Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comorbidités et aspects démographiques, cliniques et histologiques associés au Pyoderma Gangrenosum : un travail multicentrique descriptif sur 126 cas

Introduction : le pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) est une dermatose neutrophilique rare dont les notions physiopathologiques restent discutees. Le PG s'associe classiquement dans 50,0% des cas a des maladies inflammatoires chroniques intestinales (MICI), des hemopathies, et des rhumatismes inflammatoires (RI). D'autres associations possibles ont ete evoquees dans la litterature entre PG et syndrome metabolique, neoplasies, dysthyroidies, et hepatopathies. Peu de donnees francaises existent a ce jour. L’objectif principal de ce travail etait d'etudier les comorbidites associees au PG en France. Les objectifs secondaires etaient d’etudier les aspects demographiques, cliniques et histologiques lies au PG. Materiel et methodes : un travail multicentrique retrospectif etait mene sur des cas de PG diagnostiques entre 2000 et 2015, sur 2 criteres majeurs (aspect clinique compatible, exclusion des diagnostics differentiels) et au moins 2 criteres mineurs (histologie, pathologies associees, corticosensibilite, pathergie, douleur). On recueillait les donnees cliniques et demographiques des cas, et les comorbidites cardiovasculaires, neoplasiques, endocriniennes et digestives. Resultats : 126 cas provenant de 9 hopitaux francais etaient inclus, avec 72,2% de femmes. L'âge moyen au diagnostic de PG etait de 59 +/- 23 ans (11-99). Les lesions etaient multiples dans 60,5% des cas avec une localisation preferentielle au membre inferieur (83,3%). Les formes ulcerees survenaient chez des patients plus âges que les formes superficielles et pustuleuses (60 ans +/- 23 vs 39 ans +/- 18, p=0,01). Le PG etait associe a une pathologie classique dans 53,2%, avec 23,8% de MICI, 24,6% d'hemopathies et 7,1% de RI. On trouvait par ailleurs 15,1% de diabete de type 2, 36,5% d'hypertension arterielle, 18,8% d'obesite, 7,9% de cancers solides 7,1% de dysthyroidie, 4,8% de cirrhose. Discussion : nos resultats concordent avec la litterature sur la predominance feminine, l'âge moyen de 60 ans, les maladies classiquement associees. Quel que soit l'âge et le sexe, un cas de PG sur deux presente une pathologie associee classique. Les maladies cardiovasculaires, neoplasies, dysthyroidies et cirrhoses apparaissent comme de potentielles comorbidites du PG. Des mecanismes physiopathologiques communs, par le biais de cascades inflammatoires cytokiniques, sous-tendent probablement ces differentes pathologies, notamment par le biais de la voie du Th17. Conclusion : avec 126 cas, ce travail represente a notre connaissance la plus large etude francaise sur les comorbidites associees au PG. Tout etat inflammatoire chronique semble propice a l'apparition d'un PG. Les potentielles comorbidites cardiovasculaires, neoplasiques, thyroidiennes et hepatiques doivent etre prises en compte dans la decision therapeutique du patient. Les mecanismes physiopathologiques, les liens exacts et la cinetique de survenue entre PG et ces comorbidites meriteraient d'etre explores dans une etude prospective a grande echelle.
The Role of the CB1 Cannabinoid Receptor at the Frog Neuromuscular Junction

Endocannabionoids are endogenous compounds that have been linked to the activation of endocannabinoid receptors, like CB1, in the brain. Endocannibinoids, via CB1 activation, are responsible for modulating inhibitory and excitatory responses through retrograde signaling. Here we show that CB1 activation through application of an endocannabinoid agonist, arachidonylcyclopropylamide (ACPA), causes a decrease in stimulus-induced end-plate potentials (EPPs) in the frog neuromuscular junction (NMJ). We found that EPP amplitude decreased significantly only after eight minutes postapplication, and remained depressed for an additional 36 minutes. This study demonstrates that retrograde signaling through endocannabinoid activation of CB1 receptors may influence synaptic transmission at the frog NMJ.
When to use FaaS? - Influencing Technical Factors for and against using Serverless Functions

