Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictive spatial modelling of alternative control strategies for the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in Great Britain, 2001

A spatial simulation model of foot-and-mouth disease was used in March and early April 2001 to evaluate alternative control policies for the 2001 epidemic in Great Britain. Control policies were those in operation from March 20, 2001, and comprised a ban on all animal movements from February 23, 2001, and a stamping-out policy. Each simulation commenced with the known population of infected farms on April 10, 2001, and ran for 200 days. For the control policy which best approximated that actually implemented from late March, the model predicted an epidemic of approximately 1800 to 1900 affected farms, and estimated that the epidemic would be eradicated between July and October 2001, with a low probability of continuing beyond October 2001. This policy included the slaughter-out of infected farms within 24 hours, slaughter of about 1-3 of the surrounding farms per infected farm within a further 48 hours, and minimal interfarm movements of susceptible animals. Delays in the slaughter of animals on infected farms beyond 24 hours after diagnosis slightly increased the epidemic size, and failure to achieve pre-emptive slaughter on an adequate number of at-risk farms substantially increased the expected size of the epidemic. Vaccination of up to three of the most outbreak-dense areas carried out in conjunction with the adopted control policy reduced the predicted size of the epidemic by less than 100 farms. Vaccination of buffer zones (designed to apply available vaccine and manpower as effectively as possible) carried out in place of the adopted control policy allowed the disease to spread out of control, producing an epidemic involving over 6000 farms by October 2001, with no prospect of immediate eradication.
Effects of Social Networks on Social Life of Undergraduate Students

The aim of the study is to determine the effects social networks on social life of freshmen and sophomores. The study was designed as a qualitative case study. Data was collected through focus group interviews. The participants were 24 teacher candidates studying in various departments in the faculty of education. Only four students expressed that social networking has no effect at all while others agreed that social networking has somewhat positive or negative effects on their social lives. The most common positive effect emerged as keeping in touch with the ones whom can be seen rarely or cannot be seen at all. The pictures and videos shared in social networks seem to help the users start conversation. Although, the participating students expressed that communicating with old friends through social networks as one positive effect of these sites, they also mentioned that changing lifestyles by time may cause negativities in communication. Some of the participants had complaints on side effects of adding their relatives to the friends list. As a significant finding of the study, some students pointed out they spend too much time on social networks because they cannot find anything better to do. It seems that at least some of the students could have used social networks less if they had more opportunities of spending their spare time on sports, arts or other social events.
2-Coefficient Fixed Point Hardwired Adaptive Filtering Based on LMS Algorithm

Adaptive filtering techniques have a wide spectrum of utilization, such as in acoustic and electrical echo cancellation, interference cancellation, cancellation of harmonics, among others. Among the various strategies of adaptation, the Least Mean Square algorithm (LMS) is arguably the most popular, mainly because of its low computational cost, robustness and tracking ability. We are proposing the study of tradeoffs in the design of dedicated structures of fixed point and float point adaptive filters based on LMS algorithm. While the fixed point structure enables the implementation of simpler structure, and therefore speeding up the development time of the project, on the other hand the float-point structure enables higher precision in the results, which allows for less error in stead-state operation of the adaptive filter. However, this higher precision is obtained at the cost of higher complexity in the hardware structure. This work will explore the study of these tradeoffs in the development of the fixed point and float point structures, and after that we intend to apply them to the harmonics cancelling application. The developed architectures were described in hardware description language VHDL and the validation of the structure shows that it is able to cancel the interference from a sinusoidal signal efficiently.
Enterprise Systems Competencies-Supplying the Skills – The Novice Practitioner Perspective

