Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coronary risk stratification

Background High sensitive-C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) is associated with coronary risk, which may be explained by an association with (unstable) coronary artery disease (CAD). Until now, histopathological and angiographic studies have failed to consistently demonstrate a strong relationship. However, most of these studies were limited by a cross-sectional design. Our aim was to prospectively evaluate the association between hs-CRP and plaque instability. Therefore, firstly, we investigated the relation between hs-CRP measured long before coronary angiography (CAG) and angiographic characteristics of stable and unstable CAD. In addition, we investigated the association with coronary events during follow up in the total PREVEND population. Methods and results Of the population based Prevention of REnal and Vascular ENdstage Disease (PREVEND) study, 8,139 subjects without previous documented CAD were followed for the incidence of CAG and coronary events from 1997-2003. For the qualitative angiographic analysis, 216 CAGs were available. Mean time to CAG was 37±19 months. The 864 coronary vessels were graded as follows: 436 coronary vessels as normal, 175 as non-obstructive CAD, 179 as stable obstructive CAD and 74 as unstable obstructive CAD. Multilevel ordinal regression analysis was performed to study associations between baseline clinical variables and angiographic findings. HsCRP contributed significantly to the multivariate model after adjustment for age, gender, smoking, lipids and blood pressure. In 8,139 subjects, two-hundred-andone (2.5%) first coronary events occurred during follow up. Cox survival analysis showed ageand sexadjusted hazard ratios for hs-CRP 1-3 mg/L and >3 mg/L of, respectively, 1.26 (95% CI 0.67-2.40) and 3.16 (95% CI 1.26-3.16), relative to hsCRP <1 mg/L. Conclusions In the prospective PREVEND study of subjects without previous documented CAD, hsCRP levels at baseline were associated with angiographic characteristics and clinical consequences of plaque instability during follow up. This observation supports the concept that hs-CRP significantly contributes to coronary atherogenesis.
Complementary dynamic BH3 profiles predict co-operativity between the multi-kinase inhibitor TG02 and the BH3 mimetic ABT-199 in acute myeloid leukaemia cells

Direct co-operation between sensitiser molecules BAD and NOXA in mediating apoptosis suggests that therapeutic agents which sensitise to BAD may complement agents which sensitise to NOXA. Dynamic BH3 profiling is a novel methodology that we have applied to the measurement of complementarity between sensitiser BH3 peptide mimetics and therapeutic agents. Using dynamic BH3 profiling, we show that the agent TG02, which downregulates MCL-1, sensitises to the BCL-2-inhibitory BAD-BH3 peptide, whereas the BCL-2 antagonist ABT-199 sensitises to MCL-1 inhibitory NOXA-BH3 peptide in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) cells. At the concentrations used, the peptides did not trigger mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilisation in their own right, but primed cells to release Cytochrome C in the presence of an appropriate trigger of a complementary pathway. In KG-1a cells TG02 and ABT-199 synergised to induce apoptosis. In heterogeneous AML patient samples we noted a range of sensitivities to the two agents. Although some individual samples markedly favoured one agent or the other, in the group as a whole the combination of TG02 + ABT-199 was significantly more cytotoxic than either agent individually. We conclude that dynamic NOXA and BAD BH3 profiling is a sensitive methodology for investigating molecular pathways of drug action and complementary mechanisms of chemoresponsiveness.
Replacing calcineurin inhibitors with mTOR inhibitors in children

Abstract: A highly selected subject group comprising pediatric recipients of liver (n = 36) and small intestine alone (n = 1) or multivisceral graft (n = 2) were converted to sirolimus maintenance therapy for tacrolimus‐related side effects (n = 32) or by primary intent (n = 7). Indications were nephrotoxicity (n = 14), primary intent (n = 7), post‐transplant lymphoproliferative disorder (n = 6), seizures (n = 4), recurrent acute rejection (n = 2), and cardiomyopathy (n = 1). Thirty subjects (78%) experienced successful conversion, with one subject requiring atorvastatin for hypercholesterolemia and hypertriglyceridemia. Nine subjects (22%) were converted back to tacrolimus for serious adverse events including acute rejection (n = 2), elevated liver function tests (n = 1), severe leucopenia (n = 1), non‐compliance (n = 2), recurrent malignancy/death (n = 1), steatohepatitis (n = 1), and thrombocytopenic thrombotic purpura (n = 1). Among subjects with nephrotoxicity, significant benefit was seen only in those subjects with shorter time to rescue after transplantation (n = 8 of 14 subjects). Additional benefits included a significant decrease in mean serum creatinine from pretransplant values for the entire population, and elimination of antihypertensive treatment in all five subjects receiving it prior to conversion. Hemoglobin, serum cholesterol and triglycerides, white cell counts and platelets remained within normal limits for the duration of follow‐up (36 month). Conversion from tacrolimus to sirolimus is successful in selected pediatric liver and intestine recipients. Chronic nephrotoxicity may be ameliorated by early conversion. Improvement in renal function and hypertension management, and absence of sirolimus‐related adverse events argue for prospective evaluation of regimens in which mTOR inhibitors are used without calcineurin inhibitors in children.
The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration

The image of the great artist as a suffering visionary is a recent invention, observes sociologist Nathalie Heinich - an invention rooted in the "canonisation" of Vincent van Gogh as a cultural hero for the twentieth century. Heinich explores how and why the impoverished and mentally tormented van Gogh came to be glorified shortly after his suicide at the age of 37. Did the secular art world need a rebel-saint of its own? In considering this possibility, the author explores the history of efforts to celebrate van Gogh, whether in biographies or on T-shirts, showing how the details of his life have been constructed according to the pattern of a Christian saint's rise to recognition. These biographical details circulated first as anacdotes, then as historical truths, and finally became legendary motifs defining individual greatness. At the time of van Gogh's death, early modernists hailed the work of this young self-taught painter as that of a reforming prophet. Public interest stirred when the unique and tragic aspect of the artist's personal life came to light. In these stories, the figure of van Gogh oscillated between godlike asceticism (he lived on very little, did not get married, did not eat much, and devoted his life to his work) and demonic frenzy (he drank, went to brothels, and offered a piece of his own flesh, his severed ear, to a prostitute). His legend became one of victim and sacrificer, of an accursed artist who gave the world great paintings but paid the heavy price of society's ignorance. Heinich organises her book around the stages that characterise the life of a saint - deviation, renewal, reconciliation, and pilgrimage, the latter culminating in visits to van Gogh's burial site and the competition to buy his paintings or "relics. Heinich explores the economics of the art market and the themes that make up the van Gogh myth, such as the person-alisation of artistic grandeur, the celebration of the inte-riority of the creator, and the glorification of abnormality. By examining the mythology that helps drive artistic investment, she forces us to reconsider the nature of admiration and particularly the notion that obscurity during an artist's lifetime is a guarantee of true genius.
Children's Antisocial Behavior, Mental Health, Drug Use, and Educational Performance After Parental Incarceration

Unprecedented numbers of children experience parental incarceration worldwide. Families and children of prisoners can experience multiple difficulties after parental incarceration, including traumatic separation, loneliness, stigma, confused explanations to children, unstable childcare arrangements, strained parenting, reduced income, and home, school, and neighborhood moves. Children of incarcerated parents often have multiple, stressful life events before parental incarceration. Theoretically, children with incarcerated parents may be at risk for a range of adverse behavioral outcomes. A systematic review was conducted to synthesize empirical evidence on associations between parental incarceration and children's later antisocial behavior, mental health problems, drug use, and educational performance. Results from 40 studies (including 7,374 children with incarcerated parents and 37,325 comparison children in 50 samples) were pooled in a meta-analysis. The most rigorous studies showed that parental incarceration is associated with higher risk for children's antisocial behavior, but not for mental health problems, drug use, or poor educational performance. Studies that controlled for parental criminality or children's antisocial behavior before parental incarceration had a pooled effect size of OR = 1.4 (p < .01), corresponding to about 10% increased risk for antisocial behavior among children with incarcerated parents, compared with peers. Effect sizes did not decrease with number of covariates controlled. However, the methodological quality of many studies was poor. More rigorous tests of the causal effects of parental incarceration are needed, using randomized designs and prospective longitudinal studies. Criminal justice reforms and national support systems might be needed to prevent harmful consequences of parental incarceration for children.
Surgical treatment of cerebellar hemangioblastomas

Background: Hemangioblastomas (HBL) are uncommon tumors of the central nervous system (CNS), corresponding to 1–2.5% of all intracranial tumors. They can present sporadically or in patients with von Hippel–Lindau (VHL) disease and are most often located in the cerebellum, brainstem, and spinal cord. VHL disease is a multiple neoplasia syndrome inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion and caused by a VHL suppressor gene deletion. We present our experience in the management of patients with cerebellar HBL. Methods: Thirty consecutive patients with cerebellar HBL were included in this study. Hospital charts, radiological images, and operative records were reviewed. Modified Rankin scores were used to evaluate the clinical course. Results: Thirty patients diagnosed with cerebellar HBL were operated. Complete total resection was achieved in 93% of the cases. Postoperatively, 83% of the patients showed good functional recovery. Conclusions: HBL of the cerebellum should be resected when symptomatic or when the tumor (or a tumor-associated cyst) shows signs of enlargement. Surgical intent should seek en bloc resection to minimize intraoperative bleeding. Patients with HBLs must be tested for VHL gene mutations, and in confirmed cases, relatives should be offered genetic counseling.
Adventure Programs and Diverse Family Styles

