in advance. We propose that this protocol, along with multiple possible variations, presents a novel behavioral approach to identify the role of covert visual attention during obstacle-crossing planning and other goal-directed walking tasks.
Effect of Educational Intervention based on the Health Belief Model in Blood Pressure Control in Hypertensive Women

Background and purpose: Hypertension is a global public health issue. It contributes to the burden of heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, and premature mortality and disability. Given the high prevalence of hypertension and its serious complications this study was performed to determine the effect of Health Belief Model in blood pressure control in hypertensive women attending Khorramabad's health centers Materials and methods: This experimental study was based on a before-after design which was performed in 200 hypertensive women. They were randomly stratified into two groups (n=100 per group). The robinson's hypertension beliefs and behaviors questionnaire was used to collect the data. Educational procedures in case group included training sessions, holding question-and-answer sessions, group discussion, using pamphlet, poster and educational booklets. Data analysis was done applying independent t test, paired t test, chi- square, and fisher measurement test in SPSS12. Results: After the intervention, the mean scores of awareness and various structures of Health Belief Model (perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, self-efficacy, practice,) increased significantly in case group (p<0.05). Significant decrease was observed in the mean score for perceived barriers (p<0.05). Conclusion: The results of this study showed the efficacy of Health Belief Model in promotion of behavior associated with blood pressure control. Therefore, training programs based on health education models are of great help in blood pressure control
Temperature-Dependent Character istics of an n-InGaAs/n-GaAs Composite Doped Channel (CDC) Heterostructure Field-Effect Transistor

The temperature-dependent characteristics of an n-InGaAs/n-GaAs composite doped channel (CDC) heterostructure field-effect transistor have been studied. Due to the reduction of leakage current and good carrier confinement in the n-InGaAs/n-GaAs CDC structure, the degradation of device performances with increasing the temperature is insignificant. Experimentally, for a 1× 100 μm device, the gate-drain breakdown voltage of 24.5 (22.0) V, turn-on voltage of 2.05 (1.70) V, transconductance of 161 (138) mS/mm, output conductance of 0.60 (0.60) mS/mm, and voltage gain of 268 (230) are obtained at 300 (450) K, respectively. In addition, the studied device also shows good microwave performances with flat and wide operation regime.
From incidental findings to systematic discovery: locating and monitoring a new population of the endangered Harlequin Toad

—The scientific and conservation communities recognize toads of genus Atelopus as among the most vulnerable of all amphibian groups, with over 75% of the species assessed as “Critically Endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. Atelopus varius, known as the Harlequin Toad, has been thought to be extinct in Costa Rica since the mid-1990s. There have been four rediscovered populations of the species since 2004. This report presents the fifth reappearance of A. varius, this time in the Alexander Skutch Biological Corridor (ASBC) in the Pacific Slope foothills of La Amistad International Park, Costa Rica, which represents a new location. Previously, the pattern of reappearance of this species has been unclear. In this study, the discovery of a new population of A. varius allows us to evaluate the presence of Bd infection and offer critical natural history remarks. In total, 25 different individuals were identified. All samples analyzed for Bd diagnosis were negative. In contrast to other A. varius populations, this one was mostly found high above the riverbed, often in the foliage, tree trunks, and bromeliads, from 1–6 m above the water both during day and night. The absence of Bd infection in these Harlequin Toads, a highly susceptible species, in an area identified as having a high probability of Bd occurrence, suggests that this behavior could have helped this population survive by reducing infection risk. Moreover, the distribution of A. varius may have changed in the last 50 years, by penetrating higher in the montane regions of the Talamanca mountains, a change in distribution that might also help its survival of some environmental stressors. With the discovery of a new locality for A. varius, this study offers an animal behavior argument to account for species recovery in general, as well as a possible expansion of what has been accepted as the historical distribution of this species.
Climate Change and Crop Yields in Zambia: Correlative Historical Impacts and Future Projections

Farming systems prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa are exposed and vulnerable to climate change due to their high dependence on rainfall. However, most studies have only estimated the impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity at a regional or national level. We add to this literature by focussing on the sub-national impacts. This study uses 30 years (1981–2011) of yield and weather data in Zambia and applies the Just and Pope model to determine how rainfall and temperature affect yield and yield variability of maize and beans at the national and subnational levels. Results show a negative impact of temperature rise on yield and a positive impact of rainfall rise on yield, above the current mean levels. These results differ by agro-ecological region. Worst-case-scenario predicted impacts using HadGEM-ES2 global circulation model show that major yield decreases (25% for maize and 34% for beans) by 2050 will be in region II and will be driven mainly by temperature increase offsetting the positive gains from rainfall increase. The model mainly under-predicts yield for maize and overpredicts yield for beans. These findings call for agro-ecological region-specific adaptation strategies and well-planned policy interventions to make agriculture more resilient to climate change.
Some Novel Interactive Hybrid Weighted Aggregation Operators with Pythagorean Fuzzy Numbers and Their Applications to Decision Making

