Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pyoderma Gangrenosum Associated with an Aseptic Splenic Abscess in a Patient with Neurofibromatosis

Pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) is a painful, ulcerating neutrophilic dermatosis commonly associated with a variety of underlying systemic conditions. We report a child with neurofibromatosis‐1 (NF‐1) and an aseptic splenic abscess who developed multifocal PG in areas of iatrogenic skin trauma. There is no clinical evidence or theoretical basis to suggest a causal relationship between NF‐1 and PG. Systemic corticosteroid and cyclosporine therapy led to complete resolution of the lesions.
Frequency of gastrointestinal involvement and its clinical significance in mantle cell lymphoma

The reported frequency of gastrointestinal (GI) tract involvement in patients with mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is 15–30%. However, this figure most likely is an underestimate because most patients with MCL involving the GI tract previously reported were examined endoscopically only if they had GI tract symptoms. The impact of endoscopic assessment on the management of MCL patients is unknown.
The Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services: A Model of Care

Several models of service care delivery have emerged to meet the challenges of providing health care to our growing multiethnic world. This article will present Campinha-Bacote’s model of cultural competence in health care delivery: The Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Health-care Services. This model views cultural competence as the ongoing process in which the health care provider continuously strives to achieve the ability to effectively work within the cultural context of the client (individual, family, community). This ongoing process involves the integration of cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, cultural skill, cultural encounters, and cultural desire.
What Constitutes a Dignified Death? The Voice of Oncology Advanced Practice Nurses

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the concept of dignified dying from the perspective of oncology advanced practice nurses. Methodology: A naturalistic, hermeneutic approach was used to interview the study participants. A sample of 19 oncology advanced practice nurses was obtained by combining data sets from 2 larger studies of patient control and end-of-life care. Audiotaped interviews of the nurses were transcribed verbatim and were analyzed using a phenomenological approach. Results: The analysis revealed that dignified dying is an experience that includes the following themes: going in peace, maintaining bodily integrity, and dying on their own terms. Conclusions: Advanced practice nurses lend an important perspective that expands understanding of the concept of dignified dying. Future studies of patient and family perceptions will enhance knowledge of their needs and lead to intervention studies to promote an end-of-life experience that is consistent with patient priorities and values.
Post-mortem DNA damage hotspots in Bison ( Bison bison ) provide evidence for both damage and mutational hotspots in human mitochondrial DNA

Post-mortem damage-driven mutations are a phenomena associated with ancient DNA (aDNA) studies. A previous study has demonstrated that the distribution of such mutations in human mitochondrial DNA is not random, but is concentrated in ‘hotspots’ that correlate with sites of elevated mutation rate in vivo. However, as the previous study was undertaken on human samples, it is possible for a critic to argue that the results might be biased through the presence of modern contaminant DNA sequences among the ancient DNA extracts. In this study we confirm the phenomena of DNA damage hotspots using a data set that is unlikely to be affected by contamination e cloned mitochondrial control region sequences extracted from 81 ancient bison (Bison bison). Furthermore, using published data from modern bovid specimens, we confirm that the damage hotspots correlate with sites of in vivo hypermutation. In conclusion, the aDNA sequences from archaeological specimens provide evidence that structural elements of mitochondrial DNA confer a degree of in vivo and post-mortem protection from sequence modification. This in turn provides useful insights into the debate as to whether mutational hotspots or mitochondrial recombination might best explain homoplasies observed on phylogenetic trees of human mitochondrial sequences. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Effect of Membrane Flux and Dialyzer Biocompatibility on Survival in End-Stage Diabetic Nephropathy

