Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Population Pharmacokinetic Analysis of Piperacillin/Tazobactam in Korean Patients with Acute Infections

Background For more effective and safer usage of antibiotics, the dosing strategy should be individualized based on the patients’ characteristics, including race. The aim of this study was to investigate the population pharmacokinetic (PK) profiles of piperacillin and tazobactam in Korean patients with acute infections. Materials and Methods At least four consecutive 2/0.25 g or 4/0.5 g doses of piperacillin/tazobactam (TZP) were intravenously infused over 1 h every 8 h for patients with creatinine clearance (CLcr) ≤50 ml/min or CLcr >50 mL/min, respectively. Blood samples from 33 patients at a steady-state were taken pre-dose and at 0 min, 30 min, and 4-6 h after the fourth infusion. The population PK analysis was conducted using a non-linear mixed-effects method. A likelihood ratio test was used to select significant covariates, with significance levels of P <0.05 for selection and P <0.01 for elimination. Results Both piperacillin PK and tazobactam PK were well described by a two-compartment model with first-order elimination. Creatinine clearance and body weight, as covariates on clearance (CL) and volume of central compartment (V1), were selected among the covariates possibly affecting PK parameters of both drugs. CL was defined as CL = 2.9 + 4.03 × CLcr /47 for piperacillin and CL = 1.76 + 4.81 × CLcr /47 for tazobactam. V1 was defined as V1 = 19.5 × weight/60 for piperacillin and V1 = 22.6 × weight/60 for tazobactam. Conclusion The PK profiles of TZP at a steady-state in Korean patients with acute infections were well described by a two-compartment model with first-order elimination. Both piperacillin and tazobactam clearances were significantly influenced by creatinine clearance.
Legendrian solid-torus links

Differential graded algebra invariants are constructed for Legendrian links in the 1-jet space of the circle. In parallel to the theory for R 3 , Poincare-Chekanov polynomials and characteristic al- gebras can be associated to such links. The theory is applied to dis- tinguish various knots, as well as links that are closures of Legendrian versions of rational tangles. For a large number of two-component links, the Poincare-Chekanov polynomials agree with the polynomials defined through the theory of generating functions. Examples are given of knots and links which differ by an even number of horizontal flypes that have the same polynomials but distinct characteristic algebras. Results ob- tainable from a Legendrian satellite construction are compared to results obtainable from the DGA and generating function techniques.
The Roles of Dopamine D 1 and D 2 Receptors in Working Memory Function

Dopamine has been implicated in the modulation of working memory via its interactions with circuits located in the prefrontal cortex of rodents and non-human primates. However, the role that pathways triggered by dopamine receptor subtypes play in affecting processes of working memory remains unclear. In humans, the evidence for dopaminergic modulation of working memory is controversial and the neurological substrates for dopamine’s modulatory effects are not fully understood. This paper will review the major animal and human studies that implicate synaptic dopaminergic transmission in working memory function and will outline a new framework to clarify the specific contribution of dopamine D2 receptors to the performance of this cognitive function. Specifically, it is proposed that activation of hippocampal dopamine D2 receptors by chemical agonists could result in the enhancement of spatial working memory.
Auditory Function and Speech Understanding in Listeners Who Qualify for EAS Surgery

Objective: For patients with relatively good low-frequency hearing and relatively poor high-frequency hearing, who met the pre-implant criteria for combined electric and acoustic stimulation (EAS), our aims were to i) assess deficits in low-frequency auditory function, ii) to identify measures which might be sensitive to changes resulting from the insertion of an intracochlear electrode array, and iii) to quantify the relationship between measures of auditory function and performance on tasks of speech and melody recognition. Design: Measures of frequency selectivity, temporal resolution, and nonlinear cochlear function, along with measures of word, sentence, consonant, vowel, and melody recognition, were obtained from 5 normal-hearing and 17 hearing-impaired listeners. The hearing-impaired listeners had auditory thresholds at 500 Hz, ranging from 20 to 60 dB HL, and thresholds at 1 kHz, ranging from 60 to 100 dB HL. Results: Nonlinear cochlear function was either reduced or absent. Frequency selectivity at 500 Hz was significantly reduced but still present in most patients. Temporal resolution, when measured at low modulation frequencies, was normal. Speech recognition in a modulated background revealed significantly poorer performance than normal. Speech and melody recognition varied over a large range. No measure of auditory function was correlated significantly with speech recognition. However, frequency selectivity was related to melody recognition. Conclusions: (1) Patients who qualify for EAS surgery have a wide range of speech and melody recognition abilities. (2) A number of the psychophysical measures tested may prove more sensitive than the audiogram in determining the degree of damage inflicted by the intracochlear electrode array. (3) Speech recognition was not correlated with any of the measures of auditory function.
The business of sexuality education : changing practice : the need for professional development