The demand for enterprise systems skills is increasing persistent enterprise systems skill shortages. One explanation for the skills shortages is the gap between enterprise systems curricula in higher education institutions and the competencies expected from graduates by industry. A contemporary South African study identified interpersonal and business process competencies as key skills required by enterprise systems practitioners. Further studies identified and ranked business process practitioner competencies from the perspective of business. The current research extends these studies by examining the competency requirements identified by novice enterprise systems practitioners undertaking in-situ business process improvement assignments. Informing the study was the principle that competency acquisition is a combination of theory and practice intertwined through reflection. The findings show the importance of both business process competency and interpersonal competencies and confirm that these are global issues. The study contributes to the existing enterprise systems education body of knowledge in highlighting limitations in the transfer of technical competencies and identifying five specific technical competencies.
Direct Isolation and Characterization of Human Nephron Progenitors

Mature nephrons originate from a small population of uninduced nephrogenic progenitor cells (NPs) within the cap mesenchyme. These cells are characterized by the coexpression of SIX2 and CITED1. Many studies on mouse models as well as on human pluripotent stem cells have advanced our knowledge of NPs, but very little is known about this population in humans, since it is exhausted before birth and strategies for its direct isolation are still limited. Here we report an efficient protocol for direct isolation of human NPs without genetic manipulation or stepwise induction procedures. With the use of RNA‐labeling probes, we isolated SIX2+CITED1+ cells from human fetal kidney for the first time. We confirmed their nephrogenic state by gene profiling and evaluated their nephrogenic capabilities in giving rise to mature renal cells. We also evaluated the ability to culture these cells without complete loss of SIX2 and CITED1 expression over time. In addition to defining the gene profile of human NPs, this in vitro system facilitates studies of human renal development and provides a novel tool for renal regeneration and bioengineering purposes. Stem Cells Translational Medicine 2017;6:419–433
A Comparison of Classifiers for Intelligent Machine Usage Prediction

Probability estimation of machine usages is an essential task to the development of an intelligent device/environment. In this paper, we propose a generic framework to the task using the sliding window technique and incremental feature selection. The methodology is applied to a real-life dataset of office printers and the performances of different standard classifiers in supervised learning are compared. We conclude that Logistic Regression (LR) outperform other classifiers and is appropriate for the proposed framework. The use of Generic Bayesian Network (GBN) classifier is also promising, if combined with feature reduction methods.
Neurologic Complications of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation

Background and Purpose The rate and outcomes of neurologic complications of patients receiving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) are poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to identify these parameters in ECMO patients. Methods All patients receiving ECMO were selected from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample between 2001-2011. The rate and outcomes of neurologic complications [acute ischemic stroke, intracranial hemorrhage (ICH), and seizures] among these patients was determined. Discharge status, mortality, length of stay, and hospitalization costs were compared between patients with and without neurologic complications using chi-squared tests for categorical variables and Student's t-test for continuous variables. Results In total, 23,951 patients were included in this study, of which 2,604 (10.9%) suffered neurologic complications of seizure (4.1%), stroke (4.1%), or ICH (3.6%). When compared to patients without neurologic complications, acute ischemic stroke patients had significantly higher rates of discharge to a long-term facility (12.2% vs. 6.8%, p<0.0001) and a significantly longer mean length of stay (41.6 days vs. 31.9 days, p<0.0001). ICH patients had significantly higher rates of discharge to a long-term facility (9.5% vs. 6.8%, p=0.007), significantly higher mortality rates (59.7% vs. 50.0%, p<0.0001), and a significantly longer mean length of stay (41.8 days vs. 31.9 days) compared to patients without neurologic complications. These outcomes did not differ significantly between seizure patients and patients without neurologic complications. Conclusions Given the increasing utilization of ECMO and the high costs and poor outcomes associated with neurologic complications, more research is needed to help determine the best way to prevent these sequelae in this patient population.
Influence of genetic susceptibility on the urinary excretion of 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine of firefighters

