Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scaling up HIV self-testing in sub-Saharan Africa: a review of technology, policy and evidence

Purpose of review HIV self-testing (HIVST) can provide complementary coverage to existing HIV testing services and improve knowledge of status among HIV-infected individuals. This review summarizes the current technology, policy and evidence landscape in sub-Saharan Africa and priorities within a rapidly evolving field. Recent findings HIVST is moving towards scaled implementation, with the release of WHO guidelines, WHO prequalification of the first HIVST product, price reductions of HIVST products and a growing product pipeline. Multicountry evidence from southern and eastern Africa confirms high feasibility, acceptability and accuracy across many delivery models and populations, with minimal harms. Evidence on the effectiveness of HIVST on increased testing coverage is strong, while evidence on demand generation for follow-on HIV prevention and treatment services and cost-effective delivery is emerging. Despite these developments, HIVST delivery remains limited outside of pilot implementation. Summary Important technology gaps include increasing availability of more sensitive HIVST products in low and middle-income countries. Regulatory and postmarket surveillance systems for HIVST also require further development. Randomized trials evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness under multiple distribution models, including unrestricted delivery and with a focus on linkage to HIV prevention and treatment, remain priorities. Diversification of studies from west and central Africa and around blood-based products should be addressed.
The One Hour Yeast Proteome*

We describe the comprehensive analysis of the yeast proteome in just over one hour of optimized analysis. We achieve this expedited proteome characterization with improved sample preparation, chromatographic separations, and by using a new Orbitrap hybrid mass spectrometer equipped with a mass filter, a collision cell, a high-field Orbitrap analyzer, and, finally, a dual cell linear ion trap analyzer (Q-OT-qIT, Orbitrap Fusion). This system offers high MS2 acquisition speed of 20 Hz and detects up to 19 peptide sequences within a single second of operation. Over a 1.3 h chromatographic method, the Q-OT-qIT hybrid collected an average of 13,447 MS1 and 80,460 MS2 scans (per run) to produce 43,400 (x̄) peptide spectral matches and 34,255 (x̄) peptides with unique amino acid sequences (1% false discovery rate (FDR)). On average, each one hour analysis achieved detection of 3,977 proteins (1% FDR). We conclude that further improvements in mass spectrometer scan rate could render comprehensive analysis of the human proteome within a few hours.
WERS the validity? a critique of the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey of employees

The Workplace Employment Relations Survey series is a tremendously useful source of data for industrial relations researchers. But, like all large-scale secondary datasets, it has a number of structural design problems. These have not been articulated previously in much depth. Looking at the 2004 instalment of the series, this article aims to offer a critical appraisal of the survey of employees. The structure of the questionnaire and the validity of the items are critiqued. Recommendations are offered for the next edition of the Workplace Employment Relations Survey.
Eddy Current Effects on Rotor Position Estimation and Magnetic Pole Identification of PMSM at Zero and Low Speeds

High-frequency current responses of a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM), with and without considering eddy current effects, are significantly different. This paper investigates the eddy current effects on rotor position estimation. A compensation method is developed to improve the high-frequency-injection-based rotor position estimation of a PMSM at zero and low speeds. The paper also contributes to an improved magnetic pole identification based on space vector pulse width modulation for an arbitrary initial rotor position. The estimation and sensorless control method of PMSM, considering eddy current effects, has been verified by experimental results.
Cultural heritage tourism — opportunities for product development: The Barcelona Case

A theoretical framework and a practical case is presented, which introduce a new methodology for the creation of tourism products based on cultural heritage. After discussing selected definitions of cultural tourism, a first approach towards classifying cultural heritage based tourism is defined. The author emphasizes that one of the most crucial component of tourism development is policy, which has been analysed in order to shed light on the most important issues related to it. Thus, a conceptual chart on the creation of tourism products is drafted, outlining the elements that have to be taken into consideration in order to successfully stimulate ‘cultural consumption’ or exchange between hosts and guests. A case study shows the opportunities to create new tourism products using cultural heritage resources: “Barcelona's Cultural Identity Itinerary”, which is based on cultural centres and associations as the basic cultural resources, but also includes among others, museums, art galleries, historic sites and monuments within the itinerary.
Transaction costs of the Kyoto Mechanisms

