Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Correction: Patients' Global Ratings of Their Health Care Are Not Associated with the Technical Quality of Their Care

Correction An article on patients' global ratings of health care (1) contained errors. Figure 2 and Figure 3 and their accompanying legends were incorrect; the corrected figures are shown here (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The last sentence before the heading Logistic Regression Analysis on page 669 should have read, Patients' global ratings of health care were not correlated with technical quality of care (Figure 2) but were more closely related to ratings for communication (Figure 3). In the last paragraph of the Discussion section on page 671, the second sentence should have read, Technical quality of care and reports about interpersonal quality of care seem to be separate domains, and patients' global ratings of health relate only to the latter. Dr. Wenger's primary affiliation is with the University of California, Los Angeles, not RAND. Figure 1. Relationship of patient global rating of care to technical quality of care. Each dot represents a data point for a participant. To help visualize overlapping data points, a small amount of random jitter is added to each global care rating so that patients with identical ratings on both scales are not superimposed. Figure 2. Relationship of patient global rating of care to patient report about provider communication. Each dot represents a data point for a participant. To help visualize overlapping data points, a small amount of random jitter is added to each global care rating so that patients with identical ratings on both scales are not superimposed.
Fire‐induced changes in soil water repellency increased fingered flow and runoff rates following the 2004 Huelva wildfire

Water repellency (WR) from fire‐affected soils can affect infiltration processes and increase runoff rates. We investigated the effects of fire‐induced changes in soil WR and the related soil hydrological response after one of the largest wildfires in Spain in recent years. The vertical distribution of WR in soil profiles was studied under oak and pine forests and the wetting pattern was analysed after rainfall simulations (85 mm h−1 during 60 min). After burning, the persistence of WR in soils under oaks increased in the upper 0–5 cm of soil in comparison with pre‐fire WR, but no significant changes were observed under pines. After a fire, WR was stronger and the thickness of the water‐repellent layer increased in soils under pines in the upper 0–16 cm of soil. The hydrophobic layer was thinner under oaks, where no strong to extremely water‐repellent samples were observed below 12 (in burnt soils) and 8 cm (in unburnt soils). Uniform wetting was observed through soil depth in burnt and unburnt soils under oaks, as a consequence of the prevailing matrix flux infiltration. Water was mostly stored in the upper few centimetres and soil became rapidly saturated, favouring a continuous rise in the runoff rate during the experiments. Moisture profiles under pines showed a heterogeneous wetting pattern, with highly irregular wetting fronts, as a result of wettable and water‐repellent three‐dimensional soil patches. In this case, runoff rates on burnt plots increased in relation to unburnt plots, but runoff generation reached a steady state after 25–30 min of simulated rainfall at an intensity of 85 mm h−1. Rainfall water infiltrated over a small part of the ponded area, where the vertical pressure of the water column overcame the WR. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Satellite measurements of large-scale air pollution - Measurements of forest fire smoke

The transport, optical properties, total mass, and removal of smoke produced by forest fires in western Canada during late July and early August 1982 are studied using NOAA 7 Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data. Color composite imagery is produced to track the movement of the smoke over Canada and the United States as the smoke traveled thousands of kilometers from the source region. Smoke optical thickness, particle size, and single scattering albedo (ratio of particle scattering to extinction) are computed using radiances measured by AVHRR bands 1 (0.58–0.68 μm) and 2 (0.72–1.10 μm). Results show that smoke optical thickness ranged from less than 0.1 greater than 3.7 and the geometric mean mass radii ranged from 0.3 to 0.9 μm. The smoke single scattering albedo ranged from 0.9 to nearly 1.0. The total smoke mass over the eastern United States, computed using the derived particle size and optical thickness, ranged from 0.1 to 0.5 Tg which is close to the 0.5 Tg estimated to have been produced by the fires based on the forest fuel content. The smoke lifetime is estimated to be between 15 and 20 days.
Plio-Pleistocene reconstruction of East African and Arabian Sea palaeoclimate

