Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Childbearing postponement and child wellbeing in the U.K. : reconciling and integrating different perspectives

The demographic literature has tended to interpret the postponement of childbearing, experienced in developed countries over the past three decades, as beneficial for families. As women who postpone their first birth accumulate resources before they become mothers, an increasing maternal age at first birth is expected to be positively associated with children’s wellbeing. Existing evidence is only partially able to support these arguments, primarily for two reasons. Firstly, the demographic literature has been mainly preoccupied with the social aspects of postponement, ignoring that, as showed by the medical literature, older childbearing may involve health complications and result in worse outcomes for children. Indeed, the link between postponement and child wellbeing may depend on how late the birth occurs. Secondly, the “weathering” hypothesis literature argues that the link between maternal age and child wellbeing is heterogeneous for population subgroups. Ethnic minority women may have fewer opportunities to acquire resources even if they postpone childbearing. Because of the disadvantage and racism they endure, they may experience a more rapid deterioration of their health, which implies that their children’s wellbeing might worsen, rather than improve, with increasing maternal age at birth. The original contribution to knowledge of this thesis is that of investigating the way childbearing postponement is associated with family and child wellbeing by integrating and reconciling different perspectives on maternal age, which have so far been developed and applied relatively independently. The research focuses on the U.K. context, on first births and compares (children born to) Black and White mothers. The results, on average, support the arguments of the demographic literature as first born children of older mothers (30+) fare significantly better than children of younger mothers, although, consistent with the medical literature, the benefits cease to accumulate at particularly advanced maternal ages. However, consistent with the “weathering” hypothesis literature, the results suggest that when analysed separately for Black and White mothers, the association between maternal age and child wellbeing varies across these groups. Indeed, Black/White gaps in child low birth weight widen with increasing maternal age at first birth. The results also reveal that when Black mothers delay childbearing to older ages, they do not experience the same accumulation of resources as White mothers do, suggesting that childbearing postponement may reflect qualitatively different processes for these groups.
Determinants of Actual Digital Library Usage

The purpose of this research was to determine the influence of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and attitude toward using digital libraries. Data analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM) with partial least square (PLS) to explain the actual digital libraries usage among university student. The analysis includes the results of measurement model and structural model. Based on sample of 400 user of university digital library, the results of the research indicate that: 1) perceived ease of use has significant and positive effect on the perceived usefulness of digital libraries. Its mean users will find digital libraries are useful since it become easier to use, 2) perceived ease of use have significant and positive effect on the attitude toward using digital libraries. This finding confirm that acceptance of digital libraries depends on friendliness of that system, 3) perceived usefulness significantly influence the attitude toward using digital libraries, and 4) attitude toward using digital libraries have significant and positive effect on the actual digital libraries usage. Users may be willing to accept the digital libraries and continue to use in the future if they found the usefulness of that system. Keywords—actual system use; perceived ease of use; perceived usefulness; attitude toward using
Polycystic ovarian syndrome: Proposal for an evidence -based management plan for an electronic patient record system

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome: Proposal for an Evidence-based Management Plan for an Electronic Patient Record System Mary Elizabeth DuRant The goal of this change project was to improve the diagnosis and management of women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) through the use of an electronic patient record system. PCOS is one of the top ten missed or delayed diagnoses as well as an inconsistently or mismanaged women’s health issue in primary care. The chronic care model, known pathophysiology, and evidence-based research composed the framework used in developing the diagnosis and management plan for an electronic record system in a free health care clinic. The project was evaluated based on the following four objectives: 1. To provide an educational session at a free clinic to increase providers’ knowledge about diagnosing PCOS; 2. To assess health care providers' knowledge about PCOS and its management before and after an educational session; 3. To develop a management plan and imbed the plan in an electronic patient record system at the free clinic to improve efficiency and quality of care for PCOS management; 4. To evaluate the effectiveness of an electronic management plan in increasing the frequency of diagnosis and appropriateness of treatment of PCOS at the free clinic. Objective one was evaluated by testing providers’ knowledge before and after the educational session. Preand post educational session chart review was used to evaluate objectives two through four. Thirtyfour total charts met the inclusion criteria for evaluation for this project. Analysis of the data revealed a significant improvement in knowledge level of providers after the educational session. However, no statistically significant difference between pre and post educational session was found in diagnosing and managing the metabolic status of the PCOS population at the clinic. This project is an initial step in utilizing technology to improve diagnosis and management of a frequently misdiagnosed or under diagnosed and mismanaged common chronic syndrome on women.
Vaccinating against influenza in children without needles: A new initiative

