Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors associated with early career progression in professional Australian Football players

ABSTRACT This study examined the association between individual and team characteristics and the probability of being offered a second contract in professional Australian Football. Contract status was obtained from the AFL for players who were drafted in the AFL National Draft between 1999 and 2013 (n = 999). Individual player characteristics were retrieved from the AFL while variables relating to performance were accessed online via Champion Data®. A binary logistic regression examined the influence of each characteristic on the probability of a professional Australian Football player receiving a second contract. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and the associated AUC were used to assess the discriminant ability of both a training (n = 938) and test data set (n = 61). The characteristics that influenced the probability of receiving a second contract included first year debut (pr 0.606), draft order (pr – 0.126), draft year (pr 0.059), games played (pr 1.848), team state (pr 0.458), rising star nomination (pr 1.553) and team ladder position (pr −0.043) (χ2 (8) = 198.28, p < 0.001). The ROC curve demonstrated an AUC of 82.4% (training) and 76.0% (test). A combination of individual and team based characteristics are associated with early career progression in professional Australian Football.
Safety and effect on ablation size of hydrochloric acid-perfused radiofrequency ablation in animal livers

Abstract Purpose: Our objective was to determine the safety and ablation size of hydrochloric acid-perfused radiofrequency ablation (HCl-RFA) in liver tissues, prospectively using in vivo rabbit and ex vivo porcine liver models. Materials and methods: The livers in 30 rabbits were treated in vivo with perfusions of normal saline (controls) and HCl concentrations of 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%, during RFA at 103 °C and 30 W for 3 min. For each experimental setting, six ablations were created. Safety was assessed by comparing baseline weight and selected laboratory values with those at 2, 7, and 14 days’ post-ablation, and by histopathological analysis. The livers in 25 pigs were treated ex vivo with the same five perfusions during RFA at 103 °C, at both 30 W and 60 W, for 30 min. Ablation diameters and volumes were measured by two examiners. Results: Rabbit weights and selected laboratory values did not differ significantly from baseline to 7 and 14 days’ post-ablation, liver tissues outside the ablation zones were normal histologically, and adjacent organs showed no macroscopic damage. The mean ablation volumes in the porcine livers treated with HCl-RFA were all larger than those treated with normal saline perfusion during RFA (NS-RFA), at both 30 W and 60 W (p < 0.001). The largest ablation volume and transverse diameter were observed in the porcine livers during 10% HCl-RFA at 60 W, measuring 179.22 (SD = 24.79) cm3 and 6.84 (SD = 0.36) cm, respectively. Conclusions: Based on our experiments, HCl-RFA in the liver appears to be as safe as NS-RFA while also resulting in larger ablation zones.
Use of an Innovative, Affordable, and Open-Source Short Message Service–Based Tool to Monitor Malaria in Remote Areas of Uganda

Quality health management requires timely and accurate data, and paper-based reporting does not fill this role adequately. The introduction of malaria rapid diagnostic tests and the availability of wireless communications present an opportunity to open direct data transmission and feedback between peripheral health workers and central managers. In November 2009, the Uganda Ministry of Health deployed a short message service–based reporting system in two districts. At a set-up cost of $100/health facility, local technician support of $ 400 per month, and a cost of $0.53/week/clinic, the SMS reporting system was started at more than 140 clinics. Positivity rates for rapid diagnostic tests and artemisinin combination therapy stock outs were 48% and 54% in Kabale and 71% and 54% in Gulu, among other reports, at more than 85% health facilities reporting weekly and without monetary incentives or additional supervision. The SMS-based reporting systems have potential to improve timeliness in reporting of specific, time-sensitive metrics at modest cost, while by-passing current bottlenecks in the flow of data. With the development of specific capacity to manage stock data at district level, the availability of timely data offers potential to address commodity distribution problems and reduce stock-outs.
Using the Oxford Cognitive Screen to Detect Cognitive Impairment in Stroke Patients: A Comparison with the Mini-Mental State Examination

