Depth-Wise Attention (DWAtt): A Layer Fusion Method for Data-Efficient Classification

Language Models pretrained on large textual data have been shown to encode different types of knowledge simultaneously. Traditionally, only the features from the last layer are used when adapting to new tasks or data. We put forward that, when using or finetuning deep pretrained models, intermediate layer features that may be relevant to the downstream task are buried too deep to be used efficiently in terms of needed samples or steps. To test this, we propose a new layer fusion method: Depth-Wise Attention (DWAtt), to help re-surface signals from non-final layers. We compare DWAtt to a basic concatenation-based layer fusion method (Concat), and compare both to a deeper model baseline -- all kept within a similar parameter budget. Our findings show that DWAtt and Concat are more step- and sample-efficient than the baseline, especially in the few-shot setting. DWAtt outperforms Concat on larger data sizes. On CoNLL-03 NER, layer fusion shows 3.68-9.73% F1 gain at different few-shot sizes. The layer fusion models presented significantly outperform the baseline in various training scenarios with different data sizes, architectures, and training constraints.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Home Care Offered by Family Caregivers to Preschool Children, Suffering From Hemiplegic Cerebral Palsy

Objectives: The objective of this study was to assess family caregivers' knowledge & practice regarding home care (activities of daily living) offered to preschool children suffering from hemiplegic cerebral palsy (HCP). Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional design was used to collect data from a convenience sample of 50 family caregivers and their preschool children aged from three to less than six years, who are suffering from hemiplegic cerebral palsy. The study participants were recruited from rehabilitation centers, and rheumatic unit in Minia Governorate, Egypt. Family caregiver’s were interviewed face-to-face after agreeing to participate in the study. Data was collected by using two tools; a structural questionnaire and observational check list. Results reveled that more than two third (78 %) of family caregivers had an unaccepted level of knowledge regarding hemiplegic cerebral palsy and activities of daily living for their children. The majority (86 %) had unaccepted level of practice toward activities of daily living for their children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy. There was a highly significant correlation between family caregivers' knowledge and practice (r =.567 at p = 0.000). Conclusion: the study reported a clear lack of knowledge about HCP & unaccepted level care from family’s caregivers to their children who suffer from HCP. In addition to the practice of family caregiver’s were poor in the most aspects of care to their children. Keywords: Family caregiver’s knowledge, practice, home care, hemiplegic cerebral palsy

OPT-R: Exploring the Role of Explanations in Finetuning and Prompting for Reasoning Skills of Large Language Models

In this paper, we conduct a thorough investigation into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing specifically on the Open Pretrained Transformers (OPT) models as a representative of such models. Our study entails finetuning three different sizes of OPT on a carefully curated reasoning corpus, resulting in two sets of finetuned models: OPT-R, finetuned without explanations, and OPT-RE, finetuned with explanations. We then evaluate all models on 57 out-of-domain tasks drawn from the SUPER-NATURALINSTRUCTIONS benchmark, covering 26 distinct reasoning skills, utilizing three prompting techniques. Through a comprehensive grid of 27 configurations and 6,156 test evaluations, we investigate the dimensions of finetuning, prompting, and scale to understand the role of explanations on different reasoning skills. Our findings reveal that having explanations in the fewshot exemplar has no significant impact on the model's performance when the model is finetuned, while positively affecting the non-finetuned counterpart. Moreover, we observe a slight yet consistent increase in classification accuracy as we incorporate explanations during prompting and finetuning, respectively. Finally, we offer insights on which skills benefit the most from incorporating explanations during finetuning and prompting, such as Numerical (+20.4%) and Analogical (+13.9%) reasoning, as well as skills that exhibit negligible or negative effects.Comment: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations (NLRSE) at ACL 202

Educational Intervention Program to Tackle Health Risk Behaviors among Male Secondary School Students (Tawjjehi) in Khan Younis Governorate - Gaza Strip

