Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Mediating Role of Temporal Considerations on the Effects of Self-Affirmation on Responses to Organ Donation Messages

ABSTRACT Previous self-affirmation research has shown that individuals who are allowed to reflect on their values and self-worth are less likely to exhibit message derogation and are more likely to accept risk information and change their behaviors compared to those who are not. However, the underlying mechanisms for the effect are unclear. Based on a randomized experiment (N = 331), we examined the mediating role of temporal considerations in participants’ health-related cognitions and emotional responses. We found that self-affirmed participants (vs. not affirmed) were more likely to consider future consequences, which in turn was positively associated with message evaluation, attitudes toward organ donation, anticipated guilt for not registering as donors, and donor registration efficacy. Both theoretical and practical implications were discussed.
The Generation Effect and Source Memory

Superior memory performance for self-generated items compared to read or simply perceived items is called the positive generation effect, whereas the reverse pattern is called the negative generation effect. For item memory tasks, a positive generation effect typically occurs (cf., Slamecka & Graf, 1978). In contrast to this, no clear picture exists as to whether a positive or a negative generation effect is bound to emerge for source memory of perceptual attributes, due to empirical evidence for both outcomes. Therefore, the two lines of research investigated in the course of the present dissertation deal with the generation effect and source memory. They aim to shed light on present inconsistencies and contradictions as well as to illuminate unanswered questions. In the first line of research, I addressed the role of the processing of perceptual attributes and of the processing of internal states in memory for the degree of completeness. In the second line of research, I investigated the role of increased conceptual processing for the memory of presentation colour, for which a negative generation effect has been found consistently (e.g., Mulligan, 2004; Mulligan, Lozito, and Rosner, 2006; Riefer et al., 2007). All data were achieved in laboratory experiments and were analysed using the multinomial processing tree model for crossed source dimensions (Meiser & Broder, 2002). I conclude (a) that self-reference plays a critical role for generation effect studies when attempting to investigate source memory and (b) that conceptual and perceptual processing play a less critical role than assumed – results could rather be interpreted as evidence in favour of a more general account involving visual and non-visual processing.
Robotic platform for telerehabilitation studies based on unity game engine

In this paper we present a robotic platform and a computer game designed to evaluate cooperative bilateral telerehabilitation approaches. The virtual environment was developed using the Unity Game Engine in order to create a deep immersion to the patients. In a cooperative bilateral telerehabilitation system, two or more patients (or patients and therapists) interact with each other through the graphical environment of the game, with direct transmission of forces between the robots. In this case, one player feels the motion performed by the other player through the force transmission between the robots. Three telerehabilitation approaches are evaluated: the symmetrical PD strategy, the teleoperator based on wave variables, and the virtual model-based teleoperator. Experimental results for the three approaches are presented using a bilateral one degree of freedom robotic system.
Persistent Spatial Information in the Frontal Eye Field during Object-Based Short-Term Memory

Spatial attention is known to gate entry into visual short-term memory, and some evidence suggests that spatial signals may also play a role in binding features or protecting object representations during memory maintenance. To examine the persistence of spatial signals during object short-term memory, the activity of neurons in the frontal eye field (FEF) of macaque monkeys was recorded during an object-based delayed match-to-sample task. In this task, monkeys were trained to remember an object image over a brief delay, regardless of the locations of the sample or target presentation. FEF neurons exhibited visual, delay, and target period activity, including selectivity for sample location and target location. Delay period activity represented the sample location throughout the delay, despite the irrelevance of spatial information for successful task completion. Furthermore, neurons continued to encode sample position in a variant of the task in which the matching stimulus never appeared in their response field, confirming that FEF maintains sample location independent of subsequent behavioral relevance. FEF neurons also exhibited target-position-dependent anticipatory activity immediately before target onset, suggesting that monkeys predicted target position within blocks. These results show that FEF neurons maintain spatial information during short-term memory, even when that information is irrelevant for task performance.
Heightened Beta EEG Activity During Nonrapid Eye Movement Sleep in Primary Insomnia Patients With Reports of Childhood Maltreatment

Summary: The present study explores the relationship between childhood maltreatment experiences and spectral power in high-frequency EEG activity during sleep in a sample of adults experiencing primary insomnia. Forty-five nontreated patients with primary insomnia spent three consecutive nights in the sleep laboratory, during which polysomnographic recordings were carried out. Nonrapid eye movement and rapid eye movement EEG data were analyzed using spectral analysis. In addition, each participant completed several self-report questionnaires assessing maltreatment in childhood and adolescence, current level of stress, and current depressivity. Insomnia patients with self-reported history of moderate to severe childhood maltreatment (MAL group; n = 25), as measured by the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, were compared with insomnia patients without such a history (non-MAL group; n = 20). The MAL group exhibited more absolute and relative beta 1 and beta 2 power in nonrapid eye movement sleep and more absolute beta 1 and beta 2 activity in rapid eye movement sleep than the non-MAL group. Contrary to hypothesis, no group differences were found in gamma frequency band. The results suggest an association between history of childhood maltreatment and increased beta EEG activity particularly during nonrapid eye movement sleep in adult insomnia, what may reflect heightened psychophysiologic arousal during sleep.
The Association between Polyclonal Combined Serum Free Light Chain Concentration and Mortality in Individuals with Early Chronic Kidney Disease