Superimposed upon a long-term trend of aridification, the climate history of Africa was punctuated by episodes of extreme climate variability, characterised by the precessionally-forced appearance and disappearance of large lake systems within the East African Rift Valley. In order to investigate the nature of low-latitude climate variability during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, this thesis combines high-resolution analyses from one of the lake phases in the Central Kenyan Rift with the reconstruction of long-term changes in the transport of wind-borne terrigenous dust to the Arabian Sea. Climate in both regions is strongly influenced by relative changes in the strength of the Indian Ocean monsoons, which determine rainfall distribution in equatorial East Africa and generate the low-level winds which transport dust offshore from the Arabian Peninsula. In the Baringo-Bogoria basin in the Central Kenyan Rift, a well-dated package of fluvio-lacustrine sediments and diatomite units documents a major humid phase between 2.7 and 2.55 million years ago (Ma), coincident with the intensification of glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere. Stable oxygen isotope measurements of diatom silica, combined with the XRF analysis of whole-sample geochemistry, reveal that the deep lake phase was characterised by wet-dry cycles lasting, on average, 1,400 years. Over longer timescales, variations in the aeolian delivery of lithogenic matter to the Arabian Sea, reflected in normalised flux of titanium, show that monsoonal circulation prior to 2.6 Ma was highly variable and primarily driven by orbitally-forced changes in tropical summer insolation, modulated by the 400,000 year cycle of orbital eccentricity. Millennial-scale fluctuations in the dust record also support the evidence of abrupt wet-dry cycles in East Africa. Such high-resolution cycles are rarely found in older records, thus giving a valuable insight to the nature of short-term fluctuations in Plio-Pleistocene climate.
Curcumin (diferuloylmethane) delivery methods: A review

Curcumin interacts with a large number of extra‐ and intracellular targets in a biphasic dose‐dependent manner. It controls inflammation, oxidative stress, cell survival, cell secretion, homeostasis, and proliferation. Its mechanisms of action are generally directed toward cells that exhibit disordered physiology or blatant mutation‐based abnormal states. Optimizing preventative or therapeutic applications require delivering appropriate quantities of curcumin to lesioned cellular targets. Since diseased conditions anatomically are located from topical to systemic sites, efficient application of curcumin requires specific lesion‐oriented delivery methods, representatives of which are here reviewed. © 2013 BioFactors, 39(1):21–26, 2013
The thermal behaviour of the water-vein system in polycrystalline ice

Abstract Experimental studies are reported concerning the thermal behaviour of the water-vein system in ice grown in the laboratory from dilute solutions. The temperature versus vein-size behaviour of these samples is determined. The measurements show that the solute, which is concentrated in the veins, remains in the liquid phase during a temperature change. The mass of the solute per unit length of vein M is found to be of the order of M ≈ 10−8 mol m−1 for samples grown from singly-distilled water. M is seen to vary with temperature only because of the volume expansion (contraction) on freezing (melting) which causes the liquid to flow along the veins. The effect of these flows on the sample is studied. They are found to provide a mechanism for the transport of impurities along the veins and to and from the sample surface. Samples grown from doubly-distilled water doped with small amounts of NaCl or H2SO4 are studied and are found to display the same general behaviour. However, M is an order of magnitude higher in the H2SO4-doped samples than in either the NaCl-doped samples or the samples grown from singly-distilled water. The approach to equilibrium of distortions in the vein-system geometry is studied. It is suggested that these distortions are due to variations in M along the length of the veins and that equilibration is therefore governed by diffusion of the solutes.
Human Action Recognition in Unconstrained Videos by Explicit Motion Modeling

Human action recognition in unconstrained videos is a challenging problem with many applications. Most state-of-the-art approaches adopted the well-known bag-of-features representations, generated based on isolated local patches or patch trajectories, where motion patterns, such as object-object and object-background relationships are mostly discarded. In this paper, we propose a simple representation aiming at modeling these motion relationships. We adopt global and local reference points to explicitly characterize motion information, so that the final representation is more robust to camera movements, which widely exist in unconstrained videos. Our approach operates on the top of visual codewords generated on dense local patch trajectories, and therefore, does not require foreground-background separation, which is normally a critical and difficult step in modeling object relationships. Through an extensive set of experimental evaluations, we show that the proposed representation produces a very competitive performance on several challenging benchmark data sets. Further combining it with the standard bag-of-features or Fisher vector representations can lead to substantial improvements.
Effects of continuum breakdown on hypersonic aerothermodynamics

