Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Environment and Social Gradient on Leptospira Infection in Urban Slums

Background Leptospirosis has become an urban health problem as slum settlements have expanded worldwide. Efforts to identify interventions for urban leptospirosis have been hampered by the lack of population-based information on Leptospira transmission determinants. The aim of the study was to estimate the prevalence of Leptospira infection and identify risk factors for infection in the urban slum setting. Methods and Findings We performed a community-based survey of 3,171 slum residents from Salvador, Brazil. Leptospira agglutinating antibodies were measured as a marker for prior infection. Poisson regression models evaluated the association between the presence of Leptospira antibodies and environmental attributes obtained from Geographical Information System surveys and indicators of socioeconomic status and exposures for individuals. Overall prevalence of Leptospira antibodies was 15.4% (95% confidence interval [CI], 14.0–16.8). Households of subjects with Leptospira antibodies clustered in squatter areas at the bottom of valleys. The risk of acquiring Leptospira antibodies was associated with household environmental factors such as residence in flood-risk regions with open sewers (prevalence ratio [PR] 1.42, 95% CI 1.14–1.75) and proximity to accumulated refuse (1.43, 1.04–1.88), sighting rats (1.32, 1.10–1.58), and the presence of chickens (1.26, 1.05–1.51). Furthermore, low income and black race (1.25, 1.03–1.50) were independent risk factors. An increase of US$1 per day in per capita household income was associated with an 11% (95% CI 5%–18%) decrease in infection risk. Conclusions Deficiencies in the sanitation infrastructure where slum inhabitants reside were found to be environmental sources of Leptospira transmission. Even after controlling for environmental factors, differences in socioeconomic status contributed to the risk of Leptospira infection, indicating that effective prevention of leptospirosis may need to address the social factors that produce unequal health outcomes among slum residents, in addition to improving sanitation.
The Overseas Libraries Controversy and the Freedom to Read: U.S. Librarians and Publishers Confront Joseph McCarthy

In the early Cold War years, censorship pressures on libraries led in 1948 to the adoption of a strengthened Library Bill of Rights by the American Library Association (ALA). In 1953 pressures intensified when Senator Joseph McCarthy opened an investigation of the United States Department of State's Overseas Libraries. This essay explores the response of the ALA and the American Book Publishers Council to McCarthy's attacks. Through adoption of The Freedom to Read and the Overseas Libraries Statement, librarians and publishers identified librarians as defenders of intellectual freedom. In addition, they helped to restore balance to book selection for U.S. information services abroad and affected the role of books and libraries in cultural diplomacy.
The discovery of nitric oxide in the vessel wall. A unifying concept in the pathogenesis of sepsis.

William Altemeier spent a lifetime studying the bacteriology and treatment of sepsis. The story I am going to tell you today will illustrate one of the most important steps forward in our understanding of this condition, which still represents one of the biggest problems in surgery. I am going to tell you about nitric oxide (NO) and use the work from our group at the Wellcome Research Laboratories (Beckenham) in the United Kingdom to illustrate the essential points that relate NO to the pathogenesis of sepsis. In particular, I will focus on the role of NO in the control of blood pressure and on its role in tissue damage. In the last 4 years, the formation of NO from the amino acid L-arginine has been shown in many cells and tissues. 1 I will only discuss some of these, focusing on those that may contribute to our understanding of the
The Effectiveness of a Violence Prevention Program: Did It Influence How Children Conceptualize Bullying?.

This paper reports on a study, which is part of a broader set of studies, designed to evaluate a violence prevention program entitled Expect Respect conducted in Austin, Texas elementary schools. The qualitative study was conducted to determine whether students in schools who received the Expect Respect curriculum conceptualized bullying differently from their cohorts in other schools. The program aims to improve peer relationships and communication skills among students and to help bullies understand the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. Forty fifth-grade students from four schools participated in the study. Two of the schools were part of the Expect Respect program and two were not. The results showed that students characterized a more diverse set of behaviors as bullying than expected. Students who participated in Expect Respect curriculum were more aware of instances of bullying and were more likely to think something could be done about bullying. One recommendation of the study is that children need to explain their definitions of bullying in order for teachers and researchers to understand their existing cognitions about the topic. It was apparent that students perceived a need for forums to allow them to discuss bullying. Appended are the Expect Respect Interviews. (Contains 24 tables and 14 references.) (JDM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy: applications for the management of bipolar disorder.

