Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of Malawi’s success in child mortality reduction through the lens of the Catalytic Initiative Integrated Health Systems Strengthening programme: Retrospective evaluation

Background Malawi is estimated to have achieved its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 target. This paper explores factors influencing progress in child survival in Malawi including coverage of interventions and the role of key national policies. Methods We performed a retrospective evaluation of the Catalytic Initiative (CI) programme of support (2007–2013). We developed estimates of child mortality using four population household surveys undertaken between 2000 and 2010. We recalculated coverage indicators for high impact child health interventions and documented child health programmes and policies. The Lives Saved Tool (LiST) was used to estimate child lives saved in 2013. Results The mortality rate in children under 5 years decreased rapidly in the 10 CI districts from 219 deaths per 1000 live births (95% confidence interval (CI) 189 to 249) in the period 1991–1995 to 119 deaths (95% CI 105 to 132) in the period 2006–2010. Coverage for all indicators except vitamin A supplementation increased in the 10 CI districts across the time period 2000 to 2013. The LiST analysis estimates that there were 10 800 child deaths averted in the 10 CI districts in 2013, primarily attributable to the introduction of the pneumococcal vaccine (24%) and increased household coverage of insecticide–treated bednets (19%). These improvements have taken place within a context of investment in child health policies and scale up of integrated community case management of childhood illnesses. Conclusions Malawi provides a strong example for countries in sub–Saharan Africa of how high impact child health interventions implemented within a decentralised health system with an established community–based delivery platform, can lead to significant reductions in child mortality.
Comparing Specific Language Impairment and Hearing Impairment: Different Profiles in German Verbal Agreement Morphology

ABSTRACT The study aims at identifying characteristic phenotypes for children with SLI and children with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) in language and in domains associated with language. We focus on verbal agreement inflection and phonological short-term memory, phenomena that have been repeatedly found to be impaired in both groups of children. A nonword repetition task and an elicitation task on subject-verb agreement were conducted with three groups of monolingual German children: (i) 11 children with SLI, (ii) 10 children with HI (hearing loss between 38 and 75 dB) and hearing aids, and (iii) 10 typically developing children. Data analyses reveal quantitatively and qualitatively different performance patterns with respect to verbal agreement inflection in children with SLI and children with HI but no different patterns for nonword repetition. Our results not only identify deficits in verbal agreement inflection as a sensitive, specific, and selective clinical marker for SLI in German, but they also shed some light on the nature of the deficits that underlie SLI.
Childhood adversities, interpersonal difficulties, and risk for suicide attempts during late adolescence and early adulthood.

BACKGROUND Data from a community-based longitudinal study were used to investigate the association between childhood adversities, interpersonal difficulties during adolescence, and suicide attempts during late adolescence or early adulthood. METHODS A community sample of 659 families from Upstate New York was interviewed in 1975, 1983, 1985 to 1986, and 1991 to 1993. During the 1991-1993 interview, the mean age of the offspring was 22 years. RESULTS Maladaptive parenting and childhood maltreatment were associated with an elevated risk for interpersonal difficulties during middle adolescence and for suicide attempts during late adolescence or early adulthood after age, sex, psychiatric symptoms during childhood and early adolescence, and parental psychiatric symptoms were controlled statistically. A wide range of interpersonal difficulties during middle adolescence were associated with risk for suicidal behavior after the covariates were controlled. Profound interpersonal difficulties during middle adolescence mediated the association between maladaptive parenting or childhood maltreatment and suicide attempts during late adolescence or early adulthood. CONCLUSIONS Maladaptive parenting and childhood maltreatment may be associated with a risk for severe interpersonal difficulties during adolescence. These interpersonal difficulties may play a pivotal role in the development of suicidal behavior. Youths who are at an elevated risk for suicide may tend to be in need of mental health services that can help them to cope with an extensive history of profound interpersonal difficulties, beginning in childhood and continuing through adolescence.
Operational VaR: a closed-form approximation

