LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of toxicokinetic and tissue distribution of triptolide-loaded solid lipid nanoparticles vs free triptolide in rats.

The traditional Chinese medicine Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F (TWHF) is used clinically to treat some autoimmune and inflammatory disorders including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and skin diseases. However TWHF has a high potential for toxicity, so its clinical use is limited. Solid lipid nanoparticle (SLN) delivery systems are reported to have remarkable advantages over conventional formulations of bioactive plant extracts, such as enhancing solubility and bioavailability, offering protection from toxicity, and enhancing pharmacological activity. We reported previously that a tripterygium glycoside (TG) solid lipid nanoparticle (TG-SLN) delivery system had a protective effect against TG-induced male reproductive toxicity. To better understand this issue, we used triptolide (TP) as a model drug in a comparative study of the toxicokinetic and tissue distribution of TP-SLN and free TP in rats, allowing us to observing the in vivo behavior of this nanoformulation and to assess mechanisms of SLN-related toxicity. A fast and sensitive HPLC-APCI-MS/MS method was developed for the determination of triptolide in rat plasma. Fourteen rats were divided randomly into two groups of 7 rats each for toxicokinetic analysis, with one group receiving free TP (450μg/kg) and the other receiving the TP-SLN formulation (450μg/kg). Blood was obtained before dosing and 0.083, 0.17, 0.25, 0.33, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.5, 2, 3 and 4h after drug administration. Thirty-six rats were divided randomly into six equal groups for a tissue-distribution study. Half of the rats received intragastric administration of TP (450μg/kg) and the other half received TP-SLN (450μg/kg). At 15, 45, and 90min after dosing, samples of blood, liver, kidney, spleen, lung, and testicular tissue were taken. TP concentration in the samples was determined by LC-APCI-MS-MS. The toxicokinetic results for the nanoformulation showed a significant increase the area under the curve (AUC) (P<0.05), significantly longer T(max) and mean retention times (MRTs) (0-t) (P<0.05), significantly decreased C(max) (P<0.05). The nanoformulation promoted absorption with a slow release character, indicating that toxicokinetic changes may be the most important mechanism for the enhanced efficacy of nanoformulations. Tissue-distribution results suggest a tendency for TP concentrations in the lung and spleen to increase, while TP concentrations in plasma, liver, kidney, and testes tended to decrease in the TP-SLN group. At multiple time points, testicular tissue TP concentrations were lower in the TP-SLN group than in free TP group. This provides an important clue for the decreased reproductive toxicity observed with TP-SLN.
Competence-Based Strategies and Global Production Networks a Discussion of Current Changes and Their Implications for Employment

This paper adopts a multidisciplinary perspective to analyse current changes in firms' organisational strategies and assess their implications from the perspective of industrial organisation and employment. The analysis first draws on recent developments in the strategic management literature that conceptualise the firm as knowledge-based or competence-based. This approach is built upon to develop a competence-based organisational model integrating both firms' internal management practices and external linkages into a unified analytical framework, and showing how firms respond to new competitive pressures by managing competencies on an intrafirm and interfirm basis. Part two considers how such model can contribute to explain the emergence of global production networks, which are analysed by focusing on the key dimensions of power, activity and geography, along the lines of the global commodity chain framework. The employment outcomes of competence-based organisational strategies and network forms of organisation are then discussed from the perspective of labour market segmentation theory, with emphasis on the emergence of new forms of employment segmentation within and between firms. 3 In today's fast-changing competitive environment, firms' competitive positions are constantly challenged by the emergence of new technologies, products, markets and competitors. Flexibility and adaptability have become key management concepts to develop a sustainable competitive advantage, and successful firms apply them in new organisational strategies that put into question many conventional tenets on organisations and their management. These strategies involve a decentralised and responsive work organisation, based on cooperative relations not only within the firm but also in its relations with customers, suppliers and competitors. However, firms are also increasingly resorting to traditional market mechanisms through the use of contingent workers and arms'-length subcontracting relations. This paper adopts a multidisciplinary perspective to examine these new strategies as well as their implications in terms of industrial organisation and employment. By doing so, it aims to highlight major changes in power relations both between firms, through the new dynamics of competition, and within firms, through new forms of employment relations. Firms' organisational strategies are a key driver of changes in these two areas, and as such they constitute the entry point of our analysis. The first section builds on recent developments in the strategic management literature that conceptualise the firm as knowledge-based or competence-based, to propose an original model for analysing firms' organisational strategies. This model integrates both firms' internal management practices and external linkages into a unified analytical framework, showing how firms can successfully respond …
Substance abuser impulsivity decreases with a nine-month stay in a therapeutic community.

BACKGROUND
Substance abuse continues to be a major public health problem. Keeping substance abusers in treatment is a challenge, and researchers continue to investigate ways to increase retention.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between impulsivity in substance abusers and length of stay in the context of therapeutic community.