OBJECTIVES This paper reviews cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for bipolar disorder (BD). Data on the poor outcome of about 50% of patients diagnosed with BD supports the addition of a psychosocial intervention for the treatment of this recurring disorder. The psychoeducational nature of CBT, the effectiveness of CBT in increasing compliance to pharmacological treatment, and the ability of CBT to prevent relapse in unipolar depression (UD) are well suited to the treatment of BD. METHOD Psychosocial interventions for BD will be briefly reviewed. Individual and group CBT interventions (published and unpublished) will also be reviewed. The significance of comorbid anxiety disorders regarding response to treatment will also be discussed. A review of the treatment protocol with the specific cognitive-behavioral interventions as applied to BD will be presented. Finally, a case example will be presented to illustrate the application of CBT to BD. RESULTS Preliminary results indicate that CBT may be an effective adjunctive, intervention for the treatment of BD. Specifically CBT may be helpful in increasing compliance, improving quality of life and functioning, help early symptom recognition, decrease relapse and decrease depressive symptomatology. CONCLUSIONS Preliminary data on CBT for BD are promising but more rigorous randomized clinical trials are needed to confirm the efficacy of CBT for BD. An other area of research should be to pursue the understanding of cognitive processes in BD which would allow us to refine and develop CBT interventions unique to this disorder.
A Review of Multi Biometric System with Recognition Technologies and Fusion Strategies

Biometrics means technology of measuring and analyzing physiological or biological characteristics of living body for identification and verification purposes. A biometric system provides automatic recognition of an individual based on some sort of unique feature or characteristic of the individual. Biometric systems is based on palmprints, fingerprints, facial features, voice, signature, hand features, handwriting, the retina and iris. User verification systems that use a single biometric indicator often have to contend with noisy sensor data, restricted degree of freedom, non-universality of the biometric modalities and unacceptable error rates. So the need of modifying multimodal biometric system occurred. A multimodal biometric system have different biometric traits and provides better recognition performance as compared to the systems based on single biometric trait. This paper presents a review of multibiometric systems including its recognition technologies, level of fusion and feature extraction for fingerprint and iris. Features like minutia points from fingerprint and texture from iris are extracted.
Hypomethylation of the CTCFL/BORIS promoter and aberrant expression during endometrial cancer progression suggests a role as an Epi-driver gene

Cancers arise through accumulating genetic and epigenetic alterations, considered relevant for phenotype and approaches to targeting new therapies. We investigated a unique collection of endometrial cancer precursor samples and clinically annotated primary and metastatic lesions for two evolutionary and functionally related transcription factors, CCCTC-binding factor (zinc finger protein) (CTCF) and its paralogue CTCF-like factor, also denoted Brother of the Regulator of Imprinted Sites (CTCFL/BORIS). CTCF, a chromatin modeling- and transcription factor, is normally expressed in a ubiquitous fashion, while CTCFL/BORIS is restricted to the testis. In cancer, CTCF is thought to be a tumor suppressor, while CTCFL/BORIS has been suggested as an oncogene. CTCF mutations were identified in 13 %, with CTCF hotspot frameshift mutations at p.T204, all observed solely in the endometrioid subtype, but with no association with outcome. Interestingly, CTCFL/BORIS was amongst the top ranked genes differentially expressed between endometrioid and non-endometrioid tumors, and increasing mRNA level of CTCFL/BORIS was highly significantly associated with poor survival. As aberrant CTCFL/BORIS expression might relate to loss of methylation, we explored methylation status in clinical samples from complex atypical hyperplasia, through primary tumors to metastatic lesions, demonstrating a pattern of DNA methylation loss during disease development and progression in line with the increase in CTCFL/BORIS mRNA expression observed. Thus, CTCF and CTCFL/BORIS are found to diverge in the different subtypes of endometrial cancer, with CTCFL/BORIS activation through demethylation from precursors to metastatic lesions. We thus propose, CTCFL/BORIS as an Epi-driver gene in endometrial cancer, suggesting a potential for future vaccine development.
Archiving for Psychologists: Suggestions for Organizing, Documenting, Preserving, and Protecting Computer Files

