Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Look Back at an Ongoing Problem: Shigella dysenteriae Type 1 Epidemics in Refugee Settings in Central Africa (1993–1995)

Background Shigella dysenteriae type 1 (Sd1) is a cause of major dysentery outbreaks, particularly among children and displaced populations in tropical countries. Although outbreaks continue, the characteristics of such outbreaks have rarely been documented. Here, we describe the Sd1 outbreaks occurring between 1993 and 1995 in 11 refugee settlements in Rwanda, Tanzania and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). We also explored the links between the different types of the camps and the magnitude of the outbreaks. Methodology/Principal Findings Number of cases of bloody diarrhea and deaths were collected on a weekly basis in 11 refugee camps, and analyzed retrospectively. Between November 1993 and February 1995, 181,921 cases of bloody diarrhea were reported. Attack rates ranged from 6.3% to 39.1% and case fatality ratios (CFRs) from 1.5% to 9.0% (available for 5 camps). The CFRs were higher in children under age 5. In Tanzania where the response was rapidly deployed, the mean attack rate was lower than in camps in the region of Goma without an immediate response (13.3% versus 32.1% respectively). Conclusions/Significance This description, and the areas where data is missing, highlight both the importance of collecting data in future epidemics, difficulties in documenting outbreaks occurring in complex emergencies and most importantly, the need to assure that minimal requirements are met.
Heart Failure in Patients with Preserved Ejection Fraction: Questions Concerning Clinical Progression

Over the last two decades, important advances have been made in explaining some pathophysiological aspects of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) with repercussions for the successful clinical management of the syndrome. Despite these gains, our knowledge for the natural history of clinical progression from the pre-clinical diastolic dysfunction (PDD) until the final clinical stages is significantly limited. The subclinical progression of PDD to the clinical phenotype of HFpEF and the further clinical progression to some more complex clinical models with multi-organ involvement, similar to heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), continue to be poorly understood. Prospective studies are needed to elucidate the natural history of clinical progression in patients with HFpEF and to identify the exact left ventricular remodeling mechanism that underlies this progression.
Police tactics in incidents with mentally disturbed persons

In recent years police departments have responded to increasing numbers of incidents involving mentally disturbed people. Data for this study were drawn from a survey of 90 officers in a special unit mandated to respond to such situations and from their detailed descriptions of 90 specific incidents. Explores the types of incidents, their relative frequency, the characteristics of such incidents, and especially police tactics considered to be effective or ineffective. Discusses the findings in terms of police department organizational structure as well as individual officers’ beliefs about the mentally disturbed and tactical choices.
Approximation of Length Minimization Problems Among Compact Connected Sets

In this paper we provide an approximation \`a la Ambrosio-Tortorelli of some classical minimization problems involving the length of an unknown one-dimensional set, with an additional connectedness constraint, in dimension two. We introduce a term of new type relying on a weighted geodesic distance that forces the minimizers to be connected at the limit. We apply this approach to approximate the so-called Steiner Problem, but also the average distance problem, and finally a problem relying on the p-compliance energy. The proof of convergence of the approximating functional, which is stated in terms of Gamma-convergence relies on technical tools from geometric measure theory, as for instance a uniform lower bound for a sort of average directional Minkowski content of a family of compact connected sets.
DualVisor: Redundant Hypervisor Execution for Achieving Hardware Error Resilience in Datacenters

Virtualization technology as the foundation of cloud computing provides many benefits in cost, security, and management, but all of them rely on the reliability of the underlying virtualization software - the hypervisor (or virtual machine monitor). Cloud data centers are built upon 10Ks to 100Ks commodity servers. Hardware errors in these large scale computer systems are not rare events. When hardware errors occur during the hypervisor execution, they may cause failures or data corruptions in co-located VMs, undermining the whole system reliability. In this paper, we propose DualVisor, that uses a software redundancy based fault tolerance technique to protect the hypervisor from hardware errors. DualVisor replicates hypervisor executions and data structures for error detection and recovery. In this work, we first study the need for a hardware error-resilient hypervisor. Then, we discuss the design considerations in detail. We implement a prototype in the hypervisor to demonstrate the feasibility and evaluate the performance overhead. Our preliminary results show that the performance overhead of DualVisor is fairly small (less than 6%) for tested applications.
Bullying in German boarding schools: A pilot study

