Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Redefining Geriatric Preoperative Assessment Using Frailty, Disability and Co-Morbidity

Objectives:(1) Determine the relationship of geriatric assessment markers to 6-month postoperative mortality in elderly patients. (2) Create a clinical prediction rule using geriatric markers from preoperative assessment. Background:Geriatric surgery patients have unique physiologic vulnerability requiring preoperative assessment beyond the traditional evaluation of older adults. The constellation of frailty, disability and comorbidity predict poor outcomes in elderly hospitalized patients. Methods:Prospectively, subjects ≥65 years undergoing a major operation requiring postoperative intensive care unit admission were enrolled. Preoperative geriatric assessments included: Mini-Cog Test (cognition), albumin, having fallen in the past 6-months, hematocrit, Katz Score (function), and Charlson Index (comorbidities). Outcome measures included 6-month mortality (primary) and postdischarge institutionalization (secondary). Results:One hundred ten subjects (age 74 ± 6 years) were studied. Six-month mortality was 15% (16/110). Preoperative markers related to 6-month mortality included: impaired cognition (P < 0.01), recent falls (P < 0.01), lower albumin (P < 0.01), greater anemia (P < 0.01), functional dependence (P < 0.01), and increased comorbidities (P < 0.01). Similar statistical relationships were found for all 6 markers and postdischarge institutionalization. Logistic regression identified any functional dependence (odds ratio 13.9) as the strongest predictor of 6-month mortality. Four or more markers in any one patient predicted 6-month mortality with a sensitivity of 81% (13/16) and specificity of 86% (81/94). Conclusions:Geriatric assessment markers for frailty, disability and comorbidity predict 6-month postoperative mortality and postdischarge institutionalization. The preoperative presence of ≥4 geriatric-specific markers has high sensitivity and specificity for 6-month mortality. Preoperative assessment using geriatric-specific markers is a substantial paradigm shift from the traditional preoperative evaluation of older adults.
Turn‐taking patterns in deaf conversation

This paper will focus on the turn-taking patterns of Deaf signers and will compare them with turn-taking patterns found in spoken interaction. Turn-taking in the conversation of hearing people has been the subject of considerable attention, but the way conversation is organised by Deaf conversationalists has received less attention. This paper reports on a small project involving conversational data obtained from two Deaf friendship groups, one all-female and one all-male. Our main aim was to establish whether Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, or whether there was any evidence to suggest they can also orient to a more collaborative model. It has been assumed by researchers in the field of Deaf Studies that Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model since, where the medium of communication is visual rather than sound based, participants can attend to only those sources of talk that they can see. The paper also examines the data to see if there are any gender differences in the way Deaf interactants organise conversation.
From England with love… ARK, heterarchies and global ‘philanthropic governance’

The recent emergence of new venture philanthropists, social entrepreneurs and neoliberal policy advocates and the new ways in which they configure and perform their political agendas have brought important changes in the way in which education policy is enacted. This study takes some of the ideas sketched in previous work further and develops what was termed there as ‘philanthropic governance’. The first section analyses the transition to a new political framework characterised by new forms of coordination or ‘heterarchies’. These transformations represent new forms of governmentality and power regimes and are deeply rooted within the political economy and political philosophy of neoliberalism. The second section of the study focuses on a set of new policy actors, the ‘new’ philanthropists and explores the organisational model of a group of these philanthropic individuals and enterprises, their discourses, connections, ideological influences and agendas on the ground. Finally, the study reflects on the new ways through which philanthropic activity has gained an increasingly important political dimension, becoming a central explanatory variable to understand the recent changes and directions of national and international political agendas in different parts of the world.
Biomimetic tactile sensor based on Fiber Bragg Gratings for tumor detection — Prototype and results

Robot assisted minimally invasive surgery features many advantages, such as augmented reality or more comfort for the surgeon during the operation. On the downside, the surgeon loses all aspects of haptic perception from the operation situ. Tactile sensors are necessary to restore some of the haptic perception. In this paper, a tactile sensor is presented that mimics the human finger and is based on Fiber Bragg Gratings. The idea is a comparison of strain measurements of two materials of different stiffnesses. The principle is described in detail, as well as the fabrication of our first prototype. First experiments have been carried out, showing the potential of the tactile sensor to detect tumors within healthy tissue by looking at the progression of the strain-strain-curve.
Multiple Masculinities?