Background The Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS) was recently developed with the aim of describing the cognitive deficits after stroke. The scale consists of 10 tasks encompassing five cognitive domains: attention and executive function, language, memory, number processing, and praxis. OCS was devised to be inclusive and un-confounded by aphasia and neglect. As such, it may have a greater potential to be informative on stroke cognitive deficits of widely used instruments, such as the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) or the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which were originally devised for demented patients. Objective The present study compared the OCS with the MMSE with regards to their ability to detect cognitive impairments post-stroke. We further aimed to examine performance on the OCS as a function of subtypes of cerebral infarction and clinical severity. Methods 325 first stroke patients were consecutively enrolled in the study over a 9-month period. The OCS and MMSE, as well as the Bamford classification and NIHSS, were given according to standard procedures. Results About a third of patients (35.3%) had a performance lower than the cutoff (<22) on the MMSE, whereas 91.6% were impaired in at least one OCS domain, indicating higher incidences of impairment for the OCS. More than 80% of patients showed an impairment in two or more cognitive domains of the OCS. Using the MMSE as a standard of clinical practice, the comparative sensitivity of OCS was 100%. Out of the 208 patients with normal MMSE performance 180 showed impaired performance in at least one domain of the OCS. The discrepancy between OCS and MMSE was particularly strong for patients with milder strokes. As for subtypes of cerebral infarction, fewer patients demonstrated widespread impairments in the OCS in the Posterior Circulation Infarcts category than in the other categories. Conclusion Overall, the results showed a much higher incidence of cognitive impairment with the OCS than with the MMSE and demonstrated no false negatives for OCS vs MMSE. It is concluded that OCS is a sensitive screen tool for cognitive deficits after stroke. In particular, the OCS detects high incidences of stroke-specific cognitive impairments, not detected by the MMSE, demonstrating the importance of cognitive profiling.
Different intensities of basketball drills affect jump shot accuracy of expert and junior players

Background In basketball a maximum accuracy at every game intensity is required while shooting. The aim of the present study was to investigate the acute effect of three different drill intensity simulation protocols on jump shot accuracy in expert and junior basketball players. Materials & Methods Eleven expert players (age 26 ± 6 yrs, weight 86 ± 11 kg, height 192 ± 8 cm) and ten junior players (age 18 ± 1 yrs, weight 75 ± 12 kg, height 184 ± 9 cm) completed three series of twenty jump shots at three different levels of exertion. Counter Movement Jump (CMJ) height was also measured after each series of jump shots. Exertion’s intensity was induced manipulating the basketball drills. Heart rate was measured for the whole duration of the tests while the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) was collected at the end of each series of shots. Results Heart rate and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were statistically different in the three conditions for both expert and junior players. CMJ height remained almost unchanged in both groups. Jump shot accuracy decreased with increasing drills intensity both in experts and junior players. Expert players showed higher accuracy than junior players for all the three levels of exertion (83% vs 64%, p < 0.001; 75% vs 57%, p < 0.05; 76% vs 60%, p < 0.01). Moreover, for the most demanding level of exertion, experts showed a higher accuracy in the last ten shots compared to the first ten shots (82% vs 70%, p < 0.05). Discussion Experts coped better with the different exertion’s intensities, thus maintaining a higher level of performance. The introduction of technical short bouts of high-intensity sport-specific exercises into skill sessions should be proposed to improve jump shot accuracy during matches.
Analyzing and Identifying Teens’ Stressful Periods and Stressor Events From a Microblog

Increased health problems among adolescents caused by psychological stress have aroused worldwide attention. Long-standing stress without targeted assistance and guidance negatively impacts the healthy growth of adolescents, threatening the future development of our society. So far, research focused on detecting adolescent psychological stress revealed from each individual post on microblogs. However, beyond stressful moments, identifying teens’ stressful periods and stressor events that trigger each stressful period is more desirable to understand the stress from appearance to essence. In this paper, we define the problem of identifying teens’ stressful periods and stressor events from the open social media microblog. Starting from a case study of adolescents’ posting behaviors during stressful school events, we build a Poisson-based probability model for the correlation between stressor events and stressful posting behaviors through a series of posts on Tencent Weibo (referred to as the microblog throughout the paper). With the model, we discover teens’ maximal stressful periods and further extract details of possible stressor events that cause the stressful periods. We generalize and present the extracted stressor events in a hierarchy based on common stress dimensions and event types. Taking 122 scheduled stressful study-related events in a high school as the ground truth, we test the approach on 124 students’ posts from January 1, 2012 to February 1, 2015 and obtain some promising experimental results: (stressful periods: recall 0.761, precision 0.737, and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$F_1$</tex-math></inline-formula>-measure 0.734) and (top-3 stressor events: recall 0.763, precision 0.756, and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$F_1$</tex-math> </inline-formula>-measure 0.759). The most prominent stressor events extracted are in the self-cognition domain, followed by the school life domain. This conforms to the adolescent psychological investigation result that problems in school life usually accompanied with teens’ inner cognition problems. Compared with the state-of-the-art top-1 personal life event detection approach, our stressor event detection method is 13.72% higher in precision, 19.18% higher in recall, and 16.50% higher in <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"> $F_1$</tex-math></inline-formula>-measure, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Alcohol use, depression, and life satisfaction among older persons in Jamaica

