Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predicting IPTV usage : an SEM approach

To get a better understanding of the factors underlying the adoption of a new technology like Internet Protocol Television, two structural equation models (SEM) with different theoretical backgrounds were used in this study. The Unified Model of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was used to give insight into the role of performance and effort expectancies, while the Model of Media Attendance contributed by focusing on behavioral mechanisms like habit, experience and self-efficacy. In most studies both models were primarily used to explain existing use behavior. In contrast the main interest of this study was the intention of future behavior, as actual behavior can not be measured for a technology that is not yet adopted. To reflect this both models had to be adjusted and factors only influencing actual usage of the technology were dropped. For the Model of Media Attendance the concept of counterintentional habit (viewing standard TV) was added on the basis of a literature study. 160 students of the University of Twente participated in an online survey to gather data for this study. The results do suggest that scales that are primarily used to explain media use may not be as reliable when used to predict media use. This severely limits the interpretability of this study
Structural Rearrangement of Human Lymphotactin, a C Chemokine, under Physiological Solution Conditions*

NMR spectra of human lymphotactin (hLtn), obtained under various solution conditions, have revealed that the protein undergoes a major conformational rearrangement dependent on temperature and salt concentration. At high salt (200 mm NaCl) and low temperature (10 °C), hLtn adopts a chemokine-like fold, which consists of a three-stranded antiparallel β-sheet and a C-terminal α-helix (Kuloğlu, E. S., McCaslin, D. R., Kitabwalla, M., Pauza, C. D., Markley, J. L., and Volkman, B. F. (2001) Biochemistry 40, 12486–12496). We have used NMR spectroscopy, sedimentation equilibrium, and intrinsic fluorescence to monitor the reversible conformational change undergone by hLtn as a function of temperature and ionic strength. We have used two-, three- and four-dimensional NMR spectroscopy of isotopically enriched protein samples to determine structural properties of the conformational state stabilized at 45 °C and 0 mm NaCl. Patterns of NOEs and1Hα and 13C chemical shifts show that hLtn rearranges under these conditions to form a four-stranded, antiparallel β-sheet with a pattern of hydrogen bonding that is completely different from that of the chemokine fold stabilized at 10 °C and 200 mm NaCl. The C-terminal α-helix observed at 10 °C and 200 mm NaCl, which is conserved in other chemokines, is absent at 45 °C and no salt, and the last 38 residues of the protein are completely disordered, as indicated by heteronuclear15N-1H NOEs. Temperature dependence of the tryptophan fluorescence of hLtn in low and high salt confirmed that the chemokine conformation is stabilized by increased ionic strength. Sedimentation equilibrium analytical ultracentrifugation showed that hLtn at 40 °C in the presence of 100 mm NaCl exists mainly as a dimer. Under near physiological conditions of temperature, pH, and ionic strength, both the chemokine-like and non-chemokine-like conformations of hLtn are significantly populated. The functional relevance of this structural interconversion remains to be elucidated.
Comparative efficacy of long-acting β2-agonists as monotherapy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a network meta-analysis

