Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling 1-3 composite piezoelectrics: thickness-mode oscillations

A simple physical model of 1-3 composite piezoelectrics is advanced for the material properties that are relevant to thickness-mode oscillations. This model is valid when the lateral spatial scale of the composite is sufficiently fine that the composite can be treated as an effective homogeneous medium. Expressions for the composite's material parameters in terms of the volume fraction of piezoelectric ceramic and the properties of the constituent piezoelectric ceramic and passive polymer are derived. A number of examples illustrate the implications of using piezocomposites in medical ultrasonic imaging transducers. While most material properties of the composite roughly interpolate between their values for pure polymer and pure ceramic, the composite's thickness-mode electromechanical coupling can exceed that of the component ceramic. This enhanced electromechanical coupling stems from partially freeing the lateral clamping of the ceramic in the composite structure. Their higher coupling and lower acoustic impedance recommend composites for medical ultrasonic imaging transducers. The model also reveals that the composite's material properties cannot be optimized simultaneously; tradeoffs must be made. Of most significance is the tradeoff between the desired lower acoustic impedance and the undesired smaller electromechanical coupling that occurs as the volume fraction of piezoceramic is reduced. <<ETX>>
CHANGE OF CONSUMER PREFERENCES AND GROWTH

The paper examines the effects on growth of both pr ivate and public investment in health, schooling and culture: in short, education. These xpenditures exert two effects on the growth rate: (i)they increase labour and capital stock productiv ity through a positive externality, and (ii) they modify saving and investment decisions through the substitutability between education and private consumption. The different effects on economic gro wth of publicly financed education and private investment in education are investigated. The optim al growth rate depends on households’ preferences for education. Moreover, there will be always an optimal tax rate that produces the same rate of growth in alternative regimes, private and public, of education financing. Universalistic public education exerts a strong pos itive externality on the economic efficiency but unlike private investments it does not create suf ficient incentives through income differentials to change consumer preferences for education. JEL:H5-O4
Commercial peptidoglycan preparations are contaminated with superantigen‐like activity that stimulates IL‐17 production

The immunomodulatory properties of peptidoglycan (PGN), a constituent of the bacterial cell wall, have been studied extensively but with contrasting results. Recent studies have demonstrated that the TLR2‐mediated inflammatory responses elicited by Gram‐positive PGN preparations are in fact a result of contaminating lipoproteins and lipoteichoic acid that can be removed only through sophisticated extraction procedures. Here, we report that commercial preparations of Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus pyogenes PGN are contaminated with bacterial superantigens (SAg). The T cell‐derived cytokines IL‐17A and IL‐17F were induced by PGN preparations but not by TLR agonists or nucleotide‐binding and oligomerization domain‐like receptor agonists in human PBMC. IL‐17 induction by PGN preparations was sensitive to protease digestion and required TCR signaling. Bacterial SAg could be detected by immunoblot in the PGN preparations, and purified recombinant SAg were powerful inducers of IL‐17. Finally, the PGN preparations stimulated proliferation and expansion of T cells bearing specific TCR Vβ elements. Our results suggest that a large body of literature that relied on commercial PGN preparations to study inflammatory diseases, such as arthritis, where IL‐17 also plays an important role, should be interpreted with caution and possibly revisited. Future studies aimed at characterizing the activities of PGN should use PGN preparations of proven purity.
Traitement automatique des termes composés : segmentation, traduction et variation. (Processing of Compound Terms: Segmentation, Translation and Variation)

Le nombre de termes specialises croit constamment dans les documents, a un rythme difficile a suivre pour les organismes de normalisation de la terminologie. Les methodes de construction des lexiques terminologiques bilingues a partir de corpus de textes proposent des solutions. Notre these s'inscrit dans cette problematique : la construction de lexiques bilingues a partir de corpus comparables. Les termes composes (les termes contenant plusieurs radicaux, mais un seul mot graphique) constituent un defi pour les applications du traitement automatique des langues. Etant donne leur forme graphique, ils sont souvent traites comme des termes simples, ce qui empeche de capturer leur complexite semantique. Notre participation a une evaluation d'extraction automatique de termes a permis de verifier notre hypothese : les termes composes necessitent un traitement particulier dans un contexte multilingue. Nous avons propose une methode de reconnaissance et de segmentation des termes composes, combinant des caracteristiques dependantes et independantes de la langue. Elle permet d'obtenir des resultats comparables a ceux des methodes de l'etat de l'art, tout en etant validee sur un echantillon de familles de langues varie (germanique, slave, romane) et adaptable au domaine de specialite (verifiee sur deux domaines : l'energie eolienne et le cancer du sein). Nous avons exploite les segmentations produites pour la traduction compositionnelle des termes et pour la detection des variantes syntagmatiques des termes composes dans les textes specialises. Ces deux experiences illustrent l'utilite de la segmentation pour la construction des lexiques terminologiques bilingues.
A Novel Serum Metabolomics-Based Diagnostic Approach to Pancreatic Cancer