Hypersonic vehicles experience different flow regimes during flight due to changes in atmospheric density. Hybrid Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) methods are being developed to simulate the flow in different hypersonic regimes. These methods use a breakdown parameter to determine regions of the flow where the CFD physics are no longer valid. The current study investigates the effect of continuum breakdown on surface aerothermodynamic properties, such as pressure, shear stress and heat transfer rate, of a cylinder in a Mach 10 flow of argon gas for several different flow regimes, from the continuum to a rarefied gas. CFD and DSMC solutions are obtained at each flow condition. Total drag predictions are identical for a continuum flow while differing by more than 26% for a rarefied flow. Peak heat transfer rate differences range from less than 1% for a continuum flow to almost 32% for a rarefied flow. Drag depends primarily on continuum breakdown in the wake, while heat transfer rate appears to depend primarily on continuum breakdown in the shock and differences in thermal boundary layer thickness.
The transport and retention of fine sediments in seasonally vegetated lowland streams

2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS . 5 LIST OF FIGURES . 12 LIST OF TABLES . 23 ABBREVIATIONS & SYMBOLS . 25 CHAPTER 1 Introduction . 30 CHAPTER 2 Literature review. 35 2.0 Introduction . 35 2.1 What is fine sediment? 35 2.2 Fine sediment transport and deposition within rivers . 37 2.3 The provenance of fine sediment . 38 2.4 The transport of fine sediment within streams and rivers . 39 2.4. 1 Previous methods of estimating sediment transport characteristics within rivers and streams . 42 2.4. 2 Particle longitudinal loss rate (KP) as a sediment transport and retention parameter . 46 2.4. 3 Vdep as a sediment transport and retention parameter . 47 2.4. 4 Estimates of fine sediment transport involving aquatic macrophytes . 50 2.5 Deposition and storage of fine sediment with rivers and streams . 53 2.5. 1 Retention, storage and deposition within gravel-bed rivers . 53 2.5. 2 Surficial fine sediment retention and storage by in-stream structures . 55 2.5. 3 How do aquatic macrophytes retain and store fine sediment? 55 2.5. 4 Estimates of the area, volume and weight of fine sediment deposits within macrophyte beds. 57 2.5. 5 Patterns of fine sediment particle characteristics within aquatic macrophyte patches . 59 2.6 The geography, morphology and lifecycle of aquatic Ranunculus species . 61 2.7 Summary . 63 2.8 Research aims & specific questions . 64 CHAPTER 3 Methodology . 68 3.0 Introduction . 68 3.1 Study sites . 68 3.1. 1 Selection of study sites . 68 3.1. 2 Frome Vauchurch on the River Frome. 70 3.1. 3 The Bere Stream at Snatford Bridge . 72
What do aqueous geothermometers really tell us

The application of chemical geothermometry to shallow groundwaters or spring discharge assumes that there is minimal mixing or re-equilibration of water as it travels from depth to the surface. In this study, we examine the potential for mixing and re-equilibration by examining heat and fluid flow along crustal-scale faults in tectonic geothermal systems. Numerical modeling results indicate that maximum in situ temperatures could be under-predicted by up to 30% due to mixing of fluids that enter the fault at different depths. This, coupled with the depression of isotherms by downward groundwater flow in the hanging wall, could cause underestimates of maximum circulation depth of greater than 80% in extreme cases. Kinetics does not favor re-equilibration in the shallower portions of faults due to low temperatures and higher fluid velocities. However, in areas of deeper circulation or higher heat flow such reactions are possible.
Rule-Based Forecasting: Development and Validation of an Expert Systems Approach to Combining Time Series Extrapolations