This paper reports on data collected from practicing sexuality education teachers following their participation in professional learning intervention in sexuality education. It explores whether the provision of effective professional development and classroom resources enables teachers to effectively address the sensitive issues of sexual diversity, gender and power. This paper reports on data collected from practicing sexuality education teachers following their participation in professional learning intervention in sexuality education. It explores whether the provision of effective professional development and classroom resources enables teachers to effectively address the sensitive issues of sexual diversity, gender and power.
The politics of privatisation: insights from the Central Asian university

The origins of this chapter lie in an informal discussion about the ‘crisis of the university’ organized for social scientists and humanities scholars who were participating in an Open Society Institute seminar from universities across post-Soviet Central Asia, the Caucuses and Afghanistan. The purpose of the seminar was to discuss what I had presumed would be shared experiences of ‘becoming academic’ in universities being transformed through the various policies of privatization and marketization that have come to dominate higher education reform both throughout the region and internationally. The discussion, however, evoked a more provocative decentring of some of the principal criticisms of privatized education now circulating within Anglo-European intellectual space, and a challenge to the transnational alter-education movement to clarify its critiques of privatisation and give texture to the alternative visions being produced. For, in circumstances where privately-owned and operated universities may appear to be the only institutional formations in which learning and knowledge production are not transmogrified through state control, wage poverty and petty corruption, arguments against privatization are harder to sustain at a superficial level. In Central Asian societies, liberal forms of privatized education are therefore often represented and experienced as viable means to eke out narrow forms of intellectual and professional autonomy, even while being recognized as repressive forces of de-professionalization, anti-intellectualism and inequality. This chapter begins from this tension to explore how specifically post-Soviet modalities of neoliberal restructuring amplify a dilemma faced by advocates of critical, public education in post-welfare societies around the world; namely, how to extricate education from dependencies on both managerialist states and the irrational vicissitudes of capitalist markets. It suggests that interrogating what privatization means in practice to educators across variegated spaces of neoliberalism, in particular its operations in relation to local traditions, systems and imaginaries, is vital for deepening our understanding of the situated nature and possibilities of alternatives and strengthening transnational movements for critical education.
The fasting metabolism of cattle

1. The metabolism of seventeen steers was determined on forty-nine occasions during fasts of either 112 or 136 h duration. 2. Faeces continued to be produced during fasts of up to 136 h duration at rates which were 15–20% of those noted before the fasts began. 3. Carbon dioxide production and oxygen consumption fell continuously throughout with animals weighing less than 200 kg but changed little after 88 h in animals weighing more than 200 kg. Methane production was considerably reduced during fasting but did not disappear. Urinary nitrogen excretion changed very little. Of the total loss of energy from the body, the loss of protein accounted for 25%. This was unaffected by age or size of animal. 4. With individual Ayrshire steers, metabolism increased during growth with body-weight raised to the power 0.68±0.05. No greater precision of estimate was obtained from logarithmic regressions of metabolism on body-weight than from linear ones. 5. Seven Ayrshire steers had a mean fasting metabolism of 100±1.6 kcal/kg W0.73 24 h, eight Black cattle of the Aberdeen Angus type a fasting metabolism of 81±1.5 kcal/kg W0.73 24 h and two Ayrshire x Beef Shorthorn steers a fasting metabolism of 96±2.9 kcal/kg W0.73 24 h. Variation in the fasting metabolism of an individual steer from time to time, expressed as a coefficient of variation, was ±7.4%. 6. The results are discussed in relation to interspecies generalizations about the relation between fasting metabolism and body-weight.
An Overview of the Research on Plant Leaves Disease detection using Image Processing Techniques

Diseases in plants cause major production and economic losses as well as reduction in both quality and quantity of agricultural products. Now a day's plant diseases detection has received increasing attention in monitoring large field of crops. Farmers experience great difficulties in switching from one disease control policy to another. The naked eye observation of experts is the traditional approach adopted in practice for detection and identification of plant diseases. In this paper we review the need of simple plant leaves disease detection system that would facilitate advancements in agriculture. Early information on crop health and disease detection can facilitate the control of diseases through proper management strategies. This technique will improves productivity of crops. This paper also compares the benefits and limitations of these potential methods. It includes several steps viz. image acquisition, image pre-processing, features extraction and neural network based classification.
Volatility, Volume and Pricing Efficiency in the Stock Index Futures Market When the Underlying Cash Market Does Not Trade