Background: To improve the prognosis of patients with pancreatic cancer, more accurate serum diagnostic methods are required. We used serum metabolomics as a diagnostic method for pancreatic cancer. Methods: Sera from patients with pancreatic cancer, healthy volunteers, and chronic pancreatitis were collected at multiple institutions. The pancreatic cancer and healthy volunteers were randomly allocated to the training or the validation set. All of the chronic pancreatitis cases were included in the validation set. In each study, the subjects' serum metabolites were analyzed by gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC/MS) and a data processing system using an in-house library. The diagnostic model constructed via multiple logistic regression analysis in the training set study was evaluated on the basis of its sensitivity and specificity, and the results were confirmed by the validation set study. Results: In the training set study, which included 43 patients with pancreatic cancer and 42 healthy volunteers, the model possessed high sensitivity (86.0%) and specificity (88.1%) for pancreatic cancer. The use of the model was confirmed in the validation set study, which included 42 pancreatic cancer, 41 healthy volunteers, and 23 chronic pancreatitis; that is, it displayed high sensitivity (71.4%) and specificity (78.1%); and furthermore, it displayed higher sensitivity (77.8%) in resectable pancreatic cancer and lower false-positive rate (17.4%) in chronic pancreatitis than conventional markers. Conclusions: Our model possessed higher accuracy than conventional tumor markers at detecting the resectable patients with pancreatic cancer in cohort including patients with chronic pancreatitis. Impact: It is a promising method for improving the prognosis of pancreatic cancer via its early detection and accurate discrimination from chronic pancreatitis. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 22(4); 571–9. ©2013 AACR.
Association Between Domestic Violence and HIV Serostatus Among Married and Formerly Married Women in Kenya

The prevalence of both domestic violence (DV) and HIV among Kenyan women is known to be high, but the relationship between them is unknown. Nationally representative cross-sectional data from married and formerly married (MFM) women responding to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2008/2009 were analyzed adjusting for complex survey design. Multivariable logistic regressions were used to assess the covariate-adjusted associations between HIV serostatus and any reported DV as well as four constituent DV measures: physical, emotional, sexual, and aggravated bodily harm, adjusting for covariates entered into each model using a forward stepwise selection process. Covariates of a priori interest included those representing marriage history, risky sexual behavior, substance use, perceived HIV risk, and sociodemographic characteristics. The prevalence of HIV among MFM women was 10.7% (any DV: 13.1%, no DV: 8.6%); overall prevalence of DV was 43.4%. Among all DV measures, only physical DV was associated with HIV (11.9%; adjusted odds ratio: 2.01, p <.05). Efforts by the government and women's groups to monitor and improve policies to reduce DV, such as the Sexual Offences Act of 2006, are urgently needed to curb HIV, as are policies that seek to provide DV counseling and treatment to MFM women.
Quality of integrated chronic disease care in rural South Africa: user and provider perspectives.

The integrated chronic disease management (ICDM) model was introduced as a response to the dual burden of HIV/AIDS and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in South Africa, one of the first of such efforts by an African Ministry of Health. The aim of the ICDM model is to leverage HIV programme innovations to improve the quality of chronic disease care. There is a dearth of literature on the perspectives of healthcare providers and users on the quality of care in the novel ICDM model. This paper describes the viewpoints of operational managers and patients regarding quality of care in the ICDM model.In 2013, we conducted a case study of the seven PHC facilities in the rural Agincourt sub-district in northeast South Africa. Focus group discussions (n = 8) were used to obtain data from 56 purposively selected patients ≥18 years. In-depth interviews were conducted with operational managers of each facility and the sub-district health manager. Donabedian's structure, process and outcome theory for service quality evaluation underpinned the conceptual framework in this study. Qualitative data were analysed, with MAXQDA 2 software, to identify 17 a priori dimensions of care and unanticipated themes that emerged during the analysis.The manager and patient narratives showed the inadequacies in structure (malfunctioning blood pressure machines and staff shortage); process (irregular prepacking of drugs); and outcome (long waiting times). There was discordance between managers and patients regarding reasons for long patient waiting time which managers attributed to staff shortage and missed appointments, while patients ascribed it to late arrival of managers to the clinics. Patients reported anti-hypertension drug stock-outs (structure); sub-optimal defaulter-tracing (process); rigid clinic appointment system (process). Emerging themes showed that patients reported HIV stigmatisation in the community due to defaulter-tracing activities of home-based carers, while managers reported treatment of chronic diseases by traditional healers and reduced facility-related HIV stigma because HIV and NCD patients attended the same clinic.Leveraging elements of HIV programmes for NCDs, specifically hypertension management, is yet to be achieved in the study setting in part because of malfunctioning blood pressure machines and anti-hypertension drug stock-outs. This has implications for the nationwide scale up of the ICDM model in South Africa and planning of an integrated chronic disease care in other low- and middle-income countries.
Bosu: a physical programmable design tool for transformability with soft mechanics