OBJECTIVES Oxidative DNA damage has been implicated in carcinogenesis. The DNA damage can be assessed from the urinary excretion of the DNA-repair product 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OH-dG). The factors were investigated that influenced the excretion of urinary 8-OH-dG in 78 firefighters. METHODS 53 Out of 78 firefighters were exposed to fire within 5 days of the study and 25 were not. 8-OH-dG was measured by ELISA and the distribution of the genotypes of CYP1A1, CYP2E1, GSTM1, and GSTT1 was measured by polymerase chain reaction. RESULTS The homozygous wild type frequencies of CYP1A1 MspI, CYP1A1 ile-val, CYP2E1, GSTM1, and GSTT1 were 31.5%, 56.2%, 60.3%, 50.7%, and 53.4%, respectively. The geometric mean of urinary 8-OH-dG was 14.1 ng/mg creatinine in more active firefighters and 12.3 ng/mg creatinine in non-exposed and less active subjects. Significantly increased concentrations of urinary 8-OH-dG were found to be associated with cigarette smoking, and 14% of the variation of 8-OH-dG was explained by cigarettes smoked per day. The CYP1A1MspI, CYP1A1 ile-val, GSTM1, and GSTT1 genetic polymorphisms were not found to be significantly associated with the urinary excretion of 8-OH-dG. However, the subjects carrying the CYP2E1 mutant type excreted higher concentrations of 8-OH-dG and there was a marginally significant interaction of GSTT1 with firefighting activity. Multiple regression analysis confirmed that smoking was the strongest predictor of excretion of 8-OH-dG. Age, body mass index, and firefighting activity were not significant predictive factors for urinary 8-OH-dG. CONCLUSION Smoking and CYP2E1 gene polymorphism may be important factors in carcinogenesis and the GSTT1 positive genotype may be a genetic susceptibility factor in firefighters who are exposed regularly to various chemical carcinogens.
Simulation of a patient driven strategy for FES supported sit-to-stand movement

A comprehensive research has been undertaken to simulate a model based on the functional electrical stimulation (FES), the only method to stimulate the paralyzed muscles of paraplegics. The simulation of sit-to-stand (STS) movement using a patient driven technique has been presented in this paper. The strategy is to use the voluntary body effort of the patient to perform the STS movement. The main tasks are mathematical modeling of a three link biomechanical model, development of a humanoid model, development of an inverse model to estimate the joint torques and designing a controller for the controlled movement of the system. The humanoid model has been designed in Visual Nastran software. Neural Network has been used to develop the inverse model while a PID (Proportional-Integral-derivative) controller has been used in Matlab/Simulink to simulate the movement.
A Practically Linear Relation Between Time Delay and the Optimal Settling Time of a Haptic Device

Haptic rendering denotes the process of computing and displaying forces from a virtual environment to a human operator via a haptic device. From the control point of view, the complete haptic system comprising virtual environment, haptic device, and human operator is a hybrid control system that contains both discrete- and continuous-time elements. This letter investigates the influence of time delay on the theoretical optimal performance during haptic rendering with regard to minimal settling time, which belongs to the most frequently used design criteria in control engineering. It is shown that both continuous-time stiffness and damping of human operator or haptic device improve the optimal performance of the device. For the worst case, i.e., without such physical elements, the influence of delay on the optimal settling time becomes almost linear. This observation leads to an easy-to-remember rule of thumb for the optimal settling time that a haptic device should theoretically be able to reach. It states that each sampling period of additional time delay causes the optimal settling time (for a $2\%$ position threshold) to increase by approximately five sampling periods. In this linear relation, the effect of discrete-time sampling appears to correspond to a delay of one whole sampling period. The theoretical investigations are accompanied by a series of experiments on a DLR/KUKA light-weight robot, which shows that the newly introduced rule of thumb also applies for single joints of complex robotic systems.
L-Dopa Medication in Parkinson's Disease Restores Activity in the Motor Cortico-Striatal Loop but Does Not Modify the Cognitive Network

