Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Compliance with noninvasive home ventilation in children with obstructive sleep apnoea.

INTRODUCTION This study aimed to determine compliance with noninvasive home ventilation in children with obstructive sleep apnoea and the factors affecting this compliance. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed 51 children who were prescribed noninvasive home ventilation for the management of obstructive sleep apnoea from 1 January 2000 until 31 May 2008. Noninvasive ventilation was started based on positive polysomnogram, i.e. obstructive apnoea hypopnea index ≥ 1/hr. Compliance was defined as the use of noninvasive ventilation ≥ 4 days/week. RESULTS Noninvasive home ventilation was started at a median age of 11.5 years. In all, 21 (41.2 %) children were reported to be compliant with treatment. Univariate analysis revealed that the female gender (p = 0.017), presence of asthma (p = 0.023), presence of genetic syndromes (p = 0.023), use of bi-level ventilation versus continuous positive airway pressure (p = 0.027), and funding from the social work department (p = 0.049) were associated with compliance with noninvasive home ventilation. Logistic regression revealed the presence of asthma (p = 0.008) and female gender (p = 0.047) to be significantly associated with compliance with treatment. However, factors such as counselling prior to initiation of treatment, severity of obstructive sleep apnoea before initiation of treatment, obesity, use of humidification, and polysomnogram indices were not found to be associated with treatment compliance. CONCLUSION Only 41.2% of the children in this study were reported to be compliant with noninvasive home ventilation. The female gender and the presence of asthma were associated with treatment compliance. Future research focusing on effective methods to improve compliance with noninvasive home ventilation in children should be undertaken.
Characterization of Large-Scale SMTP Traffic: the Coexistence of the Poisson Process and Self-Similarity

Network traffic such as Ethernet, Internet, World Wide Web, and TCP/UDP protocols has been extensively studied, with efforts focusing on the Poisson process and self-similarity. However, although SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) occupies a significant portion of Internet traffic, it has attracted little attention. This paper shows that large-scale SMTP traffic possesses both the characteristics of the Poisson process and self-similarity through an analysis of high quality SMTP traces collected from one of the largest Web portal sites in South Korea over a period of almost nine months. First, we show that, at small (several-second) time scales, interarrival times of SMTP session arrivals are exponentially distributed and independent of each other, which makes it possible to model SMTP session arrivals as a Poisson process. On the contrary, at large (several-month) time scales, SMTP session arrivals exhibit self-similarity. They are strongly autocorrelated across time scales of days and their Hurst parameters are estimated to be somewhere between 0.85 to 0.97. In addition, we find that SMTP traffic consists of many individual ON/OFF sources whose distributions of OFF-period lengths are heavy-tailed, which confirms self-similarity of SMTP traffic.
Development of an Educational Intervention Focused on Sexuality for Women with Gynecological Cancer

The purpose of this article is to report on the development of an educational intervention that focuses on providing women with gynecological cancer information on sexuality. Intervention development was guided by the Medical Research Council framework for complex intervention development. A phased approach was taken to the design and evaluation of this complex intervention which included (1) an in-depth literature review, (2) selection of a theoretical framework, (3) a qualitative study, (4) development of intervention content and process, and (5) pilot testing of the intervention. The educational intervention consists of an information booklet combined with a verbal education session. Content of the intervention is guided by a conceptual framework of sexuality, whereas the intervention process is guided by andragogical principles and the PLISSIT model. Content validity was established by patient and expert review.
Multiprogramming Performance of the Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a very ne grained form of hardware multithreading that allows simultaneous execution of more than one thread without the notion of an internal context switch. The ne grained sharing of processor resources means that threads can impact each others’ performance. Tuck and Tullsen rst published measurements of the performance of the SMT Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading [12]. Of particular interest is their evaluation of the multiprogrammed performance of the processor by concurrently running pairs of singlethreaded benchmarks. In this paper we present experiments and results obtained independently that conrm their observations. We extend the measurements to consider the mutual fairness of simultaneously executing threads (an area hinted at but not covered in detail by Tuck and Tullsen) and compare the multiprogramming performance of pairs of benchmarks running on the Hyper-Threaded SMT system and on a comparable SMP system. We show that there can be considerable bias in the performance of simultaneously executing pairs and investigate the reasons for this. We show that the performance gap between SMP and Hyper-Threaded SMT for multiprogrammed workloads is often lower than might be expected, an interesting result given the obvious economic and energy consumption advantages of the latter.
Phase IIb multicentred randomised trial of besifovir (LB80380) versus entecavir in Asian patients with chronic hepatitis B

