Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
VITALITY trial: protocol for a randomised controlled trial to establish the role of postnatal vitamin D supplementation in infant immune health

Introduction Postnatal vitamin D supplementation may be associated with a reduction in IgE-mediated food allergy, lower respiratory tract infections and improved bone health. Countries in the Northern hemisphere recommend universal infant vitamin D supplementation to optimise early vitamin D levels, despite the absence of large trials proving safety or efficacy for any disease outcome. With the aim of determining the clinical and cost-effectiveness of daily vitamin D supplementation in breastfed infants from age 6–8 weeks to 12 months of age, we have started a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial of daily 400 IU vitamin D supplementation during the first year of life, VITALITY. Methods nd analysis Infants (n=3012) who are fully breastfed and not receiving vitamin D supplementation will be recruited at the time of their first immunisation, from council-led immunisation clinics throughout metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. The primary outcome is challenge-proven food allergy at 12 months of age. Secondary outcomes are food sensitisation (positive skin prick test), number of lower respiratory infections (through hospital linkage), moderately-severe and persistent eczema (by history and examination) and vitamin D deficiency (serum vitamin D <50 nmol/L) at age 12 months. The trial is underway and the first 130 participants have been recruited. Ethics and dissemination The VITALITY study is approved by the Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) Human Research Ethics Committee (#34168). Outcomes will be disseminated through publication and will be presented at scientific conferences. Trial registration numbers ANZCTR12614000334606 and NCT02112734; pre-results.
Lone‐actor Terrorism and Impulsivity

In some recent cases of lone‐actor terrorism, there is evidence the subject acted impulsively, often in response to a triggering event which contained a loss and humiliation. Evidence suggests the subjects acted precipitously, despite planning and preparation carried out in the preceding weeks or months, and their attacks failed to include the often considerable preparation that had been done. The pathway became a runway. The authors recommend the traditional assessment of impulsivity in persons of concern for lone acts of terrorism, as well as other proximal warning behaviors for targeted violence. Both indirect and direct assessment guidelines are proposed, with an emphasis upon self‐report, psychological testing, collateral data gathering, and historical records.
Kinetics of Colloid Deposition onto Heterogeneously Charged Surfaces in Porous Media.

general theoretical approach for the calculation of colloid deposition rate onto heterogeneously charged surfaces is presented. Patchwise and random distribution models are used to quantitatively describe surface charge het- erogeneity and its effect on the kinetics of colloid deposi- tion. It is shown that unfavorable surfaces with only minor amounts of charge heterogeneity have particle deposition rates that are orders of magnitude larger than similar surfaces having no charge heterogeneity. Furthermore, the sensitivity of particle deposition rate to solution ionic strength decreases as the degree of surface charge het- erogeneity increases. Parameters characterizing the sur- face charge heterogeneity of collectors in porous media are identified from experimental data of colloid deposition by using the inverse procedure of parameter estimation. These heterogeneity parameters can be used in conjunction with current theories of particle deposition to explain experimental results of colloid deposition rates under chemical conditions that are unfavorable for particle deposition.
Supercritical fluid extraction of thorium and uranium ions from solid and liquid materials with fluorinated .Beta.-Diketones and tributyl phosphate.

A recent report shows that trivalent lanthanide and uranyl ions can be extracted by supercritical CO[sub 2] containing the fluorinated [beta]-diketone, 2,2-dimethyl-6,6,7,7,8,8,8-hyptafluoro-3,5-octanedione (FOD). Extraction and separation of actinides by supercritical fluids are of particular interest today because of potential applications to nuclear waste analysis and management. This paper describes the conditions of extracting thorium and uranium ions from solid and liquid materials by supercritical CO[sub 2] containing different [beta]-diketones. The synergistic extraction of the actinides by mixed ligands involving [beta]-diketones and tributyl phosphate (TBP) in supercritical CO[sub 2] is also reported. Synergistic extraction is another approach to improve the efficiencies of ligands of SFE of actinides. Potential applications of this new extraction technique for the separation of actinides from environmental samples are discussed. The five [beta]-diketones tested for the extraction of uranyl and Th(IV) ions in supercritical carbon dioxide are given as follows: acetylacetone, trifluoroacetylacetone, hexafluoroacetylacetone, thienoyltrifluoroacetylacetone, and FOD. 12 refs., 5 tabs.
Attitudes and beliefs about deceased organ donation in the Arabic-speaking community in Australia: a focus group study

