Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Letter to the Editor Ciliary Hypoplasia: A Rare Cause of Ciliary Dyskinesia

Juan Luis Orradre, MD Servicio de Anatomı́a Patol ogica, Hospital Virgen de la Salud, Toledo, Spain Dear Sir, We have read with interest the report of Carlén and Stenram [1] about primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). We agree with the authors’ view that although there are many known ultrastructural abnormalities associated with PCD, there could be aberrations still not described. We want to report another unusual case of immotile cilia syndrome in line with the variant of partial aplasia identified in a single case of the 38 patients series described by Carlén and Stenram. An 11-year-old white boy was referred to our department from the regional Hospital Virgen de la Salud in Toledo. A clinical diagnosis of immotile cilia syndrome was suspected, based on a history of recurrent infections of the upper and lower airways since birth. Two separate biopsy specimens were taken from the surface of the inferior nasal turbinate. Both specimens were fixed in buffered glutaraldehyde and processed for electron microscopy. The apical cells showed normal appearance of microvilli but very few cilia, which, however, failed to show any internal architectural abnormalities (Figures 1 and 2). Although a variant of the immotile cilia syndrome characterized by complete ciliary aplasia has been reported previously [2], only a few cases have been communicated subsequently [3, 4] and it is even more uncommon to find features similar to the single case reported by Carlén and Stenram [1]. They described respiratory epithelium keeping elongated well-preserved microvilli but with only occasional normal cilia. This partial aplasia–hypoplasia is coincident with the alterations found in our case. We have studied 109 biopsy specimens of patients with suspected PCD, during a 10-year period in Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre. After ultrastructural examination, 27 showed the ultrastructural findings usually described in PCD, which included dynein arms abnormalities, absence of radial spokes, microtubular transposition, random ciliary orientation, lack of the central pair, and absence of nexin. This is the only case that showed ciliar aplasia–hypoplasia as the sole ultrastructural abnormality. As the clinical PCD phenotype is broad and often mimics other chronic airways diseases such as cystic fibrosis, asthma, or immunologic disorders we have to emphasize the need to identify the diverse ultrastructural Received 19 May 2006
School neighbourhood socio-economic status and teachers’ work commitment in Finland: longitudinal survey with register linkage

The extent to which school neighbourhood affects teachers’ work commitment is poorly known. In the current study, we investigated whether school neighbourhood socio-economic characteristics predicted teachers’ organizational and professional commitment. Primary school teachers (n = 1042) responded to surveys in 2000–2001 (baseline) and 2004 (follow-up). Their responses were linked to records of the school neighbourhood income and unemployment levels obtained from nationwide registers. Teachers working in areas with a high income level and low unemployment rate had longer job tenure and higher probability of organizational (school) commitment at follow-up compared to teachers working in areas with a low income level or high unemployment rate. Less consistent associations were found for professional commitment. These findings suggest that school neighbourhood characteristics may affect teachers’ work commitment, especially their organizational commitment. Further research is needed to determine whether this increases inequalities in children’s learning opportunities.
The Impact of Time and Economic Circumstances on Popular Evaluations of Russia's President

Building on the economic voting literature, the article hypothesizes that support for democratic reformers in a post-Soviet society can be expected to vary with economic conditions and also with where the country is in the transition process. Using a series of nine repeated surveys covering the time span from 1991 to 1999 in the Russian Federation, it tests both a reward-punishment hypothesis and a “price of reform” hypothesis. Among the best predictors of positive evaluations of President Yeltsin are time in the transition process (early in the process rather than late) and positive outlooks about the economic prospects for one's own family. Yet, political evaluation measures are found to have equal importance in understanding the dynamics of democratic support. In evaluating support for the opposition, the article finds that support for the Communist Party is directly related to negative economic evaluations, to experience with severe hardship, and to low monthly income.
The relationship of self-concept and social support to emotional distress among women during war.

Few studies have examined immediate stress resistance during massive crisis. In this paper, 56 Israeli women whose loved ones were mobilized into the Israeli Defence Forces were evaluated as to their coping resources and psychological distress during the first week of the June 1982 Israel—Lebanon conflict. Coping traits (self-esteem and mastery) were negatively related to psychological distress (state anxiety and state depression). These internal coping traits were seen as immediately available to individuals, despite the suddenness of the event. Contrary to predictions, social support was related to greater psychological distress. The unexpected findings for social support are attributed to a “pressure-cooker” effect, whereby war rumors were spread rapidly and women with more intimate relationships were more exposed to the sorrows of others. Alternatively, social support may have been adversive to women with high self-esteem who chose to master life challenges independently. The importance of studying im.
Privacy-Aware Mobile Services over Road Networks