Aims: We examined the effects of dialyzer membrane flux and biocompatibility on mortality in diabetic dialysis patients. Methods: We enrolled 402 prevalent chronic hemodialysis patients from 30 centers in Germany in 1999 for a prospective observational study until 2003. We compared 2 groups in post hoc analysis: high-flux (HF, n = 166) versus low-flux (LF, n = 236) membrane, and high biocompatibility (HB, n = 300) versus low biocompatibility (LB, n = 102). All-cause mortality (ACM) was the primary endpoint. Death causes were the secondary endpoints. Results: Multivariate Cox regression analysis showed no significant difference in risk for ACM with respect to flux (hazard ratio, HR, 0.79; p = 0.08; ACM 63% in HF vs. 70% in LF dialysis) and biocompatibility level (HR 1.00; p = 0.98; ACM 67% for HB vs. 66% for LB). The multivariate analysis of different causes of death did not reveal any outcome differences dependent on flux and biocompatibility level apart from a slightly better cumulative survival regarding the death cause ‘infectious’ in our HF dialysis group (HR 0.48; p = 0.07, Kaplan-Meier analysis p = 0.03). Conclusion: Our data indicate that mortality of hemodialysis patients with type-2 diabetic nephropathy is influenced neither by dialyzer flux level nor by biocompatibility.
International Trade and Income Inequality*

We propose a theory that explains why international trade can widen a wage gap between top income earners and others and cause job polarization. In the basic model, we consider two symmetric countries in which individuals with different abilities work either as knowledge workers, who develop products produced in a differentiated-good sector, or as production workers, who engage in actual production processes. In equilibrium, ex ante symmetric firms post different wages for knowledge workers and hence attract workers with different abilities, creating the firm heterogeneity in product quality. International trade will benefit firms that produce high-quality products and harm firms that produce low-quality products. The relative wage gap between individuals with high ability and those with low ability expands as a result. Indeed, we show that international trade increases the real wages for those with lowest and highest abilities but decreases the real wages for those with intermediate abilities. We also extend the basic model to the one with asymmetric countries and show that income inequality worsens in the smaller or talent-scarce country while it lessens in the talent-abundant country as a result of international trade.
Substance Use and Misuse: Are Bisexual Women at Greater Risk?

Abstract The objective of this study was to compare the prevalence of substance use and alcohol-related consequences among bisexual and heterosexual women. A cross-sectional survey was self-administered to a random sample of undergraduate women. The final sample consisted of 49 self-identified bisexual women and 2,042 self-identified heterosexual women. Bivariate and multivariate results indicated that bisexual women were more likely than heterosexual women to report cigarette smoking, illicit drug use and medically prescribed use of antidepressant prescription medication. Although their drinking behaviors were similar, bisexual women were more likely than heterosexual women to experience adverse alcohol-related consequences. These findings suggest that traditional-age undergraduate women who self-identify as bisexual may be at heightened risk for substance use. However, additional research is needed to replicate these findings with larger samples of bisexual women.
The Chemical Modification of KCa Channels by Carbon Monoxide in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells*

The chemical modification of big conductance calcium-activated potassium (KCa) channels in rat tail artery smooth muscle cells by carbon monoxide (CO) was investigated using the cell-free single channel recording technique. Exposure of the internal surface of cell membranes to diethyl pyrocarbonate (DEPC) neither affected the characteristics of KCa channels nor modified the stimulatory effect of CO on KCa channels. However, when DEPC was applied to the external surface of cell membranes, the open probability of KCa channels was reduced. The pH and concentration dependence of the effect of DEPC indicated the specific modification of histidine residues. Kinetic analysis suggested that one externally located histidine residue was modified by DEPC. Treatment of the external surface of cell membranes with DEPC abolished the CO-induced increase in the open probability of KCa channels. Likewise, the presence of CO partially protected KCa channels from inhibition by DEPC. Moreover, photooxidation of the histidine residue located on the external membrane surface abolished the CO-induced activation of KCa channels. Our study demonstrates that the CO-induced increase in the open probability of KCa channels may rely specifically on the structure and topological locations of histidine residues.
Compute Less to Get More: Using ORC to Improve Sparse Filtering

