Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reliability of Computed Tomography Measurements of Paraspinal Muscle Cross-Sectional Area and Density in Patients With Chronic Low Back Pain

Study Design. A reliability study was conducted. Objective. To estimate measurement errors related to equipment and the observer in computed tomography measurements of cross-sectional area and density of paraspinal muscles. Interobserver reliability was not investigated in the current study. Summary of Background Data. Computer tomography (CT) had been used to measure the cross-sectional area and degeneration of the back muscles in patients with low back pain. Methods. This study included 31 patients, mean age 47 years, with chronic low back pain. The measurements comprised cross-sectional area (cm2) and density (Hounsfield units [HU]) of the paraspinal muscles at Th12–L1, L3–L4, and L4–L5. To measure the reliability of the equipment and the observer (total reliability), two independent CT scans were performed for each patient. The radiologist traced the cross-sectional area twice within 2 weeks for measurement of the intraobserver reliability. Results. There were no significant differences in the assessments between the first and second CT scans, or between the radiologist’s two measurements of the identical slices. The critical difference for the total reliability ranged from 11.3 to 22.8 for the density and from 10.0 to 16.0 for the cross-sectional area. For the cross-sectional area, the measurement error associated with the observer was higher than for the equipment. For the density, the measurement error related to the equipment was higher. The main measurement error was associated with the radiologist for the cross-sectional area and with the CT scanner for the density. Conclusions. The reliability of the CT scan for measuring the cross-sectional area and density of the back muscles is acceptable. The authors do not know definitely whether their results can be generalized because the interobserver and intermachine reliabilities were not investigated.
Coping with drought-induced xylem cavitation: coordination of embolism repair and ionic effects in three Mediterranean evergreens.

Embolism repair and ionic effects on xylem hydraulic conductance have been documented in different tree species. However, the diurnal and seasonal patterns of both phenomena and their actual role in plants' responses to drought-induced xylem cavitation have not been thoroughly investigated. This study provides experimental evidence of the ability of three Mediterranean species to maintain hydraulic function under drought stress by coordinating the refilling of xylem conduits and ion-mediated enhancement of stem hydraulic conductance (K stem). Vessel grouping indices and starch content in vessel-associated parenchyma cells were quantified to verify eventual correlations with ionic effects and refilling, respectively. Experiments were performed on stems of Ceratonia siliqua L. , Olea europaea L. and Laurus nobilis L. Seasonal, ion-mediated changes in K stem (ΔK stem) and diurnal and/or seasonal embolism repair were recorded for all three species, although with different temporal patterns. Field measurements of leaf specific stem hydraulic conductivity showed that it remained quite constant during the year, despite changes in the levels of embolism. Starch content in vessel-associated parenchyma cells changed on diurnal and seasonal scales in L. nobilis and O. europaea but not in C. siliqua. Values of ΔK stem were significantly correlated with vessel multiple fraction values (the ratio of grouped vessels to total number of vessels). Our data suggest that the regulation of xylem water transport in Mediterranean plants relies on a close integration between xylem refilling and ionic effects. These functional traits apparently play important roles in plants' responses to drought-induced xylem cavitation.
Improving Media Message Interpretation Processing Skills to Promote Healthy Decision Making About Substance Use: The Effects of the Middle School Media Ready Curriculum

The Media Ready Program was designed as a middle school, media literacy education, preventive intervention program to improve adolescents' media literacy skills and reduce their intention to use alcohol or tobacco products. In a short-term efficacy trial, schools in North Carolina were randomly assigned to conditions (Media Ready: n = 214; control: n = 198). Boys in the Media Ready group reported significantly less intention to use alcohol in the future than did boys in the control group. Also, students in the Media Ready group who had used tobacco in the past reported significantly less intention to use tobacco in the future than did students in the control group who had previously used tobacco. Multilevel multiple mediation analyses suggest that the set of logical analysis Message Interpretation Processing variables mediated the program's effect on students' intentions to use alcohol or tobacco in the future.
What is ethnic in an ethnic economy?