ABSTRACT Background: We aimed to determine the prevalence of alcohol use among older Jamaicans as well as to explore among this population the relationships between alcohol use and: age, sex, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction. Although the nature of these relationships among the proposed study population were uncertain, in other settings alcohol use has tended to decline with increasing age, occur more commonly among men than women, and show non-linear relationships with depressive symptoms and life satisfaction. Methods: Data gathered by two-stage cluster sampling for a nationally representative health and lifestyle survey of 2,943 community-dwelling older Jamaicans, aged 60 to 103 years, were subjected to secondary analysis using the Student's t-test and χ 2 test as appropriate. Results: Current alcohol use was reported by 21.4% of the participants. It steadily declined with age and was six times more prevalent among men (37.6%) than women (6.2%). These findings were statistically significant as were associations of current alcohol use with comparatively lower levels of depressive symptoms. Current alcohol use was also more prevalent among persons who were either highly satisfied or highly dissatisfied with their lives, compared to others who had levels of life satisfaction between these two extremes. Conclusions: Current alcohol use among older Jamaicans occurs primarily among men, declines with increasing age, and is associated with a relatively low likelihood of depression. It is also associated with very high and very low levels of life satisfaction.
Evaluation of Generalized Born Models for Large Scale Affinity Prediction of Cyclodextrin Host-Guest Complexes

Binding affinity prediction with implicit solvent models remains a challenge in virtual screening for drug discovery. In order to assess the predictive power of implicit solvent models in docking techniques with Amber scoring, three generalized Born models (GBHCT, GBOBCI, and GBOBCII) available in Dock 6.7 were utilized, for determining the binding affinity of a large set of β-cyclodextrin complexes with 75 neutral guest molecules. The results were compared to potential of mean force (PMF) free energy calculations with four GB models (GBStill, GBHCT, GBOBCI, and GBOBCII) and to experimental data. Docking results yield similar accuracy to the computationally demanding PMF method with umbrella sampling. Neither docking nor PMF calculations reproduce the experimental binding affinities, however, as indicated by a small Spearman rank order coefficient (∼0.5). The binding energies obtained from GB models were decomposed further into individual contributions of the binding partners and solvent environments and compared to explicit solvent simulations for five complexes allowing for rationalizing the difference between explicit and implicit solvent models. An important observation is that the explicit solvent screens the interaction between host and guest much stronger than GB models. In contrast, the screening in GB models is too strong in solutes, leading to overestimation of short-range interactions and too strong binding. It is difficult to envision a way of overcoming these two opposite effects.
Efficacy of Dilute Povidone-Iodine against Multi- Drug Resistant Bacterial Biofilms, Fungal Biofilms and Fungal Spores

Objective: To study the in vitro effect of novel low-dose povidoneiodine formulations against established biofilms of multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Candida albicans and to test the Minimal Inhibitory Concentration of the same formulations against Candida auris, Trichophton mentagrophytes, Microsporum canis, Candida albicans and Aspergillus fumigatus. Methods: Biofilms of multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Candida albicans were developed on solid surfaces using the Calgary Biofilm Device plate. Minimum biofilm eradication concentration was then determined for each test drug and for control samples of known antimicrobials, ciprofloxacin and itraconazole. Quality control fungal strains of Candida auris, Trichophton mentagrophytes, Microsporum canis, Candida albicans and Aspergillus fumigatus were grown on Sabouraud’s Dextrose Agar plates as the growth medium for the anti-fungal susceptibility. Minimal Inhibitory Concentration was then determined for each test drug and for control samples of know antifungals, fluconazole and amphotericin B. Results: The low-dose povidone-iodine formulations completely eliminated all biofilms of bacterial and fungal species in the test systems. Ciprofloxacin was able to eradicate one bacterial biofilm only at concentrations greater than 0.25 ug/mL. Fluconazole was ineffective against C. albicans, A. fumigatus and C. auris. Amphotericin B had good anti-fungal activity against fungal strains. Conclusions: These novel dilute PVP-I formulations are effective anti-biofilm and anti-fungal /sporicidal agents in vitro. Further evaluation in living models is warranted.
Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) increases the risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD) while effective HCV treatment decreases the incidence of CKD