Abstract Transaction costs will reduce the attractiveness of the Kyoto Mechanisms compared to domestic abatement options. Especially the project-based mechanisms Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI) are likely to entail considerable costs of baseline development, verification and certification. The Activities Implemented Jointly (AIJ) pilot phase and the Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF) programme give indications about the level of these costs. Under current estimates of world market prices for greenhouse gas emission permits, projects with annual emission reductions of less than 50,000 t CO2 equivalent are unlikely to be viable; for micro projects transaction costs can reach several hundred € per t CO2 equivalent. Thus, the Marrakech Accord rule to have special rules for small scale CDM projects makes sense, even if the thresholds chosen advantage certain project types; projects below 1000 t CO2 equivalent per year should get further exemptions. An alternative solution with no risk for the environmental credibility of the projects would be to subsidise baseline setting and charge lower, subsidised fees for small projects for the different steps of the CDM/second track JI project cycle.
Restricted Authority

This article connects slavery politics with the curtailment of antebellum infrastructure policy and the limits placed on the development of the early American state. Because many Southerners feared that a unified Northern majority could hinder slavery's expansion or continued existence, they successfully worked to curtail federal power, even in areas seemingly unconnected to slavery. They helped to undermine a national improvement system, the federal government's ability to build improvements within state borders, and Congress's power to levy tolls to fund road repairs. In addition, Southerners' efforts to curb certain improvement projects curtailed the federal government's overall administrative capacity.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF CHILD NUTRITIONAL STATUS ACROSS COUNTRIES AND OVER TIME

Malnutrition is manifested in various degrees of both underweight and overweight, with large differences and rapid changes in their prevalence and severity. This paper introduces a new approach to characterizing the distribution of a population’s nutritional status, to help analyze changes in that distribution over time and across countries. Our method draws on the poverty literature to construct Foster-Greer-Thorbecke measures for the incidence and severity of under- and overweight, based on deviations in either direction from the median of a healthy population. We apply this median-based measure to the nutritional status of over 400,000 preschool children, as measured in 130 DHS surveys covering 53 countries over a period from 1986 to 2006. Unlike conventional threshold-based methods, the new approach counts changes in every child’s bodyweight. We find that this offers a more sensitive measure of differences across countries and changes over time, showing in particular that children’s bodyweights are closely linked to local agricultural output and gender equality as well as real GDP per capita.
Afferent innervation of eyelids and their connections to the superior colliculus

Normal functioning of the eyelids is necessary to protect the eye against corneal drying and damage and, thus, is essential to maintain good vision. During eyelid movements, striated eyelid muscles, the levator palpebrae superioris (LPS) and the orbicularis oculi (OO) muscles, and smooth muscles, the superior tarsal muscle (Mu ̈ller’s) and the inferior tarsal muscles, are involved in an active or passive way. In the different types of blinking, LPS and OO muscles are antagonistically active, 1,2
A comparison of vincristine and doxorubicin infusional chemotherapy with methylprednisolone (VAMP) with the addition of weekly cyclophosphamide (C‐VAMP) as induction treatment followed by autografting in previously untreated myeloma