Consider a mobile client who travels over roads and wishes to receive location-based services (LBS) from untrusted service providers. How might the user obtain such services without exposing her private position information? Meanwhile, how could the privacy protection mechanism incur no disincentive, e.g., excessive computation or communication cost, for any service provider or mobile user to participate in such a scheme? We detail this problem and present a general model for privacy-aware mobile services. A series of key features distinguish our solution from existing ones: a) it adopts the network-constrained mobility model (instead of the conventional random-waypoint model) to capture the privacy vulnerability of mobile users; b) it regards the attack resilience (for mobile users) and the query-processing cost (for service providers) as two critical measures for designing location privatization solutions, and provides corresponding analytical models; c) it proposes a robust and scalable location anonymization model, XStar, which best leverages the two measures; d) it introduces multi-folded optimizations in implementing XStar, which lead to further performance improvement. A comprehensive experimental evaluation is conducted to validate the analytical models and the efficacy of XStar.
What Keeps Teachers Going? And Other Thoughts on the Future of Public Education

I am a teacher. This is the profession I chose as a young child when I set up "school" on the stoop in front of our tenement building in Brooklyn, New York. Then, I was teacher to a raggedy crew of three-, four-, and five-year-olds, the only ones who would listen to a not-much-older child of ten, who even then was enamored of the idea of teaching. In my 35 years as a teacher, I have taught English, Spanish, reading, ESL, writing, mathematics, science, social studies, art, and even gym and French; I have taught in urban elementary and junior high schools, and in English, Spanish, and through both languages when I was a bilingual teacher. And, for the past 28 years, I have taught teachers. In this article, I explore the tension between the possibilities of public education, especially through the work of excellent teachers in urban schools, and the inherent limits placed on education by the sociopolitical context of society and schools. I also share a number of lessons I have learned as a teacher and teacher educator by focusing on three key questions: How has education been realized, especially in urban schools? What are the challenges that teachers face today, and how do they remain hopeful in spite of these challenges? and What can we learn from teachers who persevere? To address these questions, I review the research and teaching in which I have been engaged over the years, including my latest project, "What Keeps Teachers Going in Spite of Everything? "
Laminin and beta1 integrins are crucial for normal mammary gland development in the mouse.

We have examined the role of integrin-extracellular matrix interactions in the morphogenesis of ductal structures in vivo using the developing mouse mammary gland as a model. At puberty, ductal growth from terminal end buds results in an arborescent network that eventually fills the gland, whereupon the buds shrink in size and become mitotically inactive. End buds are surrounded by a basement membrane, which we show contains laminin-1 and collagen IV. To address the role of cell-matrix interactions in gland development, pellets containing function-perturbing anti-beta1 integrin, anti-alpha6 integrin, and anti-laminin antibodies respectively were implanted into mammary glands at puberty. Blocking beta1 integrins dramatically reduced both the number of end buds per gland and the extent of the mammary ductal network, compared with controls. These effects were specific to the end buds since the rest of the gland architecture remained intact. Reduced development was still apparent after 6 days, but end buds subsequently reappeared, indicating that the inhibition of beta1 integrins was reversible. Similar results were obtained with anti-laminin antibodies. In contrast, no effect on morphogenesis in vivo was seen with anti-alpha6 integrin antibody, suggesting that alpha6 is not the important partner for beta1 in this system. The studies with beta1 integrin were confirmed in a culture model of ductal morphogenesis, where we show that hepatocyte growth factor (HGF)-induced tubulogenesis is dependent on functional beta1 integrins. Thus integrins and HGF cooperate to regulate ductal morphogenesis. We propose that both laminin and beta1 integrins are required to permit cellular traction through the stromal matrix and are therefore essential for maintaining end bud structure and function in normal pubertal mammary gland development.
Evidence for the Presence of Chronic Inflammation during Peritoneal Dialysis: Therapeutic Implications

D peritoneal dialysis (PD), the peritoneal cavity is exposed continuously to solutions that, after instillation and an intraperitoneal dwell of varying length, are drained. Effluent dialysate contains peritoneal white blood cells and mesothelial cells desquamated from the surface of the peritoneum. The procedure of PD is highly unphysiological and results in various disturbances of intraperitoneal homeostasis. Morphological and functional studies reveal that both the morphology and the permeability of the peritoneum change during dialysis, and the intensity of these changes is proportional to the duration of dialysis (1,2). There is general agreement that the bioincompatibility of the solutions makes a significant contribution to peritoneal injury during dialysis. Various in vitro studies (3,4) have demonstrated the cytotoxicity of dialysis f luids due to the i r hyperosmolality or low pH and the simultaneous presence of lactate. However, we are beginning to understand that some of the injurious effects of the dialysis fluid on the peritoneum depend not on their acute actions but rather are a consequence of prolonged exposure of that membrane to these solutions. Glycosylation of the peritoneal proteins is a good example of such long-term toxicity of dialysis solutions that contain abundant amounts of glucose (5). Yamadaei ol. demonstrated glycosylated proteins in the peritoneum of nondiabetic continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) patients (6). Whether or not continuous PD initiates a state of chronic intraperitoneal inflammation has been debated since Beelenei al. described exudate and peroxidase-negative macrophages in the effluent from CAPD patients (7). It might seem unlikely that dialysis fluids, which strongly suppress the function of the
The Economic Burden of Meningitis to Households in Kassena-Nankana District of Northern Ghana

