Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of fat digestion in infancy

AIM To measure the development of fat digestion in early life, using a stable isotope breath test. METHODS A combined longitudinal and cross sectional study was performed on 30 term and preterm infants using 13C-labelled mixed triglyceride (MTG). Seventy six tests were performed in all. Results were expressed as cumulative percentage dose recovered over 6 hours (cPDR). RESULTS Eighteen of 34 tests performed on infants under 30 days of age showed cPDRs below the normal range for adults and older children. The remainder of tests, performed on infants over 57 days of age, all showed cPDRs within the normal range. Peak PDR correlated significantly (r = 0.928, p<0.01) with cPDR. CONCLUSION The capacity to digest fat is incomplete at birth, but quickly develops to normal levels during the first months of life. The MTG breath test is a useful non-invasive method to measure the development of fat digestion in early life. Key points Indirect evidence suggests that neonates have a limited capacity to digest dietary fat Using a 13C-labelled mixed triglyceride, infants show a rapid maturation in intraluminal fat digestion during the early months of life Stable isotope breath tests are a safe, simple, reproducible non-invasive way of measuring the development of fat digestion in early life
Infections with oseltamivir-resistant influenza A(H1N1) virus in the United States.

CONTEXT During the 2007-2008 influenza season, oseltamivir resistance among influenza A(H1N1) viruses increased significantly for the first time worldwide. Early surveillance data suggest that the prevalence of oseltamivir resistance among A(H1N1) viruses will most likely be higher during the 2008-2009 season. OBJECTIVES To describe patients infected with oseltamivir-resistant influenza A(H1N1) virus and to determine whether there were any differences between these patients and patients infected with oseltamivir-susceptible A(H1N1) virus in demographic or epidemiological characteristics, clinical symptoms, severity of illness, or clinical outcomes. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Influenza A(H1N1) viruses that were identified and submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by US public health laboratories between September 30, 2007, and May 17, 2008, and between September 28, 2008, and February 19, 2009, were tested as part of ongoing surveillance. Oseltamivir resistance was determined by neuraminidase inhibition assay and pyrosequencing analysis. Information was collected using a standardized case form from patients with oseltamivir-resistant A(H1N1) infections and a comparison group of patients with oseltamivir-susceptible A(H1N1) infections during 2007-2008. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Demographic and epidemiological information as well as clinical information, including symptoms, severity of illness, and clinical outcomes. RESULTS During the 2007-2008 season, influenza A(H1N1) accounted for an estimated 19% of circulating influenza viruses in the United States. Among 1155 influenza A(H1N1) viruses tested from 45 states, 142 (12.3%) from 24 states were resistant to oseltamivir. Data were available for 99 oseltamivir-resistant cases and 182 oseltamivir-susceptible cases from this period. Among resistant cases, median age was 19 years (range, 1 month to 62 years), 5 patients (5%) were hospitalized, and 4 patients (4%) died. None reported oseltamivir exposure before influenza diagnostic sample collection. No significant differences were found between cases of oseltamivir-resistant and oseltamivir-susceptible influenza in demographic characteristics, underlying medical illness, or clinical symptoms. Preliminary data from the 2008-2009 influenza season identified resistance to oseltamivir among 264 of 268 influenza A(H1N1) viruses (98.5%) tested. CONCLUSIONS Oseltamivir-resistant A(H1N1) viruses circulated widely in the United States during the 2007-2008 influenza season, appeared to be unrelated to oseltamivir use, and appeared to cause illness similar to oseltamivir-susceptible A(H1N1) viruses. Circulation of oseltamivir-resistant A(H1N1) viruses will continue, with a higher prevalence of resistance, during the 2008-2009 season.
Fuel on the Invention Funnel: Technology Licensing-in, Antecedents and Invention

In this paper, we examine the impact of technology licensing-in on firm invention performance. Studying a sample of 266 licensees and matched non-licensees using a two-part model specification, we find that licensees are more likely to introduce inventions than their non-licensee counterparts. This holds both if we consider invention in general, and invention in the licensed technological class only. We also show that familiarity with the licensed technology and technological specialization drives licensees to pursue a narrow invention strategy primarily focusing on the technological class specified in the license agreement.
Motion control of leg-wheel robot for an unexplored outdoor environment