This paper examines the feasibility of rule -based forecasting, a procedure that applies forecasting expertise and domain knowledge to produce forecasts according to features of the data. We developed a rule base to make annual extrapolation forecasts for economic and demographic time series. The development of the rule base drew upon protocol analyses of five experts on forecasting methods. This rule base, consisting of 99 rules, combined forecasts from four extrapolation methods (the random walk, regression, Brown's linear exponential smoothing, and Holt's exponential smoothing) according to rules using 18 features of time series. For one-year ahead ex ante forecasts of 90 annual series, the median absolute percentage error (MdAPE) for rule- based forecasting was 13% less than that from equally-weighted combined forecasts. For six-year ahead ex ante forecasts, rule-based forecasting had a MdAPE that was 42% less. The improvement in accuracy of the rule - based forecasts over equally-weighted combined forecasts was statistically significant. Rule-based forecasting was more accurate than equal-weights combining in situations involving significant trends, low uncertainty, stability, and good domain expertise.
Cerebrovascular reactivity and hypercapnic respiratory drive in diabetic autonomic neuropathy.

Because abnormalities in cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) in subjects with long-term diabetes could partly be ascribed to autonomic neuropathy and related to central chemosensitivity, CVR and the respiratory drive output during progressive hypercapnia were studied in 15 diabetic patients without (DAN-) and 30 with autonomic neuropathy (DAN+), of whom 15 had postural hypotension (PH) (DAN+PH+) and 15 did not (DAN+PH-), and in 15 control (C) subjects. During CO(2) rebreathing, changes in occlusion pressure and minute ventilation were assessed, and seven subjects in each group had simultaneous measurements of the middle cerebral artery mean blood velocity (MCAV) by transcranial Doppler. The respiratory output to CO(2) was greater in DAN+PH+ than in DAN+PH- and DAN- (P < 0.01), whereas a reduced chemosensitivity was found in DAN+PH- (P < 0.05 vs. C). MCAV increased linearly with the end-tidal PCO(2) (PET(CO(2))) in DAN+PH- but less than in C and DAN- (P < 0.01). In contrast, DAN+PH+ showed an exponential increment in MCAV with PET(CO(2)) mainly >55 Torr. Thus CVR was lower in DAN+ than in C at PET(CO(2)) <55 Torr (P < 0.01), whereas it was greater in DAN+PH+ than in DAN+PH- (P < 0.01) and DAN- (P < 0.05) at PET(CO(2)) >55 Torr. CVR and occlusion pressure during hypercapnia were correlated only in DAN+ (r = 0.91, P < 0.001). We conclude that, in diabetic patients with autonomic neuropathy, CVR to CO(2) is reduced or increased according to the severity of dysautonomy and intensity of stimulus and appears to modulate the hypercapnic respiratory drive.
Sequential Transcatheter Arterial Chemoembolization and Portal Vein Embolization for Hepatocellular Carcinoma: The University of Tokyo Experience

When undertaking portal vein embolization (PVE) in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the following possibilities should be considered: (1) failure to induce hypertrophy of the nonembolized segments due to the underlying liver disease, (2) acceleration of tumor growth by occlusion of the portal venous flow because HCC is a hypervascular tumor fed exclusively by hepatic arterial flow, and (3) poor efficacy of PVE due to the presence of arterioportal shunts frequently observed in cases of liver cirrhosis and HCC. With these in mind, we performed sequential transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) and PVE in 45 patients with HCC undergoing major liver resection. This double preparation was well tolerated, enhanced the hypertrophy process in the nonembolized segments, and suppressed the tumor growth during the preparation period. Furthermore, PVE also functioned as a preoperative test to select patients for major liver resection. Sequential TACE and PVE is an effective preoperative intervention in patients with HCC scheduled for major liver resection.
Pomegranate Flower Extract does not Prevent Cisplatin-Induced Nephrotoxicity in Female Rats

Background: Nephrotoxicity is the major side-effect of cisplatin (CDDP), and it is reported to be gender-related. We evaluated the effects of pomegranate flower extract (PFE) as an antioxidant on CDDP-induced nephrotoxicity in female rats. Methods: Twenty-three adult female rats in four groups treated as following. Groups 1 and 2 received PFE at doses of 25 and 50 (mg/kg/day), respectively, for 9 days, and from day 3 on, they also received cisplatin (CDDP) (2.5 mg/kg) daily. Group 3 was treated as group 1 expects saline instead of PFE, and group 4 received PFE (25 mg/kg/day) alone. Results: Cisplatin alone increased the serum levels of blood urea nitrogen, creatinine, and nitrite; and kidney tissue damage score and kidney weight. However, PFE not only did not ameliorate the induced nephrotoxicity, but also aggravated renal tissue damage. Conclusions: Pomegranate extract as an antioxidant did not ameliorate CDDP-induced nephrotoxicity in female rats.
Structural Equation Modeling of the Effects of Family, Preschool, and Stunting on the Cognitive Development of School Children

