Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measuring chronic care delivery: patient experiences and clinical performance.

OBJECTIVE To assess the relationship between clinical care metrics and patient experiences of care among patients with chronic disease. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey and clinical performance data. SETTING Eighty-nine medical groups across California caring for patients with chronic disease. PARTICIPANTS Using patient surveys, we identified 51 129 patients with a chronic disease. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Using patient surveys, we produced five composite measures of patient experiences of care and self-management support (scale 0-100). Using Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set data, we analyzed care for asthma, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, producing one composite summarizing clinical processes of care and one composite summarizing outcomes of care. We calculated adjusted Spearman's correlation coefficients to assess the relationship between patient experiences of care, clinical processes and clinical outcomes. RESULTS Clinical performance was higher for process measures compared with outcomes measures, ranging from 91% for appropriate asthma medication use to 59% for controlling low-density lipoprotein cholesterol in the presence of diabetes. Performance on patient experiences of care measures was the highest for the quality of clinical interactions (88.5) and the lowest for delivery of self-management support (68.8). Three of the 10 patient experience-clinical performance composite correlations were statistically significant. These three correlations involved composites summarizing integration of care and quality of clinical interactions, and ranged from a low of 0.30 to a high of 0.39. CONCLUSIONS Chronic care delivery is variable across diseases and domains of care. Improving care integration processes and communication between health-care providers and their patients may lead to improved clinical outcomes.
Ion Cyclotron Wave Dissipation in the Solar Corona: The Summed Effect of More than 2000 Ion Species

In this paper the dissipation of ion cyclotron resonant Alfvén waves in the extended solar corona is examined in detail. For the first time, the wave damping arising from more than 2000 low-abundance ion species is taken into account. Useful approximations for the computation of coronal ionization equilibria for elements heavier than nickel are presented. Also, the Sobolev approximation from the theory of hot-star winds is applied to the resonant wave dissipation in the solar wind, and the surprisingly effective damping ability of "minor" ions is explained in simple terms. High-frequency (10-10,000 Hz) waves propagating up from the base of the corona are damped significantly when they resonate with ions having charge-to-mass ratios of about 0.1, and negligible wave power would then be available to resonate with higher charge-to-mass ratio ions at larger heights. This result confirms preliminary suggestions from earlier work that the waves that heat and accelerate the high-speed solar wind must be generated throughout the extended corona. The competition and eventual equilibrium between wave damping and wave replenishment may explain observed differences in coronal O VI and Mg X emission line widths.
Catalytic Properties of Human Manganese Superoxide Dismutase*

The depletion of superoxide catalyzed by human manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) was observed spectrophotometrically by measuring the absorbance of superoxide at 250-280 nm following pulse radiolysis and by stopped-flow spectrophotometry. Catalysis showed an initial burst of activity lasting approximately 1 ms followed by the rapid emergence of a greatly inhibited catalysis of zero-order rate. These catalytic properties of human MnSOD are qualitatively similar to those reported for MnSOD from Thermus thermophilus (Bull, C., Niederhoffer, E. C., Yoshida, T., and Fee, J. A. (1991) J. Am. Chem. Soc. 113, 4069-4076). However, there are significant quantitative differences; the emergence of the inhibited form is approximately 30-fold more rapid for human MnSOD. The turnover number for human MnSOD at pH 9.4 and 20°C was kcat = 4 × 104 s−1 and kcat/Km = 8 × 108 M−1 s−1, determined by a simulated fit of the model of Bull et al. (1991) to the pulse radiolysis data. We also report that the maximum of the visible absorption spectrum of human MnSOD (ε480 = 525 M−1 cm−1) showed a strong dependence on pH that could be described by an ionization of pKa 9.4 ± 0.1 with a maximum at low pH.
Increased glucose metabolism during long-duration recurrent inhibition of hippocampal pyramidal cells