Objective To estimate the direct and indirect costs of meningitis to households in the Kassena-Nankana District of Ghana. Methods A Cost of illness (COI) survey was conducted between 2010 and 2011. The COI was computed from a retrospective review of 80 meningitis cases answers to questions about direct medical costs, direct non-medical costs incurred and productivity losses due to recent meningitis incident. Results The average direct and indirect costs of treating meningitis in the district was GH¢152.55 (US$101.7) per household. This is equivalent to about two months minimum wage earned by Ghanaians in unskilled paid jobs in 2009. Households lost 29 days of work per meningitis case and thus those in minimum wage paid jobs lost a monthly minimum wage of GH¢76.85 (US$51.23) due to the illness. Patients who were insured spent an average of GH¢38.5 (US$25.67) in direct medical costs whiles the uninsured patients spent as much as GH¢177.9 (US$118.6) per case. Patients with sequelae incurred additional costs of GH¢22.63 (US$15.08) per case. The least poor were more exposed to meningitis than the poorest. Conclusion Meningitis is a debilitating but preventable disease that affects people living in the Sahel and in poorer conditions. The cost of meningitis treatment may further lead to impoverishment for these households. Widespread mass vaccination will save households' an equivalent of GH¢175.18 (US$117) and impairment due to meningitis.
Fatigue behaviour of composite adhesive lap joints

This paper is concerned with a fatigue study of composite adhesive lap joints produced from a bi-directional woven E-glass fibres and polypropylene. The adhesive used was a Bostik 7452 (Rubber & Plastics Grade) ethyl cyanoacrylate type. The effects of layer orientation, lap joint length and water immersion on the fatigue behaviour were studied. The specimens were immersed in water during periods until ninety days for controlled temperatures of 20, 40 and 70 C. The results are presented in the form of curves of stress amplitude versus number of cycles to failure and also in the form of number of cycles to failure against time to exposure in water for fixed stress amplitudes. The fatigue damage and failure mechanisms were analysed and discussed. The joint shows that creep deformation within the temperature range of this study was probably the mainly cause of the dynamic stiffness reduction observed. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Time- and VLSI-Optimal Sorting on Enhanced Meshes

Sorting is a fundamental problem with applications in all areas of computer science and engineering. In this work, we address the problem of sorting on mesh connected computers enhanced by endowing each row and each column with its own dedicated high-speed bus. This architecture, commonly referred to as a mesh with multiple broadcasting, is commercially available and has been adopted by the DAP family of multiprocessors. Somewhat surprisingly, the problem of sorting m, (m/spl les/n), elements on a mesh with multiple broadcasting of size /spl radic/n/spl times//spl radic/n has been studied, thus far, only in the sparse case, where m/spl isin//spl Theta/(/spl radic/n) and in the dense case, where m/spl isin//spl Theta/O(/spl radic/n). Yet, many applications require using an existing platform of size /spl radic/n/spl times//spl radic/n for sorting m elements, with /spl radic/n<m/spl les/n. Our main contribution is to present the first known adaptive time- and VLSI-optimal sorting algorithm for meshes with multiple broadcasting. Specifically we show that, for every choice of a constant 0</spl epsiv//spl les/ 1/2 , it is possible to sort m elements, n/sup 1/2 +/spl epsiv///spl les/m/spl les/n, stored in the leftmost [m//spl radic/n] columns of a mesh with multiple broadcasting of size /spl radic/n/spl times//spl radic/n in /spl Theta/(m//spl radic/n) time.
Estimation of sparking voltage in high-temperature nitrogen gas present under a constant volume condition