Purpose Long-acting β2-agonists (LABAs) have demonstrated efficacy in patients with COPD in clinical trials. The purpose of this study was to assess the comparative efficacy of all available dosages of all LABA monotherapies using a network meta-analysis. Methods A systematic literature review identified 33 randomized controlled trials of LABA monotherapies (salmeterol 50 μg twice daily [BID]; formoterol 12 μg BID; indacaterol 75, 150, and 300 μg once daily [OD]; olodaterol 5 and 10 μg OD, and vilanterol 25 μg OD). Clinical efficacy was evaluated at 12 and 24 weeks in terms of trough forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1), transition dyspnea index focal score, St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire total score, and rate of COPD exacerbations. The relative effectiveness of all LABA monotherapies was estimated by Bayesian network meta-analysis. Results At 12 and 24 weeks, indacaterol 300 and 150 μg OD were associated with statistically significant improvement in trough FEV1 compared to all other LABA monotherapies; vilanterol 25 μg OD was superior to formoterol 12 μg BID. At 12 weeks, indacaterol 75 μg OD was associated with significant improvement in trough FEV1 compared to formoterol 12 μg BID and olodaterol (5 and 10 μg OD); salmeterol 50 μg BID was superior to formoterol 12 μg BID and olodaterol 5 μg OD. Indacaterol 300 μg OD was also associated with significant improvement in transition dyspnea index focal score compared to all other LABAs at 12 or 24 weeks. Indacaterol 150 μg OD had significantly better results in exacerbation rates than olodaterol 5 μg and olodaterol 10 μg OD. Conclusion Indacaterol 300 μg, followed by 150 and 75 μg, were the most effective LABA monotherapies for moderate to severe COPD.
Accounting Conservatism and Incentives: Intertemporal Considerations

ABSTRACT We study intertemporal incentive properties of conditional accounting conservatism. Conservatism has detrimental and beneficial properties. In our first model, conservatism introduces downward bias in the first period; any understatement of first-period performance is reversed in the second period. A conservative bias is not costly in the first period but instead is costly in the second period when a new manager may be rewarded for the performance of his predecessor. In an extension on learning, we illustrate a beneficial role of conservatism in fine-tuning incentives. In the second model, conservatism is modeled as recognizing effort-independent bad news early and good news late. Recognizing bad news early can be optimal because of intertemporal rent shifting, which improves incentives via an “incentive spillback. ” We also study overlapping projects (a multi-task setting) in which an interior accounting system can be optimal to avoid making one of the overlapping projects an incentive bottleneck.
Environmental decoherence versus intrinsic decoherence

We review the difference between standard environmental decoherence and ‘intrinsic decoherence’, which is taken to be an ineluctable process of Nature. Environmental decoherence is typically modelled by spin bath or oscillator modes—we review some of the unanswered questions not captured by these models, and also the application of them to experiments. Finally, a sketch is given of a new theoretical approach to intrinsic decoherence, and this scheme is applied to the discussion of gravitational decoherence.
Associations between parenting and children's socio-emotional well-being : the role of empathy and social understanding

The socio-emotional well-being of maltreated children is a key priority for practitioners and policy-makers alike; yet not enough is known about the developmental mechanisms that might link children's parenting experiences with their psychosocial adjustment. Previous research suggests that parental abuse and neglect can have adverse effects on children's peer relationships and self-perceptions. Emerging theoretical and empirical work suggests that children's social understanding and empathy could play a key role as mediators of these effects, but we have little knowledge about the differentiated pathways that might be uncovered by adopting a multidimensional conceptualisation of parenting experiences, social understanding and empathy, and peer reputations and self-perceptions. This thesis includes five papers reporting on a programme of empirical research conducted in order to address this gap in knowledge. The first, a meta-analysis and systematic review, revealed a complex and differentiated profile of social understanding among maltreated children. The second paper reports on a thematic analysis of a focus group and detailed semi-structured individual interviews with foster carers. In line with our theoretical model, carers readily identified children's difficulties with social understanding and empathy as relevant explanations for their socio-emotional problems. The third paper presents a new multidimensional self-report measure of empathy in children, demonstrating differentiated connections with socio-emotional functioning. The fourth paper presents comparisons between maltreated children in foster care and their classmates at school (aged 7-11 years), using measures that assess their peer reputations, self-perceptions, social understanding and empathy. Results indicate both direct links from maltreatment status to self-perceptions, as well as indirect links via children's theory of mind skills, their prosocial responses to others' emotional states and their behavioural reputations. The final paper delves deeper into the variations within the non-maltreated sample, uncovering links between specific features of the children's parenting experiences and their behavioural reputations, peer status and self-perceptions, via emotion understanding and empathic responses. Overall, the findings from this programme of research highlight the interplay of parenting experiences and socio-emotional competence in understanding school-aged children's psychosocial functioning. The results carry implications for further research as well as for applied work to support maltreated children and the adults who work with and care for them.
The Pennsylvania State University