Physical transformability is emerging as an important element of interaction design as advances in material science and computational control give rise to new possibilities in actuated products and kinetic environments. However, this transition also produces a new range of design problems-how do we visualize, imagine, and design the physical processes of transformation? This paper presents Bosu, a design tool offering kinetic memory---the ability to record and play back motion in 3-D space---for soft materials. It is used for motion prototyping and digitally augmented form finding, combining dynamic modeling with coincident sensing and actuation to create transformable structures. Evaluation from a workshop with architects and interaction, product, and fashion designers is presented discussing the ramifications of physically programming motion with a new soft materiality, moving toward new ideas in body mimesis and material construction for kinetic design.
In vivo evidence of interaction between interferon-stimulated gene factors and the interferon-stimulated response element

Constitutive and interferon-inducible DNase hypersensitive sites in vivo are located in interferon-stimulated gene promoters near sequences that specifically bind constitutive or interferon-inducible proteins in vitro. Induced sites and proteins are transient or maintained, depending on cell type. Interferon-stimulated gene transcription is transient or maintained in parallel.
Radiation characteristics of a dipole embedded below a HIS

Numerical investigation on the radiation characteristics of a dipole embedded between a high impedance surface and a ground plane are proposed. The geometry is realized by periodic repetition of a unit cell in two orthogonal directions and insertion of the dipole is possible because of the simplicity of the structure that does not use vias or shorting pins. Starting from the dispersion diagram of the unit cell, slow and fast waves regions are determined, and the radiative behaviour for the two different cases is investigated.
GridBlocks DISK - Distributed Inexpensive Storage with K-availability

This paper describes an architecture for an archival data storage system. The design enables aggregation of storage resources in a scalable fashion to achieve highly reliable data storage. Reliability is implemented by using erasure coding which provides lower storage overhead than full replication. Scalability of the architecture is achieved through the ability to work with multiple different storage locations and a scalable metadata management system. The integrity of the data is ensured through use of cryptographic naming. Feasibility of the proposed design is assessed with a real world implementation named GB-DISK.
Data integration constraints for consistent data redundancy in fuzzy databases

Although the problem of data integration in relational databases has been extensively studied, little work has addressed this problem in the context of fuzzy relational databases. Data integration is highly complex in fuzzy relational databases, partially because of the involvement of the resemblance relation. Inconsistent data redundancy may occur when the fuzzy databases to be integrated are associated with different resemblance relation on a given domain. This work presents the notions of consistency constraints, and applies them to the problem of data integration in several fuzzy data models. The constraints ensure that fuzzy databases with different resemblance relations agree to each other regarding data redundancy. In addition a solution for integrating inconsistent fuzzy databases with minimal information loss is provided. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Pancreatic (cid:1) -cell failure in obese mice with human-like CMP-Neu5Ac hydroxylase deﬁciency

Type 2 diabetes is highly prevalent in human populations, particularly in obese individuals, and is characterized by progressive pancreatic (cid:1) -cell dysfunction and insulin resistance. Most mammals, including Old World primates, express two major kinds of sialic acids, N -acetylneuraminic acid (Neu5Ac) and N -glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc), typically found at the distal ends of glycoconjugate chains at the cell surface. Humans are uniquely unable to produce endogenous Neu5Gc due to an inactivating mutation in the CMP-Neu5Ac hydroxylase ( CMAH ) gene. The CMAH enzyme catalyzes the generation of CMP-Neu5Gc by the transfer of a single oxygen atom to the acyl group of CMP-Neu5Ac. Here, we show that mice bearing a human-like deletion of the Cmah gene exhibit fasting hyperglycemia and glucose intolerance following a high-fat diet. This phenotype is caused not by worsened insulin resistance but by compromised pancreatic (cid:1) -cell function associated with a 65% decrease in islet size and area and 50% decrease in islet number. Obese Cmah- null mice also show an (cid:1) 40% reduction in response to insulin secretagogues in vivo . These ﬁnd-ings show that human evolution-like changes in sialic acid composition impair pancreatic (cid:1) -cell function and exacerbate glucose intolerance in may lend insight into the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes in obese
Understanding the basis of auriculocondylar syndrome: Insights from human, mouse and zebrafish genetic studies

Among human birth defect syndromes, malformations affecting the face are perhaps the most striking due to cultural and psychological expectations of facial shape. One such syndrome is auriculocondylar syndrome (ACS), in which patients present with defects in ear and mandible development. Affected structures arise from cranial neural crest cells, a population of cells in the embryo that reside in the pharyngeal arches and give rise to most of the bone, cartilage and connective tissue of the face. Recent studies have found that most cases of ACS arise from defects in signaling molecules associated with the endothelin signaling pathway. Disruption of this signaling pathway in both mouse and zebrafish results in loss of identity of neural crest cells of the mandibular portion of the first pharyngeal arch and the subsequent repatterning of these cells, leading to homeosis of lower jaw structures into more maxillary‐like structures. These findings illustrate the importance of endothelin signaling in normal human craniofacial development and illustrate how clinical and basic science approaches can coalesce to improve our understanding of the genetic basis of human birth defect syndromes. Further, understanding the genetic basis for ACS that lies outside of known endothelin signaling components may help elucidate unknown aspects critical to the establishment of neural crest cell patterning during facial morphogenesis. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
ON BAHADUR EFFICIENCY AND MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION IN GENERAL PARAMETER SPACES

The paper studies large deviations of maximum likelihood and related estimates in the case of i.i. d. observations with distribution determined by a param- eter θ taking values in a general metric space. The main theorems provide sufficient conditions under which an approximate sieve maximum likelihood estimate is an asymptotically locally optimal estimate of g(θ) in the sense of Bahadur, for virtu- ally all functions g of interest. These conditions are illustrated by application to several parametric, nonparametric, and semiparametric examples.
Why there is so much enthusiasm for performance-based financing, particularly in developing countries.

are therefore welcome. However, some of their points of criticism are based on misunderstandings and they transpose assumptions about behaviour in high-income countries to low-income settings. Ironically, their criticism only strengthens the case for PBF, since the mentioned authors do not propose any alternative for PBF but linger in the status quo, which most people would agree is detrimental to development and health.Since PBF was first used around 15 years ago, there has been an open debate about its pros and cons. There has been criticism that incentive payments focused too much on quantity and not on quality. We subsequently adapted the incentives towards improv -ing quality with very favourable results shown in recent evaluations from Burundi,
Striatal Network Models of Huntington's Disease Dysfunction Phenotypes

We present a network model of striatum, which generates “winnerless” dynamics typical for a network of sparse, unidirectionally connected inhibitory units. We observe that these dynamics, while interesting and a good match to normal striatal electrophysiological recordings, are fragile. Specifically, we find that randomly initialized networks often show dynamics more resembling “winner-take-all,” and relate this “unhealthy” model activity to dysfunctional physiological and anatomical phenotypes in the striatum of Huntington's disease animal models. We report plasticity as a potent mechanism to refine randomly initialized networks and create a healthy winnerless dynamic in our model, and we explore perturbations to a healthy network, modeled on changes observed in Huntington's disease, such as neuron cell death and increased bidirectional connectivity. We report the effect of these perturbations on the conversion risk of the network to an unhealthy state. Finally we discuss the relationship between structural and functional phenotypes observed at the level of simulated network dynamics as a promising means to model disease progression in different patient populations.
Haemoglobin E and alpha-Thalassaemia.

respiratory waves are absent. In Fig. 4, recorded from the same relaxed patient, the airway is only partially obstructed, resulting in an obvious reduction of tidal volume. Fig. 5 shows the effect, again in the same apnoeic patient, of disconnecting the ventilator. This pattern is indistinguishable from that shown in Fig. 4, demonstrating that this technique reveals the essential point-namely, that ventilation of the lungs has ceased. So far as we know this is the only method of monitoring which cannot give a wrong indication in these circumstances. It is also possible to study the shape of the respiratory waveform with the impedance spirometer. The tracing follows closely all changes in the volume of air in the lungs, so that it is possible to measure not only the tidal volume but the rate of change of volume, both in inspiration and in expiration. Fig. 6 was recorded on a patient ventilated with a Barnet Mark III ventilator. This machine, though theoretically a constant pressure generator, in practice operates as a
Immunosuppressive drugs and corticosteroids for HIV infection.

Cyclosporine (CsA), corticosteroids, cyclophosphamide (CY), and methotrexate (TX) have been proposed for, or have entered, trials for HIV infection or AIDS. CsA acts specifically against T-cells in the early stages of activation. Reports on the use of CsA in people with HIV are contradictory; positive results from two studies have not been confirmed with randomized controlled trials. CsA's high cost and severe side effects are significant drawbacks. Corticosteroids have more encouraging results, but the effects on primary HIV infection have not been formally studied. Long-term use of corticosteroids has been associated with an exacerbation of AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma. CY and MTX are used at high doses for cancer chemotherapy; at low doses they have proven immunomodulatory and inflammation-suppression properties, respectively. The goals of the proposed studies are to reduce B-cell activity with CY and to reduce levels of inflammatory immune markers with MTX, without adversely affecting CD4 or white blood cell counts or HIV levels.