The locally subnormal brain metabolism observed in some experiments utilizing the Sokoloff 2-deoxyglucose (2-DG) method has often been attributed to postsynaptic inhibition despite the fact that inhibitory postsynaptic potentials are themselves caused by energy-requiring mechanisms. To explore this issue, neurophysiologically confirmed long-duration recurrent inhibition of hippocampal pyramidal unit firing was induced by low frequency (2 to 4 Hz) stimulation of the fornix for 60 min following intravenous infusion of [14C]-2-DG. The resulting autoradiograms showed that long-duration suppression of pyramidal cell firing was accompanied by distinctly increased hippocampal 2-DG uptake, particularly in the stratum pyramidale, which contains a dense plexus of inhibitory interneuronal terminals upon pyramidal cells. Both the pyramidal inhibition and the increased 2-DG uptake were confined to the ipsilateral hippocampus in animals with previously severed fornices and hippocampal commissures. In a second series of rats, the excitatory entorhinohippocampal “perforant path” (PP) was stimulated at low frequency (2 to 9 Hz) following 2-DG administration. At 2 to 4 Hz, each PP stimulation resulted in a brief burst of pyramidal unit firing followed by short-duration firing suppression; this result was associated with paradoxically decreased 2-DG uptake in the ipsilateral stratum molecular. By contrast, 7 to 9 Hz entorhinal stimulation induced PP-mediated excitation immediately followed by powerful intrinsic hippocampal inhibition, evidenced by prolonged pyramidal unit suppression after each stimulation. This suppression was accompanied by increased 2-DG uptake in the dentate stratum molecular and hippocampal stratum pyramidale. Thus it appeared that even with entorhinal stimulation, hippocampal 2-DG uptake was more closely associated with long-duration recurrent inhibition than with transient pyramidal excitation. Therefore, although it still remains possible that regions of hypometabolism observed in some previous 2-DG studies may actually reflect mild inhibition, other mechanisms such as disfacilitation are more likely mechanisms for this metabolic pattern.
In vitro fertilization healthcare professionals generally underestimate patients’ satisfaction with quality of care

Previous studies have mainly compared professionals’ and patients’ ratings of the importance of different care aspects, finding poor agreement between the groups concerning patient‐centered quality of care. There is still little known about professionals’ knowledge of how patients experience the quality of care they receive during in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. The aim of this study was to investigate how IVF healthcare professionals estimate patients’ experience of patient‐centered quality of care and if certain factors influenced the IVF professionals’ perceptions and IVF patients’ experience of quality of care.
Change Detection: Training and Transfer

Observers often fail to notice even dramatic changes to their environment, a phenomenon known as change blindness. If training could enhance change detection performance in general, then it might help to remedy some real-world consequences of change blindness (e.g. failing to detect hazards while driving). We examined whether adaptive training on a simple change detection task could improve the ability to detect changes in untrained tasks for young and older adults. Consistent with an effective training procedure, both young and older adults were better able to detect changes to trained objects following training. However, neither group showed differential improvement on untrained change detection tasks when compared to active control groups. Change detection training led to improvements on the trained task but did not generalize to other change detection tasks.
GPI anchor attachment is required for Gas1p transport from the endoplasmic reticulum in COP II vesicles.

Inositol starvation of auxotrophic yeast interrupts glycolipid biosynthesis and prevents lipid modification of a normally glycosyl phosphatidylinositol (GPI)‐linked protein, Gas1p. The unanchored Gas1p precursor undergoes progressive modification in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), but is not modified by Golgi‐specific glycosylation. Starvation‐induced defects in anchor assembly and protein processing are rapid, and occur without altered maturation of other proteins. Cells remain competent to manufacture anchor components and to process Gas1p efficiently once inositol is restored. Newly synthesized Gas1p is packaged into vesicles formed in vitro from perforated yeast spheroplasts incubated with either yeast cytosol or the purified Sec proteins (COP II) required for vesicle budding from the ER. In vitro synthesized vesicles produced by inositol‐starved membranes do not contain detectable Gas1p. These studies demonstrate that COP II components fulfill the soluble protein requirements for packaging a GPI‐anchored protein into ER‐derived transport vesicles. However, GPI anchor attachment is required for this packaging to occur.
Time Course of Change in Blood Pressure From Sodium Reduction and the DASH Diet

Both sodium reduction and the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet lower blood pressure (BP); however, the patterns of their effects on BP over time are unknown. In the DASH-Sodium trial, adults with pre-/stage 1 hypertension, not using antihypertensive medications, were randomly assigned to either a typical American diet (control) or DASH. Within their assigned diet, participants randomly ate each of 3 sodium levels (50, 100, and 150 mmol/d, at 2100 kcal) over 4-week periods. BP was measured weekly for 12 weeks; 412 participants enrolled (57% women; 57% black; mean age, 48 years; mean systolic BP [SBP]/diastolic BP [DBP], 135/86 mm Hg). For those assigned control, there was no change in SBP/DBP between weeks 1 and 4 on the high-sodium diet (weekly change, −0.04/0.06 mm Hg/week) versus a progressive decline in BP on the low-sodium diet (−0.94/−0.70 mm Hg/week; P interactions between time and sodium <0.001 for SBP and DBP). For those assigned DASH, SBP/DBP changed −0.60/−0.16 mm Hg/week on the high- versus −0.42/−0.54 mm Hg/week on the low-sodium diet (P interactions between time and sodium=0.56 for SBP and 0.10 for DBP). When comparing DASH to control, DASH changed SBP/DBP by −4.36/−1.07 mm Hg after 1 week, which accounted for most of the effect observed, with no significant difference in weekly rates of change for either SBP (P interaction=0.97) or DBP (P interaction=0.70). In the context of a typical American diet, a low-sodium diet reduced BP without plateau, suggesting that the full effects of sodium reduction are not completely achieved by 4 weeks. In contrast, compared with control, DASH lowers BP within a week without further effect thereafter. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00000608.
Theoretical Study of High Repetition Rate Short Pulse Generation With Fiber Optical Parametric Amplification