Cloud computing offerings evolve continuously. A recent trend is the Function as a Service paradigm which confronts developers with the decision whether adopting this new paradigm can be beneficial for parts of their application. However, many factors influence this decision or even prevent the usage of FaaS. Therefore, this paper provides a structured overview of relevant technical factors to guide the decision process.
Consensus Report on Management of Wheezing in Preschool Children, Hong Kong Society of Paediatric Respirology

Recurrent wheezing is a common clinical problem facing the paediatricians. Overseas studies showed that about one third of the preschool children had intermittent wheezing before three years of age, and almost 60% of the children would experience the same problem by the ages of six years. In Hong Kong, a total of 5,428 cases of acute wheezy attack (with the diagnoses of asthma, acute bronchitis or acute bronchiolitis) under or equal to the age of six years, which accounted for about 10% of all acute admission, were admitted to the hospitals under Hospital Authority in 2009 (Figure 1). The number of admissions had shown a steady increase trend from Abstract Objective: To review the literature on the clinical problem of recurrent wheezing in children and providing suggestion for the treatment of this problem based on the currently available evidences. Data sources and extraction: Literature search using Medline, Pubmed and the Cochrane Library up to March, 2010, using the terms "recurrent wheezing", "preschool children", "viral induced wheeze" and "multiple trigger wheeze". Study selection: A total of 38 original papers and review articles were selected for inclusion in this review. Data synthesis: Parent reported wheezing may represent a heterogenous condition while doctor-confirmed wheeze is more specific and exhibit greater airway resistance. In Hong Kong, there had been more than 5000 preschool children admitted for acute wheezy attack in the recent few years. Wheezing can be classified into different phenotypes according to its epidemiological characteristics or clinical features. Classification of recurrent wheezing into episodic viral wheeze and multiple trigger wheeze provides a practical framework for treatment. The treatment of the condition would include the bronchodilator, inhaled corticosteroids, and / or leucotriene receptor antagonist. The choice of treatment will depend on the clinical phenotypes and other clinical factors. The main effect of inhaled corticosteroids is symptomatic control rather than disease modification. Conclusions: Recurrent wheezing in preschool children is a common clinical problem. Classification of recurrent wheeze into episodic viral wheeze and multiple trigger wheeze enables us to manage the condition with the treatment of inhaled corticosteroids and / or leucotriene receptor antagonist or the combination.
Chatting about data

Conversation privacy is not one of the primary concerns in the development of chatbots, which require the use of powerful Natural Language Processing engines to function. Applications of the technology in healthcare require confidentiality of patient information. We propose the first decentralised chatbot protocol, designed to protect message contents and user identities from a powerful global adversary that controls the NLP server. Our design moves the central data processing to the chatbot client and hides the message sender through anonymous routing and the removal of linguistic features. A variety of attacks and their mitigations are discussed. Initial benchmark results are reported on language transformations.
Breeding and genetic management of drought in cowpea: Progress and technologies

Cowpea [Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp] is one of the most important leguminous crops grown in tropics and sub-tropics worldwide. It serves as a good source of proteins and minerals for nutritional benefits of both humans and animals. However, its production is hindered by recurrent drought conditions associated with climate changes. Under abnormal conditions, drought alone causes grain and fodder yield losses of about 62% and 56% of realizable yield, respectively in cowpea. Numerous efforts to mitigate drought through breeding resilient cultivars are underway in many countries. Progress is hampered due to the fact that drought is a complex trait controlled by many genes that is affected by the environment. Consequently, breeding for drought tolerance requires an integration of various knowledge systems and methodologies from multiple plant science disciplines. The success of drought tolerance depends on the accumulation of additive genes, accurate control of stress environments and the use of high throughput selection methods to maximise selection gains. This review aimed at providing perspectives on the status of the progress made thus far on cowpea drought tolerance improvement and the technologies used for genetic management of drought tolerance in cowpea in order to reduce losses incurred due to moisture stress.
Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Responsiveness to Food-Fiber Adequacy in a Community-Based Lifestyle Modification Program