Klaus Böcker and Claudia Klüppelberg investigate a simple loss distribution model for operational risk. They show that, when loss data are heavy-tailed (which in practice they are), a simple closed-form approximation for the OpVaR can be obtained. They apply this approximation in particular to the Pareto severity model, for which they obtain also a simple time scaling rule for the operational VaR.
Incremental orthogonal projective non-negative matrix factorization and its applications

In this paper, we propose an incremental orthogonal projective non-negative matrix factorization algorithm (IOPNMF), which aims to learn a parts-based subspace that reveals dynamic data streams. There exist two main contributions. Firstly, our proposed algorithm can learn parts-based representations in an online fashion. Secondly, by using projection and orthogonality constrains, our IOPNMF algorithm can guarantee to learn a linear parts-based subspace. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct two kinds of experiments, incremental learning parts-based components on facial database and visual tracking on several challenging video clips. The experimental results show that our IOPNMF algorithm learns parts-based representations successfully.
Successful Control of Soil-Transmitted Helminthiasis in School Age Children in Burkina Faso and an Example of Community-Based Assessment via Lymphatic Filariasis Transmission Assessment Survey

Background Burkina Faso is endemic with soil-transmitted helminth infections. Over a decade of preventive chemotherapy has been implemented through annual lymphatic filariasis (LF) mass drug administration (MDA) for population aged five years and over, biennial treatment of school age children with albendazole together with schistosomiasis MDA and biannual treatment of pre-school age children through Child Health Days. Assessments were conducted to evaluate the current situation and to determine the treatment strategy for the future. Methodology/Principal Findings A cross-sectional assessment was conducted in 22 sentinel sites across the country in 2013. In total, 3,514 school age children (1,748 boys and 1,766 girls) were examined by the Kato-Katz method. Overall, soil-transmitted helminth prevalence was 1.3% (95% CI: 1.0–1.8%) in children examined. Hookworm was the main species detected, with prevalence of 1.2% (95% CI: 0.9–1.6%) and mean egg counts of 2.1 epg (95% CI: 0–4.2 epg). Among regions, the Centre Ouest region had the highest hookworm prevalence of 3.4% (95% CI: 1.9–6.1%) and mean egg counts of 14.9 epg (95% CI: 3.3–26.6 epg). A separate assessment was conducted in the Centre Nord region in 2014 using community-based cluster survey design during an LF transmission assessment survey (TAS). In this assessment, 351 children aged 6–7 years and 345 children aged 10–14 years were examined, with two cases (0.6% (95% CI: 0.2–2.1%)) and seven cases (2.0% (95% CI: 1.0–4.1%)) of hookworm infection was identified respectively. The results using both age groups categorized the region to be 2% to <10% in STH prevalence according to the pre-defined cut-off values. Conclusions/Significance Through large-scale preventive chemotherapy, Burkina Faso has effectively controlled STH in school age children in the country. Research should be conducted on future strategies to consolidate the gain and to interrupt STH transmission in Burkina Faso. It is also demonstrated that LF TAS provides one feasible and efficient platform to assess the STH situation for post LF MDA decision making.
Alida, a cognitive approach of text categorization

This paper proposes a model of text categorization named Alida, which combines a model of categorization inspired of the classical cognitive models of categorization of Nosofsky, with a semantic space model as system of semantic knowledge representation. The model addresses large-scale text categorization applications in opinion mining in different domains and different languages. The performance in the text-mining campaign DEFT'09 shows that the model can compete with existing Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval models.
Use cases and usability challenges for head-mounted displays in healthcare

Abstract In the healthcare domain, head-mounted displays (HMDs) with augmented reality (AR) modalities have been reconsidered for application as a result of commercially available products and the needs for using computers in mobile context. Within a user-centered design approach, interviews were conducted with physicians, nursing staff and members of emergency medical services. Additionally practitioners were involved in evaluating two different head-mounted displays. Based on these measures, use cases and usability considerations according to interaction design and information visualization were derived and are described in this contribution.
Polycentric city and multi-worker households: an agent-based microeconomic model

