Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quality of Outpatient Care for Diabetes Mellitus in a National Electronic Health Record Network

This retrospective cohort study examined quality of care for diabetes ina largenationalnetwork of electronic health record users. Of 10572 patients with diabetes included in the study, 55% had at least 2 hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) tests, 95% had at least 1 systolic and diastolic blood pressure test, and 52% had at least 1 low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol test over a 1-year period. Of those tested, 41% had an HbA1c <7.0, 28% had a blood pressure <130/80mmHg, and 44% had an LDLcholesterol level <100mg/dL. Of those not adequately controlled, 99% were prescribed hypoglycemic medications, 85% were prescribed antihypertensive medications, and 71% were prescribed lipidlowering medications. These results suggest that there is significant room for improvement in testing and control of risk factors for persons with diabetes and that the electronic health record has a significant potential for conducting practice-based quality-ofcare studies across large numbers of outpatient practices.
Forest Elephant Crisis in the Congo Basin

Debate over repealing the ivory trade ban dominates conferences of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Resolving this controversy requires accurate estimates of elephant population trends and rates of illegal killing. Most African savannah elephant populations are well known; however, the status of forest elephants, perhaps a distinct species, in the vast Congo Basin is unclear. We assessed population status and incidence of poaching from line-transect and reconnaissance surveys conducted on foot in sites throughout the Congo Basin. Results indicate that the abundance and range of forest elephants are threatened from poaching that is most intense close to roads. The probability of elephant presence increased with distance to roads, whereas that of human signs declined. At all distances from roads, the probability of elephant occurrence was always higher inside, compared to outside, protected areas, whereas that of humans was always lower. Inside protected areas, forest elephant density was correlated with the size of remote forest core, but not with size of protected area. Forest elephants must be prioritised in elephant management planning at the continental scale.
Evaluating the relationship between Orthodontic Treatment need and Oral Health-Related Quality of life Among students aged 15-18 year in Shiraz

Abstract Introdouction: The major demand for orthodontic treatment is associated with esthetic complaints rather than with the severity of occlusal irregularities. This study evaluated the relationship between orthodontic treatment need based on index of complexity, outcome, and need (ICON) and orthodontic-specific quality of life (QOL) among high school students in Shiraz. Materials and methods: Based on the correlation between ICON and QOL score (r = 0.254) with α = 0.05 and an estimated power of 80%, 118 high school students (49 girls and 69 boys) aged 15-18 years were selected for this analytical cross-sectional study. The students were randomly selected. The need for orthodontic treatment was determined according to ICON and was compared with QOL, which was assessed using Cunningham’s questionnaire. Data analysis was performed by SPSS-21 using Spearman’s correlation coefficient and Mann-Whitney tests. (p<0.05) Results: Analysis based on Spearman’s correlation coefficient, showed no significant association between QOL score and ICON (r=0.95, p=0.282), Mann-Whitney test did not show a significant difference between boys and girls. QOL score was considerably higher in boys (median = 18.50, mean ± SD = 14.82 ± 18.5) compared with girls (median = 9.00, mean ± SD = 14.3 ± 15.02) (p = 0.58). Conclusion: No significant difference among boys and girls in relation to orthodontic treatment need was observed, although girls had a significantly lower QOL score than boys. Correlation between orthodontic treatment need and its impact on QOL was also not significant. Therefore, dental esthetics has a greater impact on social acceptance and self-concept among girls.
Temporality, transience and regularity in sport-for-development: synchronizing programs with events

Policy makers now widely accept that, when appropriately conceived and properly managed, sport-for-development (S4D) programs can provide important benefits to disadvantaged communities. This acknowledgement is, however, quite recent. Over the last decade, the field of S4D has received significant attention from both practitioners and academics around the world. While at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, it was difficult to find projects that used sport as a strategic vehicle for positive social, health and economic change, the number of S4D initiatives that aim to make a positive difference in disadvantaged communities has since skyrocketed. One explanation for this escalation is the strong political support for the ‘S4D movement’. In particular, the creation of the United Nations Office for Sport for Development and Peace in 2001 was a significant step toward official recognition and legitimacy for S4D. Subsequent assertions, such as the Magglingen Declaration in 2003 and the United Nation's International Year of Sport and Physical Education in 2005, further contributed to raising awareness of S4D as a philosophy underpinning positive change. Overall, the increased recognition of the social, health and economic value of S4D quickly led to a proliferation of local and international development projects implemented by sport associations, aid agencies, development bodies and NGOs. This flurry of activity has recently attracted research into the efficacy of S4D programs; policy makers and funding bodies are keen to establish whether resources provided are bringing about touted impacts. These stakeholders are willing to provide funding to allow S4D benefits to communities, and have become increasingly conscious about the timing and longevity of financial support. Scholars have conducted studies into an array of S4D program areas: the contribution of sport to peace and reconciliation (Gasser & Levinsen, 2004; Schulenkorf, 2010a; Stidder & Haasner, 2007; Sugden, 2006), social change and identity building (Schulenkorf, 2010b; Vermeulen & Verweel, 2009), trauma relief (Gschwend & Selvaranju, 2007; Kunz, 2009), socio-economic development (Kobayashi, Nicholson, & Hoye, in press), gender equality (Meier & Saavedra, 2009), health improvement (Banda, Lindsey, Jeanes, & Kay, 2008; Webb, 2004) and local capacity building (Wright, 2009). The debate about impact cannot simply be about value for money, with a forensic accountancy focus to program outcomes in respect of expenditure. It must also be
A new Evolutionary Neural Network for forecasting net flow of a car sharing system