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is an increasingly condition seen in patients with obesity, type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and cardiovascular diseases. Previous data pointed out sedentary behavior and inadequate fiber intake as environmental factors associated with a community-based NAFLD patients. Now, we intended to engage them in a lifestyle-change protocol with dietary counseling and physical exercises (LiSM), complemented with dietary fiber intervention. Among the NAFLD voluntaries (diagnosed by Fatty Liver Index-FLI>60), 20 fulfilled the inclusion criteria and assembled groups G1(regular diet) and G2 (fiber adequacy to 30g/day) that stayed on 20wk-LiSM complying combined physical exercise (walking and strength, 100min./ day). Clinical, dietary, anthropometric and biochemical assessments were undertaken at baseline, 10 and 20 wks. The statistical analyses used software SAS for Windows, version 9.3 with p<0.05. NAFLD sample was predominantly female (84.2%), 56.6 ±9.3 years of age, 84.2% obese, 21% metabolic syndrome and 15.8% T2DM. G1 and G2 were similar at baseline and responded similarly to LiSM. The overall FLI reduction in G2 achieved 14.4%, more steeply in 10 week (12%), exactly when G2 presented the highest ingested level of fiber (r= -0.44; p=0.057). The lacking of responsiveness of FLI to the intervention might be attributed to the higher values of FLI components at baseline and their slower decreasing during LiSM. The effect of fiber adequacy on NAFLD normalization was specifically by reducing abdominal fatness, triglycerides and insulin resistance associatively to a general anti-inflammatory action of LiSM.
Disorder and excess modes in hard-sphere colloidal systems

The anomalous thermodynamic properties of glasses remain incompletely understood, notably the anomalous peak in the heat capacity at low temperatures; it is believed to be due to an excess of low-frequency vibrational modes and a manifestation of the structural disorder in these systems. We study the thermodynamics and vibrational dynamics of colloidal glasses and (defected) crystals. The experimental determination of the vibrational density of states allows us to directly observe a strong enhancement of low-frequency modes. Using a novel method (Zargar R. et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 (2013) 258301) to determine the free energy, we also determine the entropy and the specific heat experimentally. It follows that the emergence of the excess modes and high values of the specific heat are directly related and are specific to the glass: even for solids containing a very large amount of defects, both the low-frequency density of states and the specific heat are significantly smaller than for the glass.
Brillouin light scattering characterization of optical materials

We have carried out measurements of Brillouin Scattering Stimulation on an optical resonator fabricated in Magnesium Fluoride. This technique allow obtaining various peaks corresponding to transverse and longitudinal frequencies inside the material. It correspond to slow transverse frequencies, fast transverse frequencies and longitudinal frequencies even if the precise determination is still to be improved.
Low-resource Language Identification From Speech Using X-vectors

Language identification from speech is a very challenging problem to tackle. For this project, the powerful new X-vector approach is taken, and found to achieve very reasonable performance on the GlobalPhone corpus. The particular applications of X-vectors for low-resource languages are then considered. In the experiments carried out, it is first discovered that the X-vector method can still work well with just a few hours of data per language. Secondly, the possibilities of adapting a low-resource language to an existing model are explored, achieving mixed results. Lastly, different data augmentation strategies are tried, and some are found to be quite effective in improving the performance of languages with limited data.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Research Network to Prevent Obesity Among Latino Children

Our Our Salud America! pilot research study, ―Integrating DDR to Promote Urban Latino School Children’s Physical Health and Academic Achievement: Project GAME,‖ examines the impact of a structured exercise program (e.g., the interactive video game Dance Dance Revolution [DDR], 5 during which players stomp on a dance mat to mimic the steps of an on-screen dancer; aerobic dance; jump rope; etc.) on physical fitness and academic performance among urban Latino children. We compared physical fitness levels and reading and math test scores of students who participated in the exercise intervention (with DDR) to those in a comparison group. Fitness was measured using the FITNESSGRAM test, 5 including a 1-mile run and body mass index (BMI) assessment. The FITNESSGRAM accounts for age, gender
The Effect of Yemeni EFL Learners' Low Listening Proficiency on Their Performance in the TOEFL IBT Integrated Test of Writing.