Adolescents who attend boarding schools share more time with peers than do students from day schools which, in turn, could provide more opportunities for bullying. Furthermore, some students attend boarding schools because of former social problems. In order to analyse the role of these factors, we examined the bullying behaviour of 706 German adolescents at boarding and day schools in a cross-sectional design. Adolescents at boarding schools showed higher levels of bullying by comparison to adolescents in day schools. Elevated levels of overt bullying in boarding schools could be explained by selection effects. In addition, more time spent with peers was associated with elevated levels of relational victimization. Furthermore, being overtly bullied showed stronger negative associations with life-satisfaction in students from boarding school than in students living at home.
Children's Moral and Affective Judgments Regarding Provocation and Retaliation

Moral judgments, attributions of emotion, and their associations were examined in hypothetical, prototypical situations and situations of provocation and peer retaliation. Eighty-one school-age children, 46 kindergartners and first graders and 35 2nd-4th graders, judged prototypical and provoked moral transgressions (hitting and teasing). Children judged hypothetical moral transgressions to be more serious and more deserving of punishment, and they reasoned more about concerns with others' welfare, for prototypical than for provoked transgressions and when retaliation involved hitting rather than teasing. Children's moral condemnation of provocation increased with age. Across conditions, children attributed greater happiness to transgressors than to victims; "happy victimizer" responses decreased with age for prototypical but not for provoked transgressions. Moreover, retaliators were seen as both happier and angrier than their victims. Anger increased and sadness decreased with age, but children's emotion attributions were not associated with their moral judgments about either prototypical or provoked transgressions.
Ligand Specificity Determined by Differentially Arranged Common Ligand-binding Residues in Bacterial Amino Acid Chemoreceptors Tsr and Tar*

Escherichia coli has closely related amino acid chemoreceptors with distinct ligand specificity, Tar for l-aspartate and Tsr for l-serine. Crystallography of the ligand-binding domain of Tar identified the residues interacting with aspartate, most of which are conserved in Tsr. However, swapping of the nonconserved residues between Tsr and Tar did not change ligand specificity. Analyses with chimeric receptors led us to hypothesize that distinct three-dimensional arrangements of the conserved ligand-binding residues are responsible for ligand specificity. To test this hypothesis, the structures of the apo- and serine-binding forms of the ligand-binding domain of Tsr were determined at 1.95 and 2.5 Å resolutions, respectively. Some of the Tsr residues are arranged differently from the corresponding aspartate-binding residues of Tar to form a high affinity serine-binding pocket. The ligand-binding pocket of Tsr was surrounded by negatively charged residues, which presumably exclude negatively charged aspartate molecules. We propose that all these Tsr- and Tar-specific features contribute to specific recognition of serine and aspartate with the arrangement of the side chain of residue 68 (Asn in Tsr and Ser in Tar) being the most critical.
Survival and divergence in a small group: The extraordinary genomic history of the endangered Apennine brown bear stragglers

Significance A small and relict population of brown bears lives in complete isolation in the Italian Apennine Mountains, providing a unique opportunity to study the impact of drift and selection on the genomes of a large endangered mammal and reconstruct the phenotypic consequences and the conservation implications of such evolutionary processes. The Apennine bear is highly inbred and harbors very low genomic variation. Several deleterious mutations have been accumulated by drift. We found evidence that this is a consequence of habitat fragmentation in the Neolithic, when human expansion and land clearance shrank its habitat, and that retention of variation at immune system and olfactory receptor genes as well as changes in diet and behavior prevented the extinction of the Apennine bear. About 100 km east of Rome, in the central Apennine Mountains, a critically endangered population of ∼50 brown bears live in complete isolation. Mating outside this population is prevented by several 100 km of bear-free territories. We exploited this natural experiment to better understand the gene and genomic consequences of surviving at extremely small population size. We found that brown bear populations in Europe lost connectivity since Neolithic times, when farming communities expanded and forest burning was used for land clearance. In central Italy, this resulted in a 40-fold population decline. The overall genomic impact of this decline included the complete loss of variation in the mitochondrial genome and along long stretches of the nuclear genome. Several private and deleterious amino acid changes were fixed by random drift; predicted effects include energy deficit, muscle weakness, anomalies in cranial and skeletal development, and reduced aggressiveness. Despite this extreme loss of diversity, Apennine bear genomes show nonrandom peaks of high variation, possibly maintained by balancing selection, at genomic regions significantly enriched for genes associated with immune and olfactory systems. Challenging the paradigm of increased extinction risk in small populations, we suggest that random fixation of deleterious alleles (i) can be an important driver of divergence in isolation, (ii) can be tolerated when balancing selection prevents random loss of variation at important genes, and (iii) is followed by or results directly in favorable behavioral changes.
The mediating effects of expatriate adjustment and operational capabilityon the success of expatriation