In this work, an evolutionary neural network (ENN) is proposed for forecasting net flow of a car sharing system. This work consists mainly of two contributions. The first is to develop a mixed optimization approach with genetic algorithm (GA) and back propagation (BP) training for the ENN. In particular, the crossover operator of the genetic algorithm is performed with multiple neural networks that have heterogeneous structures: either different number of nodes in a hidden layer or different number of hidden layers. Hence, this optimization process enables co-evolution of multiple NN structures which present different nonlinear models, and facilitates the selection of the most suitable forecasting model from multiple candidates. To expedite the searching process for ENN and meanwhile retain an efficient learning rate, the back- propagation training is applied only to the best or the second best chromosome in each generation. The second contribution of this work is the application of the ENN to a real forecasting problem arising from a car-sharing system. Despite the presence of randomness, nonlinearity and complexity in the forecasting process, the ENN demonstrates superior performance when comparing with both classics time series forecasting approaches and other soft-computing approaches.
Joint end-to-end loss-delay hidden Markov model for periodic UDP traffic over the Internet

Performance of real-time applications on network communication channels is strongly related to losses and temporal delays. Several studies showed that these network features may be correlated and exhibit a certain degree of memory such as bursty losses and delays. The memory and the statistical dependence between losses and temporal delays suggest that the channel may be well modeled by a hidden Markov model (HMM) with appropriate hidden variables that capture the current state of the network. In this paper, an HMM is proposed that shows excellent performance in modeling typical channel behaviors in a set of real packet links. The system is trained with a modified version of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Hidden-state analysis shows how the state variables characterize channel dynamics. State-sequence estimation is obtained by the use of Viterbi algorithm. Real-time modeling of the channel is the first step to implement adaptive communication strategies.
A variational approach to online road and path segmentation with monocular vision

In this paper we present an online approach to segmenting roads on large scale trajectories using only a monocular camera mounted on a car. We differ from popular 2D segmentation solutions which use single colour images and machine learning algorithms that require supervised training on huge image databases. Instead, we propose a novel approach that fuses 3D geometric data with appearance-based segmentation of 2D information in an automatic system. Our contribution is twofold: first, we propagate labels from frame to frame using depth priors of the segmented road avoiding user interaction most of the time; second, we transfer the segmented road labels to 3D laser point clouds. This reduces the complexity of state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms running on 3D Lidar data. Segmentation fails is in only 3% of the cases over a sequence of 13,600 monocular images spanning an urban trajectory of more than 10km.
Adult's Perception of Male Garment Styles

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of male apparel styles (daring, conservative, formal; casual) on American adult perceptions of personal traits of men. The relationship between personal traits on each of the garment styles and the clothing interest of viewers was determined Results indicated that a male stranger dressed in the daring style was considered unattractive, not intelligent, but very popular; a male stranger formally dressed was considered attractive, intelligent, and popular; a male stranger casually dressed was viewed as unattractive, not intelligent, and not popular; and a male stranger conservatively dressed was seen as attractive and intelligent but not popular. Respondents with high clothing interest rated the conservatively dressed male stranger as more sociable than the stranger dressed in the daring and casual styles and preferred the formally dressed stranger.
Extending symbolic brands using their personality: examining antecedents and implications towards brand image fit and brand dilution

This research provides a framework to achieve two objectives. First, it helps us to understand the implications of congruency of information, motivation, and perceived prestige orientation as antecedents to brand personality fit. Second, it examines the mediating role of brand image fit between brand personality fit and dilution of brand affect. The above is explained by using elaboration theory, conceptual coherence theory, and goal-derived categorization theory. The results of the implication of elaboration theory on brand personality fit were mixed. While congruency of personality dimensions between parent and extension brands has bearings towards brand personality fit, the motivation of processing information did not. In contrast to brand image fit, this study showed that the prestige orientation of a brand did not influence brand personality fit. The subsequent mediation analysis demonstrated that brand personality fit is positively related to brand image fit, but neither of these two variables has any influence on dilution of brand affect. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Symmetry and performance in consistency protocols