In this paper, we study theoretically the generation of high repetition rate short pulses using fiber optical parametric amplification. We show that the pulse shape and duration depend on the signal location relatively to the pump frequency. We demonstrate that in order to get the shortest pulse width, the signal must be located at one of the extremities of the gain spectrum associated with the pump peak power. We derive the analytical expression of the pulse shape in this case and compare it to the exponential gain regime case. Using numerical simulations, we also analyze the impact of walk-off and pump phase modulation that is required to suppress Stimulated Brillouin Scattering and derive guidelines to design stable train of short and high repetition rate pulses.
Social Adjustment in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The Social Adjustment Scale-Self Report was administered to 32 subjects with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and age-sex matched controls. The patients had global impairment, especially during leisure, which correlated with severity of the disorder. The improvement of this impairment with therapy is highlighted. It is stressed that social adjustment in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder subjects should be con sidered during their therapy.
Learning Measures of Progress for Planning Domains

We study an approach to learning heuristics for planning domains from example solutions. There has been little work on learning heuristics for the types of domains used in deterministic and stochastic planning competitions. Perhaps one reason for this is the challenge of providing a compact heuristic language that facilitates learning. Here we introduce a new representation for heuristics based on lists of set expressions described using taxonomic syntax. Next, we review the idea of a measure of progress (parmar 2002), which is any heuristic that is guaranteed to be improvable at every state. We take finding a measure of progress as our learning goal, and describe a simple learning algorithm for this purpose. We evaluate our approach across a range of deterministic and stochastic planning-competition domains. The results show that often greedily following the learned heuristic is highly effective. We also show our heuristic can be combined with learned rule-based policies, producing still stronger results.
Theory of Mass Transfer from a Sphere and a Circular Cylinder in Pulsating Flow

Generalized expressions for both the local and the overall mass-transfer from a sphere and a circular cylinder in steady, oscillating, and pulsating flows are derived by using solutions to velocities around the bodies. The integrals included in these expressions being evaluated numerically, the local mass-transfer distribution profiles around the bodies and the overall mass-transfer expressions are given for these cases.Comparison between local mass-transfer distributions around the bodies in steady and pulsating flows shows that pulsating flow accelerates the mass transfer particularly on the rear side of the body, where the mass transfer under steady flow is small because of the dead-water region. The approximate expressions of overall mass-transfer under pulsating flow are Sh=2+[(0.654)1.85+(0.648z1/3)1.85]1/1.85Sc1/3Re1/2p for a sphere and Sh=[(0.615)1.74+(0.728z1/3)1.74]1/1.74Sc1/3Re1/2p for a circular cylinder, where Sh=2rokf/D, z=(aω/U∞)3/2(a/ro)1/2, Sc=ν/D and Rep=2roU∞ν (a: amplitude, D: diffusivity, kf: mass-transfer coefficient, ro: radius, U∞: free stream velocity, v: kinematic viscosity, ω: angular frequency). These expressions coincide with ones under steady flow, i.e., Sh=2+0.654Sc1/3Re1/2p (sphere), Sh=0.615Sc1/3Re1/2p (circular cylinder) and ones under oscillating flow, i.e., Sh=2+0.917Sc1/3(roaω/ν)1/2(a/ro)1/6 (sphere), Sh=1.03Sc1/3(roaω/ν)1/2(a/ro)1/6 (circular cylinder), according as z→0 and z→∞, respectively. These results are compared with analytical and experimental ones reported previously, and shown to be rather satisfactory.
Programming models for many-core architectures: a co-design approach