Through interviews with 20 teenage boys at two high schools, the author examines the ways in which boys from different school subcultures engage with the most dominantly masculine of the school's peer groups—the Jocks. The author investigates how boys from less “masculine” groups maintain a sense of self as masculine. The boys do this by reworking meanings of group membership and gendered identity to include masculinized attributes associated with Jocks, such as competence, heterosexual success, and dominance. These findings indicate that a simplistic deployment of the “multiple masculinities” model may miss some of the ways gender works in a given setting. The author argues that typologies overlook the complex ways in which masculinity is discursively manipulated so that even boys who are understood as less masculine within a school's social hierarchy maintain or create a sense of self as recognizably masculine.
Stroop-test interference in bipolar disorder

Summary We analysed Stroop (neuropsychological screening test) measures of response inhibition in 18 twin pairs discordant for bipolar I disorder compared with 17 healthy control pairs, as well as 40 singletons with bipolar disorder with psychotic features and a family history of psychosis, 46 of their first-degree relatives without bipolar disorder or psychosis and 48 controls. In both studies, individuals with bipolar disorder showed Stroop deficits and their first-degree relatives showed intact performance. In the twin patients, an interference score was associated with depressive symptoms. Having a first-degree relative with bipolar disorder, even a familial, psychotic form, did not confer risk for enhanced susceptibility to interference in our studies.
Promoting Well-Being and Desistance Through Sport and Physical Activity: The Opportunities and Barriers Experienced by Women in English Prisons

Despite an increased focus on the benefits of participation in sport and physical activity for men in custody, little attention has been paid to its potential role in meeting the specific needs of female prisoners. Qualitative data from female offenders (n = 45) within the English prison estate illustrated that, despite low levels of participation, prison-based sport and physical activities have clear physical and psychological benefits and can be valuable in promoting desistance from crime. Institutional barriers to participation, such as in the provision of activities and the prison regime, coupled with gendered barriers, such as self-presentational and motivational concerns, are identified and explored. Findings are discussed in the context of existing policy and principles of best practice.
Prosecutors and end-of-life decision making.

OBJECTIVE To examine personal beliefs and professional behavior of state criminal prosecutors toward end-of-life decisions. DESIGN Mail survey. SETTING District attorney offices nationwide. PARTICIPANTS All prosecuting attorneys who are members of the National District Attorneys Association. A total of 2844 surveys were mailed with 2 follow-up mailings at 6-week intervals; 761 surveys were returned for a response rate of 26.8%. The majority of respondents were white men, Protestant, and served in rural areas. INTERVENTIONS None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES On the basis of 4 case scenarios, (1) professional behavior as determined by respondents' willingness to prosecute and what criminal charges they would seek; and (2) personal beliefs as determined by whether prosecutors believed the physicians' actions were morally wrong and whether they would want the same action taken if they were in the patient's condition. RESULTS Most respondents would not seek prosecution in 3 of the 4 cases. In the fourth case, involving physician-assisted suicide, only about one third of the respondents said that they definitely would prosecute. Those who would prosecute would most often seek a charge of criminal homicide. A majority of respondents believed that the physicians' actions were morally correct in each of the 4 cases and would want the same action taken if they were in the patient's position. There was a strong correlation between personal beliefs and professional behaviors. CONCLUSIONS A large majority of responding prosecutors were unwilling to prosecute physicians in cases that clearly fall within currently accepted legal and professional boundaries. In the case of physician-assisted suicide, results reflected a surprisingly large professional unwillingness to prosecute and an even greater personal acceptance of physician-assisted suicide.
The Sociology of Mental Disorder

Aimez-vous Brahms? Aimez-vous le structuralisme? The half-jibing stereotype of the Frenchman as the great lover is as true in the intellectual sphere as any other and perhaps even more so. After the long affair with existentialism, now the almost obsessional concern with structuralism. But this is a brave book, an honest, uneasy and unassuming book. There are three clearly defined sections. The middle section deals with major sociological variables? such as social class, mobility, religion, ethnicity, family and kinship? and consists of an encyclopaedic review of all the major empirical work in these fields. The author writes as a sociologist of course and is extremely hesitant about interpretation of results? and so he ought to be for, in all these fields, there are contradictory findings among the various researchers. But Bastide rarely ducks out, and he persists in the attempt to relate fieldwork to meaningful theory. That is the real delight of the book ? his refusal to dodge issues, his refusal to stay safely inside some ivory tower of abstract speculation, his grinding concern with the meaning of fieldwork reports. The research review is exhaustive though 'middle-aged' if not actually 'elderly' ? the book was published in 1965 and, inevitably, it has a pretty well exclusively Franco-American bias. The early part of the book is a laborious outline, in the familiar European style, of the relationship between mental illness theories and various social philosophies (notably those of Comte and Durkheim) and the ponderousness is quite offputting? not so much of the Gallic
Purification, biochemical characterization and self-assembled structure of a fengycin-like antifungal peptide from Bacillus thuringiensis strain SM1

