Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Repolarization Changes Underlying Long-Term Cardiac Memory Due to Right Ventricular Pacing: Noninvasive Mapping With Electrocardiographic Imaging

Background— Cardiac memory refers to the observation that altered cardiac electrical activation results in repolarization changes that persist after the restoration of a normal activation pattern. Animal studies, however, have yielded disparate conclusions, both regarding the spatial pattern of repolarization changes in cardiac memory and the underlying mechanisms. The present study was undertaken to produce 3-dimensional images of the repolarization changes underlying long-term cardiac memory in humans. Methods and Results— Nine adult subjects with structurally normal hearts and dual-chamber pacemakers were enrolled in the study. Noninvasive electrocardiographic imaging was used before and after 1 month of ventricular pacing to reconstruct epicardial activation and repolarization patterns. Eight subjects exhibited cardiac memory in response to ventricular pacing. In all subjects, ventricular pacing resulted in a prolongation of the activation recovery interval (a surrogate for action potential duration) in the region close to the site of pacemaker-induced activation from 228.4±7.6 ms during sinus rhythm to 328.3±6.2 ms during cardiac memory. As a consequence, increases are observed in both apical-basal and right-left ventricular gradients of repolarization, resulting in a significant increase in the dispersion of repolarization. Conclusions— These results demonstrate that electrical remodeling in response to ventricular pacing in human subjects results in action potential prolongation near the site of abnormal activation and a marked dispersion of repolarization. This dispersion of repolarization is potentially arrhythmogenic and, intriguingly, was less evident during continuous right ventricular pacing, suggesting the novel possibility that continuous right ventricular pacing at least partially suppresses pacemaker-induced cardiac memory.
The Biological Embedding of Child Abuse and Neglect Implications for Policy and Practice

Each year within the US alone over 770,000 children are victimized by abuse and neglect (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2010), and this figure is likely to underestimate the extent of the problem. Researchers have long recognized that maltreatment has adverse effects on children’s mental health and academic achievement. Studies of adults show that adverse childhood experiences like maltreatment increase risk for chronic diseases of aging, including Type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease. What the field does not fully understand is why maltreatment has such pervasive ef fects. Studies on the neuroscience of maltreatment have begun to offer some clues. Victims of maltreatment differ from non-victims with respect to brain structure and function, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-(HPA) axis and autonomic nervous system function, immune function, and epigenetic markers. These studies identify potential mechanisms by which maltreatment increases risk for poor mental and physical health and poor school performance by affecting systems that subserve memory, attention, the response to stress, and inflammation. The findings highlight the importance of broadening the scope of child welfare beyond child protection to include child wellbeing. A focus on child well-being would require integrated services, wherein comprehensive mental and physical health care are routinely offered to victims of maltreatment and case workers, pediatricians, and psychologists would work as teams to determine how best to deliver care to children and families in the child welfare system. In working with the family, such efforts could potentially reduce the risk of re-victimization which commonly jeopardizes long-term gains in child well-being.
Extracting Clinical Relationships from Patient Narratives

The Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF) project has built a system to extract clinically significant information from the textual component of medical records, for clinical research, evidence-based healthcare and genotype-meets-phenotype informatics. One part of this system is the identification of relationships between clinically important entities in the text. Typical approaches to relationship extraction in this domain have used full parses, domain-specific grammars, and large knowledge bases encoding domain knowledge. In other areas of biomedical NLP, statistical machine learning approaches are now routinely applied to relationship extraction. We report on the novel application of these statistical techniques to clinical relationships. We describe a supervised machine learning system, trained with a corpus of oncology narratives hand-annotated with clinically important relationships. Various shallow features are extracted from these texts, and used to train statistical classifiers. We compare the suitability of these features for clinical relationship extraction, how extraction varies between inter- and intra-sentential relationships, and examine the amount of training data needed to learn various relationships.
A Stakeholder Framework for Analyzing and Evaluating Corporate Social Performance