A consistency protocol can be termed symmetric if all processors are treated identically when they access common resources. By contrast, asymmetric protocols usually assign a home or manager to each resource. Use of the resource by the home incurs less overhead than use by other processors. The key to good performance in such systems is to ensure that the asymmetry of the underlying protocol is skewed in the same way as that of the application. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of a symmetric and an asymmetric DSM protocol. We pay particular attention to those performance differences caused by symmetric and asymmetric features of the protocols. We then present the design and evaluation of an improved asymmetric writer protocol that dynamically migrates ownership according to access patterns. We show that the new protocol outperforms and is more stable than the non-migrating asymmetric protocol, and has much less memory overhead than the symmetric protocol.
The good, the bad, and the irrational: three views about mental content

Recent philosophy of psychology has seen the rise of so‐called “dual‐component” and “two‐dimensional” theories of mental content as what I call a “Middle Way” between internalism (the view that contents of states like belief are “narrow”) and externalism (the view that by and large, such contents are “wide”). On these Middle Way views, mental states are supposed to have two kinds of content: the “folk‐psychological” kind, which we ordinarily talk about and which is wide; and some non‐folk‐psychological kind which is narrow. Jerry Fodor is responsible for one of the most influential arguments that we need to believe in some such non‐folk‐psychological kind of content. In this paper I argue that the ideas behind Fodor's premises are mutually inconsistent—so it would be irrational to believe in a Middle Way theory of mental content no matter how many of Fodor's premises you find plausible. Common opinion notwithstanding, we have to choose between internalism and externalism, full‐stop.
Overexpression of a secretory form of FGF‐1 promotes MMP‐1‐mediated endothelial cell migration

A coordinated interaction between fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) and matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) is implicated in migration of microvascular endothelial cells (ECs), an early stage of angiogenesis. Specifically, we investigated microvascular ECs migration in vitro, which can be initiated by the overexpression of a secretory form of the angiogenic fibroblast growth factor‐1 (FGF‐1) and mediated through the enzymatic activity of matrix metalloproteinase‐1 (MMP‐1). MMP‐1 is a member of the MMP family with a propensity for degradation of interstitial type I collagen. We stably overexpressed a chimeric FGF‐1 construct composed of the FGF‐4 signal‐peptide gene, linked in‐frame to the FGF‐1 coding frame gene (sp‐FGF‐1), in cultured postcapillary venular ECs. The presence of the biologically active form of FGF‐1 was readily detected in the conditioned medium of ECs transfected with sp‐FGF‐1 construct as demonstrated by DNA synthesis assay. The sp‐FGF‐1‐, but not the plasmid vector alone‐transfected ECs, exhibited an altered morphology as demonstrated by their conversion from a classic cobblestone form to a fibroblastlike shape that featured prominent neuritelike extensions. Addition of the anti‐FGF receptor 1 antibody (FGFR1 Ab) reverted the transformed phenotype of sp‐FGF‐1 transfectants. This suggests that the resulting phenotypic transformation in sp‐FGF‐1 transfectants requires an uninterrupted interaction between the FGF‐1 ligand and its receptor. We studied migration of cells through matrices of either highly pure collagen I or reconstituted basement membrane (matrigel) and found that sp‐FGF‐1‐transfected cells migrated two times and six times faster than the vector control transfectants in the respective matrices. We further demonstrated that the enhanced migration rate of sp‐FGF‐1‐transfected EC coincided with the induction of their MMP‐1 mRNA level and increased enzymatic activity. The enhanced migratory activity of sp‐FGF‐1 could be blocked with a selective inhibitor of MMP‐1. These results suggest that the multipotent FGF‐1 plays a key role in the early stages of angiogenesis, by mediating MMP‐1 proteolytic activity. J. Cell. Biochem. 78:487–499, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Motor development facilitates the prediction of others' actions through sensorimotor predictive learning