In this study the mediating effects of expatriates’ operational capability on the success of expatriation were examined. The moderating effects of social support were also tested in this study. Two hundred and twenty-two expatriates of Taiwanese multinational companies (MNCs) participated in the survey. Results reveal that expatriates’ personality has direct effects on perceived adjustment and operational capability. The expatriates’ operational capability was found to be a mediating variable for both expatriates’ personality and adjustment on performance. Moreover, social support moderated the effects of expatriate personality on perceived adjustment, operational capability, and performance. The practical implications as well as academic contributions of the research are presented.
Long-Term Effects of Homeownership on the Self-Perceptions and Social Interaction of Low-Income Persons

A variety of public, private and non-profit organizations have developed programs to assist low-income families purchase homes. These programs are often justified on the grounds that homeownership has a number of social and-psychological benefits. On the individual level, homeowners are said to enjoy higher social status and self-esteem, increased sense of control, and higher levels of life satisfaction. On the societal level, homeowners are said to have higher rates of participation in voluntary organizations and local social interaction. The longitudinal research described in this article assesses the validity of these claims by comparing changes in self esteem, perceived control, life satisfaction and social interaction between a group of low-income home buyers and a demographically similar group of continuing renters. The results show that home ownership has a positive and significant impact on both the life satisfaction and participation in neighborhood and block association meetings. Home ownership, however, was not found to significantly affect self-esteem, perceived control or informal social interaction in the local area.
Energy-efficient MAC schemes for Delay-Tolerant Sensor Networks

Delay-Tolerant Sensor Networks (DTSN) experience long, unpredictable latency under fluctuating wireless networks with intermittent connectivity. Energy consumption and throughput improvement are essential in the design of MAC for DTSNs. However, when latency is relaxed in DTSN environments, traditional metrics such as throughput and energy consumption cannot express the transmission efficiency and energy consumption. Therefore, transmission strategies in DTSNs can use data packets over energy as energy efficiency to demonstrate efficiency under the requirements of high data volumes and energy conservation. In this paper, we examine and analyze the MAC parameters that impact energy efficiency with reservation-based and contention-based MAC approaches under DTSN environments. Simulation results from two typical MAC protocols also match the results of our analysis regarding energy efficiency in DTSN.
Tag suggestion using visual content and social tag

With the popularity of social media sharing sites such as Flickr or YouTube, tagging has become a more important task to describe the content of the multimedia object. Recently, automatic tagging or tag recommendation has studied to automatically provide a relevant tag to the media by analyzing the user tags. However, the social tags annotated by common users are known to be ambiguous and subjective because of biased tags by individual users. In this paper, we present the task of combining visual content and social tag for tag suggestion. Our method finds the visual neighbors using subject-based visual content analysis, and analyzes the social tags of visual neighbors by weighted neighbor voting technique. This enables to solve the problem that general voting technique can give irrelevant tags caused by the low performance of visual search. We evaluate our method on a social-tagged image database from Flickr by comparing our method to visual-based and tag-based methods. Our experimental results show that our method has an improvement in tag suggestion or image tagging.
Treatment Outcome Assessment of the Pharmacist-Managed Quit Smoking Clinic in Malaysia

Introduction: Evaluating a new health service is different from evaluating a new drug, as the former depends on the local delivery structure and culture. No data are available on the effectiveness of the existing pharmacist-managed quit smoking clinic (PM-QSC) in Malaysia. We evaluated the effectiveness in terms of the quit and default rate, the cost per quitter, cost per patient and the number of days of the patient remained in the managed care of the pharmacist. Methods: The patients’ medical records at the PM-QSC in a tertiary hospital in Melaka, Malaysia, were examined retrospectively from January 2009 to December 2010. Patients were grouped into current smokers, attempted to quit and quitters. Costs were calculated per patient visit on the basis of resource used (smoking cessation agents (SCAs)) and the personnel involved (time spent by the pharmacist). This study was reviewed and approved by the Malaysia Research Ethics Committee (MREC). Results: The quit rate between January 2009 and December 2010 was 5.8%, and the default rate was 71.8%. The average quit period for all smokers enrolled was 298 days. From the health provider perspective, the average costs per quitter, per patient and per quit attempt were MYR 953.28 (USD 308), MYR 55.71 (USD 18) and MYR 34.74 (USD 11), respectively. Conclusion: The pharmacist delivery of cessation services at a public-funded QSC was associated with a high default rate. The pharmacist could not be dismissed entirely as an ineffective health care professional (HCP) for the provision of the cessation service based solely on this preliminary data, but these findings stress the need to address the high default rate prior to the expansion of the service.
Some experiences with experimental high level fusion systems