[Clin Psychol Sci Prac 18: 246–265, 2011] Psychological researchers create a large number of files as part of their work, including study stimuli, assessment forms, data sets, analytic output, and manuscripts. We argue that it is fundamentally important that psychologists develop systematic ways of archiving these files. A well-designed file archive can greatly improve the efficiency of locating information, the security of stored files, the ability to recover from human and mechanical errors, the generation of future studies, and the sharing of knowledge with other psychologists. A survey of clinical psychologists demonstrated a need for greater knowledge and training in archiving. To address this issue, we describe the abstract demands that a file archive must meet and then provide concrete suggestions on how to meet these demands.
Log canonical singularities are Du Bois

A recurring difficulty in the Minimal Model Program is that while log terminal singularities are quite well behaved (for instance, they are rational), log canonical singularities are much more complicated; they need not even be Cohen-Macaulay. The aim of this paper is to prove that log canonical singularities are Du Bois. The concept of Du Bois singularities, introduced by Steenbrink, is a weakening of rationality. We also prove flatness of the cohomology sheaves of the relative dualizing complex of a projective family with Du Bois fibers. This implies that each connected component of the moduli space of stable log varieties parametrizes either only Cohen-Macaulay or only non-Cohen-Macaulay objects.
Perception of Business Studies Teachers on the Infuence of Large Class Size in Public Secondary Schools in Yobe State, Nigeria

This is a survey study conducted to determine the perception of business studies teacher’s on the influence of large class size in Yobe state public secondary school. Three research questions were raised to guide the study. The population comprised of one hundred and twenty (120) business studies teachers from one hundred and five (105) Secondary schools in Yobe state. A sample of ninety (90) Business studies teachers from seventy five (75) secondary schools were selected through a random sampling. Structured Questionnaire was used for data collection and the data was analyzed using mean. The findings of the study revealed that large class size has negative effect on Business studies teacher’s as it affect their performance. It is therefore recommended that more schools and classrooms should be build and more teacher’s be employed to ease teacher’s activities for improved performance.
Fault detection in Flexible Assembly Systems using Petri net

A significant part of the activities in a manufacturing system involve assembly tasks. Nowadays, these tasks are object of automation due to the market increasing demand for quality, productivity and variety of the products. Consequently, the automation of assembly systems should consider flexibility to face product diversification, functionalities, delivery times, and volumes involved. However, these systems are vulnerable to faults due to the characteristic of their mechanism and the complex interaction among their control devices. In this context, the present work is focused on the modeling design of flexible assembly systems control, including the occurrence of faults. The proposed method structures a sequence of steps for the models construction of assembly processes and their fault detection, based on the theory of discrete events systems and Petri net. This work use in special, production flow schema/mark flow graph (PFS/MFG) technique to describe and model the flexible assembly systems control through a rational and systematic procedure, as well as, the processes data record based on quantitative techniques for fault detection. This approach is applied to a flexible assembly systems installed and in operation to compare the effectiveness of the developed procedure.
The challenge of international consensus: defining an opioid essential prescription package