This paper presents an event study of the trading of Hang Seng Index (HSI) futures contracts on the Hong Kong Futures Exchange (HKFE) after it begins to open fifteen minutes earlier and close fifteen minutes later than the underlying cash market, the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK) in November 1998. The empirical results show that the extension of trading hours in the HKFE causes futures traders to shift their orders from other sessions of the day to the first 15-minute trading session preceding the opening in cash market. However, the increase in trading volume during the opening session does not bring any corresponding upsurge in return volatility. Instead, futures returns during the opening session are found to be relatively less volatile than before. In addition, the futures contract opening prices appear to have little change (or even reduction) in pricing errors when compared with the pre-extension period. These observations suggest that trading activities during the extended opening session of the futures market are dominated by the better-informed traders which help to speed up the price discovery process in the market. On the other hand, there are no notable changes in return volatility, trading volume and pricing efficiency in the last 15-minute trading session of the HKFE during the post-extension period.
Low-drag events in transitional wall-bounded turbulence

Intermittency of low-drag pointwise wall shear stress measurements within Newtonian turbulent channel flow at transitional Reynolds numbers (friction Reynolds numbers 70 – 130) is characterized using experiments and simulations. Conditional mean velocity profiles during low-drag events closely approach that of a recently discovered nonlinear traveling wave solution; both profiles are near the so-called maximum drag reduction profile, a general feature of turbulent flow of liquids containing polymer additives (despite the fact that all results presented are for Newtonian fluids only). Similarities between temporal intermittency in small domains and spatiotemporal intermittency in large domains is thereby found.
Modal Decomposition on Nondeterministic Probabilistic Processes

We propose a SOS-based method for decomposing modal formulae for nondeterministic probabilistic processes. The purpose is to reduce the satisfaction problem of a formula for a process to verifying whether its subprocesses satisfy certain formulae obtained from its decomposition. By our decomposition, we obtain (pre)congruence formats for probabilistic bisimilarity, ready similarity and similarity.
Comparing live to recorded music and stories using multiple psychoneuroendocrine and psychological measures

ii Acknowledgements . iv TABLE OF CONTENTS . v List of Tables . xi List of Figures . xi Abbreviations . xv Dedication . xviii Prelude . xix Overture . 1 Chapter 1: THEMATIC EXPOSITION A Review of the Literature . 4 Music and the arts as therapeutic tools . 5 Music in history . 5 Arts and science . 6 Engagement with the creative arts. 6 Music therapy and music in medicine . 8 What is music? 10 A Westernised perspective . 10 A more functional perspective . 11 Multimodal complexities . 11 Meaningful, structured and patterned sound . 12 Characteristics of music . 13 Musical structure . 13 Rhythm and tempo . 14
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON FIRM-BANK RELATIONSHIPS IN THE G-8 COUNTRIES

This study sets out to explore the relationships between the banking and night-industry types of nonbanking sectors of the G8 over the years of 1994-2004â€”before the Kyoto Protocol was enacted in 2005. Our findings show that these relationships are still conditional upon the financial structure of these countries, including financial systems, regulations on banking activities, bank competition and the protection of the rights of creditors. By extending the Shen and Huang (2003) approach into different industries, this study provides additional information on firm-bank relationships among nine major industries with a longer period analysis. Bank concentrations intensify firm-bank relationships; that is, improving the banking sector through an overall increase in bank concentration can help to improve the performance of the non-banking sector. A bank-based system mitigates the relationship between bank performance and firm performance by bringing the inter-temporal smoothing function into operation. Unlike separated banks, universal banks tend to intensify the relationship between the performance of the firms and the banks as mere myopic investors. One rather unexpected result is the finding that this relationship is intensified by the existence of appropriate methods of protection for the rights of creditors.
SCOPE: An Efficient One Pass Approach to Find Strongly Correlated Item Pairs

This paper presents an efficient one pass technique, SCOPE (strongly correlated item pairs extraction), which finds all the strongly correlated item pairs from transaction database, without generating any candidate sets. We experimented with real and synthetic datasets and compared the performance of SCOPE with its other counterparts i.e. TAPER and TCP and found satisfactory.
The Morphology of M17-UC1: A Disk Candidate Surrounding a Hypercompact H II Region

We investigate the morphology and the evolutionary stage of the hypercompact H II region M17-UC1 using observations at infrared wavelengths and NIR radiative transfer modeling. For the first time, this region is resolved into two emission areas separated by a dark lane reminiscent of an obscuring silhouette caused by a circumstellar disk. So far, the observational data as well as model calculations suggest that M17-UC1 is surrounded by a disk of cool dust. This direct detection of a circumstellar disk candidate around a hypercompact H II region is in agreement with the expectations of the disk accretion model for high-mass star formation.
An overview of ACE‐Asia: Strategies for quantifying the relationships between Asian aerosols and their climatic impacts