We have constructed a leg-wheel mobile robot called ChariotII that has mechanically separated wheels and legs which allows it to utilize the advantages of the two mechanisms. A new motion control approach, the leg-wheel passive hybrid crawl gait (LWPCG) motion control approach, for moving ChariotII is discussed under the environment of unexplored rough terrain in this paper. To enable the robot to negotiate a extensive range of unexplored terrain, an automatic control function which shifts the profile of the desired foot trajectory (automatic profile shift, or APS) has also been implemented. The proposed motion control approach is extremely simple computationally, does not require knowledge of the robot's dynamic model or environmental parameters, and does not necessitate late the use of external sensors. The effectiveness of this method is confirmed through simulations and experiments.
Negative Imaginary Lemmas for Descriptor Systems

This technical note studies the negative imaginary properties of descriptor linear systems based on state-space realizations. Under the assumption of a minimal realization, necessary and sufficient conditions are established to characterize the negative imaginary properties of descriptor systems in terms of linear matrix inequalities with equality constraints. In particular, a negative imaginary lemma, a strict negative imaginary lemma and a lossless negative imaginary lemma are developed. A multiple-input and multiple-output RLC circuit network is used as an illustrative example to validate the developed theory.
Intensity-modulated arc therapy: principles, technologies and clinical implementation

Intensity-modulated arc therapy (IMAT) was proposed by Yu (1995 Phys. Med. Biol. 40 1435–49) as an alternative to tomotherapy. Over more than a decade, much progress has been made. The advantages and limitations of the IMAT technique have also been better understood. In recent years, single-arc forms of IMAT have emerged and become commercially adopted. The leading example is the volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT), a single-arc form of IMAT that delivers apertures of varying weights with a single-arc rotation that uses dose-rate variation of the treatment machine. With commercial implementation of VMAT, wide clinical adoption has quickly taken root. However, there remains a lack of general understanding for the planning of such arc treatments, as well as what delivery limitations and compromises are made. Commercial promotion and competition add further confusion for the end users. It is therefore necessary to provide a summary of this technology and some guidelines on its clinical implementation. The purpose of this review is to provide a summary of the works from the radiotherapy community that led to wide clinical adoption, and point out the issues that still remain, providing some perspective on its further developments. Because there has been vast experience in IMRT using multiple intensity-modulated fields, comparisons between IMAT and IMRT are also made in the review within the areas of planning, delivery and quality assurance.
Eating attitudes, body image and risk for eating disorders in a group of Spanish dancers.

INTRODUCTION Prevalence of eating disorders (ED) and discrepancies between actual weight and weight perception seem much higher in dancers. The aims analysed in 77 dancers were: risk for ED; relationship between eating attitudes and psychological variables; dieting and self-weighing, and body image distortion. METHOD Weight- and body image-related variables, dieting, self-reported physical fitness, specific ED-related variables and other psychological variables were assessed. The robust Huber's model was applied in order to test the inflluence of the variables analysed on the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-40) scores. In case of categorical variables, the Chi-square (χ2-test) or the Fisher's exact test were applied. RESULTS Higher risk of ED was not obtained. Despite the relationship between EAT-40 and BMI, body appreciation and drive for thinness, scores on EAT-40 and BMI do not suggest higher risk in dancers. Dancers had a similar weight perception than other populations and body dissatisfaction seems not to be worse than the reported in other types of participants. CONCLUSIONS Despite some limitations, our study adds some data in this field of study bearing in mind the use of a cluster of variables previously not taken into account as a whole.
Effect of Poor Access to Water and Sanitation As Risk Factors for Soil-Transmitted Helminth Infection: Selectiveness by the Infective Route

Background Soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections are a public health problem in resource-limited settings worldwide. Chronic STH infection impairs optimum learning and productivity, contributing to the perpetuation of the poverty-disease cycle. Regular massive drug administration (MDA) is the cardinal recommendation for its control; along with water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions. The impact of joint WASH interventions on STH infections has been reported; studies on the independent effect of WASH components are needed to contribute with the improvement of current recommendations for the control of STH. The aim of this study is to assess the association of lacking access to water and sanitation with STH infections, taking into account the differences in route of infection among species and the availability of adequate water and sanitation at home. Methods and Findings Cross-sectional study, conducted in Salta province, Argentina. During a deworming program that enrolled 6957 individuals; 771 were randomly selected for stool/serum sampling for parasitological and serological diagnosis of STH. Bivariate stratified analysis was performed to explore significant correlations between risk factors and STH infections grouped by mechanism of entry as skin-penetrators (hookworms and Strongyloides stercoralis) vs. orally-ingested (Ascaris lumbricoides and Trichuris trichiura). After controlling for potential confounders, unimproved sanitation was significantly associated with increased odds of infection of skin-penetrators (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 3.9; 95% CI: 2.6–5.9). Unimproved drinking water was significantly associated with increased odds of infection of orally-ingested (aOR = 2.2; 95% CI: 1.3–3.7). Conclusions Lack of safe water and proper sanitation pose a risk of STH infections that is distinct according to the route of entry to the human host used by each of the STH species. Interventions aimed to improve water and sanitation access should be highlighted in the recommendations for the control of STH.
Screening of Peptide Ligands for Pyrroloquinoline Quinone Glucose Dehydrogenase Using Antagonistic Template-Based Biopanning