Background Besifovir (LB80380) is an acyclic nucleotide phosphonate effective in hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA suppression for both treatment-naive and lamivudine-resistant chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients in preliminary studies. Design We aimed to compare the safety and antiviral activity of two doses of besifovir (90 mg and 150 mg daily) with entecavir 0.5 mg daily in CHB patients. 114 patients were randomised to receive besifovir 90 mg daily (n=36), besifovir 150 mg daily (n=39) or entecavir 0.5 mg daily (n=39). HBV DNA and liver biochemistry, including serum L-carnitine levels, were monitored. Results At week 48, in the intention-to-treat population, the proportion of patients achieving undetectable HBV DNA (<20 IU/mL) were 63.6%, 62.9% and 58.3%, respectively (p>0.05). The serum mean log10 HBV DNA changes from baseline for the HBeAg-positive patients were −5.84, −5.91 and −6.18, respectively; and for the HBeAg-negative patients were −4.65, −4.55 and −4.67, respectively (p>0.05). There were no differences in the proportions of patients achieving normalisation of alanine aminotransferase (91.7%, 76.9%, 89.7%, respectively) and HBeAg seroconversion (11.11%, 15%, 9.52%, respectively) among all three groups. None of the patients had resistant mutations or increase in serum creatinine of >0.5 mg/dL from baseline. 64 (94.1%) patients on besifovir had lowering of serum L-carnitine (not tested in entecavir patients). L-carnitine levels returned to normal with carnitine supplement. Conclusions At 48 weeks, 90 mg and 150 mg daily of besifovir were non-inferior to entecavir 0.5 mg daily in treatment-naive CHB patients. The only significant side effect of besifovir was L-carnitine depletion, requiring carnitine supplementation.
Translocation of presynaptic delta opioid receptors in the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray after swim stress

Immunolabeling for the delta opioid receptor (DOR) is localized primarily to axon terminals in the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray (vlPAG). However, rather than on the plasma membrane, DOR immunoreactivity is usually located within the cytoplasmic compartment, often associated with dense‐core vesicles. In this study, the hypothesis that a behavioral stimulus, a cold water swim stress (3 minutes at 4°C; CWSS), could initiate the translocation of the DOR was tested. The subcellular distribution of DOR was examined using a preembedding immunogold‐labeling method and ultrastructural analysis in control rats and in rats that had a CWSS. In both cases, dense‐core vesicles associated with DOR labeling were often within 100 nm of the plasma membrane. When the dense‐core vesicles were near the plasma membrane, sometimes electron‐dense “tethers” appeared between the vesicle and the plasma membrane. However, in rats exposed to CWSS, there was a decrease in immunolabeling associated with dense‐core vesicles that were near the plasma membrane and a significant increase in DOR immunoreactivity associated with the plasma membrane. In addition, there was a significant increase in the fraction of DOR immunoreactivity associated with large clear‐core vesicles; possibly early endosomes. Moreover, after a CWSS, dense‐core vesicles containing DOR immunoreactivity could be visualized fusing with the plasma membrane of synaptic boutons. These data suggest the involvement of DOR in the vlPAG in the behavioral response to CWSS. Furthermore, the results support the hypothesis that the cell surface distribution of presynaptic receptors can be regulated in an activity‐dependent manner by virtue of transport via dense‐core vesicles. J. Comp. Neurol. 464:197–207, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Sound event detection in real life recordings using coupled matrix factorization of spectral representations and class activity annotations

Methods for detection of overlapping sound events in audio involve matrix factorization approaches, often assigning separated components to event classes. We present a method that bypasses the supervised construction of class models. The method learns the components as a non-negative dictionary in a coupled matrix factorization problem, where the spectral representation and the class activity annotation of the audio signal share the activation matrix. In testing, the dictionaries are used to estimate directly the class activations. For dealing with large amount of training data, two methods are proposed for reducing the size of the dictionary. The methods were tested on a database of real life recordings, and outperformed previous approaches by over 10%.
A Binaural Auditory Model for Missing Data Recognition of Speech in Noise

1Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield S1 4DP, United Kingdom. 2Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing P.O. Box 3000, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland 3Department of Computer and Information Science and the Center for Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. Email: kalle.palomaki@hut.fi, g.brown@dcs.shef. ac.uk, dwang@cis.ohio-state.edu
Co-Positivity for Anti-dsDNA, -Nucleosome and -Histone Antibodies in Lupus Nephritis Is Indicative of High Serum Levels and Severe Nephropathy

