Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The self-rated health status and key influencing factors in middle-aged and elderly

Abstract To evaluate the self-rate health (SRH) status and explore influence factors of middle-aged and elderly in China. China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey was conducted in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2018. Data of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey in 2018 was used in our study and a total of 17898 participants were included. SRH status was graded as “very good, good, average, bad, very bad. ” Participants who answered “very good” and “good” were regarded as self-rated good health and who answered “average,” “bad” and “very bad” were regarded as self-rated poor health. Odds ratio and 95% confidence interval of Logistics regression were calculated to evaluate the correlation between SRH and chronic diseases, demographic characteristics and lifestyle of middle-aged and elderly participants. A total of 4476 (25.01%) participants reported they had good health, and 13422 (74.99%) reported they had poor health. 9975 participants self-rated they had no chronic disease (55.73%), and 7923 (44.27%) participants self-rated they suffered from one and above chronic diseases. The prevalence of chronic diseases showed significant odds ratio and trend with SRH poor rate of participants. The more kinds of chronic diseases they suffered from, the poorer SRH was reported in middle-aged and elderly participants. Except for the chronic diseases, participants with higher age, living in rural, with high Center for Epidemiological Survey-Depression Scale score of depression and fewer time of physical activities also correlated with higher SRH (poor) rate. The SRH (good) rate was very low in middle-aged and elderly, participants who accompanied with more kinds of chronic diseases, fewer physical activities, higher age and living in the rural had a worse health status. A more comprehensive and integrated health framework should be strengthened to improve the health of middle-aged and elderly in China.
Dysfunction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in male rat offspring with prenatal food restriction: Fetal programming of hypothalamic hyperexcitability and poor hippocampal feedback

Prenatal food restriction (PFR) induces dysfunction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in the adult offspring. The aim of the present study was to identify the underlying mechanism of this process. Pregnant rats were placed on a restricted diet between gestational day 11 and 21. The offspring were fed with a high-fat diet and were subjected to unpredictable chronic stress (UCS) from postnatal week 17 to 20. A higher serum corticosterone (CORT) level was observed in the PFR fetuses. Although lower arginine vasopressin (AVP), hippocampal vesicular glutamate transporter 2 (vGLUT2) and glutamic acid decarboxylase 65 (GAD65) mRNA expression levels were detected in the hippocampi of PFR fetuses, the ratio of the mRNA expression levels of vGLUT2 and GAD65 was higher compared with that of the controls, which was accompanied by histopathological and ultrastructural abnormalities of both the hypothalamus and hippocampus. However, there were no marked changes in the hippocampal expression levels of glucocorticoids receptor (GR) and mineralocorticoids receptor (MR) or the ratio of MR/GR ratio. After the fetuses had matured, lower serum CORT and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) levels were observed in PFR rats without UCS when compared with the control. A higher rise rate of serum ACTH was also observed after UCS when compared with that in rats without UCS. Furthermore, the hypothalamic mRNA expression level of corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) was lower in PFR rats without UCS, while expression levels of CRH, AVP, GAD65 and vGLUT2 were enhanced after UCS when compared with the control, accompanied by an increased vGLUT2/GAD65 expression ratio. MR mRNA expression was lower, and GR mRNA expression was higher in the hippocampus of the PFR rats without UCS when compared with the control. However, the mRNA expression levels of both MR and GR in the PFR rats were higher compared with those of the control after UCS, which was accompanied histopathological changes in the dentate gyrus, cornu ammonis (CA1) and CA3 areas. In summary, it was suggested that PFR induced fetal alterations of the HPA axis manifesting as hypothalamic hyperexcitability and poor hippocampal feedback, which persisted to adulthood and affected the behavior of the rat offspring.
Economic evaluation of a cluster randomized, non-inferiority trial of differentiated service delivery models of HIV treatment in Zimbabwe