A major component of increased mortality risk in people with chronic kidney disease (CKD) is associated with non-traditional cardiovascular risk factors including markers of inflammation. We studied whether a novel marker of systemic inflammation, elevated serum combined polyclonal immunoglobulin free light chains (cFLC), was an independent risk factor for increased all-cause mortality in people with CKD stage 3. In a prospective community based cohort study, 1695 participants with stage 3 CKD and no cases of monoclonal gammopathy had cFLC concentrations measured. cFLC levels were determined using the summation of Freelite kappa and lambda assays. All other bioclinical variables were collected at the time of sample collection. Kaplan-Meier plots and Cox proportional hazards analysis was used to assess the relationship between high cFLC levels (>43.3 mg/L) and mortality. There were 167 deaths (10%) after a median of 1375 days. cFLC levels at recruitment were higher in participants who died compared with those who were alive at the end of the study; median: 46.5 mg/L (IQR: 36.1-65.4 mg/L) and 35.4 mg/L (28.1-46.6 mg/L) respectively, P <0.001. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis demonstrated participants with cFLC >43.3 mg/L levels had an increased risk of mortality compared to people with normal cFLC levels (P <0.001). Elevated cFLC levels were independently associated with worse survival (Hazard ratio: 1.50; 95% confidence interval: 1.04-2.16; P=0.03). Other independent risk factors for worse survival were: older age, male gender, previous cardiovascular event, lower eGFR and higher high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP). To conclude, high cFLC levels predict increased mortality in people with stage 3 CKD, independent of established risk factors and other markers of inflammation.
The nature of medical evidence and its inherent uncertainty for the clinical consultation: qualitative study

Abstract Objective To describe how clinicians deal with the uncertainty inherent in medical evidence in clinical consultations. Design Qualitative study. Setting Clinical consultations related to hormone replacement therapy, bone densitometry, and breast screening in seven general practices and three secondary care clinics in the UK NHS. Participants Women aged 45-64. Results 45 of the 109 relevant consultations included sufficient discussion for analysis. The consultations could be categorised into three groups: focus on certainty for now and this test, with slippage into general reassurance; a coherent account of the medical evidence for risks and benefits, but blurring of the uncertainty inherent in the evidence and giving an impression of certainty; and acknowledging the inherent uncertainty of the medical evidence and negotiating a provisional decision. Conclusion Strategies health professionals use to cope with the uncertainty inherent in medical evidence in clinical consultations include the use of provisional decisions that allow for changing priorities and circumstances over time, to avoid slippage into general reassurance from a particular test result, and to avoid the creation of a myth of certainty.
Adverse events of low- to medium-dose oral glucocorticoids in inflammatory diseases: a meta-analysis

Objectives: To systematically analyse the literature on reported adverse events of low- to medium-dose glucocorticoids during ⩾1 month for inflammatory diseases. Methods: Data were systematically retrieved and selected from PUBMED, EMBASE and CINAHL databases (6097 hits). Results: A total of 28 studies (2382 patients) met the inclusion criteria. The risk of adverse events over all studies was 150 per 100 patient-years (95% confidence interval (CI) 132 to 169). Psychological and behavioural adverse events (eg, minor mood disturbances) were most frequently reported, followed by gastrointestinal events (eg, dyspepsia, dysphagia). In 14 studies comprising 796 patients with rheumatoid arthritis the risk of adverse events was 43/100 patient-years (95% CI 30 to 55), in 4 studies of 167 patients with polymyalgia rheumatica the risk of adverse events was 80/100 patient-years (95% CI 15 to146), and in 10 studies of 1419 patients with inflammatory bowel disease the risk of adverse events was 555/100 patient-years (95% CI 391 to 718). High rates of adverse events were reported in high-quality studies with short follow-up, notably in studies of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Conclusions: The risk of adverse events depends on study design and disease. Studies on inflammatory bowel disease were often of short duration with frequent documentation of adverse events which resulted in higher adverse event rates whereas, in studies of rheumatoid arthritis, the longer follow-up may have resulted in lower adverse event rates. In most studies aimed at efficacy of glucocorticoids or other drugs, adverse events were not systematically assessed. Clear guidelines on assessment of adverse events are lacking.
Alfvén polar oscillations of relativistic stars