Common many-core processors contain tens of cores and distributed memory. Compared to a multicore system, which only has a few tightly coupled cores sharing a single bus and memory, several complex problems arise. Notably, many cores require many parallel tasks to fully utilize the cores, and communication happens in a distributed and decentralized way. Therefore, programming such a processor requires the application to exhibit concurrency. In contrast to a single-core application, a concurrent application has to deal with memory state changes with an observable (non-deterministic) intermediate state. The complexity introduced by these problems makes programming a many-core system with a single-core-based programming approach notoriously hard. The central concept of this thesis is that abstractions, which are related to (many-core) programming, are structured in a single platform model. A platform is a layered view of the hardware, a memory model, a concurrency model, a model of computation, and compile-time and run-time tooling. Then, a programming model is a specific view on this platform, which is used by a programmer. In this view, some details can be hidden from the programmer's perspective, some details cannot. For example, an operating system presents an infinite number of parallel virtual execution units to the application whilst it hides details regarding scheduling. On the other hand, a programmer usually has balance workload among threads by hand. This thesis presents modifications to different abstraction layers of a many-core architecture, in order to make the system as a whole more efficient, and to reduce the programming complexity. These modifications influence other abstractions in the platform, and especially the programming model. Therefore, this thesis applies co-design on all models. Notably, co-design of the memory model, concurrency model, and model of computation is required for a scalable implementation of lambda-calculus. Moreover, only the combination of requirements of the many-core hardware from one side and the concurrency model from the other leads to a memory model abstraction. Hence, this thesis shows that to cope with the current trends in many-core architectures from a programming perspective, it is essential and feasible to inspect and adapt all abstractions collectively.
Geometric scaling and QCD dynamics in DIS

DIS data from HERA show a striking regularity as sigma(gamma*p) is a function of the ratio tau = Q(2)/Q(s)(2)(x) only. The scaling function shows a break at 7 t, which has been taken as an indication for saturation. However, besides saturation also the transition between dominance of k(perpendicular to)-ordered (DGLAP) and k(perpendicular to)-non-ordered (BFKL) evolution contributes to a break around this value of 7, as well as the suppression for small Q(2) due to finite quark masses and confinement. In this paper we use a dipole cascade model based on Mueller's dipole model, which also includes energy conservation and pomeron mergings, to investigate the contributions of these different effects to the scaling behaviour. As a result we predict that the scaling function for tau 1 GeV2 become available. We also investigate the scaling properties of the charm contribution and the impact parameter dependence of the saturation scale.
Vitamin D and adipose tissue—more than storage

The pandemic increase in obesity is inversely associated with vitamin D levels. While a higher BMI was causally related to lower 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), no evidence was obtained for a BMI lowering effect by higher 25(OH)D. Some of the physiological functions of 1,25(OH)2D3 (1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol or calcitriol) via its receptor within the adipose tissue have been investigated such as its effect on energy balance, adipogenesis, adipokine, and cytokine secretion. Adipose tissue inflammation has been recognized as the key component of metabolic disorders, e.g., in the metabolic syndrome. The adipose organ secretes more than 260 different proteins/peptides. However, the molecular basis of the interactions of 1,25(OH)2D3, vitamin D binding proteins (VDBPs) and nuclear vitamin D receptor (VDR) after sequestration in adipose tissue and their regulations are still unclear. 1,25(OH)2D3 and its inactive metabolites are known to inhibit the formation of adipocytes in mouse 3T3-L1 cell line. In humans, 1,25(OH)2D3 promotes preadipocyte differentiation under cell culture conditions. Further evidence of its important functions is given by VDR knock out (VDR−/−) and CYP27B1 knock out (CYP27B1 −/−) mouse models: Both VDR−/− and CYP27B1−/− models are highly resistant to the diet induced weight gain, while the specific overexpression of human VDR in adipose tissue leads to increased adipose tissue mass. The analysis of microarray datasets from human adipocytes treated with macrophage-secreted products up-regulated VDR and CYP27B1 genes indicating the capacity of adipocytes to even produce active 1,25(OH)2D3. Experimental studies demonstrate that 1,25(OH)2D3 has an active role in adipose tissue by modulating inflammation, adipogenesis and adipocyte secretion. Yet, further in vivo studies are needed to address the effects and the effective dosages of vitamin D in human adipose tissue and its relevance in the associated diseases.
Chemical Surface Modifications of Titanium Implants

In the present work, various surface modifications have been applied to titanium surface. The aim of the modifications was to improve cell adhesion and to determine their influence on the properties of titanium surface. The unmodified and modified surfaces were observed using SEM. Subtle changes in modified surface layer of titanium samples were examined using the Auger Electron Microanalysis and Photoelectron Spectroscopy. The properties of surfaces were evaluated by contact angle and roughness measurements. The results revealed large differences in morphology of Ti modified with different procedures whereas only minor differences in the chemistry of the surfaces were detected. Preliminary quantitative measurements (cell number, viability and differentiation) of the MG 63 osteoblast-like cells in the direct contact with the surface of the investigated materials show that both the not pre-treated titanium surface and the surfaces modified by the methods used in the this work are all well tolerated by the living cells. Within the experimental scatter all the surfaces provided good substrate for proliferation and growth of the cells.