Polycentrism in cities is studied with the help of an agent-based model grounded in the Alonso, Muth, Mills (AMM) framework, using microeconomic interactions between heterogeneous agents. This model is shown to reproduce the standard urban equilibrium with two income groups. Two job centers at various distances from each other are introduced, and the economic, social and environmental outcomes of these various polycentric spatial structures are presented. Then we introduce two-worker households whose partners may work in different job centers. If all households are "split", i.e. the two partners work in different job centers, polycentrism is shown to be undesirable. When various two-worker households are mixed we find that polycentrism is desirable, as long as centers are not moved too far apart from each other. The environmental outcome is also positive for small values of this distance, but this positive effect is mitigated by the fact that housing surfaces increase.
A Robust Ensemble Based Approach to Combine Heterogeneous Classifiers in the Presence of Class Label Noise

In this paper, we introduced a classifier ensemble approach to combine heterogeneous classifiers in the presence of class label noise in the datasets. To enhance the performance of classifier ensemble, we give a preprocessing approach to filter out this class label noise. The filtered data is then used to learn individual classifier model. After that, a weight learning method is introduced to learn weights on each individual classifier to create a classifier ensemble. We applied genetic algorithm to search for an optimal weight vector on which classifier ensemble is expected to give best accuracy. The proposed approach is evaluated on variety of real life datasets. The proposed technique is also compared with existing standard ensemble techniques such as Adaboost, Bagging and RSM to show the superiority of proposed ensemble method, in the presence of class label noise, as compared to its competitors and also to show the sensitivity of competitors to class label noise.
Implementation of Fuzzy K-Means In Multi-Type Feature Coselection For Clustering

Feature Selection is a preprocessing technique in supervised learning for improving predictive accuracy while reducing dimension in clustering and categorization. Multitype Feature Coselection for Clustering (MFCC) with hard k means is the algorithm which uses intermediate results in one type of feature space enhancing feature selection in other spaces, better feature set is co selected by heterogeneous features to produce better cluster in each space. Soft Clustering is an optimization technique of data analysis and pattern recognition which allocates a set of observations to cluster in a fuzzy way, constructing a membership-function matrix whose (i, j) th element represents the "the degree of belonging" of the i th observations to the j th cluster. This paper presents the empirical results of the MFCC algorithm with soft clustering and also gives the comparison results of MFCC with hard and soft k means. Fuzzy k-means clustering is proposed for getting the robustness against the outliers.
Automatic keyword selection for sentiment analysis using class dependency and dissimilarity

Sentiment analysis is a task for analyzing and extracting opinions from review documents on web sites, blogs, social media, and others in order to understand the opinions of consumers. Sentiment analysis methods can analyze sentiments of people and identify types of sentiment by classifying them into positive or negative opinions. In this paper, we propose a new automatic keyword selection method for selecting subsets of keywords for sentiment analysis using the information of class dependency and dissimilarity. The proposed method can be used for removing noisy words for reducing the size of training data for faster training by classifiers. The experimental results show that the proposed method can select the concerned subset of keywords for reducing the size of training data and can improve the classification performance of classifiers, compared with four different types of classifiers.
A Systematic Approach to Process Selection in MEMS

A systematic approach is developed to select manufacturing Process Chains for the generic elements of a MEMS device. A database of MEMS Process Chains and their attendant process attributes is developed from an extensive review of the literature, and used to construct Process Attribute charts. The performance requirements of MEMS beams and trenches are translated into the same set of Process Attributes. This allows for a screening of the Process Chains to obtain a list of candidate manufacturing methods. This method is illustrated in a brief design example.1202
4 Arithmetic in finite fields II

We saw in Lecture 3 how to efficiently multiply integers, and, using Kronecker substitution, how to efficiently multiply polynomials with integer coefficients. This gives us what we need to multiply elements in finite fields, provided that we have a way to reduce the result to our standard representations of Fp ' Z/pZ and Fq ' Fp[x]/(f), using integers in [0, p− 1] and polynomials of degree less than deg f , respectively. In both cases we use Euclidean division.
Effective Detection of HIV