In a sequential nonrandomized study, 204 consecutive unselected patients aged < 70 years received induction chemotherapy with infusional vincristine and adriamycin with oral methyl prednisolone (VAMP; n=75) or with additional cyclophosphamide, C‐VAMP (n=129). 38/129 C‐VAMP patients also received verapamil during induction as part of a controlled trial with the aim to overcome drug resistance. A median of five courses (range 1–11) of chemotherapy were required before maximal response was attained and this was similar in both groups. An over‐all response rate of 71% was noted at the end of induction. The complete remission (CR) rate with C‐VAMP was 24%, which was significantly higher (P=0.04) than the CR rate with VAMP alone (8%). The addition of verapamil did not alter the response rate of C‐VAMP. Compliance to VAMP was overall 83% and not affected by the addition of cyclophosphamide. The proportion of patients going on to receive high‐dose chemotherapy and an autograft was the same for VAMP and C‐VAMP treated patients (71%). The median overall survival (OS) and progression‐free survival (PFS) for the whole group were 4.4 years and 2.0 years and no difference in outcome was observed between the different treatment groups. Therefore the addition of weekly cyclophosphamide to VAMP induction therapy has significantly improved the response rates of previously untreated myeloma patients. C‐VAMP was not more toxic and did not compromise the chances of receiving an autograft. Verapamil was without influence on any parameters in this study.
Contribution à l'analyse et l'évaluation des requêtes expertes : cas du domaine médical. (Contribution to the analyze and evaluation of clinical queries : medical domain)

The research topic of this document deals with a particular setting of medical information retrieval (IR), referred to as expert based information retrieval. We were interested in information needs expressed by medical domain experts like praticians, physicians, etc. It is well known in information retrieval (IR) area that expressing queries that accurately reflect the information needs is a difficult task either in general domains or specialized ones and even for expert users. Thus, the identification of the users’ intention hidden behind queries that they submit to a search engine is a challenging issue. Moreover, the increasing amount of health information available from various sources such as government agencies, non-profit and for-profit organizations, internet portals etc. presents opportunities and issues to improve health care information delivery for medical professionals, patients and general public. One critical issue is the understanding of users search strategies and tactics for bridging the gap between their intention and the delivered information. In this thesis, we focus, more particularly, on two main aspects of medical information needs dealing with the expertise which consist of two parts, namely : — Understanding the users intents behind the queries is critically important to gain a better insight of how to select relevant results. While many studies investigated how users in general carry out exploratory health searches in digital environments, a few focused on how are the queries formulated, specifically by domain expert users. We address more specifically domain expert health search through the analysis of query attributes namely length, specificity and clarity using appropriate proposed measures built according to different sources of evidence. In this respect, we undertake an in-depth statistical analysis of queries issued from IR evaluation compaigns namely Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) and Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) devoted for different medical tasks within controlled evaluation settings. — We address the issue of answering PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome) clinical queries formulated within the Evidence Based Medicine framework. The contributions of this part include (1) a new algorithm for query elicitation based on the semantic mapping of each facet of the query to a reference terminology, and (2) a new document ranking model based on a prioritized aggregation operator. we tackle the issue related to the retrieval of the best evidence that fits with a PICO question, which is an underexplored research area. We propose a new document ranking algorithm that relies on semantic based query expansion leveraged by each question facet. The expansion is moreover bounded by the local search context to better discard irrelevant documents. The experimental evaluation carried out on the CLIREC dataset shows the benefit of our approaches.
The Influence of Discourse in Policy-making: An Analysis of EU Sport Policy in the Area of Good Governance

In recent years ‘good governance in sport’ has become an important topic within the EU institutions and the sport movement. This article explores how the idea of good governance was constructed and served as a problem definition and as a problem solution. It is based on process tracing by analysing official publications and by conducting semi structured interviews. Using the framework of discursive institutionalism, which focuses the analysis on the content of ideas and how they are developed in the coordinative discourse of EU institutions, this article argues that different and sometimes rival narratives informed by very different ideas about sport were competing to construct the storyline good governance as an essential solution for problems concerning the sport. For instance the discursive struggle established on one hand the idea that the events of match fixing are inherent consequences of the governance structures in sport while on the other hand actors constructed the meaning that match fixing is caused by criminal forces outside the sport and separated from governance questions in sport. The conclusion of this article is that the discourse on good governance changed over the last years and this change did have an impact on the policy process of EU sport policy regarding the question of governance structures and practices in the sport sector.
TPL2 (Therapeutic Targeting Tumor Progression Locus-2)/ATF4 (Activating Transcription Factor-4)/SDF1&agr; (Chemokine Stromal Cell-Derived Factor-&agr;) Axis Suppresses Diabetic Retinopathy

