Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intramuscular Recording in Neurodiagnostic Studies

Intramuscular (IM) recordings are often used in nerve conduction studies involving deep or proximal muscles and in other electrodiagnostic tests. Little is known of how various needle electrode configurations and placements influence the characteristics of the evoked responses and their clinical interpretation. The present set of investigations sought to characterize the amplitude, waveform, consistency, latency and muscle discrimination capabilities of IM recordings from a variety of muscles using monopolar, concentric and bipolar electrodes. Results indicate that 1) all forms of IM electrodes studied show marked changes in response waveform with changes in position of the electrode tip, but the monopolar electrode configuration shows the least amount of change; 2) the concentric electrode does not differentiate well between deep and superficial muscle responses; 3) the latency of the evoked response does not change with the depth of penetration within a muscle; 4) the latency of response recorded from IM electrodes may be longer, the same or shorter than that recorded from surface electrodes; and 5) monopolar electrodes should be used when onset latency or waveform is the critical parameter to be recorded from deep or atrophied muscles
A Dynamic Model of Cultural Reproduction1

The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction to develop a formal model of the pathways through which cultural capital acts to enhance children’s educational and socioeconomic success. The authors’ approach brings conceptual and empirical clarity to an important area of study. Their model describes how parents transmit cultural capital to their children and how children convert cultural capital into educational success. It also provides a behavioral framework for interpreting parental investments in cultural capital. The authors review results from existing empirical research on the role of cultural capital in education to demonstrate the usefulness of their model for interpretative purposes, and they use National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979—Children and Young Adults survey data to test some of its implications.
Teachers and Field Instructors as Student Role Models

Abstract The social work literature often mentions the value and importance of faculty and field instructors serving as role models for students. Unlike allied disciplines, the influence of role models in social work education remains relatively unexplored. This article includes a search of two electronic databases on role models and social work education, identifies the various conceptual references the social work literature makes to the topic, and then discusses its inclusion as a variable in empirical studies. It argues that more qualitative investigation is needed into role modeling as an inextricable component of social work students' socialization to the profession.
Input-friendliness: motivating knowledge sharing across intranets

The value of an intranet for knowledge management (KM) is largely dependent on the calibre of the content and tools that it provides to its users and its ultimate application in business operations. For many organisations, there is a particular dilemma regarding the development of internally produced intranet resources for KM applications. Employees will not feel encouraged to provide content until they believe that what they provide will be used and they will not use an intranet if it does not provide useful content. This paper considers strategies for making intranets ‘input-friendly’: how can organisations extract the content needed to add to the body of internally produced resources from their employees? The discussion explores factors that encourage intranet contributions. These include enabling conditions such as the provision of appropriate tools, the development of organisational KM culture and reward systems. The paper makes reference to studies drawn from the academic literature in business studies, information systems, organisational science and sociology, as well as to practice in case study organisations.
The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach

How do readers experience literary narrative? Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind, this book offers a principled account of the dynamics underlying readers' responses to narrative. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this study combines close readings of literary texts and theoretical discussion in ways that shed light on the deep connection between narrative, literary fiction, and human experience.
Prediction of Population Health Indices from Social Media using Kernel-based Textual and Temporal Features

From 1984, the US has annually conducted the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) surveys to capture either health behaviors, such as drinking or smoking, or health outcomes, including mental, physical, and generic health, of the population. Although this kind of information at a population level, such as US counties, is important for local governments to identify local needs, traditional datasets may take years to collate and to become publicly available. Geocoded social media data can provide an alternative reflection of local health trends. In this work, to predict the percentage of adults in a county reporting "insufficient sleep", a health behavior, and, at the same time, their health outcomes, novel textual and temporal features are proposed. The proposed textual features are defined at mid-level and can be applied on top of various low-level textual features. They are computed via kernel functions on underlying features and encode the relationships between individual underlying features over a population. To further enrich the predictive ability of the health indices, the textual features are augmented with temporal information. We evaluated the proposed features and compared them with existing features using a dataset collected from the BRFSS. Experimental results show that the combination of kernel-based textual features and temporal information predict well both the health behavior (with best performance at rho=0.82) and health outcomes (with best performance at rho=0.78), demonstrating the capability of social media data in prediction of population health indices. The results also show that our proposed features gained higher correlation coefficients than did the existing ones, increasing the correlation coefficient by up to 0.16, suggesting the potential of the approach in a wide spectrum of applications on data analytics at population levels.
Mobilised bone marrow‐derived cells accelerate wound healing

