Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
May Measurement Month 2017: an analysis of blood pressure screening in Angola—Sub–Saharan Africa

Abstract Elevated blood pressure (BP) is a growing burden worldwide, leading to over 10 million deaths each year. May Measurement Month (MMM) is a global initiative aimed at raising awareness of high BP and to act as a temporary solution to the lack of screening programmes worldwide. There is increasing prevalence of hypertension in developing countries leading to increased risk of adverse outcomes. An opportunistic cross-sectional survey of volunteers aged ≥18 was carried out in May 2017. Blood pressure measurement, the definition of hypertension and statistical analysis followed the standard MMM protocol. In Angola, 17 481 individuals were screened in six provinces with an average BP of 126/78 mmHg. After multiple imputation, 6022 (34.5%) had hypertension. Of individuals not receiving antihypertensive medication, 4080 (26.3%) were hypertensive. Of those receiving antihypertensive medication, 1159 (59.7%) had uncontrolled BP. MMM17 was the largest BP screening campaign undertaken in Angola. These results suggest that there is still a significant percentage of patients who are not medicated and possibly require medication, and more than half of the hypertensive patients do not have controlled BP demonstrating the need for a more targeted and comprehensive screening of BP and more effective treatment.
Flecked retina syndrome.

Fundi characterized by a limited or widespread distribution of deep yellowish or white lesions of various size and configuration without vascular and optic nerve abnormalities or pigment migration have been described under several diagnoses. These have included Hutchinson-Tay choroiditis,1macular degeneration of Holthouse-Batten,2,3Doyne's honeycombed degeneration,4malattia Levantinese,5fundus flavimaculatus,6fundus albipunctatus (stationary form of retinitis punctata albescens),7the speckled multicolored fundus,8the fleck retina9and a general category in which the deposits are called colloid bodies or drusen and are either widespread or limited to the posterior polar region.6Such ophthalmoscopic findings have also been described in some cases classified as hereditary macular degenerations. There are, however, only three characteristic fundi among all of these conditions, despite the multiple appellations. One type is seen only in fundus albipunctatus. In this condition there are white or yellow-white uniform dot-like lesions over
A small RNA response at DNA ends in Drosophila

Small RNAs have been implicated in numerous cellular processes, including effects on chromatin structure and the repression of transposons. We describe the generation of a small RNA response at DNA ends in Drosophila that is analogous to the recently reported double-strand break (DSB)-induced RNAs or Dicer- and Drosha-dependent small RNAs in Arabidopsis and vertebrates. Active transcription in the vicinity of the break amplifies this small RNA response, demonstrating that the normal messenger RNA contributes to the endogenous small interfering RNAs precursor. The double-stranded RNA precursor forms with an antisense transcript that initiates at the DNA break. Breaks are thus sites of transcription initiation, a novel aspect of the cellular DSB response. This response is specific to a double-strand break since nicked DNA structures do not trigger small RNA production. The small RNAs are generated independently of the exact end structure (blunt, 3′- or 5′-overhang), can repress homologous sequences in trans and may therefore—in addition to putative roles in repair—exert a quality control function by clearing potentially truncated messages from genes in the vicinity of the break.
Analog cochlear implant using Sinh-Domain filters

An analog cochlear implant topology realized by utilizing the concept of Sinh-Domain filtering is presented in this work. Owing to the inherent class-AB operation of Sinh-Domain filters, the proposed topology has the capability for handling currents larger than the corresponding dc bias currents, and avoiding the employment of two identical signal paths constructed from class-A configurations, as in the case of the corresponding Log-Domain realization. Both single-channel and multi-channel cochlea configurations have been presented. The correct operation of both configurations has been verified by employing the OrCAD Pspice simulator and MOS transistors typical models provided by the AMS S35 0. 35µm BiCMOS process.
MetAmp: combining amplicon data from multiple markers for OTU analysis

Motivation: We present a novel method and corresponding application, MetAmp, to combine amplicon data from multiple genomic markers into Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) for microbial community analysis, calibrating the markers using data from known microbial genomes. When amplicons for multiple markers such as the 16S rRNA gene hypervariable regions are available, MetAmp improves the accuracy of OTU-based methods for characterizing bacterial composition and community structure. MetAmp works best with at least three markers, and is applicable to non-bacterial analyses and to non 16S markers. Our application and testing have been limited to 16S analysis of microbial communities. Results: We clustered standard test sequences derived from the Human Microbiome Mock Community test sets and compared MetAmp and other tools with respect to their ability to recover OTUs for these benchmark bacterial communities. MetAmp compared favorably to QIIME, UPARSE and Mothur using amplicons from one, two, and three markers. Availability and implementation: MetAmp is available at http://izhbannikov.github. io/MetAmp/ Contact: ilyaz@uidaho.edu, foster@uidaho.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
HIGH-RESOLUTION MID-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY OF NGC 7538 IRS 1: PROBING CHEMISTRY IN A MASSIVE YOUNG STELLAR OBJECT