This article examines critically the relationship between ethnicity and entrepreneurship in the sociology of immigrant economies. It argues that what is ethnic in an ethnic economy has often been confusingly conceptualised and that several factors now call for re-assessing the ethnic nature of immigrants' business activities. On the basis of a review of recent research, three such factors are outlined: the porosity of ethnic boundaries to cross-group business interactions; the diversity within immigrant economies in terms of status, gender, class and generation; and the political and institutional context in which immigrant economies take place. The conclusion stresses the need for multiple explanations of how and why immigrants become entrepreneurs, which take into account not only the meso-level constituted by ethnicity and social capital, but also micro-individual factors and macro-institutional settings.
Middle-School Students’ Reasoning About Alternative Hypotheses in a Scaffolded, Software-Based Inquiry Investigation

The examination of alternative hypotheses can initiate students into scientific practices and equip them with scientific literacy skills that will help them participate in ongoing debates involving complex socio-scientific problems. Hypothesis testing, in which the examination of alternative hypotheses is situated, has received much attention in the literature. However, the topic of alternative hypotheses has not been examined as extensively in scaffolded data-rich instructional interventions. This article contributes to that body of knowledge by reporting on middle-school students’ inquiry practices as they relate to considering alternative hypotheses of their data. Specifically, the article reports a multiple-case study examining six pairs’ reasoning as they try to solve a data-rich, scientific problem, scaffolded by the software investigation, the task setup, and the teacher. The students’ generation and testing of alternative hypotheses was examined through students’ discourse, actions, inquiry products, and interactions with their teacher and peers. Pre–post assessment analyses showed statistically significant learning gains while the analyses of the students’ inquiry discourse and actions indicated that the scaffolding contributed to students’ inquiry. However, several epistemological problems surfaced relating to students’ perception of the usefulness of examining and communicating alternative explanations. These findings indicate the importance of epistemologically targeted discourse alongside guided inquiry experiences, and underline the need for further examination of appropriate scaffolding to support students’ scientific reasoning processes.
Inhibition of cell spreading by expression of the C-terminal domain of focal adhesion kinase (FAK) is rescued by coexpression of Src or catalytically inactive FAK: a role for paxillin tyrosine phosphorylation

pp125FAK is a tyrosine kinase that appears to regulate the assembly of focal adhesions and thereby promotes cell spreading on the extracellular matrix. In some cells, the C terminus of pp125FAK is expressed as a separate protein, pp41/43FRNK. We have previously shown that overexpression of pp41/43FRNK inhibits tyrosine phosphorylation of pp125FAK and paxillin and, in addition, delays cell spreading and focal adhesion assembly. Thus, pp41/43FRNK functions as a negative inhibitor of adhesion signaling and provides a tool to dissect the mechanism by which pp125FAK promotes cell spreading. We report here that the inhibitory effects of pp41/43FRNK expression can be rescued by the co-overexpression of wild-type pp125FAK and partially rescued by catalytically inactive variants of pp125FAK. However, coexpression of an autophosphorylation site mutant of pp125FAK, which fails to bind the SH2 domain of pp60c-Src, or a mutant that fails to bind paxillin did not promote cell spreading. In contrast, expression of pp41/43FRNK and pp60c-Src reconstituted cell spreading and tyrosine phosphorylation of paxillin but did so without inducing tyrosine phosphorylation of pp125FAK. These data provide additional support for a model whereby pp125FAK acts as a "switchable adaptor" that recruits pp60c-Src to phosphorylate paxillin, promoting cell spreading. In addition, these data point to tyrosine phosphorylation of paxillin as being a critical step in focal adhesion assembly.
Differentially private grids for geospatial data

In this paper, we tackle the problem of constructing a differentially private synopsis for two-dimensional datasets such as geospatial datasets. The current state-of-the-art methods work by performing recursive binary partitioning of the data domains, and constructing a hierarchy of partitions. We show that the key challenge in partition-based synopsis methods lies in choosing the right partition granularity to balance the noise error and the non-uniformity error. We study the uniform-grid approach, which applies an equi-width grid of a certain size over the data domain and then issues independent count queries on the grid cells. This method has received no attention in the literature, probably due to the fact that no good method for choosing a grid size was known. Based on an analysis of the two kinds of errors, we propose a method for choosing the grid size. Experimental results validate our method, and show that this approach performs as well as, and often times better than, the state-of-the-art methods. We further introduce a novel adaptive-grid method. The adaptive grid method lays a coarse-grained grid over the dataset, and then further partitions each cell according to its noisy count. Both levels of partitions are then used in answering queries over the dataset. This method exploits the need to have finer granularity partitioning over dense regions and, at the same time, coarse partitioning over sparse regions. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we show that this approach consistently and significantly outperforms the uniform-grid method and other state-of-the-art methods.
Regularizing Bilevel Nonlinear Programs by Lifting