Sparse Filtering is a popular feature learning algorithm for image classification pipelines. In this paper, we connect the performance of Sparse Filtering with spectral properties of the corresponding feature matrices. This connection provides new insights into Sparse Filtering; in particular, it suggests early stopping of Sparse Filtering. We therefore introduce the Optimal Roundness Criterion (ORC), a novel stopping criterion for Sparse Filtering. We show that this stopping criterion is related with pre-processing procedures such as Statistical Whitening and demonstrate that it can make image classification with Sparse Filtering considerably faster and more accurate.
A phase II trial with bevacizumab and irinotecan for patients with primary brain tumors and progression after standard therapy

Abstract The combination of irinotecan and bevacizumab has shown efficacy in the treatment of recurrent glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). A prospective, phase II study of 85 patients with various recurrent brain tumors was carried out. Primary endpoints were progression free survival (PFS) and response rate. Material and methods. Patients with recurrent primary brain tumors with performance status 0–2 were eligible. Intravenous bevacizumab 10 mg/kg and irinotecan 125/340 mg/m2 were administered every 14 days. Evaluation was carried out every eight weeks using MRI and Macdonald response criteria. Treatment was continued until progression. Results. In total 85 patients were included with the following histologies: GBM (n = 32), glioma WHO gr. III (n = 33), glioma WHO gr. II (n = 12) and others (n = 8). Patients received a median of four cycles. ORR (overall response rate) for glioblastoma was 25% and 59% achieved stable disease (SD). Median PFS was 5.2 months. For grade III gliomas ORR was 21% and 45% had SD. Median PFS was 3.7 months. No objective responses occurred in grade II gliomas. In the non-glioma population, one PR as well as several long PFS times were observed. Discussion and conclusion. The combination of bevacizumab and irinotecan is well tolerated and moderately efficacious in glioblastoma and glioma WHO gr. III. A majority of patients achieve at least disease stabilization. Prolonged progression-free survival in non-glioma patients warrants further research.
Development of Mobile Phone Dependence Inventory for College Students

Objective: The research here is to develop the Mobile Phone Dependence Inventory(MPDI) for college students. Methods: Develop the inventory according to the descriptions about substance dependence and behavioral addiction from DSM-IV and related materials. Then administer it to 300 undergraduates randomly chosen from Beijing and analyze the differences between the score-high group and the score-low group in the inventory from personality and social states to examine its validity. Results: The inventory is provided with definite reliability (α coefficient is around 0.50 or higher) and validity,and the score-high are more squeamish and less able to adapt the college life than the score-low. Conclusion: The inventory can distinguish dependents from normal undergraduates,and the dependents have remarkable differences in personality and social states.
Effects of Stimulus Parameters on Seizure Duration and ECS-Induced Retrograde Amnesia

A selected electroconvulsive therapy stimulus dose can result from different combinations of pulse amplitude, pulse width, pulse frequency, and stimulus duration; however, the roles of these stimulus variables in the effects of the overall stimulus dose are not clearly understood. A series of studies on Wistar rats was therefore conducted to assess the effects of different stimulus compositions at constant stimulus charge. In the first two studies, two differently composed 60 mC charge unidirectional electroconvulsive shock (ECS) stimuli were administered once daily for 3 days, while in the third study three differently composed 120 mC charge unidirectional ECS stimuli were administered on a single occasion. At constant charge, a markedly longer stimulus duration was associated with ear burns and an approximately 12.5% longer seizure duration. At constant charge, however, different stimulus compositions were not associated with different degrees of impairment in two passive avoidance models of ECS-induced retrograde amnesia. These preliminary findings have implications for the choice of stimulus settings during dose titration and dose selection procedures. While the findings encourage further investigation, it appears that variations in stimulus duration are biologically significant, but minor variations in other stimulus elements may not influence the effects of electrically induced seizures very much.
WORK-FAMILY CONFLICT AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH JOB SATISFACTION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS: THE ROLE OF AFFECT AT WORK AND GENDER