This article presents conclusions from a 10-year research program, the purpose of which has been to develop a framework and methodology, grounded in the reality of corporate behavior, for analyzing and evaluating corporate social performance. There are three principal sections: (a) a summary of the approaches, models, and methodologies used in conducting more than 70 field studies of corporate social performance from 1983-1993; (b) a discussion of the principal conclusions derived from the data that (1) corporations manage relationships with stakeholder groups rather than with society as a whole, (2) it is important to distinguish between social issues and stakeholder issues, and (3) it is necessary to identify the appropriate level of analysis in order to evaluate CSP; and (c) a discussion of propositions and areas for further research.
Interconnect-efficient reference data shift for optimized analog motion estimation

A new simple method for shifting reference image data within an analog cellular array for variable block-size motion estimation is presented. The method leads to a greatly reduced number of neighborhood connections for each cell of the array, and allows for all shifts within the Marku, J., et al, (2007) search area to be performed in a single step, with simple digital controls. The new shift circuitry, together with some other cell and system level optimization of the analog motion estimation (AME) array, reduces silicon area and array layout complexity, enabling faster and more efficient parallel full search motion estimation hardware.
[Decreased quality of cervix mucus under the influence of clomiphene: a meta-analysis].

OBJECTIVE To determine whether clomiphene (citrate) has a negative influence on cervical mucus qualities and whether administration of exogenous oestrogens has a favourable influence in that case. DESIGN Meta-analysis. SETTING Stichting Gezondheidszorg Oostelijk Zuid-Limburg, Midwifery School, Kerkrade, the Netherlands. METHOD Relevant articles were searched using the Medline database for the years 1980-1996 and the Knowledge Finder search system. The reference lists of these articles were studied. All prospective, randomized and controlled clinical trials mentioning detailed figures were selected and analysed. RESULTS Six articles met all criteria for analysis of the effect of clomiphene on cervical mucus. Clomiphene 50 mg/day had an unfavourable influence on cervical mucus (not significant), but clomiphene 100 and clomiphene 150 mg/day did have a significant effect, the relative risk of unfavourable cervical mucus being more than seven in comparison with women not using clomiphene (respective odds ratios 7.90 (95% confidence interval: 4.15-15.00) and 7.50 (1.97-28.60)). Four articles met all criteria for analysis of the effect of exogenous oestrogens on cervical mucus of women being treated with clomiphene. Exogenous oestrogens resulted in improvement of the cervical mucus qualities in these women (odds ratio: 2.87 (1.76-4.69)). CONCLUSION The influence of clomiphene 50 mg/day on cervical mucus is not significantly unfavourable, unlike the influence of clomiphene 100 and 150 mg/day. Exogenous oestrogen administration improves this cervical mucus. In all patients being treated with clomiphene the cervical mucus qualities should be investigated.
A second-order method for convex 1-regularized optimization with active-set prediction

We describe an active-set method for the minimization of an objective function φ that is the sum of a smooth convex function f and an -regularization term. A distinctive feature of the method is the way in which active-set identification and second-order subspace minimization steps are integrated to combine the predictive power of the two approaches. At every iteration, the algorithm selects a candidate set of free and fixed variables, performs an (inexact) subspace phase, and then assesses the quality of the new active set. If it is not judged to be acceptable, then the set of free variables is restricted and a new active-set prediction is made. We establish global convergence for our approach under the assumptions of Lipschitz-continuity and strong-convexity of f, and compare the new method against state-of-the-art codes.
Scope definition and resection significance of No. 12a group lymph nodes in gastric cancer

A discrepancy exists between the 7th edition guidelines of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) and the 3rd edition Japanese treatment guidelines in terms of the classification of No. 12a lymph nodes as regional or distant lymph nodes in D2 lymphadenectomy for gastric cancer. The scope definition of No. 12a lymph nodes has yet to be fully elucidated. The present study aimed to assess the appropriateness of reclassifying No. 12a lymph node metastasis as distant metastasis according to the survival rate outcome, and to provide a clear and practical definition of the No. 12a group lymph nodes of gastric cancer. A retrospective analysis was performed on patients with gastric cancer who underwent standard or greater lymphadenectomy between January 2000 and December 2009 to find an association between No. 12a node metastasis and survival outcome. The present study first presented a clear and practical scope definition of the No. 12a group lymph nodes of gastric cancer, according to our clinical experiences and practices (Table I and Fig. 1). The survival outcome of patients with gastric cancer and No. 12a lymph node metastasis was poorer compared with that of patients with no No. 12a lymph node metastasis (P=0.0003). The results were similar in stage III patients with gastric cancer (P<0.0001). However, the survival outcome of patients was similar with or without No. 12a lymph node metastasis in stage IV gastric cancer (P=0.1968). Cox regression analysis revealed that the AJCC stage was independently associated with an unfavorable cumulative survival rate. Logistic regression analysis revealed that tumor location, AJCC stage, intravascular cancer emboli and nerve invasion were associated with No. 12a lymph node metastasis. In conclusion, the data in the present study suggested that No. 12a lymph node metastasis is associated with distant metastasis, and therefore they concur with the 7th edition AJCC gastric cancer guidelines, which appear to be correct in terms of considering No. 12a lymph node metastasis as distant metastasis.
The Right to Delete