Background: About 85% of Zimbabwe's >1.4 million people living with HIV are on antiretroviral treatment (ART). Further expansion of its treatment program will require more efficient use of existing resources. Two promising strategies for reducing resource utilization per patient are multi-month medication dispensing and community-based service delivery. We evaluated the costs to providers and patients of community-based, multi-month ART delivery models in Zimbabwe. Methods:We used resource and outcome data from a cluster-randomized non-inferiority trial of three differentiated service delivery (DSD) models targeted to patients stable on ART: 3-month facility-based care (3MF), community ART refill groups (CAGs) with 3-month dispensing (3MC), and CAGs with 6-month dispensing (6MC). Using local unit costs, we estimated the annual cost in 2020 USD of providing HIV treatment per patient from the provider and patient perspectives. Results:In the trial, retention at 12 months was 93.0% in the 3MF, 94.8% in the 3MC, and 95.5% in the 6MC arms. The total average annual cost of HIV treatment per patient was $187 (standard deviation $39), $178 ($30), and $167 ($39) in each of the three arms, respectively. The annual cost/patient was dominated by ART medications (79% in 3MF, 87% in 3MC; 92% in 6MC), followed by facility visits (12%, 5%, 5%, respectively) and viral load (8%, 8%, 2%, respectively). When costs were stratified by district, DSD models cost slightly less, with 6MC the least expensive in all districts. Savings were driven by differences in the number of facility visits made/year, as expected, and low uptake of annual viral load tests in the 6-month arm. The total annual cost to patients to obtain HIV care was $10.03 ($2) in the 3MF arm, $5.12 ($0.41) in the 3MC arm, and $4.40 ($0.39) in the 6MF arm. Conclusions:For stable ART patients in Zimbabwe, 3- and 6-month community-based multi-month dispensing models cost less for both providers and patients than 3-month facility-based care and had non-inferior outcomes.
A study protocol for community use of digital auscultation to improve diagnosis of paediatric pneumonia in Bangladesh

The World Health Organisation Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) algorithm relies on counting respiratory rate and observing respiratory distress to diagnose childhood pneumonia. IMCI performs with high sensitivity but low specificity, leading to over-diagnosis of child pneumonia and unnecessary antibiotic use. Including lung auscultation in IMCI could improve pneumonia diagnosis. Our objectives are: (i) assess lung sound recording quality by primary health care workers (HCWs) from under-five children with the Feelix Smart Stethoscope; and (ii) determine the reliability and performance of recorded lung sound interpretations by an automated algorithm compared to reference paediatrician interpretations. In a cross-sectional design, Community HCWs will record lung sounds of 1,003 under-five-year-old children with suspected pneumonia at first-level facilities in Zakiganj sub-district, Sylhet, Bangladesh. Enrolled children will be evaluated for pneumonia, including oxygen saturation, and have their lung sounds recorded by the Feelix Smart stethoscope at four sequential chest locations: two back and two front positions. A novel sound-filtering algorithm will be applied to recordings to address ambient noise and optimize recording quality. Recorded sounds will be assessed against a pre-defined quality threshold. A trained paediatric listening panel will classify recordings into one of the following categories: normal, crackle, wheeze, crackle and wheeze, or uninterpretable. All sound files will be classified into the same categories by the automated algorithm and compared with panel classifications. Lung auscultation and reliable interpretation of lung sounds of children are usually not feasible in first-level facilities in Bangladesh and other low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Incorporating automated lung sound classification within the current IMCI pneumonia diagnostic algorithm may improve childhood pneumonia diagnostic accuracy at LMIC first-level facilities.
A New Interleaving Technique Based on Current Ripple Reduction of Paralleled Converters for Renewable Systems