This study focused on the mediating effect of two adventure programs emphasizing relationship establishment between youth on the relationship between family styles and levels of intrinsic motivation. Family style is defined as the levels of caring and discipline family members give to their children. Because of its connection to interest, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, family style is considered as a variable impacting on levels of motivation participating in experiential-based programs. Findings indicated that during the overall adventure experiences, the high support and high challenge (HSHC) family group showed an enhanced level of relatedness than the low support and low challenge (LSLC) group. In addition, pairwise comparisons indicated differences in competence and relatedness between the HSHC and the LSLC groups in the pretest, but were no longer significant at the posttest. The paired t tests showed that the LSLC group improved on interest, competence, and relatedness throughout the adventure experiences. The findings indicated that the adventure programs offer an environment, which enhance youth participants’ perceived interest and psychological needs, especially for youth from the LSLC group.
Teaching Practice Self-Evaluation: Experiences at the University of Arusha- Musoma Centre, Tanzania

The present study investigated on student teachers’ competence in various aspects of teaching practice through self-evaluation approach. A total of 105 student-teachers filled the questionnaire; descriptive and inferential statistics established mean scores and differences. The study established that student-teachers, regardless of their demographic categorizations, are very competent in teaching, evaluation and supervision of co-curricular activities. Student-teachers are competent in guidance and counselling activities, though the competence level in this area is slightly lower than that of other dimensions of teaching practice. The study recommends strong motivation to educators by the University administration for them to continue doing their best in teacher training and calls for university lecturers to put more efforts in giving student-teachers guidance and counselling skills. Similar studies are recommended at the University of Arusha’s main campus and other universities in the country.
Bobtail: Avoiding Long Tails in the Cloud

Highly modular data center applications such as Bing, Facebook, and Amazon's retail platform are known to be susceptible to long tails in response times. Services such as Amazon's EC2 have proven attractive platforms for building similar applications. Unfortunately, virtualization used in such platforms exacerbates the long tail problem by factors of two to four. Surprisingly, we find that poor response times in EC2 are a property of nodes rather than the network, and that this property of nodes is both pervasive throughout EC2 and persistent over time. The root cause of this problem is co-scheduling of CPU-bound and latency-sensitive tasks. We leverage these observations in Bobtail, a system that proactively detects and avoids these bad neighboring VMs without significantly penalizing node instantiation. With Bobtail, common communication patterns benefit from reductions of up to 40% in 99.9th percentile response times.
Power Capping Via Forced Idleness

We introduce a novel power capping technique, IdleCap, that achieves higher effective server frequency for a given power constraint than existing techniques. IdleCap works by repeatedly alternating between the highest performance state and a low-power idle state, maintaining a fixed average power budget, while significantly increasing the average processor frequency. In experiments conducted on an IBM BladeCenter HS21 server across three representative workloads, IdleCap reduces the mean response time by up to a factor of 3 when compared to power capping using clock-throttling. Furthermore, we argue how IdleCap applies to next-generation servers using DVFS and advanced idle states.
Plasticity of Airway Epithelial Cell Transcriptome in Response to Flagellin

Airway epithelial cells (AEC) are critical components of the inflammatory and immune response during exposure to pathogens. AECs in monolayer culture and differentiated epithelial cells in air-liquid interface (ALI) represent two distinct and commonly used in vitro models, yet differences in their response to pathogens have not been investigated. In this study, we compared the transcriptional effects of flagellin on AECs in monolayer culture versus ALI culture using whole-genome microarrays and RNA sequencing. We exposed monolayer and ALI AEC cultures to flagellin in vitro and analyzed the transcriptional response by microarray and RNA-sequencing. ELISA and RT-PCR were used to validate changes in select candidates. We found that AECs cultured in monolayer and ALI have strikingly different transcriptional states at baseline. When challenged with flagellin, monolayer AEC cultures greatly increased transcription of numerous genes mapping to wounding response, immunity and inflammatory response. In contrast, AECs in ALI culture had an unexpectedly muted response to flagellin, both in number of genes expressed and relative enrichment of inflammatory and immune pathways. We conclude that in vitro culturing methods have a dramatic effect on the transcriptional profile of AECs at baseline and after stimulation with flagellin. These differences suggest that epithelial responses to pathogen challenges are distinctly different in culture models of intact and injured epithelium.
Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling of Impeller Designs for the HeartQuest Left Ventricular Assist Device