Most of us have incidents in our past that we'd rather leave there, but that is increasingly difficult in a world teeming with devices and services that capture our words and actions and record them indefinitely. Instead of organically being forgotten, records of the past increasingly persist in digital storage unless and until they are deleted by someone. Should an individual have the right to demand that records about her be deleted? Does it matter who holds these records or what forms the records take? And even if this right would be socially beneficial, can it be implemented? In this paper, we argue that an individual should have the right to delete information about her that is held by others, and sketch out frameworks of how such a right might work. We suggest methods of implementing this right using technical tools, legal regulation, and/or social norms and market forces. Even without the legal component, we believe that collective action has the potential to give individuals greater control over their own personal information by establishing a widely (if not universally) accepted right to delete.
Macroeconomic Policy in DSGE and Agent-Based Models Redux: New Developments and Challenges Ahead

The Great Recession seems to be a natural experiment for macroeconomics showing the inadequacy of the predominant theoretical framework—the New Neoclassical Synthesis—grounded on the DSGE model. In this paper, we present a critical discussion of the theoretical, empirical and political-economy pitfalls of the DSGE-based approach to policy analysis. We suggest that a more fruitful research avenue to pursue is to explore alternative theoretical paradigms, which can escape the strong theoretical requirements of neoclassical models (e.g., equilibrium, rationality, representative agent, etc.). We briefly introduce one of the most successful alternative research projects—known in the literature as agent-based computational economics (ACE)—and we present the way it has been applied to policy analysis issues. We then provide a survey of agent-based models addressing macroeconomic policy issues. Finally, we conclude by discussing the methodological status of ACE, as well as the (many) problems it raises.
Sex Differences at the NSW Higher School Certificate after Adjustment for the Effects of Differential Selection

Sex differences in Higher School Certificate achievement were analysed by adjusting for differential selection. A general ability criterion, favouring neither sex, was developed by modifying the Tertiary Entrance Score (TES). For each course, sex differences in achievement were displayed over eight Key Learning Areas (KLAs). Contrary to many studies based on a more restricted set of courses, it was found that females outperformed males overall. In five KLAs, females outscored males; in two, the results were mixed; and in one (Mathematics) males outscored females. Although the female TES median was 15 marks higher, males performed slightly better at high TES levels. The explanation given was that males tend to specialise in more highly intercorrelated courses than females, which creates variance in their aggregate.
Emergency contraception in Cuba with 10 mg of mifepristone

Background Mifepristone in a dose of 10 mg is an effective emergency contraceptive when administered up to 120 hours after unprotected coitus. Methods Between May 2003 and February 2005, we conducted in Cuba a single-arm trial to evaluate the effectiveness of 10 mg mifepristone for emergency contraception up to 6 days after unprotected coitus. A total of 635 women who requested emergency contraception after a single act of unprotected intercourse were included in the study. Results After treatment there were 7/635 (1.1%) pregnancies (95% CI 0.4–2.3%). Pregnancy that might have occurred was prevented in 88.0% of the cases (95% CI 77.1–95.1%). The most common side effects reported by participants were fatigue (10.7%), dizziness (6.1%) and nausea (4.9%); vomiting was only reported by 0.6%. In 38/635 (6.0%) women menstruation was delayed more than 7 days. Conclusions Mifepristone 10 mg administered is an effective emergency contraceptive with an acceptable profile of side effects up to five days, but greater studies are necessary to verify its efficacy up to 6 days after unprotected intercourse.
Childhood antecedents of schizophrenia and affective illness: social adjustment at ages 7 and 11