An antifungal lipopeptide fengycin, producing strain SM1 was isolated from farm land soil sample and identified as Bacillus thuringiensis strain SM1 by using 16S rDNA analysis. Fengycin detected in the culture extract was further purified using HPLC and showed a molecular mass of 1492.8 Da by MALDI-TOF-MS analysis. Purified fengycin was allowed to construct their self-assembled structure onto a hydrophobic surface showing a clear improvement of antibacterial activity. In self-assembly, fengycin adapts a spherical micelle core shell like structure. Self-assembled fengycin may be a successful antimicrobial compound modifying its action from confined antifungal function. Besides it can open up a new area of research in supramolecular lipopeptide based compound making. This can revealed the mode of action of this unique self-assembled structure to fully evaluate its potential for use as an antimicrobial drug to control the emergence of bacterial infection.
Female Mice Deficient in Alpha-Fetoprotein Show Female-Typical Neural Responses to Conspecific-Derived Pheromones

The neural mechanisms controlling sexual behavior are sexually differentiated by the perinatal actions of sex steroid hormones. We recently observed using female mice deficient in alpha-fetoprotein (AFP-KO) and which lack the protective actions of AFP against maternal estradiol, that exposure to prenatal estradiol completely defeminized the potential to show lordosis behavior in adulthood. Furthermore, AFP-KO females failed to show any male-directed mate preferences following treatment with estradiol and progesterone, indicating a reduced sexual motivation to seek out the male. In the present study, we asked whether neural responses to male- and female-derived odors are also affected in AFP-KO female mice. Therefore, we compared patterns of Fos, the protein product of the immediate early gene, c-fos, commonly used as a marker of neuronal activation, between wild-type (WT) and AFP-KO female mice following exposure to male or estrous female urine. We also tested WT males to confirm the previously observed sex differences in neural responses to male urinary odors. Interestingly, AFP-KO females showed normal, female-like Fos responses, i.e. exposure to urinary odors from male but not estrous female mice induced equivalent levels of Fos protein in the accessory olfactory pathways (e.g. the medial part of the preoptic nucleus, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, the amygdala, and the lateral part of the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus) as well as in the main olfactory pathways (e.g. the piriform cortex and the anterior cortical amygdaloid nucleus), as WT females. By contrast, WT males did not show any significant induction of Fos protein in these brain areas upon exposure to either male or estrous female urinary odors. These results thus suggest that prenatal estradiol is not involved in the sexual differentiation of neural Fos responses to male-derived odors.
Combatting Child Labour

This article summarizes some features of the Radda Barnen (Swedish Save the Children) study `Children's Perspectives on their Working Lives'. The case is made for working children's participation in the process of combatting child labour. Their participation will help ensure that interventions designed to eliminate exploitative and hazardous child labour are context appropriate, locally sustainable and child centred. This study is a contribution to the process. A specially designed Children's Perspectives Protocol guided group activities with over 300 children in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Central America. This article summarizes selected issues addressed by the study, including children's occupational preferences and their views on work and school.
Performance comparison of a set of periodic and non-periodic tridiagonal solvers on SP2 and Paragon parallel computers

Various tridiagonal solvers have been proposed in recent years for different parallel platforms. In this paper, the performance of three tridiagonal solvers, namely, the parallel partition LU algorithm, the parallel diagonal dominant algorithm, and the reduced diagonal dominant algorithm, is studied. These algorithms are designed for distributed-memory machines and are tested on an Intel Paragon and an IBM SP2 machines. Measured results are reported in terms of execution time and speedup. Analytical study are conducted for different communication topologies and for different tridiagonal systems. The measured results match the analytical results closely. In addition to address implementation issues, performance considerations such as problem sizes and models of speedup are also discussed.
Repeated Self-Regulation and Asymmetric Hemispheric Activation

Numerous recent studies have investigated repeated self-regulation to uncover the processes involved in self-regulatory behavior over time. Results from most of these studies are consistent with a depletion process in which self-regulatory effectiveness declines over time due to resource depletion. The present research examined an additional factor that may also be involved in repeated self-regulatory exertion, namely, differential hemispheric activation. Five studies examined this issue, focusing on self-control tasks requiring avoidance or vigilance. Studies 1 to 3 indicated that these tasks resulted in greater relative right hemispheric activation. Studies 4 and 5 indicated that, consistent with this pattern of differential activation, initial vigilance self-control resulted in better subsequent performance on a spatial self-regulatory task but worse performance on a verbal self-regulatory task. These findings provide additional insight into the dynamics of self-regulatory behavior across tasks, suggesting the combination of tasks examined may influence the pattern of results obtained.
Angiotensin‐Converting Enzyme Modulates Dopamine Turnover in the Striatum