We study polar Alfven oscillations of relativistic stars endowed with a strong global poloidal dipole magnetic field. Here, we focus only on the axisymmetric oscillations which are studied by numerically evolving the two-dimensional perturbation equations. Our study shows that the spectrum of the polar Alfven oscillations is discrete in contrast to the spectrum of axial Alfven oscillations which is continuous. We also show that the typical fluid modes, such as the f and p modes, are not significantly affected by the presence of the strong magnetic field.
Delinquency and Violence Among Girls

Community leaders, policymakers, educators, funding agencies, and the public have begun to recognize that youth delinquency and violence is a complex public health problem in this country (Dahlberg, 1998; Snyder & Sickmund, 1999; Thornton, Craft, Dahlberg, Lynch, & Baer, 2000). Embedded within the public health concerns surrounding youth delinquency and violence, the last decade has witnessed the increasing involvement of girls in more serious and violent crimes. Consequently, girls have been more visible in the juvenile justice system and have been entering the system at younger ages. Catholic educational leaders exercise an important ministry in this area, espousing a holistic philosophy in a faith-based setting to support at-risk youth. As communities, schools, practitioners, and families continue to grapple with female juvenile delinquency, this review sheds light on several critical aspects of the issue by providing a statistical overview based on national data, characteristics of female offenders, risk factors for girls' delinquency, and promising approaches for intervention.
Malnutrition in long-term haemodialysis survivors.

BACKGROUND Long survival is now common in patients with end-stage renal disease owing to improvement in dialysis techniques and kidney transplantation. As malnutrition is commonly reported in dialysis patients, we evaluated the nutritional status of patients treated with haemodialysis (HD) for more than 20 years. METHODS Ten patients (59.5 years old; 4F/6M; HD treatment for 304 months; group A) underwent an extensive nutritional examination and were compared to a control group of 10 patients treated with HD for an average of 51 months and strictly matched for age (58.6 years old), gender, and height (group B). The patients were treated on a similar basis (long-duration HD, cellulosic membranes, Daugirdas index >2). RESULTS The body weight (BW) in group A had decreased gradually from the 11th year of HD treatment, whereas it had increased by an average of 1.9+/-4.4% since the beginning of the HD treatment in group B. The body mass index (BMI) was lower in group A (19.3 +/- 2.3 vs 21.4 +/- 2.8 kg/m(2); P = 0.05). The arm-muscle circumference (AMC), the arm-muscle area (AMA), and triceps skinfold (TSF) were lower in group A than in group B. The fat mass assessed with anthropometry (10.8 +/- 4.0 vs 14.8 +/- 4.2 kg) was significantly lower in group A. The deviation of actual BW from ideal BW (IBW) was significantly lower in group A than in group B (80.6 +/- 10.7% vs 89.6 +/- 9.0%; P = 0.028); The deviations of actual BW, TSF, and AMA from standard values of the NHANES II study were more marked in group A than in group B. On the other hand, daily energy and protein intakes (DEI and DPI) were identical in both groups and met the recommendations for dialysis patients when normalized to the actual BW. When normalized to the IBW, the DEI appeared low. Energy expenditure was not different between groups, and not different from the resting metabolism calculated from the Harris and Benedict formula. Average albumin, prealbumin, and IgF-1 were normal and not different between groups. Branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), and especially leucine, were correlated with BMI in group A but not in group B. Serum total and free carnitine were low in both groups. Three patients had ascorbic acid deficiency in group A but none in group B. CONCLUSIONS Hence, despite adequate dialysis dose and protein intake, patients treated with HD for a long period of time became malnourished, whereas the classical nutritional markers remained in normal ranges. Among the potential causes leading to malnutrition, inadequate energy intake and micronutrient deficiencies were found in these patients.
The role of afterglow break-times as gamma-ray burst jet angle indicators

The early X-ray light curve of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is complex, and shows a typical steep-flat-steep behaviour. The time T a at which the flat (plateau) part ends may bear some important physical information, especially if it plays the same role of the so called jet break-time t jet· To this aim, stimulated by the recent analysis of Willingale et al., we have assembled a sample of GRBs of known redshifts, spectral parameters of the prompt emission, and T a· By using T a as a jet angle indicator, and then estimating the collimation-corrected prompt energetics, we find a correlation between the latter quantity and the peak energy of the prompt emission. However, this correlation has a large dispersion, similar to the dispersion of the Amati correlation and it is not parallel to the Ghirlanda correlation. Furthermore, we show that the correlation itself results mainly from the dependence of the jet opening angle on the isotropic prompt energy, with the time Ta playing no role, contrary to what we find for the jet break-time t jet· We also find that for the bursts in our sample T a weakly correlates with E γ,so of the prompt emission, but that this correlation disappears when considering all bursts of known redshift and T a· There is no correlation between Ta and the isotropic energy of the plateau phase.
Defending Against XML-Based Attacks Using State-Based XML Firewall