Abstract Conventional interleaving switching techniques are widely used to minimise the output current ripples of one input source with several paralleled DC-DC converters. The method of minimising the output current ripples of different paralleled renewable sources working with different duty cycles has never been considered and conventional interleaving techniques are no longer practical to meet requirements. This paper proposes a novel interleaving switching technique for multi-input sources using a novel phase shift method to reduce the current ripples, and further reduce the size/cost of inductors and capacitors needed for filtering. It has favourable advantages such as low cost and fast dynamic response. It is able to accommodate variable input voltages and duty cycles from each converter and the failures of one or more cells. The proposed switching technique is applicable to any type of buck-derived or boost-derived DC-DC converters integrated with renewable sources. It can be used to implement maximum power point tracking applications for integrating renewable sources to the grid. In this paper, photovoltaic systems are adopted for analysis. The proposed technique is validated through detailed mathematical analysis, simulation and implementation.
Display Proximity in Multicue Information Integration: The Benefits of Boxes

This study investigates the ability of an individual to integrate probabilistic information from a number of sources, and focuses particularly on the extent to which this integration is influenced by display proximity in space, time, and object configuration. In support of the principle of compatibility of proximity, the data indicated that integration performance was clearly ordered according to the degree of display integrality: those in the more integral rectangle conditions were significantly better at integration than those in the bar graph condition. Proximity of space had little effect upon performance, whereas proximity in time significantly improved performance in all three format conditions. Speed stress significantly hindered performance in all three format conditions. Finally, memory for isolated unintegrated attributes of a cue was not harmed by the increasing integrality of the rectangle formats.
InGaAs avalanche photodiode with InP p-n junction

A new InGaAs avalanche photodiode structure that has an InGaAs light absorption region and InP avalanche multiplying region is proposed. A dark-current density of 2.2 × 10-3 A/cm2 at 90% of breakdown voltage and a multiplication factor of 45 were obtained for the new structure diode fabricated from a liquid-phase epitaxially grown wafer.
Supplementary Material for “ Semi-Autoregressive Transformer for Image Captioning ” 1

Image Features Encoder. The encoder takes the image region features as inputs and outputs the contextual region features. It consists of a stack of L identical layers. Each layer has two sublayers. The first is a multi-head selfattention sublayer and the second is a position-wise feedforward sublayer. Both sublayers are followed by residual connection [10] and layer normalization [2] operations for stable training. Multi-head self-attention builds on scaled dot-product attention, which operates on a query Q, key K and value V as:
Parking guidance and information systems

As urban traffic problems become even more complex, the simple, small-scale parking lot guidance systems used heretofore are no longer adequate for solving urban traffic problems caused by the lack of parking spaces as cars driven by would-be shoppers, office workers, and tourists drive around looking for an empty lot or parking spot. These problems have created a demand for highly sophisticated large-scale systems that collect and disseminate parking lot information over an entire urban area. Such large, high-function systems were introduced in 1988 in the three cities of Toyota, Kurashiki, and Takasaki. Among these, this paper describes the advanced Toyota parking guidance and information system, which collects and presents not only parking lot information but also urban area congestion information and even highway regulation information.
Chlorpyrifos degradation, biocontrol potential and antioxidant defence activation under pesticide stress by rhizosphere bacteria isolated from rhizosphere of peach (Prunus persica) plants

ABSTRACT Current experiments were done to isolate plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) from peach (Prunus persica) rhizosphere having biocontrol, biodegradation and defence mechanism activation against pesticide toxicity. PGPR strains (Pseudomonas and Bacillus) showed biocontrol activity against phytopathogens. Bacillus flexus PS-26 tolerated a maximum amount of chlorpyrifos and was also able to degrade different concentrations of chlorpyrifos within 30 h. Bacillus flexus PS-26 formed more biofilm, released a high amount of antioxidants and exopolysaccharides under chlorpyrifos stress, which suggested its detoxification role. The present study proved Bacillus flexus PS-26 to be a super-bioinoculant, which could protect plants against pesticide.
Representation learning of urban regions via mobility-signature-based zone embedding: a case study of Seoul, South Korea