Objective To characterize the significance of correlated autoantibodies in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and its complication lupus nephritis (LN) in a large cohort of patients. Methods Clinical data were statistically analyzed in 1699 SLE patients with or without nephritis who were diagnosed and treated during 2002–2013 in the northeast region of China. Reactivity to a list of 16 autoantibodies was detected by the serum test Euroline ANA profile (IgG). Serum titers of the anti-nucleosome autoantibodies were measured by ELISA assays. Kidney biopsies were examined by pathologists. Immune complex deposition was identified by immunohistochemistry stain. Results Simultaneous positivity of anti-dsDNA, -nucleosome and -histone antibodies (3-pos) was prevalent in SLE patients with LN compared to Non-renal SLE patients (41% vs 11%, p< 0.001). Significant correlations were found between any two of the above three anti-nucleosome antibodies in LN patients. In comparison to non-3-pos cohorts, 3-pos patients with LN had significantly higher serum levels of the three antibodies and more active disease; was associated with type IV disease; suffered from more severe renal damages; received more intensive treatment and had worse disease outcome. The serum levels of these three autoantibodies in 3-pos LN patients were significantly decreased when they underwent clinical recovery. Conclusions Simultaneous reactivity to anti-dsDNA, -nucleosome and -histone antibodies by Euroline ANA profile (IgG) may indicate severe nephropathy in patients with SLE.
Teaching educational assistants to facilitate the multisymbol message productions of young students who require augmentative and alternative communication.

PURPOSE Many classroom educational assistants (EAs) have a significant amount of responsibility in carrying out educational plans for children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), but they receive little instruction on how to do so (Kent-Walsh & Light, 2003). This study investigates the impact of using a communication partner instructional program to teach EAs how to teach their students to produce symbol combinations on their speech-generating devices. METHOD A single-subject multiple-probe-across-participants design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the instructional program on (a) the EAs' implementation of an interaction strategy with their students who used AAC and (b) the rates of multisymbol message productions for the students who used AAC. RESULTS All 3 participating EAs learned to use the interaction strategy appropriately, and all 3 participating students who used AAC increased their multisymbol message production rates. CONCLUSIONS Results provide further evidence (a) of the viability of using a communication partner instructional program for teaching partners how to facilitate the communication skills of children who use AAC and (b) that the interaction strategy can be an effective tool for increasing expressive multisymbol message rates for children who use AAC.
Review of publication bias in studies on publication bias: Here's a proposal for editors that may help reduce publication bias

Editor—Publication bias is a pervasive problem in biomedical research,1 Dubben and Beck-Bornholdt providing further evidence on its importance.2 The preference for publishing papers with significant results may seriously compromise the ability to draw valid conclusions from the published literature. This problem seems particularly relevant to results from epidemiological research. We offer a solution to this problem that lies at the disposal …
A Fresh Look at the Dark Side of Contemporary Careers: Toward a Realistic Discourse

In this paper we propose that careers be considered as both offering promise and the source of potential disillusionment. While the changing nature of careers and of career management requires a comprehensive perspective to highlight the characteristics and nature of careers in their entirety, most published work predominantly addresses the positive aspects of careers, leaving their darker dynamics almost untouched. We argue that while career scholars tend to clothe such concerns in euphemistic terms, contemporary career experiences may often be quite dark and include a number of undesired consequences. By linking selected career constructs and notions of organizational dark sides, we aim to advance a more balanced framework, offering a career perspective that consists of opportunities versus threats, truth versus untruth and positive versus negative aspects, all of which are inevitably embedded in careers. Thus, we call for career conceptualization and research to be less normatively biased and prescriptive and to be more grounded in reality.
Trends in examination performance and exposure to standardised tests in England and Wales

Schools in England and Wales since the late 1980s have been compared in terms of their performances in public examinations and standardised test scores in the form of ‘school league tables’, with Wales ceasing to produce these after 2001. One of the factors related to performance in examinations is the choice of the examination board, with five main boards currently active in England and Wales. In this paper, we study differences in student uptake and performance among boards and how this has changed over time. By contrasting the experiences of England and Wales the results of our analyses provide a commentary on recent attempts to understand the effects of league tables on school performance.
Joint Attention, Social-Cognition, and Recognition Memory in Adults

The early emerging capacity for Joint Attention (JA), or socially coordinated visual attention, is thought to be integral to the development of social-cognition in childhood. Recent studies have also begun to suggest that JA affects adult cognition as well, but methodological limitations hamper research on this topic. To address this issue we developed a novel virtual reality paradigm that integrates eye-tracking and virtual avatar technology to measure two types of JA in adults, Initiating Joint Attention (IJA) and Responding to Joint Attention (RJA). Distinguishing these types of JA in research is important because they are thought to reflect unique, as well as common constellations of processes involved in human social-cognition and social learning. We tested the validity of the differentiation of IJA and RJA in our paradigm in two studies of picture recognition memory in undergraduate students. Study 1 indicated that young adults correctly identified more pictures they had previously viewed in an IJA condition (67%) than in a RJA (58%) condition, η2 = 0.57. Study 2 controlled for IJA and RJA stimulus viewing time differences, and replicated the findings of Study 1. The implications of these results for the validity of the paradigm and research on the affects of JA on adult social-cognition are discussed.
The joint contribution of insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea on sickness absence