Rationale: Diabetic retinopathy is characterized by vasopermeability, vascular leakage, inflammation, blood–retinal barrier breakdown, capillary degeneration, and neovascularization. However, the mechanisms underlying the association between diabetes mellitus and progression retinopathy remain unclear. Objective: TPL2 (tumor progression locus 2), a serine-threonine protein kinase, exerts a pathological effect on vascular angiogenesis. This study investigated the role of N&egr;-(carboxymethyl)lysine, a major advanced glycation end products, and the involved TPL2-related molecular signals in diabetic retinopathy using models of in vitro and in vivo and human samples. Methods and Results: Serum N&egr;-(carboxymethyl)lysine levels and TPL2 kinase activity were significantly increased in clinical patients and experimental animals with diabetic retinopathy. Intravitreal administration of pharmacological blocker or neutralizing antibody inhibited TPL2 and effectively suppressed the pathological characteristics of retinopathy in streptozotocin-induced diabetic animal models. Intravitreal VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) neutralization also suppressed the diabetic retinopathy in diabetic animal models. Mechanistic studies in primary human umbilical vein endothelial cells and primary retinal microvascular endothelial cells from streptozotocin-diabetic rats, db/db mice, and samples from patients with diabetic retinopathy revealed a positive parallel correlation between N&egr;-(carboxymethyl)lysine and the TPL2/chemokine SDF1&agr; (stromal cell–derived factor-&agr;) axis that is dependent on endoplasmic reticulum stress-related molecules, especially ATF4 (activating transcription factor-4). Conclusions: This study demonstrates that inhibiting the N&egr;-(carboxymethyl)lysine-induced TPL2/ATF4/SDF1&agr; axis can effectively prevent diabetes mellitus–mediated retinal microvascular dysfunction. This signaling axis may include the therapeutic potential for other diseases involving pathological neovascularization or macular edema.
Regional knowledge capabilities, embeddedness of firms and industry organisation: Bioscience megacentres and economic geography

Changes in epistemology in biosciences are generating important spatial effects. The most notable of these is the emergence of a few 'Bioscience Megacentres' for basic and applied bioscience medical and clinical research (molecular, post-genomic, proteomics, etc.), biotechnology research, training in these and related fields, academic entrepreneurship and commercial exploitation by clusters of 'drug discovery' start-up and spin-off companies, along with specialist venture capital and other innovation system support services. Large pharmaceutical firms that used to lead such knowledge generation and exploitation processes are becoming increasingly dependent upon innovative drug solutions produced in such clusters, and megacentres are now the predominant source of such commercial knowledge. 'Big pharma' is seldom at the heart of megacentres such as those the paper will argue are found in about four locations each in the USA and Europe, but remains important for some risk capital ('milestone payments'), marketing, and distribution of drugs discovered. The embedding of these processes also creates major new regional disparities, which some regional governances have recognised, causing them to develop responsibilities for regional science policy and funding to offset spatial biases intrinsic in traditional national (and in the EU, supranational) research funding regimes. Responses follow a variety of models ranging from market-following to both regionalised (decentralising by the centre) and 'regionalist' (ground-up); in each case, the role of megacentres is justified in health terms. But their role in assisting fulfilment of regional economic growth visions is also clearly perceived and pronounced in policy terms.
Income Convergence in an Endogeneous Growth Model

An endogeneous growth model is developed that produces convergence in per capita income and growth rates of output. Agents have identical preferences and access to identical technologies of production and investment, but differing levels of initial human capital. A spillover effect of human capital in the investment technology provides below-average human capital agents with a higher rate of return on investment than above-average human capital agents. Thus below-average human capital agents grow faster than above-average human capital agents. This model explains income convergence of the developed world, regional income convergence within the United States, and intergenerational mobility.
Superoxide Dismutase Enhances Tolerance of Freezing Stress in Transgenic Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.)