As urbanization continues to evolve and accelerate, understanding the interactions between urban geography and large-scale mobility data has generated a great interest in the urban studies in recent years. In this paper, we present a method to learn embeddings of urban zones by utilizing the spatiotemporal characteristics of urban mobility. We extract the mobility signature from taxi trajectory data in Seoul, South Korea. Then, we apply Skip-gram model on the mobility signature to obtain the embeddings of the urban zones. Finally, we apply the spherical k-means clustering on the learned embeddings of zones to identify the urban functional regions. Through proposed approach, region maps of Seoul that can readily identify regions of similar socio-economic activities such as mobility patterns are provided.
Hidden Defects Diagnosis Using Parameter Optimization

In this paper, the issue of composite defects diagnosis by applying the support vector machine (SVM) was addressed. The component analysis was performed initially to extract the features and to reduce the dimensionality of original data features. Kernel parameters selection of support vector machine which has great influence on the performance of defects classification has been discussed in this work. Precisely, we focus on wavelet transform to extract the feature from the original signals, adopt component analysis to do feature selection and apply support vector machine to classify the defects. This paper exploits the parameter optimization procedure to ensure the generalization ability of SVM. The result shows that multi-class SVM produces promising results and has the potential for use in fault diagnosis.
Phylogenetic Analysis of the Membrane Attack Complex/Perforin Domain-Containing Proteins in Gossypium and the Role of GhMACPF26 in Cotton Under Cold Stress

The membrane attack complex/perforin (MACPF) domain-containing proteins are involved in the various developmental processes and in responding to diverse abiotic stress. The function and regulatory network of the MACPF genes are rarely reported in Gossypium spp. We study the detailed identification and partial functional verification of the members of the MACPF family. Totally, 100 putative MACPF proteins containing complete MACPF domain were identified from the four cotton species. They were classified into three phylogenetic groups and underwent multifold pressure indicating that selection produced new functional differentiation. Cotton MACPF gene family members expanded mainly through the whole-genome duplication (WGD)/segmental followed by the dispersed. Expression and cis-acting elements analysis revealed that MACPFs play a role in resistance to abiotic stresses, and some selected GhMACPFs were able to respond to the PEG and cold stresses. Co-expression analysis showed that GhMACPFs might interact with valine-glutamine (VQ), WRKY, and Apetala 2 (AP2)/ethylene responsive factor (ERF) domain-containing genes under cold stress. In addition, silencing endogenous GhMACPF26 in cotton by the virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) method indicated that GhMACPF26 negatively regulates cold tolerance. Our data provided a comprehensive phylogenetic evolutionary view of Gossypium MACPFs. The MACPFs may work together with multiple transcriptional factors and play roles in acclimation to abiotic stress, especially cold stress in cotton.
Recent High-Resolution Structures of Amyloids Involved in Neurodegenerative Diseases

Amyloids are highly ordered aggregates composed of proteins or peptides. They are involved in several pathologies, including hallmark neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson’s (PD). Individuals affected by these diseases accumulate in their brains amyloids inclusions composed of misfolded forms of a peptide (Aβ) and a protein (Tau) in AD and α-synuclein protein (α-Sn) in PD. Tau and α-Sn aggregates are also present in other neurodegenerative diseases. The insoluble nature and heterogeneity of amyloids have hampered their study at the molecular level. However, the use of solid state NMR and Cryogenic-electron microscopy along with fine-tuned modulation of the aggregation in vitro and improved isolation methods of brain-derived amyloids has allowed the elucidation of these elusive conformations at high resolution. In this work, we review the latest progress on the recent amyloid structures reported for Aβ, Tau, and α-Sn. The two-fold symmetry emerges as a convergent feature in the tridimensional arrangement of the protofilaments in the fibrillary structure of these pathological amyloids, with many of them exhibiting a Greek-key topology as part of their overall architecture. These specific features can serve as novel guides to seek potential molecular targets in drug design efforts.
ERPS-management accounting practices fit, antecedents, and user satisfaction