METHODS
The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale- 11 (BIS-11) was used to assess impulsivity in 138 substance abusers at admission and at nine months in a therapeutic community.


RESULTS
Impulsivity significantly decreased in subjects who completed nine months in the therapeutic community. Legal stipulation increased length of stay, on average, by three months. On admission, female participants were on average more impulsive than their male counterparts.


CONCLUSION
Impulsivity decreased in subjects who remained in therapeutic community for nine months although self-reported impulsivity at baseline did not seem to be associated with retention.


SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE
Therapeutic community factors contribute to a decrease in self-reported impulsivity and these factors might be enhanced to increase retention in therapeutic community.
Effects of attribute and valence of e-WOM on message adoption: Moderating roles of subjective knowledge and regulatory focus

0747-5632/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.05.018 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 53 950 7412; fax E-mail addresses: leekt@knu.ac.kr (K.-T. Lee), unlim 1 Tel.: +82 53 950 7322; fax: +82 53 950 6247. The current study proposes a model to test whether online review valence and attributes have an effect on credibility, and whether regulatory focus and subjective knowledge have moderating effects. Three hundred nineteen university students participated in online experiments with a 2 (positive vs. negative review valence) by 2 (objective vs. subjective review attributes) between subject design. The experiment demonstrated that objective and negative online reviews have a significant positive and negative impact, respectively, on message credibility, which affects review adoption. The results also showed that the moderating effect produced by objective information and a consumer’s subjective knowledge is supported. This study contributes to explaining the inconsistent results between review valence/attribute and credibility found in previous studies. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The Jewish population of the former Lomza province by the end of the nineteenth century

The distribution of the Jewish population in the area that was formerly Lomza province Poland is examined for the period at the end of the nineteenth century according to type of locality (such as town former town or village) commune and size of locality. The results indicate a concentration of the Jewish population in the towns and a wide dispersion in villages. (summary in ENG RUS) (ANNOTATION)
On random relational structures

Erdos and Renyi gave a probabilistic construction of the countable universal homogeneous graph. We extend their result to more general structures of first-order predicate calculus. Our main result shows that if a class of countable relational structures C contains an infinite ω-categorical universal homogeneous structure U, then U can be constructed probabilistically.
Software Traceability : A Roadmap

ion and Traceability", Proceedings of the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, Germany, September 2002. 70. Watkins R, Neal M, "Why and How of Requirements Tracing", IEEE Software, 104-106, July 1994
The effect of mode of delivery on postpartum sexual functioning in primiparous women.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the effect of mode of delivery on postpartum sexual functioning in primiparous women.


METHODS
In this cross-sectional descriptive study, 150 primiparous women in postpartum period, who attended the family planning or vaccination clinics, were enrolled for the study. Eighty-one had vaginal delivery with episiotomy and 69 had experienced cesarean section. Sexual function was evaluated by the Female Sexual Function Index within 3 and 6 months postpartum.


RESULTS
About 29% in vaginal delivery group and 37% in cesarean delivery group had resumed their sexual intercourses four weeks after delivery (p=0.280).There were no significant differences between mode of delivery and sexual functioning, including desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction and pain.


CONCLUSION
The present study showed that postpartum sexual functioning was not associated with the type of delivery.
d6 metal systems for white phosphorus activation

Abstract This short review describes a breakthrough provided by the synthesis of d 6 metal complexes containing the intact molecules P 4 and P 4 S 3 . The coordinated cage molecules acquire unexpected reactivity and undergo dismutation reactions in mild conditions in the presence of water. The outcomings are obtained either in form of free or coordinated molecules; the former are hypophosphorous and phosphorous acids, the latter comprise, besides phosphine, PH 3 , such species as thiophosphinous acid, PH 2 SH, diphosphane, P 2 H 4 , 1-hydroxytriphosphane, PH(OH)PHPH 2 and 1,1,4-tris-hydroxytetraphosphane, P(OH) 2 PHPHPH(OH), which are either unknown or extremely reactive as free molecules. The formation of the above molecules provides a clue to the hydrolytic activation of the P 4 and P 4 S 3 cage molecules.
A Comparison of Physically Based Rendering Systems

In this thesis, a quantitative evaluation is performed to find the most relevant physically based rendering systems in research. As a consequence of this evaluation, the rendering systems Mitsuba, PBRT-v3 and LuxRender are compared to each other and their potential for interoperability is assessed. The goal is to find common materials and light models and analyze the effects of changing the parameters of those models.
Generic tools, specific languages