The research presented in this paper examined the relationships between work- family conflict (WFC), affect at work, and gender and tested whether positive and negative affect mediate WFC effects on job satisfaction and psychological distress in and outside the work settings. Study 1 involved 365 married teachers in the public education sector and Study 2 involved 166 married employees in the private sector. Participants completed measures of work-family conflict, positive and negative affect at work, job satisfaction, and psychological distress at work (Study 1 only) and generally. As expected, WFC was associated with lower levels of positive affect and job satisfaction and higher levels of negative affect and also psychological distress in and outside work. Results from hierarchical regression analyses and mediation tests showed that affect at work mediated effects of WFC on job satisfaction and psychological distress in and outside the work environment. Women reported higher levels of overall WFC and family to work conflict in particular but there was no evidence for differential effects of WFC between men and women. These findings point to the role of affect as an important aspect of the work experience and for understanding the effects of family- and work-role conflict in work outcomes and psychological distress.
Structural Basis for Cold Adaptation

Aquaspillium arcticum is a psychrophilic bacterium that was isolated from arctic sediment and grows optimally at 4 °C. We have cloned, purified, and characterized malate dehydrogenase from A. arcticum (Aa MDH). We also have determined the crystal structures of apo-Aa MDH, Aa MDH·NADH binary complex, and Aa MDH·NAD·oxaloacetate ternary complex at 1.9-, 2.1-, and 2.5-Å resolutions, respectively. The Aa MDH sequence is most closely related to the sequence of a thermophilic MDH fromThermus flavus (Tf MDH), showing 61% sequence identity and over 90% sequence similarity. Stability studies show that Aa MDH has a half-life of 10 min at 55 °C, whereas Tf MDH is fully active at 90 °C for 1 h. Aa MDH shows 2–3-fold higher catalytic efficiency compared with a mesophilic or a thermophilic MDH at the temperature range 4–10 °C. Structural comparison of Aa MDH and Tf MDH suggests that the increased relative flexibility of active site residues, favorable surface charge distribution for substrate and cofactor, and the reduced intersubunit ion pair interactions may be the major factors for the efficient catalytic activity of Aa MDH at low temperatures.
Unit quaternions and the Bloch sphere

The spinor representation of spin-1/2 states can equally well be mapped to a single unit quaternion, yielding a new perspective despite the equivalent mathematics. This paper first demonstrates a useable map that allows Bloch-sphere rotations to be represented as quaternionic multiplications, simplifying the form of the dynamical equations. Left-multiplications generally correspond to non-unitary transformations, providing a simpler (essentially classical) analysis of time-reversal. But the quaternion viewpoint also reveals a surprisingly large broken symmetry, as well as a potential way to restore it, via a natural expansion of the state space that has parallels to second order fermions. This expansion to ‘second order qubits’ would imply either a larger gauge freedom or a natural space of hidden variables.
How Four Weeks of Implantation Affect the Strength and Stiffness of a Tendon Graft in a Bone Tunnel

Background For a tendon graft to function as an anterior cruciate ligament, the tendon must heal to the bone tunnel. We studied the effect of 4 weeks of implantation on the strength and stiffness of a tendon in a bone tunnel using two different fixation devices in an ovine model. Hypothesis The type of fixation device in anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction may affect early healing, which can be measured as the strength and stiffness of a tendon in a bone tunnel. Study Design Controlled laboratory study. Methods An extraarticular tendon graft reconstruction was performed in ovine tibias. The graft was fixed with either a bioresorbable interference screw or a WasherLoc. After 4 weeks of implantation the strength and stiffness of the complex and the tendon graft-bone tunnel interface were determined by incrementally loading specimens to failure. Results For the interference screw, the strength deteriorated 63% and the stiffness deteriorated 40%. For the WasherLoc, the strength was similar and the stiffness improved 136%. Conclusions The type of fixation device determines whether the strength and stiffness of a tendon in a bone tunnel increases or decreases after implantation. Clinical Relevance The pace of rehabilitation may need to be adjusted based on the type of fixation device used to secure a soft tissue graft.
Contextual Hidden Markov Tree Model for Signal Denoising

