Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The association between the food environment and weight status among eastern North Carolina youth

Abstract Objective To examine associations between various measures of the food environment and BMI percentile among youth. Design Cross-sectional, observational. Setting Pitt County, eastern North Carolina. Subjects We extracted the electronic medical records for youth receiving well child check-ups from January 2007 to June 2008. We obtained addresses for food venues from two secondary sources and ground-truthing. A geographic information systems database was constructed by geocoding home addresses of 744 youth and food venues. We quantified participants’ accessibility to food venues by calculating ‘coverage’, number of food venues in buffers of 0·25, 0·5, 1 and 5 miles (0·4, 0·8, 1·6 and 8·0 km) and by calculating ‘proximity’ or distance to the closest food venue. We examined associations between BMI percentile and food venue accessibility using correlation and regression analyses. Results There were negative associations between BMI percentile and coverage of farmers’ markets/produce markets in 0·25 and 0·5 mile Euclidean and 0·25, 0·5 and 1 mile road network buffers. There were positive associations between BMI percentile and coverage of fast-food and pizza places in the 0·25 mile Euclidean and network buffers. In multivariate analyses adjusted for race, insurance status and rural/urban residence, proximity (network distance) to convenience stores was negatively associated with BMI percentile and proximity to farmers’ markets was positively associated with BMI percentile. Conclusions Accessibility to various types of food venues is associated with BMI percentile in eastern North Carolina youth. Future longitudinal work should examine correlations between accessibility to and use of traditional and non-traditional food venues.
Pediatric Sensorineural Hearing Loss, Part 2: Syndromic and Acquired Causes

SUMMARY: This article is the second in a 2-part series reviewing neuroimaging in childhood SNHL. Previously, we discussed the clinical work-up of children with hearing impairment, the classification of inner ear malformations, and congenital nonsyndromic causes of hearing loss. Here, we review and illustrate the most common syndromic hereditary and acquired causes of childhood SNHL, with an emphasis on entities that demonstrate inner ear abnormalities on cross-sectional imaging. Syndromes discussed include BOR syndrome, CHARGE syndrome, Pendred syndrome, Waardenburg syndrome, and X-linked hearing loss with stapes gusher. We conclude the article with a review of acquired causes of childhood SNHL, including infections, trauma, and neoplasms.
Prevalence and clinical characteristics of left ventricular dysfunction among elderly patients in general practice setting: cross sectional survey

abstract Objective: To assess the prevalence and clinical characteristics of left ventricular dysfunction among elderly patients in the general practice setting by echocardiographic assessment of ventricular function. Design: Cross sectional survey. Setting: Four centre general practice in Poole, Dorset. Subjects: 817 elderly patients aged 70-84 years. Main outcomes: Echocardiographic assessment of left ventricular systolic function including measurement of ejection fraction by biplane summation method where possible, clinical symptoms, and signs of left ventricular dysfunction. Results: The overall prevalence of left ventricular systolic dysfunction was 7.5% (95% confidence interval 5.8% to 9.5%); mild dysfunction (5.0%) was considerably more prevalent than moderate (1.6%) or severe dysfunction (0.7%). Measurement of ejection fraction was possible in 82% of patients (n=667): in patients categorised as having mild, moderate, or severe dysfunction, the mean ejection fraction was 48% (SD 12.0), 38% (8.1), and 26% (7.9) respectively. At all ages the prevalence was much higher in men than in women (odds ratio 5.1, 95% confidence interval 2.6 to 10.1). No clinical symptom or sign was both sensitive and specific. In around half the patients with ventricular dysfunction (52%, 32/61) heart failure had not been previously diagnosed. Conclusions: Unrecognised left ventricular dysfunction is a common problem in elderly patients in the general practice setting. Appropriate treatment with angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors has the potential to reduce hospitalisation and mortality in these patients, but diagnosis should not be based on clinical history and examination alone. Screening is feasible in general practice, but it should not be implemented until the optimum method of identifying left ventricular dysfunction is clarified, and the cost effectiveness of screening has been shown.
Inclusive-fitness logic of cooperative breeding with benefits of natal philopatry