We have developed a novel method, antagonistic template-based biopanning, for screening peptide ligands specifically recognizing local tertiary protein structures. We chose water-soluble pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) glucose dehydrogenase (GDH-B) as a model enzyme for this screening. Two GDH-B mutants were constructed as antagonistic templates; these have some point mutations to induce disruption of local tertiary structures within the loop regions that are located at near glucose-binding pocket. Using phage display, we selected 12-mer peptides that specifically bound to wild-type GDH-B but not to the antagonistic templates. Consequently, a peptide ligand showing inhibitory activity against GDH-B was obtained. These results demonstrate that the antagonistic template-based biopanning is useful for screening peptide ligands recognizing the specific local tertiary structure of proteins.
Effects of early castration on production performance, serum lipids, fatty acid profile and desaturation indexes in male chicken broilers fed a diet with increased fat content.

This paper analyses the effect of early caponisation at 18 days on the production performance, lipid metabolism and fatty acid profile of fattening broilers fed an increased amount of fat. Early castration did not influence growth performance and feed intake in the experimental birds. Feed conversion was significantly improved in castrated birds (P 0.05) by early castration. Glucose values were significantly higher on the 25th (P<0.05) and 40th (P<0.01) day in sham operated birds in comparison to castrated. Fatty acid composition of the thigh muscle was significantly influenced by castration. The most noticeable difference was in the increased percentage of saturated fatty acids (P<0.05) in castrated birds in comparison to uncastrated. Moreover, the saturation index and the thrombogenic index were higher (P<0.05) in castrated birds and unsaturated/saturated fatty acid ratio was higher (P<0.05) in uncastrated birds.
Foreign Investors Under Stress: Evidence from India

Emerging market policy makers have been concerned about the financial stability implications of financial globalisation. These concerns are focused on behaviour under stressed conditions. Do tail events in the home country trigger off extreme responses by foreign investors - are foreign investors `fair weather friends'? In this, is there asymmetry between the response of foreign investors to very good versus very bad days? Do foreign investors have a major impact on domestic markets through large inflows or outflows are they `big fish in a small pond'? Do extreme events in world markets induce extreme behaviour by foreign investors, thus making them vectors of crisis transmission? We propose a modified event study methodology focused on tail events, which yields evidence on these questions. The results, for India, do not support the skeptical perspective on financial globalisation.
Energy-aware task scheduling with task synchronization for embedded real-time systems

Slowdown factors determine the extent of slowdown that a computing system can experience based on functional and performance requirements. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) of a processor based on slowdown factors can lead to considerable energy savings. This paper addresses the problem of DVS in the presence of task synchronization. Tasks synchronize to enforce mutually exclusive access to the shared resources and can be blocked by lower priority tasks. Task slowdown factors that guarantee meeting all task deadlines are computed. Both static and dynamic priority scheduling viz. rate monotonic (RM) scheduling and earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduling, respectively, are studied
Risk factors for tuberculosis infection in children in contact with infectious tuberculosis cases in the Gambia, West Africa.