Epithelial cells form largely non-motile structures in most circumstances. However, wound healing and developmental processes require epithelial cell motility in normal physiological conditions. In other instances, cell migration plays a role in pathobiological conditions such as metastases of cancers generating from epithelial tissues. Understanding the triggers and the mechanisms for migration is therefore crucial in attempting to prevent metastasis in cancer or promote it in wound healing. The hepatocyte growth factor, HGF, is a potent inducer of motility for epithelial cells. It activates its receptor the c-Met tyrosine kinase and induces downstream cascades that promote movement. In this study we show that HGF signaling depends on a signal transduction cascade that involves multiple small GTPases downstream of c-Met. We identify two scaffolding proteins, IPCEF/CNK3 and GRASP/Tamalin necessary for assembling a multiprotein complex that brings together Arf6 and Rac1 and their respective GEFs, ARNO and Dock180 to a cellular location where they promote cytoskeletal changes and induce motility. We first identify the role of IPCEF1/CNK3 in this cascade. IPCEF and CNK3 were first thought to be two separate proteins. We found that they are two halves of the same protein. This one protein is homologous to CNK in Drosophila melanogaster. CNK3 not only interacts with ARNO and enhances its activity, but as we demonstrate, has the capacity of anchoring ARNO in a location where it can activate Arf6 downstream of HGF. We subsequently studied the function of GRASP/Tamalin in this multiprotein complex mediating Arf-to-Rac signaling. We found that GRASP acts as the molecular bridge between ARNO and Dock180, facilitating the cascade that promotes cell migration downstream of HGF. Knockdown of GRASP was shown to have detrimental effects on HGF-induced cell migration in iv general. In addition preliminary data suggest that the absence of GRASP negatively affects the activation of Rac1. These data allow us to describe the importance of protein-protein interactions in the context of cell migration. Despite the absence of catalytic domains on scaffolding proteins, they play an important role in locating the signal and connecting receptor tyrosine kinase signaling to small GTPases crosstalk. The activation of small GTPases does not give a complete picture and definitely does not answer all the questions as to where, when and why cells elect to migrate or not. Scaffolding proteins fill in certain gaps in understanding the fine tuning required for proper protein assembly at the right time and location inside the cell.
FusionFlow: Discrete-continuous optimization for optical flow estimation

Accurate estimation of optical flow is a challenging task, which often requires addressing difficult energy optimization problems. To solve them, most top-performing methods rely on continuous optimization algorithms. The modeling accuracy of the energy in this case is often traded for its tractability. This is in contrast to the related problem of narrow-baseline stereo matching, where the top-performing methods employ powerful discrete optimization algorithms such as graph cuts and message-passing to optimize highly non-convex energies. In this paper, we demonstrate how similar non-convex energies can be formulated and optimized discretely in the context of optical flow estimation. Starting with a set of candidate solutions that are produced by fast continuous flow estimation algorithms, the proposed method iteratively fuses these candidate solutions by the computation of minimum cuts on graphs. The obtained continuous-valued fusion result is then further improved using local gradient descent. Experimentally, we demonstrate that the proposed energy is an accurate model and that the proposed discrete-continuous optimization scheme not only finds lower energy solutions than traditional discrete or continuous optimization techniques, but also leads to flow estimates that outperform the current state-of-the-art.
Effect of sedation with dexmedetomidine vs lorazepam on acute brain dysfunction in mechanically ventilated patients: the MENDS randomized controlled trial.