In cooperatively breeding species, individuals help to raise offspring that are not their own. We use two inclusive-fitness models to study the advantage of this kind of helpful behaviour in social groups with high reproductive skew. Our first model does not allow for competition among relatives to occur but our second model does. Specifically, our second model assumes a competitive hierarchy among nest-mates, with non-breeding helpers ranked higher than their newborn siblings. For each model, we obtain an expression for the change in inclusive fitness experienced by a helpful individual in a selfish population. The prediction suggested by each expression is confirmed with computer simulation. When model predictions are compared to one another, we find that helping emerges under a broader range of conditions in the second model. Although competition among kin occurs in our second model, we conclude that the life-history features associated with this competition also act to promote the evolutionary transition from solitary to cooperative breeding.
Thermal Weakening of Asperity Tips on Fault Planes at High Sliding Velocities

Real contacts on the scale of ~10 μm support gigapascal shear tractions and normal tractions on rapidly sliding faults. At sliding velocities above ~0.1 m/s, the asperity tips of the contacts become hot and weak. The macroscopic friction depends on the average strength of the asperity tips during their lifetimes of contact. The strength of the asperity tips does not go essentially to zero once they become weak because frictional heating would then cease and the tips would cool and strengthen. Rather, the contact retains finite strength so that frictional heating balances the heat lost from the asperity tip by conduction. Crudely, the macroscopic coefficient of friction at high sliding velocities decreases with the inverse of the square root of velocity rather than the inverse of the velocity in the widely used model of Rice (2006, https://doi.org/10.1029/2005/JB004006). Numerical thermal‐mechanical models support this inference. The finite strength of the asperity tips retards lateral extrusion of weakened material from the tips. Otherwise, extrusion would allow the sliding surfaces to converge establishing new contacts, which would renew the strength of the surface. The macroscopic coefficient of friction with somewhat weakened asperity tips remains high enough that the fault surface becomes hot on a millimeter scale in large crustal earthquakes. Fluid pressurization and eventually millimeter‐scale melting then reduce the macroscopic shear traction to lower values than does asperity tip weakening acting alone.
Associations Between Income, Acculturation, Country of Origin, and Type II Diabetes Among African Immigrants to Ontario, Canada

Associations Between Income, Acculturation, Country of Origin, and Type II Diabetes Among African Immigrants to Ontario, Canada by Girma Aman Goshe Database Design, Mohawk College, 2013 Certified Clinical Research, McMaster University, 2009 RPN, Mohawk College, 2006 MSPH, Tulane University SPHTM, 2003 B.Sc., Addis Ababa University, 1984/1985 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Public Health Epidemiology Walden University February 2019
Milk Carton: Family Tracing and Reunification system using Face Recognition over a DTN with Deployed Computing Nodes

During the recovery period after disasters, Family Tracing and Reunification (FTR) is the process by which separated family members are reunited. Traditional FTR methods rely on paper-based registries and notice boards, which cannot automatically match missing person queries with existing records and cannot be efficiently disseminated. Furthermore, lost children or people with disabilities may not be capable of supplying the text-based personal information required by registry forms. Finally, current digital FTR systems require the Internet for data delivery and storage, which may be unavailable during a disaster scenario. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Milk Carton FTR system. Milk Carton uses the Eigenfaces face recognition algorithm to automatically match missing person queries with existing records, without requiring text-based personal information. The system uses Computing Nodes, commodity devices deployed in evacuation centers, to handle record and query creation, data storage, and matching. To handle data delivery without the Internet, Milk Carton leverages response team vehicles as data ferries. The ferries store, carry, and forward records and queries across the system. In this study, we present the design of the Milk Carton system and initial performance evaluations.
Changes in Age at Diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in the United States, 1988 to 2000

