Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infection dynamics in a traveller with persistent shedding of Zika virus RNA in semen for six months after returning from Haiti to Italy, January 2016

We describe the dynamics of Zika virus (ZIKV) infection in a man in his early 40s who developed fever and rash after returning from Haiti to Italy, in January 2016. Follow-up laboratory testing demonstrated detectable ZIKV RNA in plasma up to day 9 after symptom onset and in urine and saliva up to days 15 and 47, respectively. Notably, persistent shedding of ZIKV RNA was demonstrated in semen, still detectable at 181 days after onset.
A novel treatment for dynamic laryngeal collapse associated with poll flexion: the modified checkrein.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING THE STUDY Dynamic laryngeal collapse (DLC) associated with poll flexion is a performance limiting dynamic upper airway disorder commonly diagnosed in Coldblooded trotters. An inspiratory obstruction occurs when affected horses are driven with tension on the reins, inducing poll flexion. To date, surgical treatment and conservative management have failed to improve racing performance in affected horses. OBJECTIVES To test the efficacy of an external device, the modified checkrein, in limiting poll flexion, diminishing laryngeal collapse and improving airway mechanics when horses are driven on a treadmill with tension on the reins and test the hypothesis that the modified checkrein will limit poll flexion thereby improving endoscopic appearance of the larynx and reduce airway obstruction in harness racehorses affected with DLC. METHODS Fourteen Norwegian Coldblooded trotter (NCT) racehorses previously diagnosed with DLC associated with poll flexion exercised on a high-speed treadmill at speeds that resulted in heart rate >200 beats/min. Upper airway videoendoscopy recordings, tracheal pressures and video recordings of the head and neck position were collected while horses exercised with the conventional checkrein on Day 1 and the modified checkrein on Day 2. RESULTS The modified checkrein successfully limited poll flexion as measured by no change in head position parameters between phases of no rein tension and phases of rein tension. Endoscopic scores were significantly improved (arytenoids cartilage collapse P<0.0001; vocal fold collapse P<0.0001) and tracheal peak inspiratory pressures were significantly less negative (P = 0.0162) when horses were fitted with the modified checkrein compared to the conventional checkrein. CONCLUSIONS AND POTENTIAL RELEVANCE The modified checkrein successfully limited poll flexion and also prevented upper airway obstruction in NCT horses affected with DLC associated with poll flexion. The modified checkrein seems promising in offering a method of conservative management in harness racehorses affected with this disorder.
Infrastructures to engineer open environments as electronic institutions

Electronic institutions provide a computational analogue of human institutions to engineer open environments in which agents can interact in an autonomous way while complying with the norms of an institution. We survey the currently available infrastructures to engineer open environments as electronic institutions: (i) AMELI, the coordination infrastructure which is core to run EIs; and (ii) the conversion of the AMELI infrastructure to run over a peer to peer network. We also discuss the type of applications that both infrastructures target at.
Multiplicative conjunction and an algebraic meaning of contraction and weakening

Abstract We show that the elimination rule for the multiplicative (or intensional) conjunction Λ is admissible in many important multiplicative substructural logics. These include LLm (the multiplicative fragment of Linear Logic) and RMIm (the system obtained from LLm by adding the contraction axiom and its converse, the mingle axiom.) An exception is Rm (the intensional fragment of the relevance logic R, which is LLm together with the contraction axiom). Let SLLm and SRm be, respectively, the systems which are obtained from LLm and Rm by adding this rule as a new rule of inference. The set of theorems of SRm is a proper extension of that of Rm, but a proper subset of the set of theorems of RMIm. Hence it still has the variable-sharing property. SRm has also the interesting property that classical logic has a strong translation into it. We next introduce general algebraic structures, called strong multiplicative structures, and prove strong soundness and completeness of SLLm relative to them. We show that in the framework of these structures, the addition of the weakening axiom to SLLm corresponds to the condition that there will be exactly one designated element, while the addition of the contraction axiom corresponds to the condition that there will be exactly one nondesignated element (in the first case we get the system BCKm, in the second - the system SRm). Various other systems in which multiplicative conjunction functions as a true conjunction are studied, together with their algebraic counterparts.
Uterine leiomyomas. Racial differences in severity, symptoms and age at diagnosis.