To finalize the design of the next generation of the HeartQuest left ventricular assist device, a suitable impeller had to be designed and tested. The new prototype was based on calculations and test results of previous designs, but required several changes to decrease the size. For most pump designs, this is a simple matter of altering impeller geometry and rotational speed to achieve the desired pressure rise and flow rate. However, this particular pump was limited by housing geometry and the magnetic bearings that support the impeller. Without much freedom in the overall impeller size, the only parameters open to the designers were the blade profiles and the rotating speed. Rather than build several candidates and test them in a rig at enormous cost, computational models of several designs were tested and analyzed. This not only saved money, but also sped up the development time for the project. The computer models were developed in TASCflow, a computational fluid dynamics software package from AEA Technologies. This paper analyzes the data from several of the selected models, paying close attention to pumping performance and general trends from specific design changes.
DOI:10.1068/p3396 The

Studies in change blindness re-enforce the suggestion that veridical, pictorial representations that survive multiple relocations of gaze are unlikely to be generated in the visual system. However, more abstract information may well be extracted and represented by the visual system. In this paper we study the types of information that are retained and the time courses over which these representations are constructed when participants view complex natural scenes. We find that such information is retained and that the resultant abstract representations encode a range of information. Different types of information are extracted and represented over different time courses. After several seconds of viewing natural scenes, our visual system is able to construct a complex information-rich representation. DOI:10.1068/p3396
Maximum distance testing

Random testing has been used for years in both software and hardware testing. It is well known that in random testing each test requires to be selected randomly regardless of the tests previously generated. However, random testing could be inefficient for its random selection of test patterns. This paper, based on random testing, introduces the concept of Maximum Distance Testing (MDT) for VLSI circuits in which the total distance among all test patterns is chosen maximal so that the set of faults detected by one test pattern is as different as possible from that of faults detected by the tests previously applied. The procedure for constructing a Maximum Distance Testing Sequence (MDTS) is described in detail. Experimental results on Benchmark as well as other circuits are also given to evaluate the performances of our new approach.
Cancer-Predicting Gene Expression Changes in Colonic Mucosa of Western Diet Fed Mlh1 +/- Mice

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the Western world and interactions between genetic and environmental factors, including diet, are suggested to play a critical role in its etiology. We conducted a long-term feeding experiment in the mouse to address gene expression and methylation changes arising in histologically normal colonic mucosa as putative cancer-predisposing events available for early detection. The expression of 94 growth-regulatory genes previously linked to human CRC was studied at two time points (5 weeks and 12 months of age) in the heterozygote Mlh1 +/- mice, an animal model for human Lynch syndrome (LS), and wild type Mlh1 +/+ littermates, fed by either Western-style (WD) or AIN-93G control diet. In mice fed with WD, proximal colon mucosa, the predominant site of cancer formation in LS, exhibited a significant expression decrease in tumor suppressor genes, Dkk1, Hoxd1, Slc5a8, and Socs1, the latter two only in the Mlh1 +/- mice. Reduced mRNA expression was accompanied by increased promoter methylation of the respective genes. The strongest expression decrease (7.3 fold) together with a significant increase in its promoter methylation was seen in Dkk1, an antagonist of the canonical Wnt signaling pathway. Furthermore, the inactivation of Dkk1 seems to predispose to neoplasias in the proximal colon. This and the fact that Mlh1 which showed only modest methylation was still expressed in both Mlh1 +/- and Mlh1 +/+ mice indicate that the expression decreases and the inactivation of Dkk1 in particular is a prominent early marker for colon oncogenesis.
Work in progress — Modeling academic success of female and minority engineering students using the student attitudinal success instrument and pre-college factors

Female enrollment in engineering in the United States has remained at or below 20% for decades. Enrollment of students from traditionally underrepresented groups has also remained below desired level for years. A systematic understanding of important factors leading to persistence and success in undergraduate engineering programs for female and underrepresented minority students would be very valuable for recruiting, retaining and educating young engineers with diverse perspectives. This paper discusses the significant predictors for retention and academic performance of female engineering students, and reports the difference in comparison with male engineering students. Similar results on the important predictors for retention and performance of underrepresented minority engineering students will also be reported and compared with the ethnic majority students. The findings from this study suggest it is potentially advantageous to develop student success models specific for female or minority engineering student populations, rather than using the same model developed for the whole population. New knowledge obtained through this study will lead to the development of necessary strategies, interventions or programs to help improve retention and academic success of our engineering students.