A Pythagorean fuzzy set (PFS) is one of the extensions of the intuitionistic fuzzy set which accommodate more uncertainties to depict the fuzzy information and hence its applications are more extensive. In the modern decision-making process, aggregation operators are regarded as a useful tool for assessing the given alternatives and whose target is to integrate all the given individual evaluation values into a collective one. Motivated by these primary characteristics, the aim of the present work is to explore a group of interactive hybrid weighted aggregation operators for assembling Pythagorean fuzzy sets to deal with the decision information. The proposed aggregation operators include interactive the hybrid weighted average, interactive hybrid weighted geometric and its generalized versions. The major advantages of the proposed operators to address the decision-making problems are (i) to consider the interaction among membership and non-membership grades of the Pythagorean fuzzy numbers, (ii) it has the property of idempotency and simple computation process, and (iii) it possess an adjust parameter value and can reflect the preference of decision-makers during the decision process. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative multiple attribute decision making (MADM) process under the PFS environment based on suggested operators and illustrate with numerous numerical cases to verify it. The comparative analysis as well as advantages of the proposed framework confirms the supremacies of the method.
MANAGING MULTISOURCE DATABASES : BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE ( Practice Oriented )

The need of managing multiple data sources in information systems is increasing and managing integrated access to information that is spread over multiple, disparate, and heterogeneous sources is being among the critical problems encountered in modern information systems. In fact, modern applications and processes used in contemporary companies often solicit distributed sets of data. These data are most of the time characterized by a high overlapping rate as referring to the same or similar entities, entailing, therefore, the necessity of consolidating it. This process of integrating and sharing scattered data is known, in the industrial domain, as the critical part of entity resolution and Master Data Management (MDM) projects, the core business of the Data Quality business unit of A.I.D. Our article describes the best practices observed by A.I.D. after a decade of managing multisource information systems. This practice-oriented study is preceded by a theoretical overview of the numerous techniques and solutions of handling multisource information systems that underlines the gap existing between the industrial world and the academic one.
Neutrophil dynamics and inflammaging in acute ischemic stroke: A transcriptomic review

Stroke is among the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Restoring blood flow through recanalization is currently the only acute treatment for cerebral ischemia. Unfortunately, many patients that achieve a complete recanalization fail to regain functional independence. Recent studies indicate that activation of peripheral immune cells, particularly neutrophils, may contribute to microcirculatory failure and futile recanalization. Stroke primarily affects the elderly population, and mortality after endovascular therapies is associated with advanced age. Previous analyses of differential gene expression across injury status and age identify ischemic stroke as a complex age-related disease. It also suggests robust interactions between stroke injury, aging, and inflammation on a cellular and molecular level. Understanding such interactions is crucial in developing effective protective treatments. The global stroke burden will continue to increase with a rapidly aging human population. Unfortunately, the mechanisms of age-dependent vulnerability are poorly defined. In this review, we will discuss how neutrophil-specific gene expression patterns may contribute to poor treatment responses in stroke patients. We will also discuss age-related transcriptional changes that may contribute to poor clinical outcomes and greater susceptibility to cerebrovascular diseases.
Bioprospecting for Bioactive Peptide Production by Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Fermented Dairy Food

With rapidly ageing populations, the world is experiencing unsustainable healthcare from chronic diseases such as metabolic, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and cancer disorders. Healthy diet and lifestyle might contribute to prevent these diseases and potentially enhance health outcomes in patients during and after therapy. Fermented dairy foods (FDFs) found their origin concurrently with human civilization for increasing milk shelf-life and enhancing sensorial attributes. Although the probiotic concept has been developed more recently, FDFs, such as milks and yoghurt, have been unconsciously associated with health-promoting effects since ancient times. These health benefits rely not only on the occurrence of fermentation-associated live microbes (mainly lactic acid bacteria; LAB), but also on the pro-health molecules (PHMs) mostly derived from microbial conversion of food compounds. Therefore, there is a renaissance of interest toward traditional fermented food as a reservoir of novel microbes producing PHMs, and “hyperfoods” can be tailored to deliver these healthy molecules to humans. In FDFs, the main PHMs are bioactive peptides (BPs) released from milk proteins by microbial proteolysis. BPs display a pattern of biofunctions such as anti-hypertensive, antioxidant, immuno-modulatory, and anti-microbial activities. Here, we summarized the BPs most frequently encountered in dairy food and their biological activities; we reviewed the main studies exploring the potential of dairy microbiota to release BPs; and delineated the main effectors of the proteolytic LAB systems responsible for BPs release.
Astragaloside IV Protects Against Oxidative Stress in Calf Small Intestine Epithelial Cells via NFE2L2-Antioxidant Response Element Signaling