A very short overview is given on experience gained in the area of high level information fusion (JDL level 2 and 3) since 1988. The main characteristics of the referenced projects and experimental systems for the support of intelligence officers in land battle missions will be outlined. The different approaches to analyse and model military intelligence processing and the development of concepts and methods are described. Lessons learned from these projects are used to give a personal perception of the actual situation in level 2/3 fusion activities for intelligence and to suggest possible ways ahead for further research.
Flexible Hermetically-Sealed Mobile Robot for Narrow Spaces Using Hydrostatic Skeleton Driving Mechanism

Almost all of conventional mobile robots for narrow spaces exploration, e.g. rescue robots, adopt crawler or wheel mechanisms. However, in narrow spaces, such robot is often stuck because the robot body is sandwiched between both sides of a terrain. Especially, with normal crawler or wheel mechanisms, it is impossible to penetrate into narrow spaces lower than the height of the robot. In addition, sealing bushes of drive shaft cause unignorable energy loss because of rotational resistances. In order to solve these problems, this study proposes an innovative flexible robot with new hydrostatic skeleton driving mechanism. The main components of the robot are a hermetically-sealed outer cover with looped structure and flexible crawlers with hydrostatic skeleton named HS crawlers. This new robot provides remarkable advantages in narrow spaces as listed below: i) The robot can change its shape adapting to terrain; ii) All ground contact areas of the robot are driven toward the same direction. Thus, the robot is able to penetrate into narrow spaces changing its shape even if the terrain is rather narrower than the size of the robot. This paper describes the mechanisms of the robot and the detail of the HS crawler. Driving force of the HS crawler is discussed with comparison of simulation and experiment. Performance of first prototype robot is verified by experiments of wireless driving and passing narrow space. The prototype robot could pass through a space of 300 mm height, whereas the ordinary height of the robot is 420 mm
Role of Microglia in CNS Autoimmunity

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS) in the Western world. The disease is characterized histologically by the infiltration of encephalitogenic TH1/TH17-polarized CD4+ T cells, B cells, and a plethora of myeloid cells, resulting in severe demyelination ultimately leading to a degeneration of neuronal structures. These pathological processes are substantially modulated by microglia, the resident immune competent cells of the CNS. In this overview, we summarize the current knowledge regarding the highly diverse and complex function of microglia during CNS autoimmunity in either promoting tissue injury or tissue repair. Hence, understanding microglia involvement in MS offers new exciting paths for therapeutic intervention.
Numerical estimates of the generalized dimensions of the H´ enon attractor for negative q

The usual fixed-size box-counting algorithms are inefficient for computing generalized fractal dimensions in the range of q< 0. In this letter we describe a new numerical algorithm specifically devised to estimate generalized dimensions for large negative q, providing evidence of its better performance. We compute the complete spectrum of the Hattractor, and interpret our results in terms of a 'phase transition' between different multiplicative laws.
A recommended framework for anomaly intrusion detection system (IDS)

Signature-based solutions for Intrusion Detection are dominant in practice despite of its incapability to detect zero-day attacks. Moreover, anomaly-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), a promising approach against both known and unknown attacks, are not mature for a broad productive use. Therefore, the further development of anomaly based IDS is an imperative task to strengthen security in todays networked infrastructure. This motivates a detailed study to give a structured view of problems and challenges and of the current state in this field. For this purpose, a sound analysis of current limitations and a very comprehensive survey of research papers have been conducted. In this article, a short summary of the results of the survey is given. Furthermore, the survey led to important insights into future research efforts and a proposal for a promising future IDS architecture, which is presented in this work.
Upper bound performance estimation for copper based broadband access

Around 70% of all broadband connections in the European Union are carried over copper, and the scenario is unlikely to change in the next few years as carriers still believe in the profitability of their copper infrastructure. In this paper we show how to estimate the performance upper bound of copper based access connections at a household level by using Geographical Information System data. This can be combined with different configurations of DSLAMs distributions, in order to calculate the required number of active equipment points to guarantee certain QoS levels. This method can be used to define the limitations of copper based broadband access. A case study in a municipality in Denmark shows how the estimated network dimension to be able to provide video conference services to the majority of the population might be too high to be implemented in reality.