OBJECTIVE To investigate racial differences in the presence of leiomyomas, condition severity, associated symptoms and age at diagnosis between black and white hysterectomy patients. STUDY DESIGN This study included 409 black women and 836 white women aged 18 or older who underwent hysterectomy for noncancerous conditions at 28 hospitals in Maryland. Patients were interviewed shortly before surgery, and hospital records were abstracted after discharge. RESULTS Overall, 89% of the black women and 59% of the white women were found to have leiomyomas. Among those with a confirmed presurgical diagnosis of leiomyomas, the average age at diagnosis was 37.5 years for black women and 41.6 for white women, and the average age at hysterectomy was 41.7 for black women and 44.6 for white women. The average uterine weight for black women with leiomyomas was 420.8 g and for white women was 319.1 g. Black women were more likely to have seven or more leiomyomas (57%) in comparison to white women (36%). Black women with leiomyomas were more likely to be anemic (56%) than white women (38%) and more likely to report having very severe or severe pelvic pain (59%) than white women (41%). CONCLUSION Black women having hysterectomy had larger and more numerous leiomyomas, and the leiomyomas were more symptomatic than in white women despite a younger age at diagnosis and hysterectomy.
Fully Unsupervised Graph-Based Discovery of General-Specific Noun Relationships from Web Corpora Frequency Counts

In this paper, we propose a new methodology based on directed graphs and the TextRank algorithm to automatically induce general-specific noun relations from web corpora frequency counts. Different asymmetric association measures are implemented to build the graphs upon which the TextRank algorithm is applied and produces an ordered list of nouns from the most general to the most specific. Experiments are conducted based on the WordNet noun hierarchy and assess 65.69% of correct word ordering.
Prevalence of HBV precore/core promoter variants in the United States

Variants in the precore (G1896A) and core promoter (A1762T, G1764A) regions of hepatitis B virus (HBV) may be related to serum HBV DNA levels and severity of liver disease. The aims of this nationwide study were to determine the prevalence of HBV precore/core promoter variants in the United States and the association between these variants and patient demographics, HBV genotypes, serum HBV DNA level, and severity of liver disease. A total of 694 consecutive chronic HBV‐infected patients seen in 17 U.S. liver centers during a 1‐year period were enrolled. Demographic, clinical, and laboratory data were collected. Sera were tested for HBV genotypes as well as precore and core promoter variants by line‐probe assays. Quantitative HBV DNA levels were determined using Cobas Amplicor HBV Monitor kits. Precore and core promoter variants were found in 27% and 44% of patients with chronic HBV infection in the United States. Precore and core promoter variants were more common in hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)‐negative than in HBeAg‐positive patients (precore, 38% vs. 9%; core promoter, 51% vs. 36%; respectively, P < .001). The prevalence of these variants was related to ethnicity, place of birth, and HBV genotypes. Patients with core promoter variants were more likely to have hepatic decompensation. Precore and/or core promoter variants were associated with higher serum HBV DNA levels in HBeAg‐negative but not in HBeAg‐positive patients. In conclusion, HBV precore and core promoter variants are not rare in the United States. Physicians should be aware of the existence of HBV precore and core promoter variants and the clinical condition of “HBeAg‐negative chronic hepatitis. ”
A review of the relationship between dysphagia and malnutrition following stroke.