PURPOSE The prevalence of diabetes in the United States is increasing. There is also concern that diabetes may be occurring at a greater frequency in youth and in young adults. We describe US population trends in self-reported age at diagnosis of type 2 diabetes mellitus. METHODS We undertook a secondary analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999–2000 and NHANES III (1988–1994). Both surveys are stratified, multistage probability samples targeting the civilian, noninstitutionalized US population, which allow calculation of population estimates. We included adults aged 20 years and older. We compared self-reported age at diagnosis of type 2 diabetes between the 2 survey periods. RESULTS The mean age at diagnosis decreased from 52.0 to 46.0 years (P <.05). Racial and ethnic differences in age at diagnosis found in 1988 to 1994 are no longer found in 1999 to 2000. CONCLUSIONS The age at diagnosis of type 2 diabetes mellitus has decreased with time. This finding likely represents a combination of changing diagnostic criteria, improved physician recognition of diabetes, and increased public awareness. Younger age at diagnosis may also reflect a true population trend of earlier onset of type 2 diabetes.
Effect of land-use change on the community assemblage of the landbirds of San Cristobal, Galapagos

Habitat change affects diversity of bird communities, allowing the expansion and dominance of some guilds and species, and the decline or even local extinction of others. The general objective of this investigation is understanding the changes on the landbird communities of Pacific Ocean islands due to anthropogenic vegetation alteration, and how different species are affected distinctly.
Pharmacological Assessment of the Medicinal Potential of Acacia mearnsii De Wild.: Antimicrobial and Toxicity Activities

Acacia mearnsii De Wild. (Fabaceae) is a medicinal plant used in the treatment of microbial infections in South Africa without scientific validation of its bioactivity and toxicity. The antimicrobial activity of the crude acetone extract was evaluated by both agar diffusion and macrobroth dilution methods while its cytotoxicity effect was assessed with brine shrimp lethality assay. The study showed that both bacterial and fungal isolates were highly inhibited by the crude extract. The MIC values for the gram-positive bacteria (78.1–312.5) μg/mL, gram-negative bacteria (39.1–625) μg/mL and fungal isolates (625–5000) μg/mL differ significantly. The bacteria were more susceptible than the fungal strains tested. The antibiosis determination showed that the extract was more (75%) bactericidal than bacteriostatic (25%) and more fungicidal (66.67%) than fungistatic (33.33%). The cytotoxic activity of the extract was observed between 31.25 μg/mL and 500 μg/mL and the LC50 value (112.36 μg/mL) indicates that the extract was nontoxic in the brine shrimp lethality assay (LC50 > 100 μg/mL). These results support the use of A. mearnsii in traditional medicine for treatment of microbial infections. The extract exhibiting significant broad spectrum antimicrobial activity and nontoxic effects has potential to yield active antimicrobial compounds.
NLP for Indexing and Retrieval of Captioned Photographs

We present a text-based approach for the automatic indexing and retrieval of digital photographs taken at crime scenes. Our research prototype, SOCIS, goes beyond keyword-based approaches and methods that extract syntactic relations from captions; it relies on advanced Natural Language Processing techniques in order to extract relational facts. These relational facts consist of a "pragmatic relation" and the entities this relation connects (triples of the form: ARG1-REL- ARG2). In SOCIS, the triples are used as complex image indexing terms; however, the extraction mechanism is used not only for indexing purposes but also for image retrieval using free text queries. The retrieval mechanism computes similarity scores between query-triples and indexing-triples making use of a domain-specific ontology.
Characterizing Forest Change Using Community-Based Monitoring Data and Landsat Time Series