We assessed the risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV)‐infected patients and the incidence reduction of CKD after receipt of HCV treatment. We also evaluated the risk of membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis (MPGN) and cryoglobulinemia in chronic HCV patients. A retrospective cohort analysis of the Truven Health MarketScan Database (2008‐2015) in the United States was conducted. In a cohort of 56,448 HCV‐infected patients and 169,344 propensity score (1:3)–matched non‐HCV patients, we examined the association of HCV infection with the incidence of CKD. Of 55,818 HCV patients, 6.6 % (n = 3666), 6.3% (n = 3534), and 8.3% (n = 4628) patients received either interferon‐based dual, triple, or all‐oral direct acting antiviral agent therapy, respectively, whereas 79% of patients did not receive any HCV treatment. Cox proportional hazards models were used to compare the risk of developing CKD in HCV patients compared with non‐HCV patients and treated patients compared with untreated HCV patients. In a multivariate time‐varying Cox regression model, HCV‐infected patients had a 27% increased risk of CKD compared with non‐HCV patients (hazard ratio [HR], 1.27; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.18‐1.37). Among HCV patients, individuals who received the minimally effective HCV treatment for dual, triple, or all‐oral therapy had a 30% decreased risk of developing CKD (HR, 0.70; 95% CI, 0.55‐0.88). In addition, HCV‐infected patients experienced a twofold and a nearly 17‐fold higher risk of MPGN (HR, 2.23; 95% CI, 1.84‐2.71) and cryoglobulinemia (HR, 16.91; 95% CI, 12.00‐23.81) respectively, compared with non‐HCV patients. Conclusion: HCV‐infected individuals in the United States are at greater risk of developing CKD, MPGN, and cryoglobulinemia. Minimally effective treatment of HCV infection can prevent the development of CKD, although the association was not significant for all‐oral therapy. (Hepatology 2018;67:492‐504).
An efficient technique of scheduling mobile sinks in hybrid WSN

In the hybrid wireless sensor networks, mobile sinks move to pre-specified sink locations to gather sensory data provided by static sensors. In this setting, scheduling mobile sinks efficiently while prolonging the lifetime of network is a challenge. To remedy this problem, we propose a three-phase energy-balanced heuristic in this paper. We firstly divide the hybrid WSN into grid cells, cluster these grids into clusters according to data communication consumption, and then rebalance these clusters with considering movement consumption by a heuristics algorithm. Therefore, all clusters are balanced in energy consumption when considering the cost of both data gathering and sinks movement. The evaluation results indicate that our technique can compute an optimal grid division within limited time of iterations.
Accuracy of Abstracts for Original Research Articles in Pharmacy Journals

BACKGROUND: Accuracy of abstracts representing original research articles is imperative since these are readily available and biomedical literature readers may not have access to the full-text article. Furthermore, previous reports document discrepancies in published original research abstracts compared with the full-text article. OBJECTIVE: To determine the accuracy of abstracts for original research articles published in nationally represented, widely circulated pharmacy-specific journals (American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, The Consultant Pharmacist, Hospital Pharmacy, Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, Pharmacotherapy: The Journal of Human Pharmacology and Drug Therapy) from June 2001 through May 2002. METHODS: Outcome measures included an omission, defined as data in the abstract not located in the article. In addition, abstracts were considered deficient if these included an omission, inaccurate factual (ie, qualitative and quantitative) information presented in the abstract that differed from information contained within the text, an inconsistency in following the “Instructions for Authors” for the respective journal, or a discrepancy between the placement of text in the manuscript and a structured abstract. RESULTS: A total of 243 abstracts for original research articles were published in selected journal issues. Evaluation of these abstracts identified 60 (24.7%) abstracts containing omissions; 81 (33.3%) abstracts contained either an omission or inaccuracy. A total of 147 (60.5%) abstracts were classified as deficient. CONCLUSIONS: Results of this analysis demonstrate that improvements are needed within abstracts for original research articles published in pharmacy-specific journals. Authors and peer reviewers should analyze the abstract contents closely to ensure that the abstract accurately represents the full-text article.
The use of acousto-ultrasonics to determine the quality of the brazing of carbide-tipped cutting tools

Abstract The goal of this research was to improve the reliability of brazed cutting tools and saw blades through the development of non-destructive evaluation techniques (NDEs) to ensure tool quality. The objective was to determine the sensitivity of an acousto-ultrasonic-based technique to varying braze conditions of carbide teeth. This preliminary research developed a quick NDE technique to test not only the quality of brazed joints during manufacture, but also to inspect the carbide for micro-cracks that may have been introduced by stresses during the brazing process. The test system used an electric spark against the sawblade teeth or plate to initiate a stress wave in the sawblade which was received by an acoustic emission sensor coupled to the sawblade with a fluid couplant. A reading was taken through the saw tip and adjacent to the saw tip on the saw shoulder. An energy reading of each of the signals was obtained. A ratio was then taken of the two energy values. This gave a “self-calibrating” feature taking into account various slots and holes in the blade which could affect the waveform. This system was able to detect braze joints that had too much or too little heat applied during the brazing process, as well as no flux or twisted teeth. Future work will be conducted on saws of various sizes and designs as well as different grades of carbide tips.