Several studies have indicated a high degree of overlap between insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea, but little is known regarding how the overlap may affect adverse outcomes associated with each of the disorders. The aim of the current study was to examine the separate and combined effects of symptoms of insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea on long‐term sick leave. We used an historical cohort design with 4 years follow‐up. Information on sick leave was obtained from Norwegian official registry data, and merged with health information from the Hordaland Health Study in western Norway, 1997–99. A total of 6892 participants aged 40–45 years were assessed for self‐reported symptoms of insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea (snoring and breathing cessations), as well as confounding factors. The level of overlap between insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea was low (7–12%). Both insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea alone were significant risk factors for subsequent sick leave after adjusting for confounding factors (odds ratios ranging from 1.4 to 2.3). Having comorbid insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea increased the risk significantly. There was an additive interaction effect between the two conditions in the unadjusted analyses, but this was reduced to a non‐significant level when adjusting for confounders. This study is the first to report the separate and combined effects of insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea on any adverse outcome. Having both insomnia and obstructive sleep apnoea increased the risk of later sick leave, but there was no evidence of an independent synergy effect of the two conditions.
Institutional

This paper seeks to explore Institutional Psychotherapy’s politically informed practice by highlighting two key concepts: crisis and resistance. It first briefly sketches out a conceptual overview of the two concepts, paying particular attention to the complicated interactions between their political and therapeutic meanings. Following each conceptual elaboration there is a discussion exploring the ways in which the concept has been used by two key members of the Institutional Psychotherapy movement: Frantz Fanon and Félix Guattari.
Does the Quality of the Computer Graphics Matter when Judging Distances in Visually Immersive Environments?

In the real world, people are quite accurate in judging distances to locations in the environment, at least for targets resting on the ground plane and distances out to about 20 m. Distance judgments in visually immersive environments are much less accurate. Several studies have now shown that in visually immersive environments, the world appears significantly smaller than intended. This study investigates whether or not the compression in apparent distances is the result of the low-quality computer graphics utilized in previous investigations. Visually directed triangulated walking was used to assess distance judgments in the real world and in three virtual environments with graphical renderings of varying quality.
Walking just after a meal seems to be more effective for weight loss than waiting for one hour to walk after a meal

There is a belief that walking just after a meal causes fatigue, stomach ache, and other types of discomfort. However, the author and one volunteer participant had no such negative reactions, and found that walking just after a meal was more effective for weight loss than waiting one hour after eating before walking. For people who do not experience abdominal pain, fatigue, or other discomfort when walking just after a meal, walking at a brisk speed for 30 minutes as soon as possible just after lunch and dinner leads to more weight loss than does walking for 30 minutes beginning one hour after a meal has been consumed. The author lost nearly 3 kg and a volunteer participant lost nearly 1.5 kg during one month of walking just after lunch and dinner. The author walked at a brisk pace, while the volunteer walked at a stroll. We repeated the preliminary experiment twice, between April and early May 2002, and once between August and September 2006, and obtained the same results.
Oral Yohimbine Increases Blood Pressure and Sympathetic Nervous Outflow in Hypertensive Patients

Yohimbine is an α2-adrenoceptor antagonist that is FDA approved for treatment of impotence. The drug is an indolalkylamine alkaloid chemically similar to reserpine and is believed to act through sympatholysis. We examined effects of oral yohimbine on blood pressure (BP) and plasma levels of catechols in patients with essential hypertension, a condition in which most drug treatments can produce impotence. In 25 unmedicated hypertensive subjects, vital signs were measured and blood samples were obtained through an indwelling ante-cubital venous catheter at baseline and 1 and 2 h after subjects ingested 4 5.4-mg tablets of yohimbine. Mean blood pressure (MBP) increased by an average of 5 mm Hg (p < 0.01), plasma norepinephrine (NE) levels increased by 66% (p < 0.001), and plasma dihydroxyphen-ylglycol (DHPG) levels increased by 25% (p < 0.01) at 1 h after drug administration. The magnitude of the pressor response was unrelated to baseline MBP but positively correlated with the baseline NE level (r = 0.61, p < 0.01) and with the yohimbine-induced increment in plasma NE (r = 0.4, p < 0.01). The results indicate that yohimbine does not inhibit and actually stimulates sympathetically mediated NE release in humans and that the increased NE release produces a pressor response. Yohimbine should be administered with caution to patients with high BP, especially in individuals with evidence for increased basal sympathetic outflow or those undergoing concurrent treatment with tricyclic antidepressants or other drugs that interfere with neuronal uptake or metabolism of NE.