Activated oxygen or oxygen free radicals have been implicated in a number of physiological disorders in plants including freezing injury. Superoxide dismutase (SOD) catalyzes the dismutation of superoxide into O2 and H2O2 and thereby reduces the titer of activated oxygen molecules in the cell. To further examine the relationship between oxidative and freezing stresses, the expression of SOD was modified in transgenic alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.). The Mn-SOD cDNA from Nicotiana plumbaginifolia under the control of the cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter was introduced into alfalfa using Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation. Two plasmid vectors, pMitSOD and pChlSOD, contained a chimeric Mn-SOD construct with a transit peptide for targeting to the mitochondria or one for targeting to the chloroplast, respectively. The putatively transgenic plants were selected for resistance to kanamycin and screened for neomycin phospho-transferase activity and the presence of an additional Mn-SOD isozyme. Detailed analysis of a set of four selected transformants indicated that some had enhanced SOD activity, increased tolerance to the diphenyl ether herbicide, acifluorfen, and increased regrowth after freezing stress. The F1 progeny of one line, RA3-ChlSOD-30, were analyzed by SOD isozyme activity, by polymerase chain reaction for the Mn-SOD gene, and by polymerase chain reaction for the neo gene. RA3-ChlSOD-30 had three sites of insertion of pChlSOD, but only one gave a functional Mn-SOD isozyme; the other two were apparently partial insertions. The progeny with a functional Mn-SOD transgene had more rapid regrowth following freezing stress than those progeny lacking the functional Mn-SOD transgene, suggesting that Mn-SOD serves a protective role by minimizing oxygen free radical production after freezing stress.
Quality of life of hypertensive patients and comparison of two instruments of HRQOL measure.

BACKGROUND Measuring health-related quality of life (QOL) helps evaluating the efficiency of a treatment and identifies problems with major impact on the patient's QOL. However, these measures are safer if assessed by generic and specific instruments together, where it is necessary to check for compatibility between these and avoid repetitions and contradictions between the domains. OBJECTIVE To describe the quality of life of hypertensive patients and to evaluate the compatibility of a specific instrument (MINICHAL) and a generic instrument (SF-36). METHODS One hundred adult hypertensive under outpatient care were interviewed. The mean HRQOL as measured by MINICHAL was 6.64 (SD 6.04) in mental status and average of 5.03 (SD 4.11) in the state of somatic manifestations. The means for the instrument SF-36 were in ranking order: limitation due to physical aspects 47.3 (SD 42.9), vitality 57.4 (SD 19.7), limitation due to emotional aspects 58 (SD 44.7), functional capacity 58.7 (SD 27.8), pain 60.4 (SD 26.3), general health condition 60.7 (SD 22.7), mental health 66.8 (SD 22.1) and social aspects 78 (SD 26.1). RESULTS The MINICHAL significantly correlated (p <0.001) with the SF-36 in all domains. CONCLUSION The MINICHAL proved to be a useful tool in the assessment of HRQOL in patients with hypertension.
Post-innovation CSR Performance and Firm Value

Abstract Analyzing a sample of 13,917 US firm–years from 1991 to 2006, we find that more innovative firms demonstrate high corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance subsequent to a successful innovation. These high-CSR innovative firms enjoy significantly higher valuation post-innovation. These findings imply that firms with demonstrated potential growth opportunities, as evident from the number of registered patents and their citations, benefit by strategically investing more in CSR activities; that is, CSR investment entails ‘doing well by [strategically] doing good. ’