With the proliferation of service-oriented systems and cloud computing, web services security has gained much attention in recent years. Web service attacks, called XML-based attacks, typically occur at the SOAP message level, thus they are not readily handled by existing security mechanisms such as a conventional firewall. In order to provide effective security mechanisms for service-oriented systems, XML firewalls have recently been introduced as one of the major means for web services security. In this paper, we present a framework for state-based XML firewall, called S-Wall, which supports dynamic role-based access control (D-RBAC) and detection of XML-based attacks in real-time. We provide a detailed design of the S-Wall security model by defining state-based information, user information, access control policies, and detection and verification (D&V) rules. The D&V rules are modularized into separate units, which support real-time detection and verification of various types of attacks using state-based information. To illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we develop a prototype S-Wall, and utilize a case study to demonstrate how S-Wall can be used to efficiently detect and defend against XML-based attacks.
Mothers in the Corridors of the South African Legal System: An Assessment of the Johannesburg Family Court Pilot Project

In emerging nations and nationalisms, motherhood has historically operated as a strong symbol anchoring the 'nationalist imaginary'. 1 Indeed, the march by thousands of women to the Union buildings to protest pass laws at the height of apartheid oppression became a powerful symbol of the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Not coincidentally, the fact that many of those women were mothers was central to the power of that symbolism. That motherhood is venerated in African communities is trite, and South Africa is no exception.
Supporting Assumption-Based Reasoning in a Distributed Environment

Within the pede project we investigate the generation and execution of plans in distributed environments. As our approach is based on multi-agent systems with some or all agents performing assumption-based reasoning, we ran into the distributed belief revision problem. In order to build planning and executing agents that are able to safely perform their tasks in a highly dynamic environment, a mechanism to support the revision of decisions is required. Reason maintenance techniques are a standard approach to solve this problem, but currently available technology for the distributed case has proven inadequate for the pede domain. The new architecture presented in this paper { darms { is a true extension of deKleer's atms to multi-agent scenarios and provides exible support for revisable reasoning in distributed environments. The pede 1 project studies techniques to improve the eecient generation and fail-safe execution of plans in distributed, highly dynamic environments. In a pede domain, we typically have several planning agents (planners) and a potentially large number of executing agents (executers), for instance humans, machines, robots, and autonomous transport devices. The decisions made by planners as well as the actions performed by the executers depend on the planners' knowledge of the world state at planning time (e.g. delivery dates for parts) and on information communicated by other agents (e.g. availability of machines, tools, or parts at a speciic place at a particular time). Furthermore, many planners must make assumptions about future states of the world in order to make planning decisions. If the world state changes in an unexpected way, or an information-providing agent revises its information, or assumptions made at planning time do not hold at execution time, plans will not be safely executable and the executers will run into failure. To ensure safe execution of plans, planners need to revise their decisions as soon as changes to the underlying planning decisions become known and to propagate the eeects to other agents. Without taking special measures, an agent updating information and revising its decisions does not know whether the changes aaect any other agents, what other agents are aaected and how
Fasting Plasma C-Peptide and Micro- and Macrovascular Complications in a Large Clinic-Based Cohort of Type 1 Diabetic Patients

OBJECTIVE—A protective effect of residual β-cell function on microvascular complications of type 1 diabetes has been suggested. Our aim was to retrospectively evaluate the association of fasting plasma C-peptide values with micro- and macrovascular complications. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—We recruited a clinic-based cohort of 471 type 1 diabetic patients born after 1945 and cared for in the period 1994–2004. Centralized measurements and standardized procedures of ascertainment of micro- and macrovascular complications were employed. Individual cumulative averages of A1C up to 2007 were calculated. RESULTS—Residual β-cell secretion was detected even many years after diabetes diagnosis. In multivariate linear regression analysis, fasting plasma C-peptide values were positively associated with age at diagnosis (β = 0.02; P < 0.0001) and triglycerides (β = 0.20; P = 0.05) and inversely associated with diabetes duration (β = −0.03; P < 0.0001) and HDL cholesterol (β = −0.006; P = 0.03). The final model explained 21% of fasting C-peptide variability. With respect to fasting C-peptide values in the lowest tertile (<0.06 nmol/l), higher values were associated with lower prevalence of microvascular complications (odds ratio [OR] 0.59 [95% CI 0.37–0.94]) independently of age, sex, diabetes duration, individual cumulative A1C average during the study period, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. No association was evident with macrovascular complications (0.77 [0.38–1.58]). CONCLUSIONS—Our study shows an independent protective effect of residual β-cell function on the development of microvascular complications in type 1 diabetes, suggesting the potential beneficial effect of treatment that allows the preservation of even modest β-cell function over time.