Oxidative stress can damage intestinal epithelial cell integrity and function, causing gastrointestinal disorders. Astragaloside IV (ASIV) exhibits a variety of biological and pharmacological properties, including anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. The purpose of this research was to investigate the cytoprotective action of ASIV and its mechanisms in calf small intestine epithelial cells with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)-induced oxidative stress. ASIV pretreatment not only increased cell survival, but it also decreased reactive oxygen species generation and apoptosis, enhanced superoxide dismutase, catalase, and glutathione peroxidase levels, and it reduced malondialdehyde formation. Furthermore, pretreatment with ASIV elevated the mRNA and protein levels of nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (NFE2L2), heme oxygenase-1 (HMOX1), and NAD(P)H quinone dehydrogenase 1 (NQO1). The NFE2L2 inhibitor ML385 inhibited NFE2L2 expression and then blocked HMOX1 and NQO1 expression. These results demonstrate that ASIV treatment effectively protects against H2O2-induced oxidative damage in calf small intestine epithelial cells through the activation of the NFE2L2-antioxidant response element signaling pathway.
Visceral Language: A Phenomenological Approach to Contemporary Letterpress-Printed Artist’s Book Practice in the UK

The decline of commercial letterpress printing and technological advances in industry were major influential factors with respect to the establishment of independent small presses in the United Kingdom (UK). Although unlike work from commercial, private or fine press printers, utilisation of the letterpress process embedded a phenomenological approach to artist-led publishing where physicality and experience of using the letterpress process was reflected within the practice of making artists’ books and printed matter. Major concepts and inclusion of tools, equipment, technologies and studio methods used in historical small publishing practice can be considered in relation to today’s practitioners making letterpress-printed artists’ books to understand how skills are learnt and developed to support the evolution of a reflexive approach within contemporary practice.
Advanced human motion trajectories comparison using Dynamic Path Warping approach

Abstract: This paper describes and evaluates advanced aligning and comparison method dedicated for human motion trajectory analysis. It utilizes Dynamic Time Warping approach and can be applied for relatively long (30 seconds or longer) and complex motion paths. In contrary to other human motion analysis techniques we do not have restriction on motion direction, we use only kinematic data and we are able to compare any foot trajectory no matter how many rotations take place during the motion. As the result an algorithm outputs set of vectors along motion path that corresponds to beginning and end positions of footsteps. The left and right foot is analyzed separately. The difference of two motion paths can be expressed in any DTW-based feature namely minimal, maximal, median, mean and normalized DTW based distance. We have evaluated our method on karate kata dataset that contains four types of motion sequences performed by two black belt Shorin-Ryu karate masters with more than 20 years of experience. The evaluation of our method assured us that our approach can be easily applied for aligning and comparison of any other motion class described by two dimensional motion trajectories. The method can be applied for example in sport or physical therapy exercises data evaluation and it is invariant to body proportion and motion execution speed.
Monitoring and Quantitatively Retrieving Dust Storm from Satellite Thermal Infrared Measurements

In this paper, the possibility of monitoring and quantitatively retrieving dust storm from satellite thermal infrared measurements was investigated. It was found from satellite observations that for the dust clouds, the observed 11 μm minus 12 μm brightness temperature difference (BTD) is always negative, while the BTD of 8.5 μm minus 11 μm varies from positive to negative depending on the dust concentration. Based on the threshold classifications, a dust mask algorithm to identify the dust storm initiation and spatial extent was developed. The algorithm can be used to process data for both the daytime and nighttime. Under the Mie spherical scattering theory, the thermal radiation transfer through the single dust layer were performed by the widely used forward model DISTORT. Our calculations show that the dust-like aerosols can fairly well explain the observed BTD although both of the complex refractive index and particle size of aerosols will significantly influence the BTD. When the complex refractive index is fixed (dust-like aerosols in this paper), the dust optical thickness and effective radius of dust particles can be retrieved from the brightness temperature (BT) of the 11 μm channel and the BTD of 11 μm minus 12 μm channels, respectively. The integral dust columnar density can be also derived from retrieved dust optical thickness and effective radius. The algorithm developed here has been applied to the MODIS/Terra (polar satellite) and the SEVIRI/MSG (Geostationary satellite) data.