Health-risk behaviors are established during childhood, extend into adulthood, and are interrelated. It contributes to the leading causes of mortality and morbidity among children. The aim of this study was to design, implement and evaluate an Educational Intervention Program to tackle Health Risk Behaviors among Male Secondary School Students, (Tawjjehi), Khan Younis - Gaza Strip. A Quasi-experimental design was used in this study, the study sample was 366 students, (92 science students and 274 Humanities students), half of them were for intervention group and the others for control group, the study sample were  selected by random sampling method. Data were obtained through four main channels; I. self-structure questionnaire for personal information, demographics characteristics, health risk behaviors (tobacco use, recreation facilities, dietary behaviors, school violence, intentional and un intentional injuries), II. student's records, III. anthropometric measurements and IV. hemoglobin level test in Male Secondary School Students, (Tawjjehi), Khan Younis - Gaza Strip . The main results three months after the program show that: Healthy students behaviors were significantly higher than post and follow up test after the educational intervention program implementation than for pretest for intervention group and greater than control group for all domains. The study concluded that the educational intervention program had a positive effect on students regarding all health risk behaviors. The study recommended that physical activities should be continued from sport teacher's, start the educational intervention program for the younger age (prep school students) and replicate the study in other setting with a larger sample of students. Keywords: Intervention Education Program, Health risk factors, male secondary school student

ALERT: Adapting Language Models to Reasoning Tasks

Current large language models can perform reasonably well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. Are these models applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training and reason outside of their training context, or are they simply memorizing their training corpus at finer granularity and have learnt to better understand their context? To tease apart these possibilities, we introduce ALERT, a benchmark and suite of analyses for assessing language models' reasoning ability comparing pre-trained and finetuned models on complex tasks that require reasoning skills to solve. ALERT provides a test bed to asses any language model on fine-grained reasoning skills, which spans over 20 datasets and covers 10 different reasoning skills. We leverage ALERT to further investigate the role of finetuning. With extensive empirical analysis we find that language models learn more reasoning skills such as textual entailment, abductive reasoning, and analogical reasoning during finetuning stage compared to pretraining state. We also find that when language models are finetuned they tend to overfit to the prompt template, which hurts the robustness of models causing generalization problems

Draft Genome Sequence of Photorhabdus luminescens Strain BA1, an Entomopathogenic Bacterium Isolated from Nematodes Found in Egypt

Photorhabdus luminescens strain BA1 is an entomopathogenic bacterium that forms a symbiotic association with Heterorhabditis nematodes. We report here a 5.0-Mbp draft genome sequence for P. luminscens strain BA1, with a G+C content of 42.46% and 4,250 candidate protein-coding genes

Draft Genome Sequence of Photorhabdus temperata Strain Meg1, an Entomopathogenic Bacterium Isolated from Heterorhabditis megidis Nematodes

Photorhabdus temperata strain Meg1 is an entomopathogenic bacterium that forms a symbiotic association with Heterorhabditis nematodes. We report here a 4.9-Mbp draft genome sequence for P. temperata strain Meg1, with a G+C content of 43.18% and containing 4,340 candidate protein-coding genes