Objectives To describe the beliefs and attitudes to organ donation in the Arabic-speaking community. Design Arabic-speaking participants were purposively recruited to participate in 6 focus groups. Transcripts were analysed thematically. Participants 53 participants, aged 19–77 years, and originating from 8 countries, participated in 1 of 6 focus groups. Participants identified as Christian (73%), Islam (26%), Buddhist (2%) or did not identify with any religion (2%). Results 6 themes (with subthemes) were identified; religious conviction; invisibility of organ donation; medical suspicion; owning the decision; and reciprocal benefit. Conclusions Although organ donation is considered a generous life-saving ‘gift’, representative members of the Arabic-speaking community in Australia were unfamiliar with, unnerved by and sceptical about the donation process. Making positive decisions about organ donation would likely require resolving tensions between respecting family, community and religious values versus their individual autonomy. Providing targeted education about the process and benefits of organ donation within the Arabic community may clarify ambiguities surrounding cultural and religious-based views on organ donation, reduce taboos and suspicion towards donation, and in turn, lead to increased organ donation rates.
Polymyxin B-immobilised haemoperfusion and mortality in critically ill patients with sepsis/septic shock: a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction Polymyxin-B immobilised haemoperfusion (PMX-HP) is a promising adjuvant strategy for the treatment of sepsis and septic shock. PMX-HP therapy works by clearing circulating endotoxin through binding to polymyxin-immobilised fibres during haemoperfusion. Small clinical trials have shown that PMX-HP therapy is associated with improved haemodynamic profile, oxygenation and survival. However, clear inferences have been largely inconclusive due to limitations in study design (eg, small, unblinded) and generalisability. We therefore propose to perform an up-to-date systematic review and evidence synthesis to describe the efficacy, safety and effectiveness of PMX-HP for adult patients with sepsis or septic shock. Methods and analysis We will search the following databases from 1946 to 2016 MEDLINE (Ovid), EMBASE (Ovid), Cochrane Library, Health Technology Assessment Database (HTA), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PubMed and ‘Igaku Chuo Zasshi’ (ICHUSHI) for randomised controlled trials of PMX-HP in critically ill patients with sepsis or septic shock. There will be no language restrictions in the electronic search for studies. Two reviewers will extract data and appraise the quality of each study independently. The primary outcome will be the pooled risk ratio of 28-day all-cause mortality. Serious adverse events and changes in organ dysfunction scores will also be evaluated. The secondary outcomes will be 90-day all-cause mortality, changes in haemodynamic profile and endotoxin levels, and health services use. Ethics and dissemination Our systematic review will synthesise the evidence on use of the PMX-HP as an adjuvant therapy in sepsis/septic shock to improve patient-centred, physiological and health services outcomes. Research ethics is not required for this review. The study will be disseminated by peer-reviewed publication and conference presentation. Trial registration number CRD42016038356.
An Analysis on the Choice of Alpha Level in the Osteometric Pair‐matching of the Os Coxa, Scapula, and Clavicle

This study compares the use of 0.05 and 0.10 alpha levels with the updated osteometric pair‐matching model on two samples of the os coxa, scapula, and clavicle. The samples include the Forensic Data Bank, and the osteometric sorting reference used within the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Mixed‐effects two‐way analyses of variance were used to analyze bilateral asymmetry in the standard measurements. In total, 3,793,566 t‐tests were conducted for osteometric pair‐matching analysis. The results indicate high levels of exclusion power, and accuracy can be obtained with the os coxa and scapula. The clavicle standard measurements capture too much asymmetry causing a lower exclusion to accuracy ratio for osteometric pair‐matching relative to other elements. Both 0.05 and 0.10 alpha levels provide acceptable levels of performance. A lower alpha level will result in higher accuracy with less exclusion, and a higher alpha level will result in lower accuracy with more exclusions.
A cohort study on physician documentation and the accuracy of administrative data coding to improve passive surveillance of transient ischaemic attacks