[1] The International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Program (IGAC) has conducted a series of Aerosol Characterization Experiments (ACE) that integrate in situ measurements, satellite observations, and models to reduce the uncertainty in calculations of the climate forcing due to aerosol particles. ACE-Asia, the fourth in this series of experiments, consisted of two focused components: (1) An intensive field study that sought to quantify the spatial and vertical distribution of aerosol concentrations and properties, the processes controlling their formation, evolution, and fate, and the column-integrated radiative effect of the aerosol (late March through May 2001). (2) A longer-term network of ground stations that used in situ and column-integrated measurements to quantify the chemical, physical, and optical properties of aerosols in the ACE-Asia study area and to assess their spatial and temporal (seasonal and interannual) variability (2000–2003). The approach of the ACE-Asia science team was to make simultaneous measurements of aerosol chemical, physical, and optical properties and their radiative impacts in a variety of air masses, often coordinated with satellite overpasses. Three aircraft, two research ships, a network of lidars, and many surface sites gathered data on Asian aerosols. Chemical transport models (CTMs) were integrated into the program from the start, being used in a forecast mode during the intensive observation period to identify promising areas for airborne and ship observations and then later as tools for integrating observations. The testing and improvement of a wide range of aerosol models (including microphysical, radiative transfer, CTM, and global climate models) was one important way in which we assessed our understanding of the properties and controlling processes of Asian aerosols. We describe here the scientific goals and objectives of the ACE-Asia experiment, its observational strategies, the types of observations made by the mobile platforms and stationary sites, the models that will integrate our understanding of the climatic effect of aerosol particles, and the types of data that have been generated. Eight scientific questions focus the discussion. The intensive observations took place during a season of unusually heavy dust, so we have a large suite of observations of dust and its interaction with air pollutants. Further information about ACE-Asia can be found on the project Web site at http://saga.pmel. noaa.gov/aceasia/.
3-D mesh representation and retrieval using Isomap manifold

We propose a compact 3D object representation scheme that can greatly assist the search/retrieval process in a network environment. A 3D mesh-based object is transformed into a new coordinate frame by using the Isomap (isometric feature mapping) method. During the transformation process, not only the structure of the salient parts of an object will be kept, but also the geometrical relationships will be preserved. From the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, the data distributed on the Isomap manifold can be regarded as a set of significant features of a 3D mesh-based object. To perform efficient matching, we project the Isomap domain 3D object onto two different 2D maps, and the two 2D feature descriptors are used as the basis to measure the degree of similarity between two 3D mesh-based objects. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method in retrieving similar 3D models is very effective. Most importantly, the proposed 3D mesh retrieval scheme is still valid even if a 3D mesh undergoes a mesh simplification process.
LFTF: A Framework for Efficient Tensor Analytics at Scale

Tensors are higher order generalizations of matrices to model multi-aspect data, e.g., a set of purchase records with the schema (user_id, product_id, timestamp, feedback). Tensor factorization is a powerful technique for generating a model from a tensor, just like matrix factorization generates a model from a matrix, but with higher accuracy and richer information as more attributes are available in a higher- order tensor than a matrix. The data model obtained by tensor factorization can be used for classification, recommendation, anomaly detection, and so on. Though having a broad range of applications, tensor factorization has not been popularly applied compared with matrix factorization that has been widely used in recommender systems, mainly due to the high computational cost and poor scalability of existing tensor factorization methods. Efficient and scalable tensor factorization is particularly challenging because real world tensor data are mostly sparse and massive. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm, called Lock-Free Tensor Factorization (LFTF), which significantly improves the efficiency and scalability of distributed tensor factorization by exploiting asynchronous execution in a re-formulated problem. Our experiments show that LFTF achieves much higher CPU and network throughput than existing methods, converges at least 17 times faster and scales to much larger datasets.
Mutual Synthesis of Combined Microwave Circuits Applied to the Design of a Filter-Antenna Subsystem

A mutual-synthesis approach is presented for the design of subsystems combining two microwave circuits. In this paper, we are focused on subsystems combining a filter and an antenna. In a first step, the methodology consists of synthesizing the global subsystem, which realizes both filtering and radiation functions, with respect to overall specifications. Considering circuits interactions within the subsystem, the resulting constraints are distributed optimally between the two circuits. The latter mutual synthesis then leads, on one hand, to a set of optimal impedances for their connection and, on the other hand, to the corresponding ideal characteristics of each circuit. A solution can then be selected by carrying out a compromise between the simplicity of achieving the characteristics of each circuit and the performances and compactness of the subsystem. In a second step, the circuits are designed independently with respect to the synthesized characteristics. Compared to a classical synthesis approach, where circuits are synthesized independently with respect to a common reference impedance (generally 50 or 75 Omega), the proposed mutual synthesis allows to simplify the global subsystem since interactions between the two circuits are considered and used optimally. The technique is illustrated with the design of a filter-antenna at Ku-band.