Purpose of reviewTo describe a new strategy that aimed to facilitate opioid prescription for better pain management. Recent findingsThe International Association of Hospice and Palliative Care recently develop a single prescription package (drugs and dosing) with one opioid, one laxative, and one antiemetic for the initiation of opioid treatment in cancer pain and other life-threatening conditions, with the intention to facilitate opioid use, improve patient compliance, and reduce adverse effects. SummaryThe opioid essential prescription package was an international project designed to ensure that opioids are better tolerated by reducing the adverse effects of opioids, which could lead to more sustained improvements in pain management.
Wideband millimeter wave pin diode spdt switch using ibm 0.13µm sige technology

Feasibility of wideband on-chip RF switch operating at millimeter wave frequencies using PIN diodes in IBM . 13 mum SiGe technology is demonstrated. A SPDT reflective switch targeting 60 GHz wireless and radar applications is designed, fabricated, and measured. Good correlations between simulation and hardware are reported. Measured data show 2.0 to 2.7 dB of insertion loss over 51 to 78 GHz bandwidth with better than 12 dB return loss and 25 to 35 dB of isolation.
Multi-contact frictional rigid dynamics using impulse decomposition

We present an interactive and stable multi-contact dynamic simulation algorithm for rigid bodies. Our approach is based on fast frictional dynamics (FFD) [14], which is designed for large sets of non-convex rigid bodies. We use a new friction model that performs velocity-level multi-contact simulation using impulse decomposition. Moreover, we accurately handle friction at each contact point using contact distribution and frictional impulse solvers, which also account for relative motion. We evaluate our algorithm's performance on many complex multi-body benchmarks with thousands of contacts. In practice, our dynamics simulation algorithm takes a few milliseconds per timestep and exhibits more stable behaviors.
Fuzzy rule extraction from typicality and membership partitions

This paper proposes extracting fuzzy rules from data using fuzzy possibilistic c-means and possibilistic fuzzy c-means algorithms, which provide more than one partition information: the typicality matrix and the membership matrix. Usually to extract fuzzy rules from data only one of the partition matrix is used, resulting in one rule per cluster. In our work we extract rules from both the membership partition matrix and the typicality matrix, resulting in deriving multiple rules for each cluster. These methods are applied to fuzzy modeling of four different classification problems: Iris, Wine, Wisconsin breast cancer and Altman data sets. The performance of the obtained models is compared and we consider the added value of the proposed approach in fuzzy modeling.
Making water count: water accountability change within an Australian university

Purpose - – Drought conditions affected an acute water scarcity crisis across large parts of Australia through the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Public policy responses emphasised demand management strategies. This study aims to examine the response to these challenges within a large Australian university from 1999 to 2010. Design/methodology/approach - – Case study utilising semi-structured interviews. Findings - – Staff empowered to take an emergent approach to issues of social concern, initiated water accountability change focused on water efficiency from 1999, and “water principles” from 2002. A growing network had some success translating and enrolling others over coming years. However into the late 2000s, as drought conditions abated and with a renewed focus on financial control, developments that had not established clear links to core accountability mechanisms eroded. This study demonstrates that measurement is essential to understanding patterns of water usage, but also needs to establish links to core systems of accountability to broadly change behaviour. Practical implications - – Higher education continues to be an environment where creative responses to community challenges can be nurtured. Despite increasing pressures to focus on financial outcomes, the sector should continue to nurture opportunities to shape issues of community concern through leading practice. Originality/value - – This study provides insight into the development, fragility, and contested meaning of emergent systems of water accountability within the context of a university.
Rapid Ischemic Cell Death in Immature Oligodendrocytes: A Fatal Glutamate Release Feedback Loop