Recent studies in psychology revealed that the emergence of infants' ability to predict others' action goals is correlated with the development of their motor ability to produce similar actions. In this regard, studies in neuroscience suggest that perception and production of actions share the same neural architecture (i.e., mirror neuron system). However, it is not yet clear what learning mechanisms are involved in the co-development of these abilities. Here we proposed a computational model to explain the development of prediction of others' action goals in synchronization with the development of action production. We adopted the concept of predictive learning of sensorimotor information as the key mechanism for it. Predictive learning intends to associate motor signals with sensory signals in a predictive manner during action executions. Thus, sensory signals perceived during action observations induce corresponding motor signals obtained in previous experiences. Our experimental results showed that our approach facilitated a robot to develop the ability to predict action goals in synchrony with the development of action production. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrated that the integration of goal-directed motor signals improved the accuracy to predict sensory signals and consequently action goals.
Development of Highly Informative Genome-Wide Single Sequence Repeat Markers for Breeding Applications in Sesame and Construction of a Web Resource: SisatBase

The sequencing of the full nuclear genome of sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) provides the platform for functional analyses of genome components and their application in breeding programs. Although the importance of microsatellites markers or simple sequence repeats (SSR) in crop genotyping, genetics, and breeding applications is well established, only a little information exist concerning SSRs at the whole genome level in sesame. In addition, SSRs represent a suitable marker type for sesame molecular breeding in developing countries where it is mainly grown. In this study, we identified 138,194 genome-wide SSRs of which 76.5% were physically mapped onto the 13 pseudo-chromosomes. Among these SSRs, up to three primers pairs were supplied for 101,930 SSRs and used to in silico amplify the reference genome together with two newly sequenced sesame accessions. A total of 79,957 SSRs (78%) were polymorphic between the three genomes thereby suggesting their promising use in different genomics-assisted breeding applications. From these polymorphic SSRs, 23 were selected and validated to have high polymorphic potential in 48 sesame accessions from different growing areas of Africa. Furthermore, we have developed an online user-friendly database, SisatBase (http://www.sesame-bioinfo.org/SisatBase/), which provides free access to SSRs data as well as an integrated platform for functional analyses. Altogether, the reference SSR and SisatBase would serve as useful resources for genetic assessment, genomic studies, and breeding advancement in sesame, especially in developing countries.
Platelets Contribute to BBB Disruption Induced by HIV and Alcohol

The role of platelets in the neurological diseases that underlie cognitive impairment has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Multiple pathways in platelets contribute to host defenses, as well as to CNS function. In the current study, we hypothesize that the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) is disrupted when exposed to platelets from patients with triple Co-morbidity (hazardous alcohol users+ HIV+ thrombocytopenia), compared to those with dual, single or no morbidity (HIV only, alcohol only or healthy controls).
Looking deeper: Extradyadic behaviors, jealousy, and perceived unfaithfulness in hypothetical dating relationships

This report expands on past research dealing with extradyadic (ED) relations in dating relationships by examining behaviors beyond those of a strictly sexual or romantic nature that college-age men and women consider to be unfaithful. Undergraduates (N= 219) from a U.S. university rated a hypothetical partner's ED sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, romantic attachments, flirting, group, and dyadic social activities including a member of the other gender outside the primary dating relationship as a function of relationship stage. Men and women rated all the ED behaviors as jealousy provoking except group social activities, and rated all the behaviors as unfaithful except dyadic and group social activities. Women reported greater jealousy than did men in response to a hypothetical partner's sexual fantasies, romantic attachments, and flirting behavior. Women also reported a hypothetical partner's romantic attachments and flirting behavior as more unfaithful than did men. Results are discussed in terms of support for evolutionary theory and the need to acknowledge environmental factors in examining gender differences.
The “Octopus” Lymphaticovenular Anastomosis: Evolving Beyond the Standard Supermicrosurgical Technique

Abstract Background Supermicrosurgical lymphaticovenular anastomosis (LVA) is a promising treatment modality for lymphedema. However, its practice is restricted by the surgeon/equipment-related factors, and its effectiveness limited by technical constraints. We conducted a pilot study to evaluate the feasibility of a modified “octopus” LVA technique in addressing the above problems. Method Nine consecutive lymphedema patients underwent LVA procedure using the “octopus” technique. Six had the upper extremity disease; three had the lower extremity disease. Except for one patient having primary lower extremity lymphedema, all had secondary disease related to cancer treatment. Disease severity ranged from Campisi stage Ib to IV. Qualitative and quantitative assessments were performed preoperatively, at 1, 3, and 6 months. Results A total of 130 lymphaticovenular drainage pathways were created in 39 “octopus” LVAs. All patients experienced prompt relief of lymphedema symptoms during the 1st postoperative week and continued to improve during the study period. None had postoperative complications. All had disease regression as demonstrated by statistically significant decrease in limb measurements (p = 0.0003) and severity down-staging. The modified technique was found to be easier than the standard supermicrosurgical technique and could be performed using a standard surgical microscope. Conclusion The “octopus” technique is a viable, effective technical alternative to the standard LVA technique. It may greatly simplify this technically challenging procedure.