&NA;Biomedical advances, new HIV testing technologies, and policy shifts in the last 15 years have created substantial new challenges and opportunities for service providers, policy makers, and researchers regarding broad scale identification of HIVseropositive persons. Effective HIV testing will be achieved when we: (1) increase the number of high‐risk persons tested; (2) decrease the time from HIV infection to detection; (3) increase testing acceptability; (4) increase the proportion of individuals tested who receive their results; and (5) increase the proportion of individuals tested seropositive who are linked to care. Strategies to enhance effectiveness include implementing new testing technologies and delivery modalities; expanding access to clientcontrolled testing; targeting providers' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding HIV testing; mainstreaming HIV testing as routine clinical care; targeting persons who engage in high‐risk behaviors and those in high‐risk groups; and implementing a national behavioral surveillance system. Addressing these challenges will improve HIV detection in the United States, which is vital to both HIV prevention and treatment.
Using Stress Models to Evaluate Immuno-Modulating Effects of Nutritional Intervention in Healthy Individuals

There is clear evidence that nutritional supplementation helps to restore immune function and contributes to optimal resistance to infections in malnourished people. However, the literature is less clear on the suggested benefits of dietary supplementation for immune function in healthy, well nourished subjects. Such studies are hampered by large variability in immune function markers and clinical outcome measures, which are known to be affected by factors such as genotype, age, gender, history of infections and vaccinations, and various stressors associated with lifestyle. Therefore, there appears to be a need to employ experimental models that control and/or manipulate the factors that are responsible for this variability. Conceivably, such a model could experimentally apply various forms of stress to physiologically suppress the immune system and assess whether nutritional intervention can (partially) compensate the deleterious effects. Here we review effects of psychological stress, physical exertion, and sleep deprivation on various aspects of immune function and susceptibility to common infections. We focus on the usefulness of such stress models to evaluate the putative beneficial role of diets/nutrients on immune function in healthy individuals.
Die synaptische Architektur des Zapfen-Endfüßchens

Zusammenfassung In der Netzhaut des menschlichen Auges gibt es etwa 120 Millionen Stäbchen und 6 Millionen Zapfen. Sie absorbieren das Licht, wandeln es in elektrische Signale um und leiten dann durch Ausschüttung des Neurotransmitters Glutamat die visuelle Information über die Bipolarzellen an die Ganglienzellen weiter. Die Zapfen, verantwortlich für das Sehen bei Tageslicht, die Sehschärfe und für die Farbwahrnehmung, weisen eine hochkomplexe synaptische Architektur auf. Bereits an dieser ersten Synapse des Sehsystems, dem Zapfen-Endfüßchen, wird das Lichtsignal moduliert und in verschiedene parallele Übertragungswege aufgespaltet. Entscheidend ist dabei die Expression unterschiedlicher Transmitterrezeptoren an den zahlreichen Kontakten zwischen den Zapfen-Endfüßchen und den nachgeschalteten Bipolar- und Horizontalzellen. Zusätzlich sind die Zellen häufig über elektrische Synapsen gekoppelt. Mittels konfokaler Laser-Scanning-Lichtmikroskopie sowie elektronenmikroskopischer Methoden sind wir in der Lage, die synaptischen Komponenten und deren Verteilung im Detail zu untersuchen - und somit Einblick in die Funktionsweise dieser außergewöhnlichen Synapse zu erhalten.
Surgical pleth index-guided remifentanil administration reduces remifentanil and propofol consumption and shortens recovery times in outpatient anaesthesia.