Language in India www.languageinindia. com ISSN 1930-2940 19:3 March 2019 Sara Alrefaee, Anita Mudkanna, Najeeb Almansoob and Yasser Alrefaee The Effect of Yemeni EFL Learners' Low Listening Proficiency on Their Performance in the TOEFL IBT Integrated Test of Writing 267 ====================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia. com ISSN 1930-2940 Vol. 19:3 March 2019 India’s Higher Education Authority UGC Approved List of Journals Serial Number 49042 ===================================================================== The Effect of Yemeni EFL Learners' Low Listening Proficiency on Their Performance in the TOEFL IBT Integrated Test of Writing
Trade Openness and Economic Growth in the Developing Countries: Evidence from Nigeria

This study purposed to examine the extent to which trade openness has impacted the growth of the Nigerian economy covering the period from 1981 to 2018. Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP) was used as a proxy for economic growth. Other variables of interest incorporated into the model as independent variables including trade openness exchange rate and inflation. The data for the study were sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical database. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller test (ADF) was employed to ascertain the stationary of the variables, and the result revealed that the variables became stationary after the first difference. Findings from the Johansen Co-integration Test showed evidence of long-run relationship, while the Error Correction Model (ECM) revealed that trade openness has a positive and significant impact on economic growth, the ECM further revealed that inflation has a significant negative impact on economic growth while exchange rate has a positive but not significant impact on economic growth of Nigeria within the period under study. Based on the findings from the study, it was therefore recommended that the government should embark on a comprehensive trade liberalization policies and programs in order to ensure the acceleration and sustenance of the Nigerian economy.
Prosodic features in spoken language identification

This report presents my work on the use of prosodic features for language identification using the recently proposed x-vector architecture. I discuss the differences between acoustic information and prosody and refer to past work that showed the usefulness of prosodic information when distinguishing between languages. For my experiments, I use the x-vector approach proposed by Snyder et al. (2018a), which uses a time-delay neural network (TDNN) to compute utterance-level embeddings that are subsequently processed by a light-weight classifier. While using 19 languages from the GlobalPhone corpus, I explore the use of popular acoustic features and two prosodic features: log energy and a continuous pitch curve extracted even for unvoiced speech using the algorithm proposed by Ghahremani et al. (2014). The acoustic and prosodic information is used in isolation as well as in combination – fusing the two types at the feature level and at the utterance embedding level. I observe that the addition of prosodic information to standard acoustic features improves the performance – measured by the Cprimary metric from NIST LRE 2017 – by as much as 37% and 28% for standard (≤10s) and short (≤3s) segments, respectively. My results also show that the energy and pitch information is very complementary and is best used in combination, concatenated frame-wise at the feature level. In particular, the prosodic information helps the system perform better for Slavic languages such as Bulgarian and Croatian, but also distinguish better between Asian languages like Korean and Japanese. I conclude that existing acoustic LID systems could benefit from the addition of a prosodic component which can be trained separately and fused at the utterance embedding level.
Predicting Social Network Evolution from Community Data Partitions

Social media users exhibit repetitive behavior patterns that can be leveraged to predict trends in network evolution. Our hypothesis is that these patterns exhibit greater consistency within a single community of users; hence global data distributions can be more accurately modeled by composing community data distributions. This paper compares two diﬀerent strategies for predicting social media usage with sampled historical data on Reddit and GitHub. We demonstrate that our community-based model outperforms the global one at predicting population, user, and content activity, along with network topology over three diﬀerent datasets
Towards a holographic realization of the quarkyonic phase