We present high-resolution (R = 75,000–100,000) mid-infrared spectra of the high-mass embedded young star IRS 1 in the NGC 7538 star-forming region. Absorption lines from many rotational states of C2H2, 13C12CH2, CH3, CH4, NH3, HCN, HNCO, and CS are seen. The gas temperature, column density, covering factor, line width, and Doppler shift for each molecule are derived. All molecules were fit with two velocity components between −54 and −63 km s−1. We find high column densities (∼1016 cm−2) for all the observed molecules compared to values previously reported and present new results for CH3 and HNCO. Several physical and chemical models are considered. The favored model involves a nearly edge-on disk around a massive star. Radiation from dust in the inner disk passes through the disk atmosphere, where large molecular column densities can produce the observed absorption line spectrum.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T: patient reports of disrespect in the health care setting and its impact on care.

OBJECTIVE The health care encounter is a setting in which racial/ethnic disparities can arise. Patients who experience disrespect in this encounter may be less likely to use health care services that improve outcomes. The objective of this study was to examine factors in the health care encounter and to model how negative perceptions of the encounter influence health care utilization. DESIGN, SUBJECTS, AND SETTING Data were derived from the Commonwealth Fund 2001 Health Care Quality Survey, a nationwide random-digit-dial survey of 6722 adults, conducted between April 30 and November 5, 2001. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were performed on weighted data. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Measures of negative perceptions of the patient-provider relationship included feelings of being treated with disrespect or being looked down upon, a belief that unfair treatment was received due to race or language spoken, and a belief that better treatment would have been received had the respondent had been of a different race. Measures of utilization included receipt of a physical exam within the prior year, receipt of optimal cancer screening and recommended elements of chronic disease care, delay of needed care, and not following the doctor's advice. MAIN RESULTS Minorities were significantly more likely to report being treated with disrespect or being looked down upon in the patient-provider relationship. Specifically, 14.1% of blacks (P=.06), 19.4% of Hispanics (P<.001), and 20.2% if Asians (P<.001) perceived being treated with disrespect or being looked down upon, compared with only 9.4% of whites. Persons who thought that they would have received better treatment if they were of a different race were significantly less likely to receive optimal chronic disease screening and more likely to not follow the doctor's advice or put off care (P<.01). CONCLUSIONS Perceptions of disrespect or of receiving unfair treatment within the patient-provider relationship are prevalent, particularly among racial/ethnic minorities. Such negative perceptions influence health care utilization and may contribute to existing health disparities.
Does heart failure etiology, New York Heart Association class, or ejection fraction affect the ability of clopidogrel to inhibit heightened platelet activity?

The ability of clopidogrel to inhibit platelet function in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) was proved by the PLUTO-CHF trial. We retrospectively analyzed platelet characteristics with respect to CHF etiology, class, and ejection fraction in patients enrolled in the PLUTO-CHF study. Twenty-five patients were divided by CHF etiology, severity, and ejection fraction. All patients received aspirin 325 mg for at least 1 month prior to screening. Platelet function studies were performed at baseline and after 30 days of therapy. There were no differences in platelet parameters dependent on clinical characteristics of CHF, except for a significant (P = 0.023) decrease in platelet/endothelial cell adhesion molecule 1 (PECAM-1) expression in the New York Heart Association class III–IV due to the higher baseline values. Therapy with clopidogrel resulted in a significant inhibition of platelet activity assessed by ADP-induced and epinephrine-induced aggregation, closure time, expression of PECAM-1, glycoprotein Ib, glycoprotein IIb/IIIa antigen, glycoprotein IIb/IIIa activity with PAC-1, CD151, and reduced formation of platelet–leukocyte conjugates when compared with baseline. Clopidogrel provides antiplatelet protection in the broad spectrum of patients with CHF independently of its etiology, severity, or myocardial contractility. This uniform platelet inhibition with clopidogrel may be an important consideration in designing future large-scale clinical trials.
A static software birthmark based on use-define chains for detecting the theft of Java programs