Abstract: The effect of chronic inhibition of the angiotensin‐converting enzyme on dopamine content and release in the striatum was investigated using in vivo microdialysis in awake, freely moving rats. Rats were treated for 1 week with the angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitor perindopril (1 mg/kg) via the drinking water, whereas the controls were given water alone. One week after perindopril treatment, striatal dopamine dialysate levels in the treated group were markedly elevated compared with control values: control, 233 ± 43 pg/ml; perindopril, 635 ± 53 pg/ml (p < 0.001). These results were confirmed by a complementary study in which dopamine content was measured in striatal extracts (3.5 ± 0.4 µg of dopamine/g of tissue for controls compared with 9.2 ± 2.4 µg of dopamine/g of tissue for the treated group; p < 0.05). In the rats that were dialyzed, angiotensin‐converting enzyme levels in the striatum were decreased by 50% after perindopril treatment. Levels of dopamine D1 and D2 receptors and of preprotachykinin and tyrosine hydroxylase mRNAs were unchanged after angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibition. A small, but significant, increase was detected in striatal preproenkephalin mRNA levels in the angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitor‐treated group. These results indicate that peripherally administered angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitors penetrate the blood‐brain barrier when given chronically and modulate extracellular dopamine and striatal neuropeptide levels.
The Transnational Social Question

In the 19th century, the `social question' was the central subject of extremely volatile political conflicts between the ruling classes and the working-class movements in Europe, North America and Australia. Are we now on the verge of a new social conflict, this time on a transnational scale? This analysis seeks to clarify main concepts and thus set the stage for future empirical research. The main argument is that various factors discourage one from expecting the establishment of sanctionable global social norms in the form of transnational social rights and social citizenship but that such a conclusion could be altered as a result of the mobilizing force of a politics of rights and obligations. The following five issues are thereby examined. First, what are the origins of the debate on transnational social rights? Second, what theoretical concepts are meaningful for an analysis of the transnational social question? Third, how advanced or fragmentary are social rights and citizenship in the different partial worlds? Fourth, how are existing transnational social standards regulated? Finally, what are the implications for an empirical analysis of the politics of social rights and social standards?
An Exploration of the Relationship between Learning Organisations and the Retention of Knowledge Workers

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to demonstrate a relationship between learning organisation theory and the potential to retain knowledge workers. It emphasises that human resource (HR) managers must recognise specific relationships between learning organisation elements, job satisfaction facets and turnover intent as they emerge for their knowledge workers.Design/methodology/approach – A survey was undertaken sampling knowledge workers in the information technology (IT) industry. Measured on a Likert scale, the instrument was designed to explore the impact of learning organisation disciplines upon job satisfaction and the importance of job satisfaction in determining turnover intent.Findings – Analysis of the survey showed evidence of a relationship between learning organisation disciplines and turnover intent. All the learning organisation disciplines discussed in the paper correlated to at least one of the six job satisfaction dimensions, of which reward and challenge exerted the most significant.
Flexibility in visual working memory: Accurate change detection in the face of irrelevant variations in position

Many recent studies of visual working memory have used change-detection tasks in which subjects view sequential displays and are asked to report whether they are identical or if one object has changed. A key question is whether the memory system used to perform this task is sufficiently flexible to detect changes in object identity independent of spatial transformations, but previous research has yielded contradictory results. To address this issue, the present study compared standard change-detection tasks with tasks in which the objects varied in size or position between successive arrays. Performance was nearly identical across the standard and transformed tasks unless the task implicitly encouraged spatial encoding. These results resolve the discrepancies in previous studies and demonstrate that the visual working memory system can detect changes in object identity across spatial transformations.
Multi-Strategy Segmentation of Melodies

Melodic segmentation is a fundamental yet unsolved problem in automatic music processing. At present most melody segmentation models rely on a ‘single strategy’ (i.e. they model a single perceptual segmentation cue). However, cognitive studies suggest that multiple cues need to be considered. In this paper we thus propose and evaluate a ‘multi-strategy’ system to automatically segment symbolically encoded melodies. Our system combines the contribution of different single strategy boundary detection models. First, it assesses the perceptual relevance of a given boundary detection model for a given input melody; then it uses the boundaries predicted by relevant detection models to search for the most plausible segmentation of the melody. We use our system to automatically segment a corpus of instrumental and vocal folk melodies. We compare the predictions to human annotated segments, and to state of the art segmentation methods. Our results show that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art in the instrumental set.