Increasing awareness of the issue of deforestation and degradation in the tropics has resulted in efforts to monitor forest resources in tropical countries. Advances in satellite-based remote sensing and ground-based technologies have allowed for monitoring of forests with high spatial, temporal and thematic detail. Despite these advances, there is a need to engage communities in monitoring activities and include these stakeholders in national forest monitoring systems. In this study, we analyzed activity data (deforestation and forest degradation) collected by local forest experts over a 3-year period in an Afro-montane forest area in southwestern Ethiopia and corresponding Landsat Time Series (LTS). Local expert data included forest change attributes, geo-location and photo evidence recorded using mobile phones with integrated GPS and photo capabilities. We also assembled LTS using all available data from all spectral bands and a suite of additional indices and temporal metrics based on time series trajectory analysis. We predicted deforestation, degradation or stable forests using random forest models trained with data from local experts and LTS spectral-temporal metrics as model covariates. Resulting models predicted deforestation and degradation with an out of bag (OOB) error estimate of 29% overall, and 26% and 31% for the deforestation and degradation classes, respectively. By dividing the local expert data into training and operational phases corresponding to local monitoring activities, we found that forest change models improved as more local expert data were used. Finally, we produced maps of deforestation and degradation using the most important spectral bands. The results in this study represent some of the first to combine local expert based forest change data and dense LTS, demonstrating the complementary value of both continuous data streams. Our results underpin the utility of both datasets and provide a useful foundation for integrated forest monitoring systems relying on data streams from diverse sources.
Measuring Tourism Sustainability: Proposal for a Composite Index

The methodological bases are established for the design of a global composite index, the ST index, to measure tourism sustainability. Tourism sustainability is a fairly complex concept due to its latent, multidimensional and relative nature. A method based on factor loadings is proposed to construct a global tourism sustainability index. After comparing it with various theoretical approaches, the authors apply it to the Spanish system of environmental tourism indicators. The robustness of the proposed ST index is tested by calculating composite correlations between the Euclidean distances of different tourism destinations.
BAT System Description for NIST LRE 2015

In this paper, we summarize our efforts in the NIST Language Recognition (LRE) 2015 Evaluations which resulted in systems providing very competitive performance. We provide both the descriptions and the analysis of the systems that we included in our submission. We start by detailed description of the datasets that we used for training and development, and we follow by describing the models and methods that were used to produce the ﬁnal scores. These include the front-end (i.e., the voice activity detection and feature extraction), the back-end (i.e., the ﬁnal classiﬁer), and the calibration and fusion stages. Apart from the techniques commonly used in the ﬁeld (such as i-vectors, DNN Bottle-Neck features, NN classiﬁers, Gaussian Back-ends, etc.), we present less-common methods, such as Sequence Summarizing Neural Networks (SSNN), and Automatic Unit Discovery. We present the performance of the systems both on the Fixed condition (where participants are required to use predeﬁned data sets only), and the Open condition (where participants are allowed to use any publicly available resource) of the NIST LRE 2015.
Absence of association between insurance copayments and delays in seeking emergency care among patients with myocardial infarction.

BACKGROUND The requirement of copayments for emergency care is thought to control costs by reducing "inappropriate" visits to the emergency department. However, requiring copayments may lead to adverse outcomes if patients delay seeking care for emergency conditions. To determine whether such requirements are associated with delays in seeking care, we examined the length of time from the onset of symptoms to arrival at the hospital among patients with myocardial infarction who did or did not have required insurance copayments. METHODS All patients were enrolled in a single health maintenance organization (HMO) and presented with myocardial infarction at 1 of 19 hospitals in King County, Washington, from 1989 through 1994. There were 602 patients whose health insurance required a copayment for emergency department care (range, $25 to $100) and 729 patients with no copayment requirement. Data on the time to presentation were obtained from a review of ambulance and hospital records. RESULTS The median length of time from the onset of symptoms to arrival at the hospital, as adjusted for age, sex, and race, was 135 minutes for the copayment group and 137 minutes for the group with no copayment (95 percent confidence interval for the difference, -19 to +16 minutes). There was no significant association between the presence or absence of a copayment requirement and the time to arrival at the hospital after adjustment for calendar year, income, educational level, cardiac history, or clinical symptoms. Since some patients may be unaware of their copayment requirement, we performed a subgroup analysis of data on patients who had a previous visit to the emergency department with the same copayment status - that is, of patients who were likely to know about their copayment. This analysis also showed no significant association between the requirement for a copayment and delays in seeking treatment. CONCLUSIONS For privately insured patients in this HMO, the requirement of modest, fixed copayments for emergency services did not lead to delays in seeking treatment for myocardial infarction.
A Sharp Decline in Nitrogen Input in a N‐Saturated Subtropical Forest Causes an Instantaneous Reduction in Nitrogen Leaching