Large-Nc QCD matter at intermediate baryon density and low temperatures has been conjectured to be in the so-called quarkyonic phase, i.e., to have a quark Fermi surface and on top of it a confined spectrum of excitations. It has been suggested that the presence of the quark Fermi surface leads to a homogeneous phase with restored chiral symmetry, which is unstable towards creating condensates that break both the chiral and translational symmetry. Motivated by these exotic features, we investigate properties of cold baryonic matter in the single-flavor Sakai-Sugimoto model, searching for a holographic realization of the quarkyonic phase. We use a simplified mean-field description and focus on the regime of parametrically large baryon densities, of the order of the square of the ’t Hooft coupling, as they turn out to lead to new physical effects similar to the ones occurring in the quarkyonic phase. One effect—the appearance of a particular marginally stable mode breaking translational invariance and linked with the presence of the Chern-Simons term in the flavor-brane Lagrangian—is known to occur in the deconfined phase of the Sakai-Sugimoto model, but turns out to be absent here. The other, completely new phenomenon that we, preliminarily, study using strong simplifying assumptions are density-enhanced interactions of the flavor-brane gauge field with holographically represented baryons. These seem to significantly affect the spectrum of vector and axial mesons and might lead to approximate chiral symmetry restoration in the lowest part of the spectrum, where the mesons start to qualitatively behave like collective excitations of the dense baryonic medium. We discuss the relevance of these effects for holographic searches of the quarkyonic phase and conclude with a discussion of various subtleties involved in constructing a mean-field holographic description of a dense baryonic medium.
Managing Global Production:Theory and Evidence from Just-in-Time Supply Chains

This paper examines the structure of international Just-in-Time (JIT) supply chains. Using information about JIT supply chain management for a large panel of French manufacturers I first document that JIT is widespread across all industries and accounts for roughly two thirds of aggregate employment and trade. Next, I establish two novel stylized facts about the structure of JIT supply chains: They are more concentrated in space (1) and more vertically integrated both domestically and internationally (2), than their `traditional' counterparts. I rationalize these patterns in a framework of sequential production where failure to coordinate adaptation decisions in the presence of upstream and demand shocks leads to inventory holding. In JIT supply chains, information about downstream demand conditions is shared throughout the supply chain, which facilitates coordination. The associated inventory saving effect is stronger when firms are close to each other, so that the supply chain reacts quickly to changes in demand; and when they are part of the same company, so that incentives for adaptation are aligned. Guided by further predictions of the model, I present empirical evidence that these organizational complementarities depend on inventory holding costs, demand persistence, and the ability to push inventories upstream via contractual penalties. Finally, I discuss long term implications of Brexit and COVID-19 for the structure of international supply chains based on my findings.
An e-leadership training academy for practicing clinicians in primary care and public health settings

Abstract Leadership is an essential competency for clinicians; however, these skills are not a standard part of health professionals’ education and training. Access to resources (time, money) is frequently cited as a barrier for clinicians to participate in leadership development programs. We aimed to tackle this barrier within postgraduate health professions education and training through establishing an online e-Leadership Academy. The e-Leadership Academy was developed as a community–academic partnership between Clinical Directors Network, Inc. (CDN) and the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care to train clinicians and healthcare staff in the fundamental concepts and skills for leading within a clinical practice. For this article, the primary outcome analysis examined participants’ responses to both formative and summative evaluations that took place throughout and at the end of the course. Results were used to assess course quality, participant satisfaction, participant engagement, and provide recommendations about future course offerings for a similar audience. The authors propose that future training programs could measure the changes in team behavior and clinical outcomes using expanded evaluations. Proposed plans for expansion of the e-Leadership Academy include developing additional modules, virtual coaching and mentoring, and the potential integration of an in-person component.