Software birthmarking is a new technique used to detect the theft of programs. In the technique, a software birthmark is the inherent invariable features of a program that can be used to identify the program. Some typical semantics-preserving transformations will have a significant impact on order and frequency of instructions in programs. By introducing dataflow analysis techniques, dependencies of instructions that define or use variables in programs are established. The relations between these instructions can reduce the effect of semantics-preserving transformations such as shuffle stack operation, add fake exception, change switch statements and encrypt string in SmokeScreen. Classes are compared by the optimal matching algorithm. Thus a novel method of software birthmarking based on use-define chains is presented.
Keyword Weight Propagation for Indexing Structured Web Content

documents are atomically structured, it is possible to assign them keyword vectors to support indexing. Most web content, however, have non-atomic structures. These include navigational/semantic hierarchies on the web. Al- though they are especially effective for browsing, such struc- tures make it hard for individual nodes to be properly in- dexed. This is because, in many cases, their contents have to be inferred from the contents of their neighbors, ances- tors, and descendants in the structure. In this paper, we propose a novel keyword and keyword weight propagation technique to properly enrich the data nodes in structured content. In particular, our approach first relies on under- standing the context provided by the relative content rela- tionships between entries in the structure. We then lever- age this information for relative-content preserving keyword propagation. Experiments show that we observe a signifi- cant improvement (10 − 15%) in precision with the proposed keyword propagation algorithm.
Toll-Like Receptors in Leishmania Infections: Guardians or Promoters?

Protozoa of the genus Leishmania cause a wide variety of pathologies ranging from self-healing skin lesions to visceral damage, depending on the parasite species. The outcome of infection depends on the quality of the adaptive immune response, which is determined by parasite factors and the host genetic background. Innate responses, resulting in the generation of mediators with anti-leishmanial activity, contribute to parasite control and help the development of efficient adaptive responses. Among those, the potential contribution of members of the Toll-like receptors (TLRs) family in the control of Leishmania infections started to be investigated about a decade ago. Although most studies appoint a protective role for TLRs, there is growing evidence that in some cases, TLRs facilitate infection. This review highlights recent advances in TLR function during Leishmania infections and discusses their potential role in restraining parasite growth versus yielding disease.
Adaptive modulation method for MGS video streaming

This paper proposes resource allocation method for transmitting video streams intended to multiple users over time-varying wireless channel. Medium grain scalable video coding is employed to compress the video streams. The video coding method provides packets which can be dropped for bit rate adaptation at the cost of decoded video quality. This paper also employs adaptive modulation. It can provide channel adaptability. If the wireless channel environment degrades, it can select bandwidth inefficient modulation to guarantee solid transmission at the cost of affordable bit rate reduction. Since medium grain scalable video coding is considered, the situation can be handled by reducing the transmitted packets in order to serve real time streaming service. This paper issues two control factors which are video packet dropping and modulation scheme, and proposes a method to find out optimal combination of the two factors, where received video packets without error contribute to video quality. The proposed method solves Lagrange optimization problem to obtain optimal packet dropping and continuous modulation scheme.
Combining Speedup Techniques based on Landmarks and Containers with parallelised pre- processing in Random and Planar Graphs

The Dijkstra’s algorithm is applied in many real world problems like mobile routing, road maps, railway networks, etc,. There are many techniques available to speedup the algorithm while guaranteeing the optimality of the solution. Almost all of the speedup techniques have a substantial amount of parallelism that can be exploited to decrease its running time. By suitably modifying portions of the existing system various degrees of parallelism can be achieved. The rapidly growing field of multiprocessing systems and multi-core processors provide many opportunities for such improvements. In these techniques there’s always a demand for the running time and the time required for pre-processing. Space requirements for the pre-processing also have a major influence on the running time of the algorithm. The main focus of the work is to implement landmark technique and to identify the segment of the code in landmark pre-processing which can be parallelized to obtain better speedup. The results are applied to the combined speedup technique which is based on landmarks and containers. The experimental results were compared and analysed for determining better performance improvements in random graphs and planar graphs.
A Global Review of Food-Based Dietary Guidelines

ABSTRACT The objective of this review is to provide a concise, descriptive global review of current food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG), and to assess similarities and differences in key elements of a healthy diet articulated across countries. Information was sourced from the FBDG repository of the FAO, which catalogs FBDG for all countries where they are available, including a description of the food guide (the graphic representation of the dietary guidelines), a set of key messages, and downloadable documents provided by the countries. FBDG are currently available for 90 countries globally: 7 in Africa, 17 in Asia and the Pacific, 33 in Europe, 27 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 4 in the Near East, and 2 in North America. The year of publication of current versions ranges from 1986 to 2017 (mean 2009). This review provides summaries of the key messages and food guides that are used to communicate national dietary guidance, organized by food group, and evaluates the extent to which each set of FBDG includes existing recommendations articulated by the WHO. Some guidance appears nearly universally across countries: to consume a variety of foods; to consume some foods in higher proportion than others; to consume fruits and vegetables, legumes, and animal-source foods; and to limit sugar, fat, and salt. Guidelines on dairy, red meat, fats and oils, and nuts are more variable. Although WHO global guidance encourages consumption of nuts, whole grains, and healthy fats, these messages are not universally echoed across countries. Future frontiers in FBDG development include the incorporation of environmental sustainability and increased attention to sociocultural factors including rapidly changing dietary trends. Steps toward regional and global dietary recommendations could be helpful for refinement of country-level FBDG, and for clear communication and measurement of diet quality both nationally and globally.
A traditional-learning time predictive approach for e-learning systems in challenging environments