OBJECTIVE To clarify the relationship between malnutrition and dysphagia following stroke. DESIGN Systematic review. METHODS All published trials that had examined both the swallowing ability and nutritional status of subjects following stroke were identified. Pooled analyses were performed to establish whether the odds of being malnourished were increased given the presence of dysphagia. RESULTS Eight studies were identified. The presence of malnutrition and dysphagia ranged from 8.2% to 49.0% and 24.3% to 52.6%, respectively. Five of the included trials were conducted within the first 7 days following stroke, while 3 were conducted during the rehabilitation phase. The overall odds of being malnourished were higher among subjects who were dysphagic compared with subjects with intact swallowing (odds ratio: 2.425; 95% confidence interval: 1.264-4.649, p < 0.008). In subgroup analysis, the odds of malnutrition were significantly increased during the rehabilitation stage (odds ratio: 2.445; 95% confidence interval: 1.009-5.925, p < 0.048), but not during the first 7 days of hospital admission (odds ratio: 2.401; 95% confidence interval: 0.918-6.277, p < 0.074). CONCLUSION In a systematic review including the results from 8 studies, the odds of being malnourished were increased given the presence of dysphagia following stroke.
A comprehensive quality control workflow for paired tumor‐normal NGS experiments

Summary: Quality control (QC) is an important part of all NGS data analysis stages. Many available tools calculate QC metrics from different analysis steps of single sample experiments (raw reads, mapped reads and variant lists). Multi‐sample experiments, as sequencing of tumor‐normal pairs, require additional QC metrics to ensure validity of results. These multi‐sample QC metrics still lack standardization. We therefore suggest a new workflow for QC of DNA sequencing of tumor‐normal pairs. With this workflow well‐known single‐sample QC metrics and additional metrics specific for tumor‐normal pairs can be calculated. The segmentation into different tools offers a high flexibility and allows reuse for other purposes. All tools produce qcML, a generic XML format for QC of ‐omics experiments. qcML uses quality metrics defined in an ontology, which was adapted for NGS. Availability and Implementation: All QC tools are implemented in C ++ and run both under Linux and Windows. Plotting requires python 2.7 and matplotlib. The software is available under the ‘GNU General Public License version 2’ as part of the ngs‐bits project: https://github.com/imgag/ngs‐bits Contact: christopher.schroeder@med.uni‐tuebingen.de Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Design of a WCET-Aware C Compiler

This paper presents techniques to integrate worst-case execution time (WCET) data into a compiler. Currently, a tight integration of WCET into compilers is strongly desired, but only some ad-hoc approaches were reported currently. Previous work mainly used self-written WCET estimators with limited functionality and preciseness during compilation. A very tight integration of a high quality WCET analyzer into a compiler was not yet achieved. This work is the first to present such a tight coupling between a compiler and the WCET analyzer aiT. This is done by automatically translating the assembly-like contents of the compiler's low-level format (LLIR) to aiT's exchange format CRL2. Additionally, the results produced by aiT are automatically collected and re-imported into the compiler infrastructure. The work described in this paper is smoothly integrated into a C compiler for the Infineon TriCore processor. It opens up new possibilities for the design of WCET-aware optimizations in the future. The concepts for extending the compiler structure are kept very general so that they are not limited to WCET information. Rather, it is possible to use our concepts also for multi-objective optimization of e. g. best-case execution time (BCET) or energy dissipation
Redundant Disk Arrays in Transaction Processing Systems

We address various issues dealing with the use of disk arrays in transaction processing environments. We look at the problem of transaction undo recovery and propose a scheme for using the redundancy in disk arrays to support undo recovery. The scheme uses twin page storage for the parity information in the array. It speeds up transaction processing by eliminating the need for undo logging for most transactions. The use of redundant arrays of distributed disks to provide recovery from disasters as well as temporary site failures and disk crashes is also studied. We investigate the problem of assigning the sites of a distributed storage system to redundant arrays in such a way that a cost of maintaining the redundant parity information is minimized. Heuristic algorithms for solving the site partitioning problem are proposed and their performance is evaluated using simulation. We also develop a heuristic for which an upper bound on the deviation from the optimal solution can be established.
Cost-Based Optimization of Service Compositions