Concerning an electrical breakdown of a high-temperature gas, theoretical calculations were carried out to obtain a sparking voltage from an ionization coefficient on the basis of the Townsend breakdown theory. The calculations were made for a nitrogen gas with a mass-density of 1.14 kg/m<sup>3</sup> under a constant volume, in consideration of a dissociation and an ionization reactions of N<sub>2</sub>. The calculation result for the sparking voltage V<sub>s</sub> showed that V<sub>s</sub> is 2.9 × 10<sup>4</sup> V at 300 K and also remains almost unchanged in a temperature range from 300 to 4000 K. The result also revealed that V<sub>s</sub> decreases from 2.9×10<sup>4</sup> to 1.3×10<sup>4</sup> V with the temperature from 4000 to 6000 K. This reduction in V<sub>s</sub> was found to arise from the production of N and to result from the lower ionization potential of N.
Absolute monocyte count predicts overall survival in mantle cell lymphomas: correlation with tumour‐associated macrophages

Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is characterized by a variable clinical course in which patients can experience indolent disease or frequent relapses despite a good initial response to conventional therapy. Risk stratification of MCL is most frequently performed using the MCL International Prognostic Index (MIPI). Recent studies indicate that the peripheral blood absolute monocyte count (AMC) and tumour‐associated macrophages may reflect the state of the tumour microenvironment in lymphomas. The significance of AMC and tumour‐associated macrophages in the clinical course of MCL is unknown. The prognostic impact of the AMC, of CD68 expression and of CD163 expression was retrospectively examined in 103 MCL samples using the receiver operating characteristic curved. Patients with an AMC ≥ 375 cells/μL at diagnosis were more likely to present with advanced‐stage disease (p = 0.026), leukocytosis (p < 0.001), lymphocytosis (p = 0.01) and granulocytosis (p = 0.003). On univariate analysis, a high AMC (≥375 cells/μL) correlated with poorer overall survival (OS) (p = 0.01). Neither CD68 nor CD163 expression was significantly associated with either OS or event‐free survival. Multivariate analysis showed that a high AMC was a prognostic factor for OS, independent of the MIPI [hazards ratio (HR), 1.811; 95% confidence interval, 1.018–3.223; p = 0.043]. This study demonstrates that the AMC at the time of diagnosis is an independent prognostic factor for OS in MCL, which suggests the possibility that AMC may be used in addition to the MIPI to predict outcome in patients with MCL. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
655Val and 1170Pro ERBB2 SNPs in Familial Breast Cancer Risk and BRCA1 Alterations

Human ERBB2 presents several SNPs. One of these, Ile655Val, introduces a structural change in the transmembrane region of ERBB2 and has been the focus of debate over its potential role as a susceptibility marker for breast cancer risk. Another SNP, Ala1170Pro, introduces a structural change in the carboxyl-terminal regulatory domain of the protein, but its clinical and biological importance remains undefined. The aim of this study was to investigate the association of rare alleles of both SNPs and the risk of developing breast cancer, BRCA1 alterations and clinical-pathological features of Caucasian breast cancer patients with familial history of breast/ovarian cancer. The originality of the present paper is that it is the only specifically focusing on the relationship between ERBB2 SNPs and familiarity/BRCA1 characteristics. A consecutive series of 628 patients with first diagnosis of breast cancer and 169 healthy people had DNA analyzed for both SNPs. Genotypic or allelic frequencies of ERBB2 SNPs in breast cancer patients were similar than in controls. The variant allele 655Val was significantly associated with younger age (p=0.009) particularly associated with patient family history of breast cancer (p=0.02). The 655Val allele was also more commonly found in invasive, while the variant 1170Pro in estrogen receptor positive breast cancers. Furthermore, this last SNP seems to be strictly associated with the presence of BRCA1 polymorphisms. In conclusion, these findings point to the existence of an association of ERBB2 allelic variants at both loci with specific breast tumor phenotypes and to the need of deeply investigate different gene SNPs association for risk defining.
Family Support through Childcare Services: Meeting the Needs of Asylum-seeking and Refugee Families

This article is a summary of the research carried out in relation to the experiences of asylum-seeking and refugee families regarding access and participation in local childcare services. Focus groups and interviews were carried out with 16 refugee and asylum-seeking parents, five childcare practitioners, and two support and development staff in a small, mainly rural county, in the northwest of Ireland. Following a review of the literature in relation to social networks, social capital and social support, the research was designed to establish the perceptions of service users as well as service providers. The findings showed that levels of isolation experienced by both refugee and asylum-seeking families, largely because of current policy provisions, had a significant impact on their ability to develop informal supports networks in their host community. Families found that the formal and informal networks provided through childcare services were sources of valuable support. Both service users and staff identified a number of challenges in meeting various needs and in providing culturally responsive services. Challenges identified by service users came from their living experiences in the direct provision system, and social exclusion experienced by both asylum-seeking and refugee families, such as the cost of childcare and isolation. Communication and language barriers present as a significant challenge for both service users and service providers.