Background The goal of this study was to evaluate the effects of L-Dopa medication in Parkinson's disease (PD) on brain activation during the performance of a set-shifting task. Using fMRI, we have previously studied the patterns of activity observed in patients with PD after overnight removal of dopaminergic medication compared with control participants during the performance of different stages of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST). The results revealed decreased cortical activity in the PD group compared to controls in the conditions that significantly required striatum, while increased cortical activity was observed when striatum was not involved. However, the effect of dopaminergic medication in PD patients on those patterns of activity has not yet been studied. Methodology/Principal Findings Here, eleven PD patients at early stage of the disease taking L-Dopa medication were recruited and underwent two fMRI sessions while performing the WCST: one session while taking their normal dose of medication and the other following overnight dopaminergic medication withdrawal. We found that L-dopa medication helped restoring a normal pattern of activity when matching and not planning was required, by increasing cortical activity in the premotor cortex. This effect was even stronger in the motor loop, i.e. when the putamen was required for controls, when matching following negative feedback. However, the medication did not change the pattern of activity in conditions relying primarily on a cognitive loop, i.e. when the caudate nucleus was required. Conclusions/Significance These studies provide explanation at the neural level regarding the relatively poor effects of L-Dopa on the cognitive deficits observed in PD.
Heroin dependence: Consequences and precursors related to route of administration

Two random samples of Danish prisoners on remand (solitary confinement (SC) and non-SC)) were examined using semistructured and standardized psychiatric and social interviews, cognitive tests, and questionnaires. Heroin dependence was divided into injection heroin dependence (IHD) and smoke heroin dependence (SHD). Comparisons corrected for confounders were made with regard to IHD versus SHD and dependent versus non-dependent subjects. Thirty-two per cent of the sample had lifetime heroin dependence, and the IHD versus SHD ratio was 3:1. The IHD subjects were more severely strained than SHD with regard to somatic complications (blood-transferred infections), early social strain, psychiatric comorbidity (mood disorders), personality dimensions (introversion), and cognitive performance (low performance scale score). The IHD subjects were considered more vulnerable than SHD subjects, both premorbid and during the dependence. SHD subjects may be recruited from other groups than the traditional (that is, IHD) .
Type II Activation of Macrophages and Microglia by Immune Complexes Enhances Th17 Biasing in an IL-6-Independent Manner

Macrophages can be activated into several distinct activation states. One of these states, type II activation, has a regulatory phenotype characterized by decreased IL-12 and increased IL-10, and has been shown to bias naïve CD4+ T cells to a Th2 response. Microglia, the resident macrophage-like cells in the central nervous system (CNS), are important contributors to neuroinflammation and, thus, we investigated if type II activated microglia could bias CD4+ T cell responses in a similar manner as type II activated macrophages. Using immune complex ligation in the presence of LPS to induce type II activation, we found that both type II macrophages and type II microglia biased CD4+ T cell responses in vitro to express increased levels of IL-17A and CD124. The enhanced IL-17A production occurred independently of IL-6, and IL-10 and IL-12, which were key regulators of IFN-γ production, but were not involved in the increased IL-17A. Finally, we found that another type II-activating compound, glatiramer acetate, did not bias CD4+ T cells to produce enhanced IL-17A. Taken together, this study demonstrates that microglia can be type II activated and, similarly to type II macrophages, can bias CD4+ T cell responses; however, depending on the type II stimulus, the effect on CD4+ T cell subset differentiation may vary.
S EASONAL PREDICTION USING UNSUPERVISED FEATURE LEARNING AND REGRESSION

We propose to use machine learning to discover indices from the SST field data, and to compare their prediction performance to that of the Niño3. 4 index, on tasks related to ENSO. As a first step in this direction, this work focuses on predicting the time-series of monthly temperature anomalies in Texas, from time series for the whole ocean SST field, ending 6 months prior.
Fine grain performance evaluation of e-commerce sites