The hidden Markov tree (HMT) model is a novel statistical model for signal and image processing in the wavelet domain. The HMT model captures the interscale persistence property of wavelet coefficients, but includes only a tiny intrascale clustering property of wavelet coefficients. In this paper, we propose the contextual hidden Markov tree (CHMT) model to enhance the clustering property of the HMT model by adding extended coefficients associated with the wavelet coefficients. The extended coefficients are regarded as leaves to link wavelet coefficients in the wavelet tree model without destroying the wavelet persistence property; hence, the training approach of the HMT model can be modified to estimate the parameters of the CHMT model. In experiments, the proposed CHMT model produced better results than the HMT model for signal denoising. Furthermore, the CHMT model needs fewer iterations of training than the HMT model to get the same denoised results.
Rethinking main memory OLTP recovery

Fine-grained, record-oriented write-ahead logging, as exemplified by systems like ARIES, has been the gold standard for relational database recovery. In this paper, we show that in modern high-throughput transaction processing systems, this is no longer the optimal way to recover a database system. In particular, as transaction throughputs get higher, ARIES-style logging starts to represent a non-trivial fraction of the overall transaction execution time. We propose a lighter weight, coarse-grained command logging technique which only records the transactions that were executed on the database. It then does recovery by starting from a transactionally consistent checkpoint and replaying the commands in the log as if they were new transactions. By avoiding the overhead of fine-grained logging of before and after images (both CPU complexity as well as substantial associated 110), command logging can yield significantly higher throughput at run-time. Recovery times for command logging are higher compared to an ARIEs-style physiological logging approach, but with the advent of high-availability techniques that can mask the outage of a recovering node, recovery speeds have become secondary in importance to run-time performance for most applications. We evaluated our approach on an implementation of TPCC in a main memory database system (VoltDB), and found that command logging can offer 1.5 x higher throughput than a main-memory optimized implementation of ARIEs-style physiological logging.
Combined Oral Contraceptive Pills Containing Desogestrel or Drospirenone Enhance Large Vessel and Microvasculature Vasodilation in Healthy Premenopausal Women

Please cite this paper as: Thompson, Przemska, Vasilopoulou, Newens, and Williams (2011). Combined Oral Contraceptive Pills Containing Desogestrel or Drospirenone Enhance Large Vessel and Microvasculature Vasodilation in Healthy Premenopausal Women. Microcirculation 18(5), 339–346.
Ventromedial Frontal Lobe Damage Disrupts Value Maximization in Humans

Recent work in neuroeconomics has shown that regions in orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortex encode the subjective value of different options during choice. However, these electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies cannot demonstrate whether such signals are necessary for value-maximizing choices. Here we used a paradigm developed in experimental economics to empirically measure and quantify violations of utility theory in humans with damage to the ventromedial frontal lobe (VMF). We show that people with such damage are more likely to make choices that violate the generalized axiom of revealed preference, which is the one necessary and sufficient condition for choices to be consistent with value maximization. These results demonstrate that the VMF plays a critical role in value-maximizing choice.
Tool release: gathering 802.11n traces with channel state information

We are pleased to announce the release of a tool that records detailed measurements of the wireless channel along with received 802.11 packet traces. It runs on a commodity 802.11n NIC, and records Channel State Information (CSI) based on the 802.11 standard. Unlike Receive Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values, which merely capture the total power received at the listener, the CSI contains information about the channel between sender and receiver at the level of individual data subcarriers, for each pair of transmit and receive antennas. Our toolkit uses the Intel WiFi Link 5300 wireless NIC with 3 antennas. It works on up-to-date Linux operating systems: in our testbed we use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with the 2.6. 36 kernel. The measurement setup comprises our customized versions of Intel's close-source firmware and open-source iwlwifi wireless driver, userspace tools to enable these measurements, access point functionality for controlling both ends of the link, and Matlab (or Octave) scripts for data analysis. We are releasing the binary of the modified firmware, and the source code to all the other components.