Background Administrative health data are valuable in health research and disease surveillance, but have low to moderate sensitivity in identifying transient ischaemic attacks (TIA) in the emergency department (ED). We aimed to identify the predictors of coding accuracy for TIA. Methods The study population was obtained from two ongoing studies on the diagnosis of TIA, minor stroke and stroke mimic. ED charts were manually reviewed by a stroke neurologist to obtain the clinical diagnosis, patient characteristics and content of physician documentation. Administrative data codes were compared with the chart-adjudicated diagnosis to determine cases of misclassification by administrative data. Univariable regression was used to evaluate candidate predictors of disagreement, and the significant variables were tested in a multivariable model to obtain an adjusted estimate of effect. Results Among 417 patients (39.1% TIA, 37.2% minor stroke and 23.7% stroke mimics), there were 122 cases of disagreement between adjudications and administrative data codes for the diagnosis of TIA. The majority of disagreement (n=103/122, 84.4%) arose from adjudicated TIA cases that were misclassified as non-TIA in administrative data coding. There were 78 (18.7%) charts with documented uncertain diagnosis, and 73 (17.5%) charts had no definite diagnosis. The relative risk of disagreement between chart adjudication and administrative data coding when the final diagnosis was uncertain or absent was 1.82(1.36, 2.44) and the risk difference was 18.5%. Multivariable logistic regression analyses confirmed this association using different case definition algorithms. Conclusions In suspected patients with TIA and minor stroke presenting to the ED, physician documentation was the dominant factor in coding accuracy, supporting the concept that physicians are active participants in administrative data coding. Strategies to improve chart documentation are predicted to have a positive effect on coding accuracy.
The experience of treating patients with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura with solvent detergent plasma – response to McCarthy

The letter from Dr McCarthy is very interesting as it describes the treatment of a large number of patients with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) albeit in an apparently nonrandomised fashion. In our paper (Rock et al, 2005), we described a study that was designed to compare cryosupernatant plasma (CSP) with fresh frozen plasma (FFP) in the treatment of TTP. The study was designed to enter a total of 236 patients, but was halted due to a lack of funding after only 52 patients were entered. The study was unable to show a significant difference between CSP and FFP; however, we did not accrue a sufficient number of patients to achieve statistical significance. This data appears to be similar to that reported by Dr McCarthy in his 62 patients treated with FFP and 48 patients with CSP who had 75% and 70% survival respectively. This data are also similar to that reported by Zeigler et al (2001), who did not find a significant difference in outcome in the 24 patients they treated with CSP or FFP. We take the point that the solvent detergent plasma (SDP) provided by Vitex had a decreased total amount of von Willibrand Factor (VWF) and lacked the very high molecular weight VWF multimers normally found in plasma. However, our study (Rock et al, 2005), as referred to by Dr McCarthy,
Developments and applications of field mass spectrometers.

Field GC/MS can address environmental characterization and monitoring needs. Commercial instruments are available, some methods are in place and validated, and results have been demonstrated to be equivalent to or better than those for laboratory analyses. Upcoming improvements and maturation of the technology will improve quality, and user friendliness, provide broader applications, and reduce the currently high capital costs. The identification, evaluation and implementation of field analytical methods (FAMs) such as field GC/MS will be of paramount importance in facing the rising demand for sample analysis, not only for federal agencies but also for the private sector faced with cleaning up its own sites. [open quotes]Better, faster, safer, cheaper[close quotes] are the watchwords for new characterization technologies. The GC/MS FAMs provide one excellent example of the new chemical analysis, sensor, and geophysical characterization tools just now becoming available to the environmental assessment community. 45 refs., 3 figs., 2 tabs.
Making a balanced plate for pregnant women to improve birthweight of infants: a study protocol for a cluster randomised controlled trial in rural Bangladesh

Objectives Low birthweight significantly contributes to neonatal mortality, morbidities and psychosocial debilities throughout the course of life. A large proportion of infants (36–55%) in Bangladesh is born with low birthweight. Nutritional status of women during pregnancy is critical for optimal growth and development of the fetus. Nutrition education has been found to improve maternal nutritional status. Our study aims to determine whether nutrition education with a practical demonstration during pregnancy is an effective intervention for improving the birthweight of infants compared with standard nutrition education only. Methods and analysis We will conduct a community-based cluster randomised controlled trial in one rural district of Bangladesh. Treatments will be allocated evenly between the study clusters (n=36). Participants in the intervention clusters receive ‘balanced plate nutrition education’ with a practical demonstration from community health workers 4–7 times throughout their entire pregnancy, starting from the first trimester. The control clusters will receive standard nutrition education delivered by public and other healthcare providers as per ongoing antenatal care protocol. Our sample size would be 900 pregnant women to determine 100 g differences in mean birthweight, considering 5% type 1 error, 80% power and an intra-cluster correlation coefficient of 0.03. The primary outcome of the trial is birthweight of the infants and the secondary outcomes include daily caloric intake and dietary diversity score among the pregnant women. Outcomes will be measured at enrolment, third to ninth month of gestation (monthly) and at delivery. Community health workers blinded to the study hypothesis will collect all data. Ethics and dissemination The study was approved by the James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University Ethical Review Committee, Dhaka, Bangladesh. We will communicate the final results to relevant research and public health groups and publish research papers in peer-reviewed journals. Trial registration number ACTRN12616000080426.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis using ABPCS model and SVMPperf in Chinese reviews