In China, as in other parts of the world, the emission and deposition of reactive nitrogen (N) have been reduced in recent years. Several decades of elevated N deposition in southwest China (40 to 60 kg ha−1 year−1) have resulted in extreme cases of N saturation, where N outputs are nearly equal to N inputs. Doubling N inputs using either NH4NO3 or NaNO3 fertilizer in a subtropical forest in Tieshanping, near Chongqing city in southwest China, caused an immediate doubling of N leaching (as NO3−). Reducing N inputs to ambient atmospheric deposition levels after 10 years of fertilization led to a rapid decrease in soil water NO3− concentration to levels similar to those in the reference plots that had not receive N fertilizer application. NO3− leaching via the soil water in the NH4NO3 plots was even lower than that in the NaNO3 plots or the reference plots, confirming the finding of a previous N‐fertilizing experiment that found that NH4+ deposition, in contrast to NO3− deposition, increased N retention in the forest ecosystem. The N sink remained for at least 2 years after the cessation of N addition. Even with reduced N inputs, ambient atmospheric N deposition caused significant acidification, buffered partly by SO42− sorption. Therefore, further abatement of reactive N emissions is necessary in the future.
A NOTE ON THE STABILITY OF SOLUTIONS OF ISOPRENALINE

ISOPRENALINE Spray Solution (B.P.C.) contains sodium metabisulphite (0.1 per cent) and must be recently prepared or stored protected from light in small well-filled containers. Since metallic ions catalyse the decomposition of isoprenaline (B.P.C. 1958) and since disodium edetate is a better preservative than sodium metabisulphite for solutions of the related phenylephrine (West and Whittet, 1960) comparison of the stabilising power of these two agents has been extended to the Spray Solution of Isoprenaline. Four solutions were prepared : (1) Isoprenaline Spray, B.P.C. , (2) Isoprenaline Spray, B.P.C. omitting sodium metabisulphite, (3) Isoprenaline Spray, B.P.C. omitting metabisulphite but containing disodium edetate (0.1 per cent) and (4) Isoprenaline Spray, B.P.C. containing added disodium edetate. Ampoules (5 ml.) of each of these were sealed under air and stored at 15-20" for 16 months. They were then assayed for biological activity using the blood pressure of the anaesthetised cat (depressor action) and the isolated rabbit ileum (inhibitory action). Only solution 3 differed significantly in activity from the standard solution 1 : the loss in activity, however, was slight. Both solutions not containing metabisulphite turned light brown in colour. Although intravenous infusion of isoprenaline has been recommended (Segal, 1960; Hellerstein, 1960) no information is available as to how the solutions are sterilised and the effect of various methods on the stability of isoprenaline has been examined. A solution of isoprenaline sulphate (1 in 10,000) in water for injection containing sodium metabisulphite (1 in 1,000) was prepared. Part of this was sterilised by filtration through a bacteria-proof sintered glass funnel and sealed in sterile 2 ml. ampoules, half of these under air and half under nitrogen. The remaining solution was placed in 2 ml. ampoules, half of which were sealed under air and half under nitrogen; ampoules from both of these two groups were autoclaved at 115" for 30 min., the rest were steamed at 100" for 30 min. Samples from each of the 6 batches were assayed on the isolated guineapig heart (cardiac stimulant action) and on the rabbit ileum (inhibitory action). There was no loss of biological activity in any of the solutions. Even after storage at 15-20" for 16 months, there was no significant loss of activity and all solutions remained colourless. Isoprenaline solutions of this composition showed no incompatibility with chlorocresolO.2 per cent or phenylmercuric nitrate 0.002 per cent. Thus, in the Spray Solution of Isoprenaline, disodium edetate does not prevent deterioration; it is not recommended as a preservative for this