OBJECTIVE Tuberculosis (TB) infection is highly prevalent in developing countries. As infected children represent a large proportion of the pool from which TB cases will arise, knowledge of the factors that influence TB infection in children are of importance to evaluate transmission of infection in the community and adapt TB control activities. There are limited data on the risk of infection in child populations in developing countries. METHODS We performed a household contact study in The Gambia (West Africa), in which children who were living in contact with individuals who had proven smear-positive pulmonary TB cases were investigated. A questionnaire was addressed to the mother or caregiver of the child to investigate the presence of various risk factors and assess the degree of exposure of the child to the individual with TB within the household. A tuberculin skin test (TST) was performed on each child. TST sizes > or =5 and 10 mm, respectively, were considered positive. RESULTS Households of 206 TB cases were visited, and 384 children aged <5 years were examined. The median age was 2, and 48% were girls. The distribution of TST responses followed a bimodal pattern, with 135 (35%) children presenting a palpable induration. Random effects logistic regression analysis demonstrated that the risk of positive TST response in the child increased with the geographic proximity of the child to the individual with TB within the household and with the degree of activities shared with the individual with TB. It was also associated with the clinical severity of the disease in the index case. Nutritional status and presence of a bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) scar were not independent risk factors for TST positivity in this population. On multivariate analysis, the effect of geographic proximity to the individual with TB, household size, and duration of cough in the index case persisted for TST responses > or =5 mm. CONCLUSIONS In a highly endemic country with high BCG vaccination coverage in Africa, TB infection in children who were in contact with individual with infectious TB was directly related to the intensity of exposure of the child to the individual with TB. Our data suggest that a positive TST in a child reflects most probably TB infection rather than previous BCG vaccination. Contact tracing can play a major role in the control of TB in developing countries.
A Hybrid Chinese Spelling Correction Using Language Model and Statistical Machine Translation with Reranking

We describe the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) spelling check system in the shared task. Our system contains three components: a word segmentation based language model to generate correction candidates; a statistical machine translation model to provide correction candidates and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to rerank the candidates provided by the previous two components. The experimental results show that the kbest language model and the statistical machine translation model could generate almost all the correction candidates, while the precision is very low. However, using the SVM classifier to rerank the candidates, we could obtain higher precision with a little recall dropping. To address the low resource problem of the Chinese spelling check, we generate 2 million artificial training data by simply replacing the character in the provided training sentence with the character in the confusion set.
Computing the Stationary Distribution of a Finite Markov Chain Through Stochastic Factorization

This work presents an approach for reducing the number of arithmetic operations involved in the computation of a stationary distribution for a finite Markov chain. The proposed method relies on a particular decomposition of a transition-probability matrix called stochastic factorization. The idea is simple: when a transition matrix is represented as the product of two stochastic matrices, one can swap the factors of the multiplication to obtain another transition matrix, potentially much smaller than the original. We show in the paper that the stationary distributions of both Markov chains are related through a linear transformation, which opens up the possibility of using the smaller chain to compute the stationary distribution of the original model. In order to support the application of stochastic factorization, we prove that the model derived from it retains all the properties of the original chain which are relevant to the stationary distribution computation. Specifically, we show that (i) for each recurrent class in the original Markov chain there is a corresponding class in the derived model with the same period and, given some simple assumptions about the factorization, (ii) the original chain is irreducible if and only if the derived chain is irreducible and (iii) the original chain is regular if and only if the derived chain is regular. The paper also addresses some issues associated with the application of the proposed approach in practice and briefly discusses how stochastic factorization can be used to reduce the number of operations needed to compute the fundamental matrix of an absorbing Markov chain.
Assessment of various parameters on 3D semantic object-based point cloud labelling on urban LiDAR dataset

Abstract Semantic labelling of LiDAR point cloud is critical for effective utilization of 3D points in numerous applications. 3D segmentation, incorporation of ancillary data, feature extraction and classification are the key stages in object-based point cloud labelling. The choice of algorithms and tuning parameters adopted in these stages has substantial impact on the quality of results from object-based point cloud labelling. This paper critically evaluates the performance of object-based point cloud labelling as a function of different 3D segmentation approaches, incorporation of spectral data and computational complexity of the point cloud. The designed experiments are implemented on the datasets provided by the ISPRS and the results are independently validated by the ISPRS. Results indicate that aggregation of dense point cloud into higher-level object analogue (e.g. supervoxels) before 3D segmentation stage offers superior labelling results and best computational performance compared to the popular surface growing-based approaches.
Prediction Scores as a Window into Classifier Behavior

Most multi-class classifiers make their prediction for a test sample by scoring the classes and selecting the one with the highest score. Analyzing these prediction scores is useful to understand the classifier behavior and to assess its reliability. We present an interactive visualization that facilitates per-class analysis of these scores. Our system, called Classilist, enables relating these scores to the classification correctness and to the underlying samples and their features. We illustrate how such analysis reveals varying behavior of different classifiers. Classilist is available for use online, along with source code, video tutorials, and plugins for R, RapidMiner, and KNIME at https://katehara.github. io/classilist-site/.