For providers of composite services, preventing cases of SLA violations is crucial. Previous work has established runtime adaptation of compositions as a promising tool to achieve SLA conformance. However, to get a realistic and complete view of the decision process of service providers, the costs of adaptation need to be taken into account. In this paper, we formalize the problem of finding the optimal set of adaptations, which minimizes the total costs arising from SLA violations and the adaptations to prevent them. We present possible algorithms to solve this complex optimization problem, and detail an end-to-end system based on our earlier work on the PREvent (prediction and prevention based on event monitoring) framework, which clearly indicates the usefulness of our model. We discuss experimental results that show how the application of our approach leads to reduced costs for the service provider, and explain the circumstances in which different algorithms lead to more or less satisfactory results.
Large Redshifts in Emission and Excitation from Eu 2+ -Activated Sr 2 SiO 4 and Ba 2 SiO 4 Phosphors Induced by Controlling Eu 2+ Occupancy on the Basis on Crystal-Site Engineering

The photoluminescence properties of Eu2+-activated α’-Sr2SiO4 and α’-Ba2SiO4 with a high Eu2+ concentration were investigated. In the case of Sr2-xEuxSiO4, emission was shifted from 585 to 611 nm with increasing the total Eu2+ concentration (x) from 0.1 to 0.8. This trend was similar to that in Ba2-xEuxSiO4, where the emission was shifted from 513 to 545 nm. The large redshifts in both the excitation and emission spectra were discussed in terms of the Eu2+ occupancies on two kinds of M sites and their local structural changes (M: Sr and Ba).
The impact of the heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) computerized alert on provider behaviors and patient outcomes

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to measure the effect of an electronic heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) alert on provider ordering behaviors and on patient outcomes. MATERIALS AND METHODS A pop-up alert was created for providers when an individual's platelet values had decreased by 50% or to <100,000/mm(3) in the setting of recent heparin exposure. The authors retrospectively compared inpatients admitted between January 24, 2008 and August 24, 2008 to a control group admitted 1 year prior to the HIT alert. The primary outcome was a change in HIT antibody testing. Secondary outcomes included an assessment of incidence of HIT antibody positivity, percentage of patients started on a direct thrombin inhibitor (DTI), length of stay and overall mortality. RESULTS There were 1006 and 1081 patients in the control and intervention groups, respectively. There was a 33% relative increase in HIT antibody test orders (p=0.01), and 33% more of these tests were ordered the first day after the criteria were met when a pop-up alert was given (p=0.03). Heparin was discontinued in 25% more patients in the alerted group (p=0.01), and more direct thrombin inhibitors were ordered for them (p=0.03). The number who tested HIT antibody-positive did not differ, however, between the two groups (p=0.99). The length of stay and mortality were similar in both groups. CONCLUSIONS The HIT alert significantly impacted provider behaviors. However, the alert did not result in more cases of HIT being detected or an improvement in overall mortality. Our findings do not support implementation of a computerized HIT alert.
Defending imitating attacks in web credibility evaluation systems

Unlike traditional media such as television and newspapers, web contents are relatively easy to be published without being rigorously fact-checked. This seriously influences people's daily life if non-credible web contents are utilized for decision making. Recently, web credibility evaluation systems have emerged where web credibility is derived by aggregating ratings from the community (e.g., MyWOT). In this paper, We focus on the robustness of such systems by identifying a new type of attack scenario where an attacker imitates the behavior of trustworthy experts by copying system's credibility ratings to quickly build high reputation and then attack certain web contents. In order to defend this attack, we propose a two-stage defence algorithm. At stage 1, our algorithm applies supervised learning algorithm to predict the credibility of a web content and compare it with a user's rating to estimate whether this user is malicious or not. In case the user's maliciousness can not be determined with high confidence, the algorithm goes to stage 2 where we investigate users' past rating patterns and detect the malicious one by applying hierarchical clustering algorithm. Evaluation using real datasets demonstrates the efficacy of our approach.
Improving Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Spontaneous Speech Through Variant-Based Pronunciation Variation Modelling