Fit between system functionality and task requirements is important for realising full benefi t of the information system and eventually, ensuring its success.Maximising the benefits of complex integrated information systems such as enterprise resource planning systems (ERPS) is signifi cant due to involvement of huge amount of money and time.Despite the increasing number of research on ERPS and management accounting, investigation of these two domains from the fit perspective is limited.Many studies investigating the fi t of specifi c information systems at the individual level have adopted task-technology fit (TTF) as their base.This paper discusses the adoption of TTF in a study to investigate the specific fit between ERPS and management accounting practices.Relevant literature was reviewed to develop a specific framework for the study.The framework is a combination of two separate diagrams depicting two separate groups of testing.The framework consists of adaptation, integration, computer self-efficacy, user participation, ERPS-MAP Fit, and user satisfaction.Hypotheses and implications of this study are also discussed.
Thin-film quasi-SOI power MOSFET fabricated by reversed silicon wafer direct bonding

A quasi-SOI power MOSFET has been fabricated by reversed silicon wafer direct bonding. In this power MOSFET, the buried oxide under the channel and source regions is removed and the channel region is directly connected to the source body contact electrode to reduce the base resistance of the parasitic npn bipolar transistor. The quasi-SOI power MOSFET can suppress the parasitic bipolar action and shows lower specific on-resistance than that of the conventional SOI power MOSFET. The fabricated chip level quasi-SOI power MOSFET shows the specific on-resistance of 86 m/spl Omega//spl middot/mm/sup 2/ and on-state breakdown voltage of 30 V.
Debt Financing and Agency Cost on Profitability: Are Real Estate Firms’ Performance in India Getting Affected?

This article tries to understand the relationship between agency cost, debt financing and Indian real estate companies’ performance. The study attempts to document the effect of debt on the firm’s profitability and then explores the reason behind such an impact by introducing the agency cost as a parameter. The study is conducted in two phases. Phase I is carried out to establish the relationship between debt financing and the firm’s financial performance. In Phase II, the study is conducted to understand the impact of agency cost on debt financing. Firms from the BSE Realty Index were selected for the period 2011–2018. Profitability is measured through return on equity (ROE), whereas debt financing is measured through the firm’s leverage ratio. The agency cost is measured through the asset utilisation ratio and general expense to sales ratio. Panel regression method is used to understand the impact of debt financing and agency cost on the firms’ profitability. The result of Phase I suggests a significant negative relationship between debt financing and the ROE and the result of Phase II suggests a positive relationship between the agency cost and debt financing. This means that reduction in agency cost will lead to lesser amount of debt financing thereby improving the firm’s financial performance.
How to Write (Science) Better. Simplified English Principles in a Skill-Oriented ESP Course

Abstract Teaching writing to doctoral students or academics at a technical university is a challenging task. Because they need to publish their research findings in English to pursue academic careers, they are usually highly motivated and expect a lot of the class. Their language competences, however, very often lack enough proficiency and may contribute to manuscript rejection. The paper focuses on language issues based on the rules of controlled natural languages (CNLs) and guidelines of Plain English. It shows how employing these issues improves grammatical quality and readability of science-oriented written texts. The paper describes four principles: removing nominalisation and using the so-called strong verbs to make the message simpler and more direct; combining nouns in strings to express complex ideas economically; applying grammatical consistency for coordinate elements in sentences to make them less chaotic; and reducing wordiness to obtain a more precise and comprehensible piece of writing. Sample phrases and sentences from authentic student writing as well as their improved versions are provided to each of the guidelines so that a reader has a deeper insight into how the principles work in a specialist context. Because problems with, for example, research papers, grant proposals or reports are common to various disciplines and at various levels, the Author of the paper draws conclusions that these principles should be implemented not only in a technical but also legal, medical and business writing course offered by English teachers to both young researchers and experienced scientists.