This paper considers a bilevel nonlinear program (NLP) whose lower-level problem satisfies a linear independence constraint qualification (LICQ) and a strong second-order condition (SSOC). One would expect the resulting mathematical program with complementarity constraints (MPCC), whose constraints are the first-order optimality conditions of the lower-level NLP, to satisfy an MPEC-LICQ. We provide an example which demonstrates that this is not the case. A lifting technique is presented to remedy this problem. A componentwise lifting of the inequality constraints of the lower-level problem implies that the resulting MPCC satisfies an MPCC-LICQ which leads to a faster convergence. We generalize the lifting approach to general MPCCs. Convergence results and numerical experiments are provided that show the promise of our approach.
Childhood origins of supernurturance: The social context of early humane behavior

Abstract The present study examined how strong humane inclinations in children are shaped and encouraged through interactions with human and nonhuman animals. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with 30 supernurturing children and 30 parents attending a pre-veterinary summer camp operated by an American university. Themes associated with supernurturance included validating the importance of animals, teaching nurturance, identifying as an animal person, seeing animals as helpers, and assuming responsibility. Results suggest that a single magic bullet cannot be tweaked to instill or heighten compassion for animals. Rather, an array of social psychological factors together contribute to animal supernurturing by children.
How green are HRM practices, organizational culture, learning and teamwork? A Brazilian study

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to analyze the level of greening of HRM practices, organizational culture, learning, and teamwork in Brazilian companies.Design/methodology/approach – The author surveyed 94 Brazilian companies with ISO 14001 certification.Findings – Contrasting the data, two important conclusions can be drawn. The first one is related to the importance of considering the alignment of the human resource practices systematically in order to put workers in control of environmental management. The second conclusion is about the little formalization of the inclusion of environmental issues in traditional human resource practices, which can later badly affect the good performance observed in the formation of teams, organizational culture, and learning resulting in a negative cycle.Originality/value – The greening of HRM, organizational culture, learning and teamwork is an emerging topic for scholars and consultants.
Semantically Rich Application-Centric Security in Android

Smartphones are now ubiquitous. However, the security requirements of these relatively new systems and the applications they support are still being understood. As a result, the security infrastructure available in current smartphone operating systems is largely underdeveloped. In this paper, we consider the security requirements of smartphone applications and augment the existing Android operating system with a framework to meet them. We present Secure Application INTeraction (Saint), a modified infrastructure that governs install-time permission assignment and their run-time use as dictated by application provider policy. An in-depth description of the semantics of application policy is presented. The architecture and technical detail of Saint is given, and areas for extension, optimization, and improvement explored. As we show through concrete example, Saint provides necessary utility for applications to assert and control the security decisions on the platform.
Physician Perception of Blood Pressure Control and Treatment Behavior in High-Risk Hypertensive Patients: A Cross-Sectional Study

Objective We examined physician perception of blood pressure control and treatment behavior in patients with previous cardiovascular disease and uncontrolled hypertension as defined by European Guidelines. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 321 primary care physicians throughout Spain consecutively studied 1,614 patients aged ≥18 years who had been diagnosed and treated for hypertension (blood pressure ≥140/90 mmHg), and had suffered a documented cardiovascular event. The mean value of three blood pressure measurements taken using standardized procedures was used for statistical analysis. Results Mean blood pressure was 143.4/84.9 mmHg, and only 11.6% of these cardiovascular patients were controlled according to 2007 European Guidelines for Hypertension Management target of <130/80 mmHg. In 702 (49.2%) of the 1426 uncontrolled patients, antihypertensive medication was not changed, and in 480 (68.4%) of these cases this was due to the physicianś judgment that blood pressure was adequately controlled. In 320 (66.7%) of the latter patients, blood pressure was 130–139/80–89 mmHg. Blood pressure level was the main factor associated (inversely) with no change in treatment due to physician perception of adequate control, irrespective of sociodemographic and clinical factors. Conclusions Physicians do not change antihypertensive treatment in many uncontrolled cardiovascular patients because they considered it unnecessary, especially when the BP values are only slightly above the guideline target. It is possible that the guidelines may be correct, but there is also the possibility that the care by the physicians is appropriate since BP <130/80 mmHg is hard to achieve, and recent reviews suggest there is insufficient evidence to support such a low BP target.
Employer Expectations, Peer Effects and Productivity: Evidence from a Series of Field Experiments

This paper reports the results of a series of field experiments designed to investigate how peer effects operate in a real work setting. Workers were hired from an online labor market to perform an image-labeling task and, in some cases, to evaluate the work product of other workers. These evaluations had financial consequences for both the evaluating worker and the evaluated worker. The experiments showed that on average, evaluating high-output work raised an evaluator's subsequent productivity, with larger effects for evaluators that are themselves highly productive. The content of the subject evaluations themselves suggest one mechanism for peer effects: workers readily punished other workers whose work product exhibited low output/effort. However, non-compliance with employer expectations did not, by itself, trigger punishment: workers would not punish non-complying workers so long as the evaluated worker still exhibited high effort. A worker's willingness to punish was strongly correlated with their own productivity, yet this relationship was not the result of innate differences---productivity-reducing manipulations also resulted in reduced punishment. Peer effects proved hard to stamp out: although most workers complied with clearly communicated maximum expectations for output, some workers still raised their production beyond the output ceiling after evaluating highly productive yet non-complying work products.
Tolerance and Cross-Tolerance following Toll-Like Receptor (TLR)-4 and -9 Activation Are Mediated by IRAK-M and Modulated by IL-7 in Murine Splenocytes