In this paper we present an experiment aimed at improving automatic phonetic transcription of Dutch spontaneous speech through a variant-based method of pronunciation variation modelling. For spontaneous speech, the literature does not always provide enough rules to describe its characteristic phonological processes. Therefore, other methods should be applied to model pronunciation variation for automatic phonetic transcription. We show that a large amount of manually transcribed phonetic data is an extremely useful source for collecting pronunciation variants and their prior probabilities. From the results we can conclude that the adopted method is indeed suitable for improving automatic transcription of spontaneous speech, and that further improvements can be obtained by combining this method with rule-based methods of pronunciation variation modelling.
Payments for care at private for-profit and private not-for-profit hospitals: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: It has been shown that patients cared for at private for-profit hospitals have higher risk-adjusted mortality rates than those cared for at private not-for-profit hospitals. Uncertainty remains, however, about the economic implications of these forms of health care delivery. Since some policy-makers might still consider for-profit health care if expenditure savings were sufficiently large, we undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to compare payments for care at private for-profit and private not-for-profit hospitals. Methods: We used 6 search strategies to identify published and unpublished observational studies that directly compared the payments for care at private for-profit and private not-for-profit hospitals. We masked the study results before teams of 2 reviewers independently evaluated the eligibility of all studies. We confirmed data or obtained additional data from all but 1 author. For each study, we calculated the payments for care at private for-profit hospitals relative to private not-for-profit hospitals and pooled the results using a random effects model. Results: Eight observational studies, involving more than 350 000 patients altogether and a median of 324 hospitals each, fulfilled our eligibility criteria. In 5 of 6 studies showing higher payments for care at private for-profit hospitals, the difference was statistically significant; in 1 of 2 studies showing higher payments for care at private not-for-profit hospitals, the difference was statistically significant. The pooled estimate demonstrated that private for-profit hospitals were associated with higher payments for care (relative payments for care 1.19, 95% confidence interval 1.07–1.33, p = 0.001). Interpretation: Private for-profit hospitals result in higher payments for care than private not-for-profit hospitals. Evidence strongly supports a policy of not-for-profit health care delivery at the hospital level.
Generalized method for fast field assessment in the radiating near field region

The paper follows a trend that in the recent years has been growing in interest: the assessment of the electromagnetic field in the Fresnel region of a radiator. A first version of the method, which does not require the use of any full-wave solver, has been recently presented and successfully applied to linear arrays. Its generalization is reported here, thanks to the definition of a more accurate model of the antenna and a global update of the method itself. The proposed approach allows a conservative and reliable estimation of the field radiated in proximity of a generic antenna array, being in the same time simple and easy to apply. The method is first analyzed from a theoretical point of view and then validated by means of comparisons with full/wave simulations.
Ecotourists' Motivational and Demographic Characteristics: A Case of North Carolina Travelers

Ecotourism is currently a growing segment of tourism. This study reports results of a mail survey concerning moti vational and demographic characteristics of nature tourists who had recently traveled in North Carolina. While the majority of studies have focused on general tourist characteristics, few have tried to identify characteristics of nature-based travelers. This study confirmed previous findings regarding demographic characteristics of ecotourists: that ecotourists tend to be middle age with higher education and income lev els than general travelers and the general population. It also identified general and specific activity preferences of ecotourists. The top five general activity preferences were observing wildlife; visiting state parks, national wildlife refuges, and historic sites; and hiking wetland trails. The top five specific travel attractions were First Colony and Revolutionary War sites, Native American centers, camping and hiking tours, cultural tours to archaeological centers, and flora and fauna tours. Information source preferences of ecotourists were also examined.