A recent study based on a sample of 1,580 children from five adjacent geographical locations in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, was carried out to examine the association of nutrition, family influence, preschool education, and disadvantages in geographical location with the cognitive development of school children. Data were collected on the children from 2009 to 2011 for this developmental study and included cognitive scores and information on the health and nutrition of the children. The current study analyzed the association of demographic variables (geographical location (site)), child variables (sex, preschool education and socioeconomic status), parental level of education (maternal and paternal), child’s health (HIV status and hemoglobin level) and anthropometric measures of nutritional status (height-for-age) with children’s cognitive outcomes. The hypothesis is that the nutritional status of children is a pathway through which the indirect effects of the variables of interest exert influence on their cognitive outcomes. Factor analysis based on principal components was used to create a variable based on the cognitive measures, correlations were used to examine the bivariate association between the variables of interest in the preliminary analysis and a path analysis was constructed, which was used for the disaggregation of the direct and indirect effects of the predictors for each cognitive test in a structural equation model. The results revealed that nutritional status directly predicts cognitive test scores and is a path through which other variables indirectly influence children’s cognitive outcome and development.
Lasting accelerative effects of 1 Hz and 20 Hz electrical stimulation on cortical spreading depression: relevance for clinical applications of brain stimulation

Clinical applications of brain stimulation have been increasing during the last decade; however, the mechanisms of action remain unknown. One proposed mechanism of action is that repetitive stimulation modulates cortical excitability. Herein, we explore the question of whether repetitive electric stimulation increases cortical excitability as indexed by the cortical spreading depression. Twenty‐four Wistar rats were divided into three groups according to the treatment: sham, 1‐Hz and 20‐Hz stimulation. Stimulation was applied to the left frontal cortex through a pair of epidurally implanted silver‐wire electrodes. The cortical spreading depression‐features were analysed at three time points (one day before, one day after and 2 weeks after treatment) in both the stimulated and unstimulated hemisphere. A 3 × 2 × 3 factorial anova with repeated measures showed significant differences in the main effect of time (P < 0.0001), hemisphere (P = 0.0002) and stimulation group (P = 0.008). The interaction between time vs. hemisphere vs. stimulation group was also significant (P < 0.0001). Posthoc analysis demonstrated that 1‐Hz and 20‐Hz repetitive electrical stimulation significantly increased the velocity of cortical spreading depression in the stimulated hemisphere. Furthermore, 20‐Hz stimulation showed a greater effect on cortical spreading depression compared to 1‐Hz stimulation. The results show that 1‐Hz and 20‐Hz repetitive electrical stimulation results in an increase in cortical spreading depression velocity that is associated with the frequency and the hemisphere of stimulation. Furthermore, the effects are found to be long lasting. We believe that these findings have strong relevance to support the clinical application of therapies involving electrical stimulation for diseases of reduced cortical excitability.
A Dichotomy for First-Order Reducts of Unary Structures

Many natural decision problems can be formulated as constraint satisfaction problems for reducts A of finitely bounded homogeneous structures. This class of problems is a large generalisation of the class of CSPs over finite domains. Our first result is a general polynomial-time reduction from such infinite-domain CSPs to finite-domain CSPs. We use this reduction to obtain new powerful polynomial-time tractability conditions that can be expressed in terms of the topological polymorphism clone of A. Moreover, we study the subclass C of CSPs for structures A that are first-order reducts of a structure with a unary language. Also this class C properly extends the class of all finite-domain CSPs. We apply our new tractability conditions to prove the general tractability conjecture of Bodirsky and Pinsker for reducts of finitely bounded homogeneous structures for the class C.