Massive skin defects caused by severe burn and trauma are a clinical challenge to surgeons. Timely and effective wound closure is often hindered by the lack of skin donor site. Bone marrow‐derived cells (BMDCs) have been shown to ‘differentiate’ into multiple tissue cells. In this study we focused on the direct manipulation of endogenous BMDCs, avoiding the immunocompatibility issues and complicated cell isolation, purification, identification and amplification procedures in vitro on wound repair. We found that mobilisation of the BMDCs into the circulation significantly increased the amount of BMDCs at the injury site which in turn accelerated healing of large open wound. We used a chimeric green fluorescent protein (GFP) mouse model to track BMDCs and to investigate their role in full‐thickness skin excisional wounds. We have shown that bone marrow mobilisation by granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G‐CSF) exerted multiple beneficial effects on skin repair, both by increasing the engraftment of BMDCs into the skin to differentiate into multiple skin cell types and by upregulating essential cytokine mRNAs critical to wound repair. The potential trophic effects of G‐CSF on bone marrow stem cells to accelerate wound healing could have a significant clinical impact.
Chinese Syntactic Reordering for Adequate Generation of Korean Verbal Phrases in Chinese-to-Korean SMT

Chinese and Korean belong to different language families in terms of word-order and morphological typology. Chinese is an SVO and morphologically poor language while Korean is an SOV and morphologically rich one. In Chinese-to-Korean SMT systems, systematic differences between the verbal systems of the two languages make the generation of Korean verbal phrases difficult. To resolve the difficulties, we address two issues in this paper. The first issue is that the verb position is different from the viewpoint of word-order typology. The second is the difficulty of complex morphology generation of Korean verbs from the viewpoint of morphological typology. We propose a Chinese syntactic reordering that is better at generating Korean verbal phrases in Chinese-to-Korean SMT. Specifically, we consider reordering rules targeting Chinese verb phrases (VPs), preposition phrases (PPs), and modality-bearing words that are closely related to Korean verbal phrases. We verify our system with two corpora of different domains. Our proposed approach significantly improves the performance of our system over a baseline phrased-based SMT system. The relative improvements in the two corpora are +9.32% and +5.43%, respectively.
Transient power supply current testing of digital CMOS circuits

This paper presents, in a tutorial fashion, a test technique that employs the transient power supply current, i/sub DDT/, as a window of observability into the switching behaviour of an integrated circuit. The premise is that when a circuit switches states, a temporary path is established between power and ground which results in a transient current. With proper power tree distribution, observing this transient current provides direct insight into the switching pattern of a circuit under a given stimulus. This paper includes an overall summary of physical experiments that have been conducted (previously reported in parts) as well as new results on the test overhead. The physical experimental results show i/sub DDT/ to be effective in detecting disturb faults in SRAMs and drain/ source opens in general CMOS logic structures.
Immune response to octavalent diphtheria- and tetanus-conjugated pneumococcal vaccines is serotype- and carrier-specific: the choice for a mixed carrier vaccine

Background. Development of protein-conjugated pneumococcal vaccines for infants has led to formulations that are immunogenic in the age group at highest risk for pneumococcal diseases. This study focuses on the search for an optimal formulation. Methods. In a randomized trial Icelandic infants (n = 160) were immunized at age 3, 4 and 6 months with one of two octavalent pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (serotypes 3, 4, 6B, 9V, 14, 18C, 19F and 23F conjugated to diphtheria toxoid (PncD) or tetanus protein (PncT) followed with a booster of either the same conjugate or 23-valent polysaccharide vaccine at 13 months. Safety data were collected after each vaccination, and IgG responses (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) were measured at 3, 4, 6, 7, 13 and 14 months. Results. Both conjugates were safe and caused fewer local reactions than the routine vaccines (P < 0.0001). At 7 months both groups had significant IgG response to all serotypes. The geometric mean concentration range was 0.35 to 4.09 and 0.65 to 3.38 &mgr;g/ml for PncD and PncT, respectively, with 88.2 to 100% and 92.4 to 100% of subjects reaching ≥0.15 &mgr;g/ml. The PncD gave better primary responses to serotypes 3, 9V and 18C, whereas PncT gave better response to serotype 4. Similar responses were induced to the other serotypes. Good booster IgG responses were obtained in all vaccine groups; 97.5 to 100% of subjects reached ≥1 &mgr;g/ml. Conclusions. Both octavalent pneumococcal conjugates were safe and immunogenic in infants. Based on the results from this and similar trials, a mixed diphtheria and tetanus pneumococcal conjugate vaccine was designed to provide the optimal immune response to each serotype.
School sports and identity formation: Socialisation or selection?

Abstract It seems common knowledge that school sport participation leads to all kinds of social, educational and health outcomes. However, it may also be that students with a certain predisposition, sometimes referred to as sporting habitus, are more inclined to participate in school sports and that the ‘outcomes’ were already present before participation. Several studies indicated that identity formation mediates between sport participation and the outcomes described. Therefore, a longitudinal survey study was used to investigate whether participation in an elementary school sport competition brought about changes in the formation of sport identity and student identity of students. The results of the study showed that participation in the competition was not related to changes in the sport identity and student identity of the children. In contrast to commonplace assumptions about the socialising effects of school sport participation, the results indicate that participating in this school sport competition did not influence the student identity and sport identity of children. It may be that a selected, predisposed group of children with a strong sport identity participates in school sports, although future research is necessary to test this hypothesis.
Employee Turnover and Retention Strategies : An Empirical Study of Public Sector Organizations of Pakistan

It has been observed that employee turnover, especially amongst public sector organizations, is becoming a problem which costs a lot of money, efforts and energy. This problem might be a major obstacle for HR professionals in formulation of their HR policies. This study aims to identify the main turnover factors in some public sector regulatory authorities and to suggest some employee retention strategies within the Pakistani context. Data was collected by a questionnaire distributed amongst 568 employees, developed on the basis of extensive literature review. The importance of having a retention strategy, which is based on a well articulated human resources management system, was stressed.
Cutaneous microcirculation in the neuropathic diabetic foot improves significantly but not completely after successful lower extremity revascularization.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was the examination of the effect of successful large vessel revascularization on the microcirculation of the neuroischemic diabetic foot. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We measured the cutaneous microvascular reactivity in the foot in 13 patients with diabetes with peripheral arterial disease and neuropathy (group DI) before and 4 to 6 weeks after successful lower extremity arterial revascularization. We also compared them with age-matched and sex-matched groups of 15 patients with diabetes and neuropathy, seven patients without neuropathy, and 12 healthy patients for control. We used single-point and laser Doppler scan imaging for the measurement of the foot skin vasodilatation in response to heating to 44 degrees C and to iontophoresis of 1% acetylcholine (endothelial-dependent response) and 1% sodium nitroprusside (endothelial-independent response). RESULTS The group DI response to heat increased from 289% +/- 90% before surgery (percent increase over baseline measured in volts) to 427% +/- 61% (P <.05) after surgery but was still comparable with the response of the patients with diabetes and neuropathy (318% +/- 51%) and lower than the responses of the patients without neuropathy (766% +/- 220%) and the healthy patients for control (891% +/- 121%; P <.0001). The group DI acetylcholine response also improved from 6% +/- 4% before surgery to 26% +/- 8% after surgery (P <.05) and was similar to the responses of patients with diabetes and neuropathy (18% +/- 3%) and patients without neuropathy (38% +/- 8%) but still lower when compared with the response of the patients for control (48% +/- 9%; P <.001). The sodium nitroprusside response for group DI improved from 10% +/- 4% to 29% +/- 9% (P <.05) and was similar to the responses of the neuropathic (25% +/- 9%), nonneuropathic (32% plus minus 6%), and control (40% +/- 5%) groups. The group DI neurovascular response, which depends on the healthy function of the C-fiber nociceptors, was similar at baseline (5% +/- 9%) and after surgery (14% +/- %10) and in the neuropathic group (33% +/- 21%), but it was dramatically reduced when compared with the nonneuropathic (110% +/- 40%) and control (198% +/- 54%) groups (P <.001). CONCLUSION Impaired vasodilation in the diabetic neuropathic lower extremity leads to functional ischemia, which improves considerably but is not completely corrected with successful bypass grafting surgery. Therefore, patients with diabetes and neuropathy may still be at high risk for the development of foot ulceration or the failure to have an existing ulcer heal despite adequate correction of large vessel blood flow.
A quantitative study of disfluencies in French broadcast interviews

The reported study aims at increasing our understanding of spontaneous speech-related phenomena from sibling corpora of speech and orthographic transcriptions at various levels of elaboration. It makes use of 9 hours of French broadcast interview archives, involving 10 journalists and 10 personalities from political or civil society. First we considered press-oriented transcripts, where most of the socalled disfluencies are discarded. They were then aligned with automatic transcripts, by using the LIMSI speech recogniser. This facilitated the production of exact transcripts, where all audible phenomena in non-overlapping speech segments were transcribed manually. Four types of disfluencies were distinguished: discourse markers, filled pauses, repetitions and revisions, each of which accounts for about 2% of the corpus (8% in total). They were analysed by utterance”, speaker and disfluency pattern types. Four question were raised. Where do disfluencies occur in the utterance? What is the influence of the speakers’ status? And what are the most frequent disfuency patterns?
Health perceptions and treatment adherence in adults with cystic fibrosis.

BACKGROUND: Clinical and demographic variables are poor predictors of treatment adherence. This study therefore examined the relationships between the patients' perception of their cystic fibrosis and their reported adherence to physiotherapy, exercise, pancreatic enzyme and vitamin therapies. METHODS: Sixty adults with cystic fibrosis completed the Health Perception Scale, Health Locus of Control Scale, and the Manchester Adult Cystic Fibrosis Compliance Questionnaire. RESULTS: Reported adherence to physiotherapy, exercise, pancreatic enzyme and vitamin therapies was not influenced by patients' perceptions of their past, current and future disease severity, or their perceived susceptibility to recurrent infections. The greater their level of worry regarding their disease, the more likely they were to adhere to their physiotherapy (p < 0.002), pancreatic enzyme (p < 0.001) and vitamin (p < 0.001) regimens. No difference between the exercise adherent and non-adherent groups emerged regarding their level of worry. Compared with patients who believed that they were in control of their health, those who believed that their cystic fibrosis was controlled by others (family and health professionals) reported greater levels of adherence to their physiotherapy (p < 0.001), pancreatic enzyme (p < 0.001) and vitamin (p < 0.001) therapies. In contrast, patients who adhered to their exercise regimen believed that they were in control of their disease to a greater extent than those who did not (p < 0.003). CONCLUSIONS: Worrying about cystic fibrosis and the perception of having little personal control over the disease facilitated treatment adherence. It is clear that patients perceive exercise therapy differently from other forms of treatment.
Towards an Automatic Diagnosis System for Acute Abdominal Pain - Support Vector Machines for the Diagnosis of Diverticulitis and Non-specific Abdominal Pain

The process of medical diagnosis is highly complex, and automatic decision support systems are appealing. In this study we investigate the feasibility of automating one such decision-making process, namely the diagnosis of patients seeking care for acute abdominal pain, and, specifically the diagnosis of acute diverticulitis. We used a linear support vector machine (SVM) to classify diverticulitis from all other reported cases of abdominal pain and from the important differential diagnosis non-specific abdominal pain (NSAP). Using a database containing 3 337 patients, the SVM obtained results comparable to those of the doctors. The distinction between diverticulitis and non-specific pain was substantially better for the SVM. Here the doctor achieved a sensitivity of 0.714 and a specificity of 0.963. When adjusted to the physicians results, the SVM sensitivity/specificity was higher at 0.714/0.985 and 0.786/0.963 respectively. Age was found as the most important factor for diagnosis, closely followed by C-reactive protein level and various pain indicators on the left hand side. Thus, the support vector machine is a promising tool in the diagnosis of acute abdominal pain.
Parenting Behaviors of Sleepy Parents: Associations with Emotion Regulation and Stress

OF DISSERTATION PARENTING BEHAVIORS OF SLEEPY PARENTS: ASSOCIATIONS WITH EMOTION REGULATION AND STRESS Over the last decade, the topic of sleep has garnered a great deal of interest from psychologists, due to the physiological, emotional, and behavioral outcomes associated with its deprivation. However, questions remain to be answered regarding sleep's influence in the day-to-day life of families. The current study examines the importance of sleep deprivation for parents’ parenting behaviors during problem solving discussions with their children; emotion regulation and stress reactivity are examined as mediators of these associations. Participants were 196 families with a child between the ages of 6-11. Parents filled out diaries for 7 days prior to their in-lab visit, reporting on their sleep quality and quantity. During the lab visit, parents participated individually in a 5-minute problem-solving task with their child. Parent respiratory sinus arrhythmia was attained throughout the interaction task and videos were recorded for later coding. Following the interaction, parents reported on their experiences of emotion during the task. Results supported the author’s hypothesis regarding the importance of parent emotional experience for parent changes in behavior. Stress reactivity and parent sleep, however, did not reveal significant associations to parenting practices. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
Carcinogenesis in rat esophagus by intraperitoneal injection of different doses of methyl-n-amylnitrosamine.

The carcinogenicity of methyl-n-amylnitrosamine in MRC-Wistar rats was determined after i.p. injection at a variety of dose schedules. After 6 weekly methyl-n-amylnitrosamine injections of 25 mg/kg or 12 weekly injections of either 12.5 or 25 mg/kg, the incidence of esophageal squamous cell papillomas was 85 to 100% and that of esophageal squamous cell carcinomas was 40 to 65%. With 12 injections, the mean survival time was 25 to 31 weeks. Treatment with 1 or 2 doses of 50 mg/kg produced a lesser incidence (less than 20%) of esophageal tumors, with a longer survival time of 67 to 77 weeks. One 85-mg/kg injection caused esophageal carcinomas in 5 of 7 rats. The treated groups also had squamous cell papillomas and carcinomas in the nasal cavity (up to 50% incidence) and trachea (up to 30% incidence). Hence, a 6- or 12-week treatment schedule was adequate for inducing esophageal tumors and could be used for studies on agents modifying esophageal tumor induction by methyl-n-amylnitrosamine.