Objective Immune suppression during critical illness predisposes to serious infections. We sought to determine the mechanisms regulating tolerance and cross-tolerance to common pro-inflammatory danger signals in a model that recapitulates the intact in vivo immune response. Materials and Methods Flt3-expanded splenocytes obtained from wild-type or matching IRAK-M knockout (IRAK-M-/-), C57BL/6, male mice (8–10 weeks old) were treated repeatedly or alternately with either LPS or CpGA DNA, agonists of Toll-like receptor (TLR)-4 and -9, respectively, over successive 24-hour periods. Supernatants were collected following each 24-hour period with cytokine release (ELISA) and splenocyte IRAK-M expression (Western blot) determined. Tolerance and cross-tolerance were assessed in the absence or presence of programmed death receptor (PD)-1 blocking antibody or IL-7 pre-treatment. Main Results Splenocytes notably exhibited both tolerance and cross-tolerance to subsequent treatments with either LPS or CpGA DNA. The character of tolerance and cross-tolerance in this model was distinct following initial LPS or CpGA treatment in that TNFα and IFNγ release (not IL-10) were suppressed following LPS; whereas, initial CpGA treatment suppressed TNFα, IFNγ and IL-10 release in response to subsequent stimulation (LPS or CpGA). Tolerance and cross-tolerance were unrelated to IL-10 release or PD-1 but were attenuated in IRAK-M-/- splenocytes. IL-7 significantly suppressed IRAK-M expression and restored TNFα and IFNγ production without influencing IL-10 release. Conclusions In summary, acute immune tolerance and cross-tolerance in response to LPS or CpGA were distinct in that LPS selectively suppressed pro-inflammatory cytokine responses; whereas, CpGA suppressed both pro- and anti-inflammatory responses. The induction of tolerance and cross-tolerance in response to common danger signals was mechanistically unrelated to IL-10 or PD-1 but was directly influenced by IRAK-M expression. IL-7 reduced IRAK-M expression and attenuated immune tolerance induced by either LPS or CpGA, and thus may be useful for reversal of immune tolerance in the setting of critical illness.
Development and Validation of Student Engagement Scale in the Indian Context

This article reports the development and validation of a student engagement scale (SES), as tested on a sample of 166 respondents from a management school located in the National Capital Region (NCR). The SES is a 41-item self-reporting questionnaire that measures three facets of student engagement namely, sense of belonging, individual engagement and collaborative engagement. The sub-scales had high internal consistency and test-retest reliability. All the three dimensions of student engagement were positively and significantly related to management skill, a criterion variable. Regression analysis revealed that individual engagement and collaborative engagement explained a significant amount of variance in management skill. Thus, the engagement scales demonstrated predictive validity. The usage of engagement scales for educational practices is discussed and future research directions are highlighted.
Cooperative M‐Learning with Nurse Practitioner Students

&NA; New technologies give nurse academicians the opportunity to incorporate innovative teaching‐learning strategies into the nursing curricula. Mobile technology for learning, or m‐learning, has considerable potential for the nursing classroom but lacks sufficient empirical evidence to support its use. Based on Mayer's multimedia learning theory, the effect of using cooperative and interactive m‐learning techniques in enhancing classroom and clinical learning was explored. The relationship between m‐learning and students' learning styles was determined through a multimethod educational research study involving nurse practitioner students at two mid‐Atlantic universities. During the 16‐month period, nurse practitioner students and their faculty used personal digital assistants (PDAs) to participate in various m‐learning activities. Findings from focus group and survey responses concluded that PDAs, specifically the Pocket PC, are useful reference tools in the clinical setting and that all students, regardless of learning style, benefited from using PDAs. It was also demonstrated that connecting students with classmates and other nurse practitioner students at distant universities created a cooperative learning community providing additional support and knowledge acquisition. The authors concluded that in order to successfully prepare nurse practitioner graduates with the skills necessary to function in the present and future health care system, nurse practitioner faculty must be creative and innovative, incorporating various revolutionary technologies into their nurse practitioner curricula.