E-commerce sites are still a reference for the Web technology in terms of complexity and performance requirements, including availability and scalability. In this paper we show that a coarse grain analysis, that is used in most performance studies, may lead to incomplete or false deductions about the behavior of the hardware and software components supporting e-commerce sites. Through a fine grain performance evaluation of a medium size e-commerce site, we find some interesting results that demonstrate the importance of an analysis approach that is carried out at the software function level with the combination of distribution oriented metrics instead of average values.
The Exocyst Affects Protein Synthesis by Acting on the Translocation Machinery of the Endoplasmic Reticulum*

We previously showed that the exocyst complex specifically affected the synthesis and delivery of secretory and basolateral plasma membrane proteins. Significantly, the entire spectrum of secreted proteins was increased when the hSec10 (human Sec10) component of the exocyst complex was overexpressed, suggestive of post-transcriptional regulation (Lipschutz, J. H., Guo, W., O'Brien, L. E., Nguyen, Y. H., Novick, P., and Mostov, K. E. (2000) Mol. Biol. Cell 11, 4259–4275). Here, using an exogenously transfected basolateral protein, the polymeric immunoglobulin receptor (pIgR), and a secretory protein, gp80, we show that pIgR and gp80 protein synthesis and delivery are increased in cells overexpressing Sec10 despite the fact that mRNA levels are unchanged, which is highly indicative of post-transcriptional regulation. To test specificity, we also examined the synthesis and delivery of an exogenous apical protein, CNT1 (concentrative nucleoside transporter 1), and found no increase in CNT1 protein synthesis, delivery, or mRNA levels in cells overexpressing Sec10. Sec10-GFP-overexpressing cell lines were created, and staining was seen in the endoplasmic reticulum. It was demonstrated previously in yeast that high levels of expression of SEB1, the Sec61β homologue, suppressed sec15-1, an exocyst mutant (Toikkanen, J., Gatti, E., Takei, K., Saloheimo, M., Olkkonen, V. M., Soderlund, H., De Camilli, P., and Keranen, S. (1996) Yeast 12, 425–438). Sec61β is a member of the Sec61 heterotrimer, which is the main component of the endoplasmic reticulum translocon. By co-immunoprecipitation we show that Sec10, which forms an exocyst subcomplex with Sec15, specifically associates with the Sec61β component of the translocon and that Sec10 overexpression increases the association of other exocyst complex members with Sec61β. Proteosome inhibition does not appear to be the mechanism by which increased protein synthesis occurs in the face of equivalent amounts of mRNA. Although the exact mechanism remains to be elucidated, the exocyst/Sec61β interaction represents an important link between the cellular membrane trafficking and protein synthetic machinery.
Improving first-line antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings

Purpose of reviewAccess to first-line antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings has increased rapidly in the last 5 years. Newer medicines with greater potency and better safety profiles open the possibility for improving first-line antiretroviral therapy for developing countries. Recent findingsSeveral medicines offer the potential to improve the simplicity, safety and efficacy of first-line antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings. These include tenofovir, raltegravir, elvitegravir, rilpivirine and protease inhibitors. A number of clinical questions are outstanding, particularly regarding safety in pregnancy and compatibility with drugs to treat common coinfections including tuberculosis. SummarySimple, affordable regimens were key to the initial emergency response, but the long-term response to HIV calls for a reconsideration of current treatment options. Preconditions for widespread use in developing countries include affordability, simplicity and answers to relevant research questions. In the absence of strong pharmacovigilance systems, cohort monitoring will be critical to assessing the safety profile of new drugs in such settings.
A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Strategy for Internet Addiction in adolescents

Recently, adolescents’ Internet addiction became a serious issue due to their excessive use of internet. This study focuses on Problematic Internet Use (PIU) effect on adolescents and offer therapeutic methods in treating internet addiction. Furthermore it raises concerns regarding questionable issues inherent in the existing treatment modalities for Internet addiction and proposes more effective therapeutic methods such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT).