Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating Avian Influenza Infection Hotspots in Old-World Shorebirds

Heterogeneity in the transmission rates of pathogens across hosts or environments may produce disease hotspots, which are defined as specific sites, times or species associations in which the infection rate is consistently elevated. Hotspots for avian influenza virus (AIV) in wild birds are largely unstudied and poorly understood. A striking feature is the existence of a unique but consistent AIV hotspot in shorebirds (Charadriiformes) associated with a single species at a specific location and time (ruddy turnstone Arenaria interpres at Delaware Bay, USA, in May). This unique case, though a valuable reference, limits our capacity to explore and understand the general properties of AIV hotspots in shorebirds. Unfortunately, relatively few shorebirds have been sampled outside Delaware Bay and they belong to only a few shorebird families; there also has been a lack of consistent oropharyngeal sampling as a complement to cloacal sampling. In this study we looked for AIV hotspots associated with other shorebird species and/or with some of the larger congregation sites of shorebirds in the old world. We assembled and analysed a regionally extensive dataset of AIV prevalence from 69 shorebird species sampled in 25 countries across Africa and Western Eurasia. Despite this diverse and extensive coverage we did not detect any new shorebird AIV hotspots. Neither large shorebird congregation sites nor the ruddy turnstone were consistently associated with AIV hotspots. We did, however, find a low but widespread circulation of AIV in shorebirds that contrast with the absence of AIV previously reported in shorebirds in Europe. A very high AIV antibody prevalence coupled to a low infection rate was found in both first-year and adult birds of two migratory sandpiper species, suggesting the potential existence of an AIV hotspot along their migratory flyway that is yet to be discovered.
Stacked U-Nets: A No-Frills Approach to Natural Image Segmentation

Many imaging tasks require global information about all pixels in an image. Conventional bottom-up classification networks globalize information by decreasing resolution; features are pooled and downsampled into a single output. But for semantic segmentation and object detection tasks, a network must provide higher-resolution pixel-level outputs. To globalize information while preserving resolution, many researchers propose the inclusion of sophisticated auxiliary blocks, but these come at the cost of a considerable increase in network size and computational cost. This paper proposes stacked u-nets (SUNets), which iteratively combine features from different resolution scales while maintaining resolution. SUNets leverage the information globalization power of u-nets in a deeper network architectures that is capable of handling the complexity of natural images. SUNets perform extremely well on semantic segmentation tasks using a small number of parameters.
The problem of cultural intermediaries in the economy of qualities

Production is … at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production. Each is directly its own counterpart. But at the same time an intermediary movement goes on between the two. Production furthers consumption by creating the material for the latter which otherwise would lack its object. But consumption in its turn furthers production, by providing for the products the individual for whom they are products. The product receives its last finishing touches in consumption. (Marx, 1980/1857-8: 24) This passage in Marx’s outline for his critique of political economy is famous for its provocative framing of the systemic, contingent links between production and consumption. It rather neatly introduces intermediation without labouring the theoretical problem raised by its status as a necessary movement between spheres that are simultaneous, unified, and identical. The idea that some form of mediation between production and consumption has to take place for either to exist has a long history but interest in modelling how this mediation works in practice has been uneven. Bourdieu’s (1984) formulation of the cultural intermediary occupations of the new petit bourgeoisie has acted as probably the single biggest impetus to research exploring the practical mediating function of work in professions like advertising, design, retailing, branding and marketing . This research almost endorses Bourdieu’s concept while making it clear that the idea raises as many problems as it solves. These problems are already looming in Marx’s framing of the production-consumption relation and they continue to resist neat resolution. As I’ll try to indicate in this short chapter, the attempt to understand better how the connection between production and consumption is realised in concrete market settings through the idea of cultural intermediaries has had some success, but of a limited kind.
Standard triple versus levofloxacin based regimen for eradication of Helicobacter pylori.

AIM To compare the eradication rates for Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) and ulcer recurrence of standard triple therapy (STT) and levofloxacin based therapy (LBT). METHODS Seventy-four patients with perforated duodenal ulcer treated with simple closure and found to be H. pylori infected on 3 mo follow up were randomized to receive either the STT group comprising of amoxicillin 1 g bid, clarithromycin 500 mg bid and omeprazole 20 mg bid or the LBT group comprising of amoxicillin 1 g bid, levofloxacin 500 mg bid and omeprazole 20 mg bid for 10 d each. The H. pylori eradication rates, side effects, compliance and the recurrence of ulcer were assessed in the two groups at 3 mo follow up. RESULTS Thirty-four patients in the STT group and 32 patients in the levofloxacin group presented at 3 mo follow up. H. pylori eradication rates were similar with STT and the LBT groups on intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis (69% vs 80%, P = 0.425) and (79% vs 87%, P = 0.513) by per-protocol (PP) analysis respectively. Ulcer recurrence in the STT and LBT groups on ITT analysis was (20% vs 14%, P = 0.551) and (9% vs 6%, P = 1.00) by PP analysis. Compliance and side effects were also comparable between the groups. A complete course of STT costs Indian Rupees (INR) 1060.00, while LBT costs only INR 360.00. CONCLUSION H. pylori eradication rates and the rate of ulcer recurrence were similar between the STT and LBT. The LBT is a more economical option compared to STT.
Common Flaws in Empirical Capital Structure Research

This paper critiques three issues that commonly arise in empirical capital structure research. 1. Capital Structure Proxies: The financial-debt-to-asset ratio is flawed as a measure of leverage, because the converse of financial debt is not equity. Depending on specification, the debt-to-asset ratio can explain only about 10-50% of the variation in the equity-to-asset ratio. This is because most of the opposite of the financial-debt-to-asset ratio is the non-financial-liabilities-to-asset ratio. This problem is easy to remedy— researchers should use a debt-to-capital ratio or a liabilities-to-asset ratio. The converse of either is an equity ratio. 2. Non-linearity: The intrinsic non-linearity of leverage ratios can render standard linear regressions even with perfect independent variables seemingly powerless. Fortunately, researchers can easily test whether variables have a linear or non-linear influence on equity value changes, debt value changes, or leverage ratios. 3. Selection Issues: There are large survivorship biases in the CRSP/Compustat data bases. About 10% of firms appear and 10% disappear in a single year. These birth and death rates are themselves functions of capital structure and other firm characteristics. This selection makes studying long-term capital structure changes dicult. Unfortunately, this problem is dicult to remedy. The paper does not claim that these three issues drive results in the existing literature. It does however claim that they are not so small as to allow ignoring them a priori. The paper also clarifies some theoretical issues, most of which are not new, but
An expert panel review of clinical challenges in psychiatry

Clinicians treating patients with first-episode (FE) schizophrenia can draw upon the vast literature on the treatment of patients with multiple-episode schizophrenia. Studies with multi-episode patients, however, may not fully generalize to the treatment of FE patients. Studies with multi-episode patients typically recruit from hospitals or other acute care units, settings where patients usually have been either non-responsive or non-adherent to previous treatment, or mixtures of both. Studies of multi-episode patients therefore tend to include patients who are not fully responsive to treatment. Without the filter of prior treatment history, FE compared with multi-episode patients may show a broader range of treatment patterns, ranging from extremely good to very poor. Further, studies of FE patients may be very instructive about side effects, as the confounding effect of prior medication use is particularly important with side effects. Finally, data suggest that much of the deterioration (eg, more severe negative symptoms) associated with schizophrenia may occur during the 5 years following illness onset. Providing patients with better treatment at illness onset offers the hope of improving their long-term outcome. FE studies do have limitations. Relatively few new cases of schizophrenia occur each year. The typically chronic course of schizophrenia results in a large number of patients with multiepisode schizophrenia for every FE patient at any one time. Recruitment for studies of FE schizophrenia compared with those of multi-episode schizophrenia is often more difficult given the smaller number of available patients. We systematically know less about the treatment of FE patients than we do about the treatment of multi-episode patients.
Fifty Years of Anticoccidial Vaccines for Poultry (1952–2002)

SUMMARY. Although earlier investigators experimented with anticoccidial vaccines, the world's first commercially successful product was developed by Prof. S. A. Edgar of Auburn University, Auburn, AL. This product contained live, nonattenuated Eimeria tenella oocysts and was first marketed by Dorn and Mitchell, Inc., in 1952. Under the trade names of DM® Cecal Coccidiosis Vaccine, Coxine®, NObiCOX®, and CocciVac®, it went through several formulations containing various Eimeria species that parasitize chickens, and a further product containing turkey Eimeria species was also developed. After many product and company changes, one turkey and two chicken formulations of CocciVac® are still marketed worldwide by Schering-Plough Animal Health, Inc. Chicken and turkey formulations of Immucox®, a similar type of vaccine, were developed by Dr. E. -H. Lee and first marketed in 1985 in Canada by Vetech Laboratories, Inc. In 1974, Dr. T. K. Jeffers of Hess and Clark, Inc., Ashland, OH, published his discovery of precocious lines of coccidia, which facilitated the development of the first attenuated anticoccidial vaccine. For commercial reasons, Jeffers was unable to do this himself, but this first attenuated vaccine was designed by Dr. M. W. Shirley and colleagues at the Houghton Poultry Research Station (HPRS) in the United Kingdom. The vaccine was commercially developed under license in the United Kingdom by Glaxo Animal Health Ltd. and then Pitman-Moore, Inc., and launched in The Netherlands during 1989 under the trade name Paracox®. After further changes in company ownership, two formulations for chickens are now marketed worldwide by Schering-Plough Animal Health, Inc. Attenuation of coccidia by embryo adaptation was reported in 1972 in the United Kingdom by Dr. P. L. Long, who originally worked at the HPRS and later became a professor at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA. An embryo-adapted line of E. tenella was included with precocious lines of other species in a series of three attenuated vaccines for chickens under the trade name Livacox®, developed by Dr. P. Bedrník and launched in the Czech Republic in 1992 by Biopharm. The formulations of all other commercially available live anticoccidial vaccines for poultry are currently based upon the scientific principles established for the CocciVac®, Paracox® or Livacox® vaccines.
Accessibility and inclusion in higher education : an inquiry of faculty perceptions and experiences

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.iii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 Research Problem . 3 Research Questions . 4 Definition of Terms . 5 Delimitations . 6 Assumptions and Limitations . 6 Researcher’s perspective . 7 Significance . 8 CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE . 12 History of Disability and Disability Perception . 13 Laws Regarding Accessibility and Higher Education . 14 Policy Regarding Accommodations for students with disabilities . 15 Disclosing Disability and Accommodations Processes . 16 Disability Etiquette . 17 Measurement of Constructs Related to Faculty Accommodation Practices . 19 Measurement of Faculty Attitudes and Accommodations Willingness . 20 Universal Design for Instruction . 21 Measurement of Faculty Knowledge . 25 Faculty Priority and Understanding . 26 Key Findings . 30 CHAPTER 3: METHOD . 32 Procedures . 32 Participants and Site . 33 Data Collection . 34 Measures . 35 Data Analysis . 36 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS . 41 Research Question 1-3 Factorial ANOVA . 44 Research Question 4 Correlation . 64 Research Question 5 Qualitative Analysis . 66 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION . 71 Overview of Significant Findings . 72 Accommodations Willingness . 72 Universal Design for Instruction Agreement . 74 Disability Etiquette . 75 Qualitative Report of Faculty Experiences . 76 Connections Between Quantitative and Qualitative Results . 78 Limitations . 80
Increased rate of psychosis among African–Caribbeans in Britain is not due to an excess of pregnancy and birth complications

Background It has been suggested that the increased rate of psychotic illness among African–Caribbeans living in Britain is due to an excess of pregnancy and birth complications (PBCs). Method We therefore compared the frequency of PBCs in a group of White psychotic patients (n=103) and a comparable group of patients of African–Caribbean origin (n=61); the latter consisted of 30 first-generation (born in the Caribbean) and 31 second-generation (born in Britain) individuals. Results White psychotic patients were more than twice as likely to have a history of PBCs as their African–Caribbean counterparts (odds ratio=2.34, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.88–6.47, P=0.062). The same trend was observed among patients with a DSM–III diagnosis of schizophrenia (odds ratio=l.65, 95% CI 0.56–4.97, P=0.32). The rate of PBCs was similar among the first- and second-generation Caribbean psychotic patients. Conclusions The increased rate of psychotic illness that has been reported among the African–Caribbean population in Britain is not due to an increased prevalence of PBCs.
The Mayekawa Lecture: Some Reflections on Japanese Monetary Policy

Thank you for inviting me to speak at this conference on the lessons learned and challenges ahead for monetary policy. After a period of innovation and experimentation in monetary policy, during which the Bank of Japan has often been in the vanguard, it is certainly appropriate to step back to assess what we have learned and what we still need to understand. Some review and assessment are appropriate for me personally as well. As many here will know, I’ve been thinking and writing about Japanese monetary policy for many years, as both an academic and policymaker, starting with a case study of the Bank of Japan that Rick Mishkin and I did in our 1992 paper on monetary frameworks and inflation targeting. Much of my writing on Japan has been motivated by the unique—or, at least, initially unique—challenges that the Bank of Japan has faced in dealing with deflation and the effective lower bound on short-term interest rates. As an academic, I found these challenges intellectually fascinating. The issues became much less abstract, of course, after I joined the Federal Reserve Board in 2002 and we found ourselves confronting similar problems in the United States, beginning with the deflation scare of 2003 and then the American encounter with the effective lower bound starting in late 2008. I reviewed my articles and speeches on Japan in preparation for this talk. My speeches in particular have tended to be expositional, and I accordingly tried to reflect the professional consensus of the time—including the thinking of scholars like Paul Krugman (1998), Michael Woodford and Gauti Eggertsson (2003), and Lars Svensson (2003)—as well as my own views. In retrospect, much of what I wrote about Japan in the decade before the Global Financial Crisis has held up reasonably well. For example, my 2002 speech on deflation, plus subsequent papers in 2004 with Vincent Reinhart and with Reinhart and Brian Sack, pushed back on the view—which had credence in some circles at the time—that, when short-term interest rates are near zero, the central bank is “out of ammunition. ” I argued instead that central banks have a number of options for further easing financial conditions after short rates hit zero, and my coauthors and I discussed and evaluated many of the policy tools that would be . For presentation at the Bank of Japan, May 24, 2017. The author is a Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. Peter Olson provided excellent research assistance.
An Intracellular Allosteric Site for a Specific Class of Antagonists of the CC Chemokine G Protein-Coupled Receptors CCR4 and CCR5

A novel mechanism for antagonism of the human chemokine receptors CCR4 and CCR5 has been discovered with a series of small-molecule compounds that seems to interact with an allosteric, intracellular site on the receptor. The existence of this site is supported by a series of observations: 1) intracellular access of these antagonists is required for their activity; 2) specific, saturable binding of a radiolabeled antagonist requires the presence of CCR4; and 3) through engineering receptor chimeras by reciprocal transfer of C-terminal domains between CCR4 and CCR5, compound binding and the selective structure-activity relationships for antagonism of these receptors seem to be associated with the integrity of that intracellular region. Published antagonists from other chemical series do not seem to bind to the novel site, and their interaction with either CCR4 or CCR5 is not affected by alteration of the C-terminal domain. The precise location of the proposed binding site remains to be determined, but the known close association of the C-terminal domain, including helix 8, as a proposed intracellular region that interacts with transduction proteins (e.g., G proteins and β-arrestin) suggests that this could be a generic allosteric site for chemokine receptors and perhaps more broadly for class A G protein-coupled receptors. The existence of such a site that can be targeted for drug discovery has implications for screening assays for receptor antagonists, which would need, therefore, to consider compound properties for access to this intracellular site.
ML-Aided Dynamic Clustering and Classification of UEs as VBs in D2D Communication Networks