Ischemic injury of immature oligodendrocytes is a major component of the brain injury associated with cerebral palsy, the most common human birth disorder. We now report that cultured immature oligodendrocytes [O4+/galactoceramide (GC)−] are exquisitely sensitive to ischemic injury (80% of cells were dead after 25.5 min of oxygen and glucose withdrawal). This rapid ischemic cell death was mediated by Ca2+ influx via non-NMDA glutamate receptors. The receptors were gated by the release of glutamate from the immature oligodendrocytes themselves via reverse glutamate transport and included a significant element of autologous feedback of glutamate from cells onto their own receptors. High (≥100 μm) extracellular glutamate was protective against ischemic injury as a result of non-NMDA glutamate receptor desensitization. Other potential pathways of Ca2+ influx, such as voltage-gated Ca2+ channels, NMDA receptors, or the Na+–Ca2+ exchanger, did not significantly contribute to ischemic Ca2+ influx or cell injury. Release of Ca2+ from intracellular stores was also not an important factor. In agreement with previous studies, more mature oligodendrocytes (O4−/GC+) were found to be less sensitive to ischemic injury than were the immature cells studied here.
Multipotent and Committed CD34+ Cells in Bone Marrow Transplantation

In order to study the role of CD34+ cells in hematological recovery following bone marrow transplantation (BMT), bone marrow cells stained with HPCA‐1 (CD34) and MY‐9 (CD33) monoclonal antibodies were analyzed by using a fluorescence‐activated cell sorter on or about days 14 and 28, as well as at later times, following BMT in 6 recipients. Single cell cultures of CD34+ cells were also performed to evaluate their in vitro hematopoietic function. CD34+ cells were detectable in bone marrow cells on day 14. More than 80% of CD34+ cells co‐expressed the CD33 antigen, and macrophage (Mac) colony‐forming cells predominated among total colony‐forming cells of CD34+ cells. In normal bone marrow cells, CD34+, CD33+ cells amounted to about 40% of CD34+ cells, and the incidences of erythroid bursts, granulocyte/macrophage (GM) colonies, and Mac colonies were similar to each other. After more than 10 weeks, CD34+, CD33− cells gradually recovered, as erythroid burst colony‐forming cells increased following GM colony‐forming cells. This phenomenon was well‐correlated with the time course of peripheral blood cell recovery. CD34+, CD33+ cells as committed progenitors and CD34+, CD33− cells as multipotent stem cells have distinctive biological behaviors in BMT.
The fatal booze!—triple acid–base disorder in a patient with alcohol intoxication -

Patients of chronic alcohol abuse can present with a variety of acid-base disorders and electrolyte disturbances. Lactic acidosis (LA) along with alcoholic ketoacidosis is an infrequent and underappreciated cause of wide anion-gap metabolic acidosis in alcoholic patients. The likelihood of misdiagnosing the condition is high because of the lack of awareness and presence of nonspecific clinical signs and symptoms shared with other clinical abnormalities such as acute pancreatitis, methanol or ethylene glycol poisoning, and diabetic ketoacidosis, which exist in these patients. As this condition is reversible with early intervention, promptly recognizing the condition and initiating proper treatment by the physicians would go a long way in preventing the morbidity and mortality in these patients. The outcome for such patients is excellent with early intervention. We report a patient with history of chronic alcoholism and alcohol binge admitted to the emergency department with triple acid–base disorder, which included life-threatening high anion-gap metabolic acidosis owing to concomitant LA and alcohol-related ketoacidosis in which the primary element was LA along with metabolic and respiratory alkalosis.
Extracellular fibrinogen binding protein, Efb, from Staphylococcus aureus as an antiplatelet agent in vivo

Summary Staphylococcus aureus produces and secretes a protein, extracellular fibrinogen binding protein (Efb), which contributes to virulence in wound infection. We have previously shown that Efb is a potent inhibitor of platelet function in vitro. We confirm here that this is also the case in vivo. Pre-treatment with Efb resulted in a significant prolongation of bleeding time in a mouse model. Furthermore, Efb was capable of rescuing animals from death caused by the administration of potent platelet agonists. This antiplatelet effect may explain the retardation of wound healing associated with Efb in S. aureus wound infections. These results are important not only in terms of understanding S. aureus pathogenesis, and consequently identifying new treatment strategies, but also with regard to the development of potential, novel antiplatelet agents for the prevention of thrombosis.