Bone Mineral Density Changes in Patients with Recent-Onset Rheumatoid Arthritis

Background Osteoporosis and related fragility fractures are one of the most common complications seen in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and dramatically affect quality of life. Objective To evaluate changes in bone mineral density in patients with recent onset rheumatoid arthritis (< 1 year) and its correlation if any with a modified DAS-28 score and simple erosion narrowing score (SENS). Methods This study included 30 patients with recent-onset rheumatoid arthritis fulfilling the new American College of Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism diagnostic criteria for rheumatoid arthritis and 20 healthy volunteers as controls. All were subjected to a complete blood count, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, C-reactive protein, liver function tests, renal function tests, rheumatoid factor, and plain x-rays of the hands and feet. Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry DEXA was used to measure bone mineral density (BMD) of the left proximal femur, lumbar spine (L1–L4), and lower distal radius at the time of recruitment. Results In the RA patients, 13.3% had osteoporosis, 50% had osteopenia, and 36.7% had normal BMD. The most common site of osteoporosis was the lumbar spine (four patients, 13.3%) followed by the femur (two patients, 6.6%), and forearm (only one patient, 3.3%). There was a significantly higher percentage of osteoporosis among RA males than females and the difference was statistically significant ( P = 0.009). Osteoporosis was more common in patients treated with corticosteroids and disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) than in patients treated with only nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs ( P = 0.004). Higher disease activity (DAS-28) was found in RA patients with osteoporosis compared to RA patients with normal BMD or osteopenia, but the difference was not statistically significant. Osteoporotic RA patients were found to have a higher SENS score for radiological damage than nonosteoporotic ones. Conclusion BMD changes do occur in patients with early RA, and are not necessarily correlated with disease activity (DAS-28). However, a significant negative correlation was found between BMD and the score of radiological damage (SENS). Dual energy x-ray absorptiometry is an important investigation to assess BMD in early RA patients

Effects of L-carnitine and cryodevices on the vitrification and developmental competence of invitro fertilized buffalo oocytes

In the current, study the effect of the addition of L-carnitine (LC) in in vitro maturation (IVM) medium for buffalo oocytes and different cryo-devices on developmental competence. They were matured in IVM medium supplemented with 0.0, 0.3, 0.6 and 1.2 mg/mL of LC and vitrified by using either straw (ST), open pulled-straw (OPS), solid surface vitrification (SSV). The effects of LC during invitro fertilization and invitro culture on the developmental potential were examined. ST showed a higher recovery rate when using 0.6 mg/ml; viability rate (VR) when using 0.3mg/ml and lower zona pellucida (ZP) and cytoplasmic abnormalities when using 1.2 mg/ml LC (P&lt;0.05). OPS showed a higher recovery and viability rates when using 0.3 mg (P&lt;0.05). SSD showed a higher recovery and VR when using 0.6 mg/ml LC (P&lt;0.05). Maturation and fertilization rates were increased when using 0.3 mg LC and OPS (P&lt;0.05). Cleavage was increased in 0.3 (OPS) and 0.6 mg LC (SSD). The blastocyst rate was increased in 0.3 (OPS) and 0.6 mg/ml (SSD) (P&lt; 0.05). In conclusion, 0.3 mg/ml LC and OPS gives a higher recovery and viability rates but 0.6 mg/ml LC and of both SSD and ST gives a higher recovery and viability rates

Diagnostic significance of hsa_circ_0000146 and hsa_circ_0000072 biomarkers for Diabetic Kidney Disease in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus

Background: Diabetic Kidney Disease (DKD) is a significant challenge in healthcare. However, there are currently no reliable biomarkers for renal impairment diagnosis, prognosis, or staging in DKD patients. CircRNAs and microRNAs have emerged as noninvasive and efficient biomarkers. Methods: We explored Cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1), C reactive protein (CRP), hsa_circ_ 0000146 and 0000072, and hsa-miR-21 and 495 as diagnostic biomarkers in DKD. The serum concentrations of CRP and CNR1 were measured using ELISA. Rt-qPCR was used to evaluate the expression levels of CNR1, circRNAs, and miRNAs in 55 controls, 55 type 2 diabetes mellitus patients, and 55 DKD patients. Their diagnostic value was determined by their ROC curve. KEGG pathway was used to predict the functional mechanism of the circRNA's target genes. Results: DKD patients exhibited a significant increase in CRP and CNR1 levels and the expression of miR-21 and 495. The expression levels of circ_0000146 and 0000072 decreased in DKD patients. ROC analysis revealed that circRNAs and miRNAs alone or CNR1 and CRP have significant diagnostic potential. The functional prediction results showed the involvement of hsa_circ_0000146 and 0000072 in various pathways that regulate DKD. Conclusions: Therefore, the examined circRNAs and miRNAs may represent a novel noninvasive biomarker for diagnosing and staging DKD