CONTEXT Lorazepam is currently recommended for sustained sedation of mechanically ventilated intensive care unit (ICU) patients, but this and other benzodiazepine drugs may contribute to acute brain dysfunction, ie, delirium and coma, associated with prolonged hospital stays, costs, and increased mortality. Dexmedetomidine induces sedation via different central nervous system receptors than the benzodiazepine drugs and may lower the risk of acute brain dysfunction. OBJECTIVE To determine whether dexmedetomidine reduces the duration of delirium and coma in mechanically ventilated ICU patients while providing adequate sedation as compared with lorazepam. DESIGN, SETTING, PATIENTS, AND INTERVENTION Double-blind, randomized controlled trial of 106 adult mechanically ventilated medical and surgical ICU patients at 2 tertiary care centers between August 2004 and April 2006. Patients were sedated with dexmedetomidine or lorazepam for as many as 120 hours. Study drugs were titrated to achieve the desired level of sedation, measured using the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS). Patients were monitored twice daily for delirium using the Confusion Assessment Method for the ICU (CAM-ICU). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Days alive without delirium or coma and percentage of days spent within 1 RASS point of the sedation goal. RESULTS Sedation with dexmedetomidine resulted in more days alive without delirium or coma (median days, 7.0 vs 3.0; P = .01) and a lower prevalence of coma (63% vs 92%; P < .001) than sedation with lorazepam. Patients sedated with dexmedetomidine spent more time within 1 RASS point of their sedation goal compared with patients sedated with lorazepam (median percentage of days, 80% vs 67%; P = .04). The 28-day mortality in the dexmedetomidine group was 17% vs 27% in the lorazepam group (P = .18) and cost of care was similar between groups. More patients in the dexmedetomidine group (42% vs 31%; P = .61) were able to complete post-ICU neuropsychological testing, with similar scores in the tests evaluating global cognitive, motor speed, and attention functions. The 12-month time to death was 363 days in the dexmedetomidine group vs 188 days in the lorazepam group (P = .48). CONCLUSION In mechanically ventilated ICU patients managed with individualized targeted sedation, use of a dexmedetomidine infusion resulted in more days alive without delirium or coma and more time at the targeted level of sedation than with a lorazepam infusion. TRIAL REGISTRATION clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00095251.
Effect of pregnancy on the onset and course of rheumatoid arthritis.

Hench (1938) reported the ameliorating effect of pregnancy upon rheumatoid arthritis, fibrositis, and intermittent hydrarthrosis, and noted the comment of Garrod (1890) that pregnancy acted as a temporary check upon the development of chronic arthritis in some cases. Hench studied the effect of 37 pregnancies in 22 women and found striking relief in 20 of them. The relief of joint symptoms, as a rule, was felt in the early stages of pregnancy, and remission lasted until a few weeks after parturition, when the arthritic symptoms recurred with equal or greater severity. The results achieved by some other scholars seem to point in the same direction. Barcelo Torrent and Alegre Marcet (1951) describe fifteen cases of rheumatoid arthritis, in twelve of which the activity of the disease diminished during pregnancy. Many theories have been put forward regarding the mechanism of this effect. Hench (1938) suggested that it is the same as or closely related to that responsible for amelioration during jaundice. Touw and Kuipers (1938) assumed that the favourable symptoms during the first 4 or 5 months of pregnancy were caused by the great amount of progestin that was secreted, but experiments with this hormone were not encouraging. The discovery of the ameliorating effect of Compound E brought into logical relationship several previously unrelated facts. The pregnancy effect could be explained either by supplementary E hormone from the foetal adrenal glands (Lansbury, 1949; Kandrac and Flusser, 1950), or by some adrenal cortical stimulant arising from the placenta (perhaps analogous to the chorionic gonadotropins) which causes the well known adrenal cortical hypertrophy of pregnancy (Lansbury, 1949). Kendall (1951) believed that cortisone and the substance causing remission during pregnancy are identical or closely related. Conjecturing that in pregnancy an unknown substance causes the improvement, and assuming that this substance circulates in the blood, Barsi (1947) treated patients with rheumatoid arthritis by transfusions from pregnant women, and found striking relief of symptoms in most cases. Very few remarks on this subject can be found in the literature. McKeown (1948) records eight cases in which rheumatic heart disease and damage to the myocardium occurred during pregnancy. Rheumatoid arthritis which began during pregnancy or immediately after delivery has not been regarded as related to the pregnancy.
Sensor networks deployment using flip-based sensors