Abstract Young children are of the highest hospital admission rate of all influenza cases. A broad and effective rollout of influenza vaccines for children is hindered by the current most common method of administration: the needle and syringe. Limitations include: reduced compliance due to needle-phobia; increased costs due to maintaining refrigeration due to transportation and storage (the "cold chain"); the need for qualified medical/nursing practitioners – to help reduce risk of unsafe injections and needle-stick injuries; and potentially impeded immunity – by delivery to muscle and not accessing the abundant antigen presenting cell populations resident in skin and mucosal surfaces. This paper explores needle-free routes to improved childhood influenza vaccines rollout, by being a practical device for self-administration that has also generated significantly-improved immunogenicity and also the removal of the cold chain (through dry-formulation). Marketed devices targeting the mucosa through intranasal delivery (of liquid vaccine) are analysed, together with skin-targeting approaches currently in development – offering both improved immunogenicity and cold-chain removal by formulating the vaccine in a solid form.
A Novel Symbolic Representation Based on Fast Segmentation

Symbolic representation of time series has recently attracted a lot of research interest. This is a difficult problem because of the high dimensionality of the data, particularly when the length of the time series becomes longer. In this paper, we introduce a new symbolic representation based on fast segmentation, called the trend feature symbols approximation (TFSA). The experimental results show that compared to some method, the segmentation efficiency of TFSA is improved.
A Novel Integrated Simulation and Testing Platform for Self-Driving Cars With Hardware in the Loop

Effective simulation and testing environment is a vital part in the research of self-driving vehicles. It is capable of testing self-driving software and hardware quickly in a variety of virtual environments at low cost. However, as for the current mainstream simulation platforms, a considerable gap exists between the constructed virtual environment and the actual self-driving platform, which decreases the efficiency of development and makes it difficult to complete the migration from the virtual scenario to the real environment. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a novel hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation system. It takes the real hardware electronic control unit (ECU) of the self-driving vehicle as a part of the simulation platform, which improves the efficiency of development and testing, and also, the verified algorithms can be implemented into self-driving cars faster than ever before. The proposed HiL simulation system mainly consists of four parts: the vehicle kinematic model simulation, the multi-sensor simulation, the environment simulation, and the ECU hardware. Simulation experiments on applying the HiL system are used to verify the validity of self-driving algorithms in virtual scenes, including perception, planning, decision making, and control. Furthermore, algorithms that are tested in the simulation environment can be rapidly deployed into the real self-driving vehicles. In this paper, we also presented the verification processes of various algorithms, such as planning and control. These algorithms are implemented in the HiL system, and the experimental results show the validity of our proposed platform.
Nouveautés diagnostiques en endoscopie

Le diagnostic endoscopique est le resultat de l'interaction entre trois elements : l'operateur, l'endoscope et la paroi digestive. La qualite du diagnostic endoscopique passe par une optimisation concernant chacun de ces trois elements : a) l'operateur doit bien examiner, b) la muqueuse doit etre facile a examiner et c) l'endoscope doit fournir de bonnes images. Nous presenterons donc les nouveautes en endoscopie pour chacun de ces elements. Par ailleurs, il faut bien distinguer les trois missions diagnostiques de l'endoscopie. L'endoscopie vise: a) a mettre en evidence une lesion dans un secteur a risque (« detection »), b) a determiner la nature d'une lesion detectee (« diagnostic de nature» ou « biopsie optique »), c) a aider a apprecier les contours de la lesion (« bilan d'extension »). Ces trois roles de l'endoscopie peuvent cependant se chevaucher.
Needs Analysis for ESP Course Development for Undergraduate Engineering Students - A Cross-Sectional Survey for Engineering Students in One of Universities in Bandung

: This research is aimed at finding out the target needs, in terms of necessities and lacks, relevant to engineering work context, and investigating the learning needs as the route to meet the target needs. A cross-sectional survey as research design was employed. The data were gained from the semi-structured interview to three representatives of English lecturers for engineering and the questionnaire to ninety fourth-year engineering students in the Faculty of Engineering in one of universities in Bandung. The results reveal that engineering students’ English proficiency has not met the target needs provoked by the majority lacks of communication skill, particularly speaking fluently and giving an oral presentation. With this in mind, some preferred-learning needs to overcome the lacks are the significance use of a good combination material, the use of internet as a media, working in a small group and in pair as learning partner, having a simulation related to engineering work context, problem solving, and an oral presentation.
Validity Assessment of an Experimental e-Shopping Interface and Survey in a Multicultural Context