The explosion of world-wide-web has offered people a large number of online courses, e-classes and e-schools. Such e-learning applications contain a wide variety of learning materials which can confuse the choices of learner to select. Although the area of recommender systems has made a significant progress over the last several years to address this problem, the issue remained fairly unexplored for challenging environments. This paper proposes an approach to predict traditional-learning times for recommender systems in such environments. Received on 12 September 2016; accepted on 6 July 2017; published on 29 November 2017
Ehlers symmetry at the next derivative order

We analyse four-dimensional gravity in the presence of general curvature squared corrections and show that Ehlers' SL(2, ) symmetry, which appears in the reduction of standard gravity to three dimensions, is preserved by the correction terms. The mechanism allowing this is a correction of the SL(2, ) transformation laws which resolves problems with the different scaling behaviour of various terms occurring in the reduction.
Contributions à l'apprentissage par renforcement inverse

Cette these, intitulee "Contributions a l'apprentissage par renforcement inverse", fournit trois contributions majeures au domaine. La premiere est une methode d'estimation de l'attribut moyen, une quantite exploitee par la grande majorite des approches constituant l'etat de l'art. Elle a permis d'etendre ces approches au cadre batch et off-policy. La seconde contribution majeure est un algorithme d'apprentissage par renforcement inverse, structured classification for inverse reinforcement learning (SCIRL), qui relâche une contrainte standard du domaine, la resolution repetee d'un processus decisionnel de Markov en introduisant la structure temporelle (par le biais de l'attribut moyen) de ce processus dans un algorithme de classification structuree. Les garanties theoriques qui lui sont attachees et ses bonnes performances en pratique ont permis sa presentation dans une conference internationale prestigieuse : NIPS. Enfin, la troisieme contribution est constituee par la methode cascaded supervised learning for inverse reinforcement learning (CSI) consistant a apprendre le comportement de l'expert par une methode supervisee puis a introduire la structure temporelle du MDP par une regression mettant en jeu la fonction de score du classifieur utilise. Cette methode offre des garanties theoriques de meme nature que celle de SCIRL tout en presentant l'avantage d'utiliser des composants standards pour la classification et la regression, ce qui simplifie la mise en oeuvre. Ce travail sera presente dans une autre conference internationale prestigieuse : ECML
Transport of the Influenza Virus Genome from Nucleus to Nucleus

The segmented genome of an influenza virus is encapsidated into ribonucleoprotein complexes (RNPs). Unusually among RNA viruses, influenza viruses replicate in the nucleus of an infected cell, and their RNPs must therefore recruit host factors to ensure transport across a number of cellular compartments during the course of an infection. Recent studies have shed new light on many of these processes, including the regulation of nuclear export, genome packaging, mechanisms of virion assembly and viral entry and, in particular, the identification of Rab11 on recycling endosomes as a key mediator of RNP transport and genome assembly. This review uses these recent gains in understanding to describe in detail the journey of an influenza A virus RNP from its synthesis in the nucleus through to its entry into the nucleus of a new host cell.
Replication Slippage of Different DNA Polymerases Is Inversely Related to Their Strand Displacement Efficiency*

Replication slippage is a particular type of error caused by DNA polymerases believed to occur both in bacterial and eukaryotic cells. Previous studies have shown that deletion events can occur in Escherichia coli by replication slippage between short duplications and that the main E. coli polymerase, DNA polymerase III holoenzyme is prone to such slippage. In this work, we present evidence that the two other DNA polymerases of E. coli, DNA polymerase I and DNA polymerase II, as well as polymerases of two phages, T4 (T4 pol) and T7 (T7 pol), undergo slippage in vitro, whereas DNA polymerase from another phage, Φ29, does not. Furthermore, we have measured the strand displacement activity of the different polymerases tested for slippage in the absence and in the presence of the E. colisingle-stranded DNA-binding protein (SSB), and we show that: (i) polymerases having a strong strand displacement activity cannot slip (DNA polymerase from Φ29); (ii) polymerases devoid of any strand displacement activity slip very efficiently (DNA polymerase II and T4 pol); and (iii) stimulation of the strand displacement activity byE. coli SSB (DNA polymerase I and T7 pol), by phagic SSB (T4 pol), or by a mutation that affects the 3′ → 5′ exonuclease domain (DNA polymerase II exo− and T7 pol exo−) is correlated with the inhibition of slippage. We propose that these observations can be interpreted in terms of a model, for which we have shown that high strand displacement activity of a polymerase diminishes its propensity to slip.