In this paper, we study the issue of mobility based sensor networks deployment. The distinguishing feature of our work is that the sensors in our model have limited mobilities. More specifically, the mobility in the sensors we consider is restricted to a flip, where the distance of the flip is bounded. Given an initial deployment of sensors in a field, our problem is to determine a movement plan for the sensors in order to maximize the sensor network coverage, and minimize the number of flips. We propose a minimum-cost maximum-flow based solution to this problem. We prove that our solution optimizes both the coverage and the number of flips. We also study the sensitivity of coverage and the number of flips to flip distance under different initial deployment distributions of sensors. We observe that increased flip distance achieves better coverage, and reduces the number of flips required per unit increase in coverage. However, such improvements are constrained by initial deployment distributions of sensors, due to the limitations on sensor mobility
Transformational experience of a student nurse with diabetes: a case study.

PURPOSE The current study was aimed to investigate the transformational experience of a female student nurse living with type 1 diabetes. METHODS A case study of a 24-year-old diabetes patient was conducted, with interviews concerning the evolving process she had lived through during the period from her later high school years to her graduation from nursing college. RESULTS Followings were identified as 5-transformation process: With her diabetes-related limitation, the participant experienced 'conflict involving choosing a college and major'. The participant tried to be in charge of managing her diabetes and stepped forward to 'adaptation to college life as a new environment', and she learned more about the process of 'evolving awareness of caring' and developed herself further through the process of 'integration of the nurse identity into self-identity', and finally through the process of 'progression and preparation for getting a job' she achieved her goals, being positive about the future. CONCLUSIONS The results of the study can provide individuals with diabetes a way of self-management and help the patients and their families in diabetes education. Further research will be needed to refine the results of this study and to learn more about the experiences of patients with type I diabetes in college years.
Speech and Voice Response to a Levodopa Challenge in Late-Stage Parkinson’s Disease

Background Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients are affected by hypokinetic dysarthria, characterized by hypophonia and dysprosody, which worsens with disease progression. Levodopa’s (l-dopa) effect on quality of speech is inconclusive; no data are currently available for late-stage PD (LSPD). Objective To assess the modifications of speech and voice in LSPD following an acute l-dopa challenge. Method LSPD patients [Schwab and England score <50/Hoehn and Yahr stage >3 (MED ON)] performed several vocal tasks before and after an acute l-dopa challenge. The following was assessed: respiratory support for speech, voice quality, stability and variability, speech rate, and motor performance (MDS-UPDRS-III). All voice samples were recorded and analyzed by a speech and language therapist blinded to patients’ therapeutic condition using Praat 5.1 software. Results 24/27 (14 men) LSPD patients succeeded in performing voice tasks. Median age and disease duration of patients were 79 [IQR: 71.5–81.7] and 14.5 [IQR: 11–15.7] years, respectively. In MED OFF, respiratory breath support and pitch break time of LSPD patients were worse than the normative values of non-parkinsonian. A correlation was found between disease duration and voice quality (R = 0.51; p = 0.013) and speech rate (R = −0.55; p = 0.008). l-Dopa significantly improved MDS-UPDRS-III score (20%), with no effect on speech as assessed by clinical rating scales and automated analysis. Conclusion Speech is severely affected in LSPD. Although l-dopa had some effect on motor performance, including axial signs, speech and voice did not improve. The applicability and efficacy of non-pharmacological treatment for speech impairment should be considered for speech disorder management in PD.