BACKGROUND The surgical pleth index (SPI) is an index based on changes in plethysmographic characteristics that correlate with the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. It has been proposed as a measure of the balance between nociception and anti-nociception. The goal of this study was to test whether it could be used to titrate remifentanil in day-case anaesthesia. METHODS A total of 170 outpatients were given total i.v. anaesthesia with propofol and remifentanil. The patients were randomized to have the remifentanil dose either adjusted according to the SPI (SPI group) or to clinical parameters (control group). The propofol dose was adjusted according to entropy in both groups. The consumption of anaesthetic drugs, recovery times, and complications were compared. RESULTS The mean [standard deviation (SD)] remifentanil and propofol infusion rates in the SPI and control groups were 0.06 (0.04) vs 0.08 (0.05) µg kg(-1) min(-1) and 6.0 (2.1) vs 7.5 (2.2) mg kg(-1) h(-1), respectively (both P<0.05). The mean (SD) times to eye opening were -0.08 (4.4) and 3.5 (4.3) min and to extubation were 1.2 (4.4) and 4.4 (4.5) min in the SPI and control groups, respectively (both P<0.05). There was no difference between the groups with regard to satisfaction with the anaesthetic or intensity of postoperative pain. No patient reported intraoperative awareness. CONCLUSIONS Adjusting the remifentanil dosage according to the SPI in outpatient anaesthesia reduced the consumption of both remifentanil and propofol and resulted in faster recovery.
Study on the reinitiation of transcription in 37 RC cells after actinomycin D inhibition. Spectrum of major RNA species resynthesized after maximal suppression by the drug

The reinitiation of the synthesis of major RNA species has been studied in 37 RC cells after maximal inhibition of RNA synthesis by actinomycin D (AMD). During the period of recovery from AMD, resynthesized RNA (rec- RNA) is initially composed of almost exclusively light (4-14S) heterogeneous RNA species. All normal species of RNA can be detected in the rec-RNA spectrum as early as 3 h after AMD removal. The synthesis of low molecular weight methylated RNA species increases slightly during the early period after AMD removal, while the increase of low molecular weight unmethylated species is more significant during the same period. Much of the radioactivity in the polyribosomal fraction is EDTA and puromycin sensitive. Since polysomal, puromycin-sensitive RNA is polyadenylated (as evidenced by the binding of poly-U filters), and is heterogenous in size, it belongs to the m-RNA class. The synthesis of m-RNA increases immediately after AMD removal, whereas the reinitiation of the r-RNA synthesis occurs after a lag period of about 2 h. The kinetics of recovery of the synthesis of major RNA species from AMD inhibition show a size dependency comparable to the size- related sensitivity to AMD inhibition in other cellular systems. This dependency is most clearly seen in HnRNA, the AMD sensitivity of which is measured by the length of the lag period between AMD removal and the appearance of HnRNA fractions in a sucrose density gradient. Low molecular weight HnRNA reappears first, whereas heavier fractions of HnRNA appear in the spectrum after a lag period, the length of which is in direct relation to the position of the HnRNA fraction in the gradient.
Impaired arousal in rat pups with prenatal alcohol exposure is modulated by GABAergic mechanisms

Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) increases the risk for The Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in human infants. In rat pups, the arousal response to hypoxia is modulated by medullary raphe GABAergic mechanisms. We hypothesized that arousal to hypoxia is impaired by PAE, and is associated with an increase in medullary GABA and enhanced GABAergic activity. Pregnant dams received an ethanol liquid diet (ETOH), an iso‐caloric pair fed diet (PF) or a standard chow diet (CHOW). We first measured the time to arousal (latency), during four episodes of hypoxia in P5, P15, and P21 CHOW, PF, and ETOH pups. We also measured brainstem GABA concentration in the same groups of pups. Finally, we injected artificial cerebrospinal fluid (aCSF), nipecotic acid (NIP) or gabazine into the medullary raphe of P15 and P21 pups receiving the three diets. For statistical analysis, the PF and CHOW groups were combined into a single CONTROL group. Our main finding was that compared to CONTROL, arousal latency to hypoxia is increased in ETOH pups at P15 and P21, and the concentration of brainstem GABA is elevated at P21. NIP administration in CONTROL pups led to arousal latencies similar in magnitude to those in ETOH pups after aCSF injection. NIP injected ETOH pups had no further increases in arousal latency. We conclude that PAE impairs arousal latency and this is mediated or modulated by medullary GABAergic mechanisms.