Within a context of rapidly expanding international Internet penetration, organizations must offer multicultural versions of their information systems. In multicultural countries such as Canada, enterprises recognize the benefits of conducting e-business in a multilingual environment. As well, more and more IS research is conducted within a multicultural context. However, previous research has highlighted the difficulties of IS internationalization: differences in verbal style and word interpretation greatly increase the risk of miscommunication. In the case of multicultural IS research, miscommunication problems threaten the validity of the results. Internet-based shopping interfaces offer the opportunity of selling products and services across national and geographical boundaries. However, these interfaces must be adapted to multicultural settings. A research about the cognitive fit of two e-shopping interfaces was conducted in a multicultural context. For each of eight experimental conditions, two equivalent versions, in English and in French, were prepared. The subjects shopped online for a television set then answered a survey about their shopping experience. 561 consumers participated in the first study: 399 answered in English and 162 in French. The second study, a protocol analysis, required 39 consumers (13 English-speaking and 26 French-speaking) to complete the same online experiment while performing a think-aloud protocol. To ensure that results could be pooled across the two cultural contexts, great care was taken to ensure that a) each cultural version of the interface was valid and controlled for confounding variables, b) each cultural version of the survey met strict criteria of convergent and discriminating validity, but also c) that the two cultural versions were in every respect equivalent to each other. This third point was critical to the success of the experiment. To achieve this goal, 8 pre-tests were conducted. This paper presents the methodology used to ensure experimental interface and survey validity as well as their perfect equivalence. This research methodology represents a contribution to IS researchers as well as practitioners who internationalize web-based applications and must ensure their cultural context equivalence.
An Attention-Based Spatiotemporal LSTM Network for Next POI Recommendation

Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation, also known as a natural extension of general POI recommendation, is recently proposed to predict user's next destination and has attracted considerable research interest. It focuses on learning users’ sequential patterns of check-in behavior and on training personalized recommendation models using different types of contextual information. Unfortunately, most of the previous studies failed to incorporate the spatiotemporal contextual information, which plays a critical role in analyzing user check-in behavior, into recommending the next POI. In recent years, embedding learning and recurrent neural network (RNN) based approaches show promising performance for modeling sequential patterns of check-in behavior in next POI recommendation. However, not all of the historical check-in records contribute equally to the next-step check-in behavior. To provide better next POI recommendation performance, we first proposed a spatiotemporal long and short-term memory (ST-LSTM) network. By feeding the spatiotemporal contextual information into the LSTM network in each step, ST-LSTM can model the spatial and temporal information better. Also, we developed an attention-based spatiotemporal LSTM (ATST-LSTM) network for next POI recommendation. By using the attention mechanism, ATST-LSTM can focus on the relevant historical check-in records in a check-in sequence selectively using the spatiotemporal contextual information. Besides, we conducted a comprehensive performance evaluation using large-scale real-world datasets collected from two popular location-based social networks, namely Gowalla and Brightkite. Experimental results indicated that the proposed ATST-LSTM network outperformed two state-of-the-art next POI recommendation approaches regarding three commonly-used evaluation metrics.
Flow cytometric studies of equine phagocytes following strenuous exercise

Summary The objective of this study was to determine if strenuous exercise in unconditioned horses impaired function of neutrophils and alveolar macrophages. Flow cytometry was used to assess the effects of a single bout of strenuous exercise on these cells. Bronchoalveolar lavage and venous blood sampling were performed 30 min, 1 and 5 days after exercise. Exercise consisted of 2 min at 2,4 and 6 m/s and then 1 min at 1 m/s incremental speeds until exhaustion, on a level treadmill. Intracellular oxidation of the fluorochrome dye DCFH-DA was stimulated by PMA and detected by a flow cytometer. Size and granularity of the 2 cell preparations were also measured. The respiratory burst induced in granulocytes was significantly inhibited 30 min after exercise (480 ± 182) compared to that prior to exercise (2359 ± 456). Inhibition at 1 and 5 days after exercise was less than at 30 min and did not differ significantly from either control values. No change in size or granularity was seen as a result of exercise. The alveolar macrophage population remained unchanged in size, granularity and fluorescent responses following exercise. Several cell samples taken before exercise exhibited peripheral blood eosinophilia. In these samples, granulocyte size was markedly reduced and DCFH-DA oxidation was depressed; viability did not alter. This study suggests that strenuous exercise impairs the respiratory burst of granulocytes for several days. Other factors associated with peripheral eosinophilia also have suppressive effects on granulocytes.
Language Design Rationale and Semantic Framework for Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming

REPRESENTATION SPECIFIC REPRESENTATION INDEPENDENT Conditions are expressed in terms of abstract properties of the object and do not refer to the particular implementation ACT++, ROSETTE, PROCOL, PATH EXPRESSIONS Condition are expressed directly on the hidden object state. GUIDE, Hybrid, SINA ACCEPTANCE CONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE
Disturbance suppression in active magnetic bearings with adaptive control and extended state observer

Some sources of disturbance inevitably exist in magnetic bearings systems in the process of operation. This article proposes a disturbance suppression scheme for active magnetic bearings systems using an improved characteristic model-based all-coefficient adaptive control algorithm. First, the mathematical model of the magnetic bearing system is established. Then, by introducing the extended state observer into the adaptive control, the adaptive control method is improved. And the simulation of the combined control of the adaptive control and extended state observer is carried out based on mathematical model of controlled object. Simulation results demonstrate that this control method can not only adjust the control parameters online, but also estimate and compensate the disturbance in real time, which improves the control performance of the controller. Finally, the feasibility of adaptive control method with extended state observer is verified by experiments. When the sinusoidal disturbance signal is introduced at the 9000 r/min, the vibration displacement of the magnetic bearing system with the improved adaptive controller is reduced around 43%, which is in accordance with the theoretical results.
Siçanlarda lipopolisakkarit ile indüklenen akciğer hasarinda asetilsalisilat aşiri dozlarinin etkileri: VEGF'nin rolü (Effects of acetylsalicylate overdose on lipopolysaccharide-induced lung injury in rats: the role of the VEGF)

Aim: Vascular endothelial growth factor production is decreased depending on the alveolar epithelial cell damage. Acute over expression of vascular endothelial growth factor in lung tissue contributes to the formation permeability. Excessive doses of acetylsalicylate (ASA) may induce pulmonary edema by increasing pulmonary vascular permeability. In this study, the effects of acetylsalicylate overdoses were evaluated on bronchoalveolar lavage fluid levels of vascular endothelial growth factor in the presence of lipopolysaccharide-induced lung injury in rats. Materials and Methods: Lung injury was induced by intraperitoneal injection of lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Rats were divided into six different sets consisting of 7 rats each for control, ASA-300, ASA-500, LPS, LPS+ASA-300 and LPS+ASA-500 series. ASA, 300 mg and 500 mg/kg doses were given by gavage. Acetylsalicylate was given 24 hours after lipopolysaccharide injection in LPS+ASA groups. Rats were sacrificed 6 hours after acetylsalicylate administration and bronchoalveolar lavage was performed. Results: In bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, vascular endothelial growth factor, matrix metalloproteinase-2 and nitric oxide levels were increased in group of ASA-500, and were decreased in groups of LPS+ASA. In addition, plasma salicylate half-life was prolonged in LPS+ASA groups. Conlusion: Lipopolysaccharide increases the time of being metabolized of acetylsalicylate. The lung tissue damage increases due to vascular endothelial growth factor, matrix metalloproteinase-2 and nitric oxide related mechanisms and recovery period is affected adversely. Also in humans, severe toxic effects on the lung tissue that can be generated by 300 and 500 mg/kg acetylsalicylate doses in rats showed less toxic effect.
An anthropometrical related lower body explosive power (LBEP) prediction model among a cohort of adolescents in the North West Province, South Africa : the PAHL Study

In the prediction of lower body explosive power (LBEP), very few researchers have investigated the possibility of making use of anthropometric variables to compile prediction models. Therefore the purpose of this study was to develop a LBEP prediction model from several anthropometric measurements for a cohort of adolescent boys and girls living in the Tlokwe local municipality of the Dr Kenneth Kaunda district in the North West Province, South Africa. This was a cross-sectional experimental design on a purposeively selected cohort of 214 adolescents (15.82±0.68 years) consisting of 88 boys and 126 girls who were part of the Physical Activity and Health Longitudinal Study (PAHLS). Data were obtained by means of skinfold (SF) and LBEP measurements as well as the calculation of maturity age. The results of the forward stepwise regression analysis shows that stature (57%), muscle mass percentage (10%) and maturation age (3%) were the anthropometric variables that served as significant (p<0.001) predictors of LBEP. In view of the fact that the majority of coaches and teachers in South Africa have very limited means to directly measure anthropometric variables and LBEP in adolescents, the use of adolescents' stature, muscle mass and maturity age may possibly serve as an accurate alternative to predict adolescents' LBEP.