Adapting tools to a particular domain is expensive, and the adaptation is often not very deep. To address this challenge, Generic Tools, Specific Languages shifts the focus from building and adapting tools (windows, buttons, algorithms) to building and adapting languages to a domain. The thesis applies the approach to embedded software development: mbeddr is an extensible set of integrated languages for embedded software development built with JetBrains MPS language workbench. The evaluation of mbeddr suggests that it is a productive tool for embedded software development. The evaluation of the development of mbeddr itself suggests that MPS is a suitable platform for Generic Tools, Specific Languages, and that the approach in general is worthwhile. 1.1 O V E RV I E W A N D C O N T R I B U T I O N This section provides an overview of the thesis. It starts out by describing the contribution and the research methodology. It then discusses mbeddr, the primary artifact built during the dissertation and explains its context, embedded software engineering. A discussion of the technologies used for building mbeddr – language engineering, projectional editing and JetBrains MPS – follows. The section concludes with an overview of the results. Contribution Today’s software engineering tools are hard to adapt to specific domains. A major reason is that while platforms such as Eclipse support easy extension of the tool (views, editors, buttons, menus) they do not easily support the extension of the data formats or languages that underlie a tool. The contribution of this thesis is the introduction and evaluation of a new approach to developing domain-specific software engineering tools called Generic Tools, Specific Languages. It shifts the focus from adapting the engineering tool to adapting the underlying languages to solve the problem of tool adaptation. It relies on language workbenches (the generic tool) and recent advances in language engineering, particularly, user-friendly projectional editing. The problem of tool extensibility, the Generic Tools, Specific Languages approach and the way it is evaluated is discussed in Chapter 2. The specific research questions that arise from the approach (domain-specific extensibility, language modularity and projectional editing, tool scalability, implementation efforts and the learning curve) are introduced and motivated in Section 2.6. Methodology As part of the dissertation, the Generic Tools, Specific Languages approach has been applied to embedded software engineering, resulting in a
Selection of robot pre-grasps using box-based shape approximation

Grasping is a central issue of various robot applications, especially when unknown objects have to be manipulated by the system. In earlier work, we have shown the efficiency of 3D object shape approximation by box primitives for the purpose of grasping. A point cloud was approximated by box primitives [1]. In this paper, we present a continuation of these ideas and focus on the box representation itself. On the number of grasp hypotheses from box face normals, we apply heuristic selection integrating task, orientation and shape issues. Finally, an off-line trained neural network is applied to chose a final best hypothesis as the final grasp. We motivate how boxes as one of the simplest representations can be applied in a more sophisticated manner to generate task-dependent grasps.
Finite temperature non-local effective action for scalar fields

Massless scalar fields at finite temperature are considered in four-dimensional ultrastatic curved spacetime. The one-loop non-local effective action at finite temperature is found up to second order in the curvature expansion. This action is explicitly infrared finite. In the high-temperature expansion of the free energy, essentially non-local terms linear in temperature are derived.
Modeling of Set and Reset Operations of Phase-Change Memory Cells

Phase-change memory elements with 25-nm Ge2Sb2Te5 thickness and 25-nm heater diameter with ±2-nm protrusion/recess of the heater are studied using 2-D finite-element simulations with rotational symmetry. Temperature-dependent material parameters are used to solve current continuity and heat equations self-consistently. Melting is accounted for by including latent heat of fusion in heat capacity at melting temperature. Electrical breakdown is modeled using additional field-dependent conductivity terms to enable set simulations. Analyses on current, voltage, energy, power, and minimum pitch requirements are summarized for reset/set operations with 1-ns/20-ns voltage pulses leading to ~500× difference between the reset and set resistance states.
Rates of non-confounded HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders in men initiating combination antiretroviral therapy during primary infection.

OBJECTIVE
To determine the prevalence of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) in HIV-infected participants who initiated combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) during primary infection.


DESIGN
Cross-sectional observational study.


METHODS
HIV-infected men without neuropsychiatric confounds who had initiated cART during primary infection were administered a neuropsychological battery as well as questionnaires evaluating depression and quality of life. Eligibility was determined by a medical examination with history and review of records.


RESULTS
Twenty-six primarily non-Hispanic white (73%), male (100%) participants were enrolled and underwent neurocognitive assessment. Mean age was 44 (28-71) years, with a median of 17 years of education (13-24). Median current and nadir CD4 T-cell counts were 828 (506-1411) and 359 (150-621) cells/μl. All participants had plasma HIV-1 RNA less than 50 copies/ml. Median duration of cART prior to enrolment was 5.7 years (2.2-9.9). Median global deficit score was 0.17 (0.00-0.60). Only one (4%) participant was impaired.


CONCLUSION
Rates of HAND in this cohort of HIV-infected men without comorbid conditions who initiated early cART are low. Our findings suggest a possible neuroprotective benefit of early cART and an important contribution of comorbidities to observed HAND prevalence.
Is the patient's baseline inhaled steroid dose a factor for choosing the budesonide/formoterol maintenance and reliever therapy regimen?