With the next generation of mobile devices and streaming services such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Meta being available worldwide, the network's data rate, latency, and connectivity must be improved. Even though 5G provides the user with the required Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of data rate and reduced delays by transmitting signals in the higher frequencies (called New Radio (NR)), it faces a lot of attenuation, leading to a short communication range. However, to meet goals set by utilising 6G requirements, many technological advancements and components must be incorporated into the network. The dense disposition of small cells will help reduce the network traffic in hotspot areas and increase the coverage and spectral efficiency. Nonetheless, the current deployment of 5G Base Stations (BSs) and small cells is static and cannot move around even though they are deployed in hot spot areas, leading to high operational costs. Furthermore, more than these static deployments of base stations can be required in an unpredictable scenario of extreme crowd movement. To overcome these issues, Device to Device (D2D) Communication with the dynamic deployment of Virtual Base stations (VBSs) can be called upon, which can be achieved by using User Equipment (UE) such as phones or laptops to mimic the functions of a Base Station (BS). Therefore, in this paper, a User Equipment based Virtual Base Station (UE-VBS) is studied, which will act as a secondary base station and, in turn, help alleviate the traffic load in the network. Specifically, as one UE cannot relieve the entire network traffic load, the network area is split into different clusters by using an unsupervised Machine Learning (ML) clustering technique(i.e., K-Means with Mean Shift Clustering), and a single UE is selected to act as a VBS for that cluster with the utilisation of supervised ML classification techniques (i.e., Decision Trees, Logistic Regression, Linear Discriminant Analysis And Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, Linear Support Vector). In our work, we utilise the K-means along with mean shift clustering techniques to cluster simulated network areas accurately. Also, we use and compare different classification machine learning techniques to predict/classify whether user equipment can be employed as a VBS and become UE-VBs. Our simulation study reveals that the Decision Tree algorithm achieves the highest accuracy in categorising the eligible UEs as UE-VBs.
Knowledge Distillation Facilitates the Lightweight and Efficient Plant Diseases Detection Model

Plant disease diagnosis in time can inhibit the spread of the disease and prevent a large-scale drop in production, which benefits food production. Object detection-based plant disease diagnosis methods have attracted widespread attention due to their accuracy in classifying and locating diseases. However, existing methods are still limited to single crop disease diagnosis. More importantly, the existing model has a large number of parameters, which is not conducive to deploying it to agricultural mobile devices. Nonetheless, reducing the number of model parameters tends to cause a decrease in model accuracy. To solve these problems, we propose a plant disease detection method based on knowledge distillation to achieve a lightweight and efficient diagnosis of multiple diseases across multiple crops. In detail, we design 2 strategies to build 4 different lightweight models as student models: the YOLOR-Light-v1, YOLOR-Light-v2, Mobile-YOLOR-v1, and Mobile-YOLOR-v2 models, and adopt the YOLOR model as the teacher model. We develop a multistage knowledge distillation method to improve lightweight model performance, achieving 60.4% mAP@ . 5 in the PlantDoc dataset with small model parameters, outperforming existing methods. Overall, the multistage knowledge distillation technique can make the model lighter while maintaining high accuracy. Not only that, the technique can be extended to other tasks, such as image classification and image segmentation, to obtain automated plant disease diagnostic models with a wider range of lightweight applicability in smart agriculture. Our code is available at https://github.com/QDH/MSKD.