Aspect-based sentiment analysis has always been a difficult task since it consists of several core sub-tasks: feature detection, opinion extraction and polarity classification. Consequently, by now there is little work to summarize all of these works together. In this paper, we propose a brand new holistic system, which can deal with all the problems above simultaneously using aspect-based positive center similarity(ABPCS) model. We experiment our system on clothes and hotel domain, and the result shows considerable improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.
A Robust Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Based on the YOLO Detector

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detector. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained and finetuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset, composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%, respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second, targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset1 dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better, with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.The UFPR-ALPR dataset is publicly available to the research community at https://web.inf. ufpr.br/vri/databases/ufpr-alpr/ subject to privacy restrictions.
Contamination of Environmental Samples Prepared for PCB Analysis.

Archived air-dried soil that had been collected, stored, and sealed in 1914, before the commercial manufacture of PCBs, together with wet freshly sampled ancient peat, which contained little or no PCBs, were exposed to contemporary air in a laboratory. Measurable increases in the concentration of PCBs, particularly the low molecular weight congeners, were detectable after exposure for as little as a few hours. Concentrations after a few days exposure to laboratory air were similar to those measured in contemporary field surface soils (-20-30 pg of CPCB kgl). Laboratory air concentrations ranged between 4.7 and 8.2 ng of CPCB m-3 during the period of exposure, markedly higher than routinely detected in outdoor U.K. urban air. The calculated average net dry deposition flux from air-soil in the laboratory over 25 days was 5 pg of CPCB m-2 day1. Indoor air concentrations might be expected to be higher than those routinely measured outside, exacerbating the potential problems of sample contamination. Extreme caution is needed in the preparation and handling of samples which contain inherently low concentrations of PCBs and before ascribing the presence of these compounds in certain samples to ‘natural production’ mechanisms.
Environmental azole fungicide, prochloraz, can induce cross-resistance to medical triazoles in Candida glabrata.

Acquisition of azole resistance by clinically relevant yeasts in nature may result in a significant, yet undetermined, impact in human health. The main goal of this study was to assess the development of cross-resistance between agricultural and clinical azoles by Candida spp. An in vitro induction assay was performed, for a period of 90 days, with prochloraz (PCZ) - an agricultural antifungal. Afterward, the induced molecular resistance mechanisms were unveiled. MIC value of PCZ increased significantly in all Candida spp. isolates. However, only C. glabrata developed cross-resistance to fluconazole and posaconazole. The increased MIC values were stable. Candida glabrata azole resistance acquisition triggered by PCZ exposure involved the upregulation of the ATP binding cassette multidrug transporter genes and the transcription factor, PDR1. Single mutation previously implicated in azole resistance was found in PDR1 while ERG11 showed several synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms. These results might explain why C. glabrata is so commonly less susceptible to clinical azoles, suggesting that its exposure to agricultural azole antifungals may be associated to the emergence of cross-resistance. Such studies forward potential explanations for the worldwide increasing clinical prevalence of C. glabrata and the associated worse prognosis of an infection by this species.
Microbial community structure in vineyard soils across altitudinal gradients and in different seasons.

Microbial communities living in nine vineyards distributed over three altitudinal transects were studied over 2 years. Fungal and bacterial community dynamics were explored using automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA) and by determining bacterial cells and fungal colony-forming units (CFUs). Moreover, extensive chemical and physical analyses of the soils were carried out. Multivariate analyses demonstrated that bacterial and fungal communities are affected by altitude, which acts as a complex physicochemical gradient. In fact, soil moisture, Al, Mg, Mn and clay content are changing with altitude and influencing the bacterial genetic structure, while in the case of fungi, soil moisture, B and clay content are found to be the main drivers of the community. Moreover, other exchangeable cations and heavy metals, not correlating with altitude, are involved in the ordination of the sites, especially Cu. Qualitative ARISA revealed the presence of a stable core microbiome of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) within each transect, which ranged between 57% and 68% of total OTUs in the case of fungi and between 63% and 72% for bacteria. No seasonal effect on the composition of microbial communities was found, demonstrating that bacterial and fungal communities in vineyards are mostly stable over the considered seasons.