OBJECTIVE
Baseline inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) dose may be a factor for prescribers to consider when they select a budesonide/formoterol maintenance and reliever therapy regimen for symptomatic asthmatics.


METHODS
A 6-month randomized study compared two maintenance doses of budesonide/formoterol 160/4.5 µg, 1 × 2 and 2 × 2, plus as needed, in 8424 asthma patients with symptoms when treated with ICS ± an inhaled long-acting β(2)-agonist (LABA). In the total study population, 1339 (17%) were high-dose ICS (HD) users (≥ 1600 µg/day budesonide). This HD stratum was compared with the rest of the study population, divided into low-dose (LD; 400 µg/day) and medium-dose strata (MD; 401-1599 µg/day) with regard to severe asthma exacerbations and mean changes in five-item Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ(5)) scores from baseline.


RESULTS
In all three strata there were fewer exacerbations in the 2 × 2 treatment groups (yearly rates 0.268, 0.172 and 0.094) than in the 1 × 2 treatment groups (yearly rates 0.232, 0.138 and 0.764). In no stratum was the difference between the treatment groups statistically significant. There was no statistically significant difference in time to the first severe exacerbation between the treatments 2 × 2 and 1 × 2 in the HD group (hazard ratio 0.944, p = 0.75). The adjusted mean changes in ACQ(5) scores in the HD, MD and LD strata were -0.89, -0.61 and -0.65, respectively, with 1 × 2 treatment and -0.90, -0.74 and -0.76, respectively, with 2 × 2 treatment. In the MD and LD strata, the difference between doses was significant in favour of 2 × 2 (MD p < 0.0001; LD p = 0.004), but not in the HD stratum (p = 0.870). No difference in serious adverse events was seen.


CONCLUSION
Compared with the LD and MD strata, the HD stratum patients had more exacerbations and a shorter time to first exacerbation. However, there were no differences in response between the 1 × 2 and 2 × 2 groups in any of the strata. This indicates that patients using budesonide/formoterol maintenance and reliever therapy, irrespective of baseline ICS dose, can be switched to 1 × 2 with its lower steroid load. ACQ(5) scores improved more in the HD stratum than in the MD and LD strata indicating, among other things, that HD patients were not overtreated at baseline.
The Nature of Creativity

Like E. Paul Torrance, my colleagues and I have tried to understand the nature of creativity, to assess it, and to improve instruction by teaching for creativity as well as teaching students to think creatively. This article reviews our investment theory of creativity, propulsion theory of creative contributions, and some of the data we have collected with regard to creativity. It also describes the propulsion theory of creative contributions. Finally, it draws
AMS Without 4-Wise Independence on Product Domains

1 University of California Los Angeles. Supported in part by N SF grants 0716835, 0716389, 0830803, 0916574 and Lockheed Martin Corporation. E-mail address : vova@cs.ucla.edu URL: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/ ̃ vova 2 Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Suppor ted by US-Israel BSF grant 2006060 and NSF grant CNS-0831289. E-mail address : kmchung@fas.harvard.edu URL: http://people.seas.harvard.edu/ ̃ kmchung/ 3 Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Suppor ted in part by NSF grant CNS-0721491. The work was finished during an internship in Microsoft Research Asia. E-mail address : zliu@fas.harvard.edu URL: http://people.seas.harvard.edu/ ̃ zliu/ 4 Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Suppor ted in part by NSF grant CNS-0721491 and research grants from Yahoo!, Google, and Cisco. E-mail address : michaelm@eecs.harvard.edu URL: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ ̃ michaelm/ 5 University of California Los Angeles. Supported in part by I BM Faculty Award, Lockheed-Martin Corporation Research Award, Xerox Innovation Group Award, the Okawa Fou ndation Award, Intel, Teradata, NSF grants 0716835, 0716389, 0830803, 0916574 and U.C. MICRO grant. E-mail address : rafail@cs.ucla.edu URL: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/ ̃ rafail
Leader-follower formation control using artificial potential functions: A kinematic approach

This paper presents a novel formation control technique of a group of differentially driven wheeled mobile robots employing artificial potential field based navigation and leader-follower formation control scheme. In the proposed method, the leader robot of the group determines its path of navigation by an artificial potential field and the other robots in the group follow the leader maintaining a particular formation employing the (l - ψ) control. As the leader robot navigates itself by artificial potential field it can easily avoid the collisions with the obstacles and can follow an optimal path while reaching to the goal position. The follower robots adapt their formation by suitably controlling the desired separation distance and the bearing angle. Thus, the original formation can be regained even if the formation is temporarily lost due to passage through narrow opening / path. Therefore, the overall formation control scheme results into a robust and adaptive formation control for a group autonomous differentially driven wheeled mobile robots. The effectiveness of the proposed formation control technique has been verified in simulation.