Abstract Objective: To investigate the social adjustment in childhood of people who as adults have psychiatric disorders. Design - Subjects in a prospectively followed up cohort (the national child development study) who had been admitted as adults to psychiatric hospitals were compared with the rest of the cohort on ratings of social behaviour made by teachers at the ages of 7 and 11 years. Subjects: 40 adult patients with schizophrenic illnesses, 35 with affective psychoses, and 79 with neurotic illness who had been admitted for psychiatric reasons by the age of 28. 1914 randomly selected members of the cohort who had never been admitted for psychiatric treatment. Main outcome measures: Overall scores and scores for overreaction (externalising behaviour) and underreaction (internalising behaviour) with the Bristol social adjustment guide at ages 7 and 11. Results: At the age of 7 children who developed schizophrenia were rated by their teachers as manifesting more social maladjustment than controls (overall score 4.3 (SD 2.4) v 3.1 (2.0); P <0.01). This was more apparent in the boys (5 (2.6)) than the girls underreactive behaviour. At both ages prepsychotic (affective) children differed little from normal controls. By the age of 11 preneurotic children, particularly the girls, had an increased rating of maladjustment (including overreactions and underreactions). Conclusion: Abnormalities of social adjustment are detectable in childhood in some people who develop psychotic illness. Sex and the rate of development of different components of the capacity for social interaction are important determinants of the risk of psychosis and other psychiatric disorders in adulthood.
Improving risk factor management for patients with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes: a systematic review of healthcare interventions in primary care and community settings

Objectives Poorly controlled type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a major international health problem. Our aim was to assess the effectiveness of healthcare interventions, specifically targeting patients with poorly controlled T2DM, which seek to improve glycaemic control and cardiovascular risk in primary care settings. Design Systematic review. Setting Primary care and community settings. Included studies Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) targeting patients with poor glycaemic control were identified from Pubmed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library and SCOPUS. Poor glycaemic control was defined as HbA1c over 59 mmol/mol (7.5%). Interventions Interventions were classified as organisational, patient-oriented, professional, financial or regulatory. Outcomes Primary outcomes were HbA1c, blood pressure and lipid control. Two reviewers independently assessed studies for eligibility, extracted data and assessed study quality. Meta-analyses were undertaken where appropriate using random-effects models. Subgroup analysis explored the effects of intervention type, baseline HbA1c, study quality and study duration. Meta-regression analyses were undertaken to investigate identified heterogeneity. Results Forty-two RCTs were identified, including 11 250 patients, with most undertaken in USA. In general, studies had low risk of bias. The main intervention types were patient-directed (48%) and organisational (48%). Overall, interventions reduced HbA1c by −0.34% (95% CI −0.46% to −0.22%), but meta-analyses had high statistical heterogeneity. Subgroup analyses suggested that organisational interventions and interventions on those with baseline HbA1c over 9.5% had better improvements in HbA1c. Meta-regression analyses suggested that only interventions on those with population HbA1c over 9.5% were more effective. Interventions had a modest improvement of blood pressure and lipids, although baseline levels of control were generally good. Conclusions This review suggests that interventions for T2DM, in primary care, are better targeted at individuals with very poor glycaemic control and that organisational interventions may be more effective.
The Internet Economy - Regulatory Challenges and Practices

The Internet has become an integral part of the everyday life of households, firms and governments. Its proper functioning over the long run is therefore crucial for economic growth and people’s wellbeing more generally. The success of the Internet depends on its openness and the confidence of users. Designing policies that protect society while allowing for Internet’s great economic potential to be fulfilled, is a difficult task. This paper investigates this challenge and takes stock of existing regulations in OECD and selected non-OECD countries in specific areas related to the digital economy. It finds that despite the regulatory difficulties, the Internet is far from being a “regulation-free” space as there are various industry standards, co-regulatory agreements between industry and the government, and in some cases also state regulation. Most of them aim at protecting personal data and consumers more generally. In many cases generally applicable laws and regulations exist that address privacy, security and consumer protection issues both in the traditional and the digital economy. L'economie internet - Enjeux et pratiques de la reglementation L'Internet fait partie integrante de la vie quotidienne des menages, des entreprises et des gouvernements. Son bon fonctionnement sur le long terme est donc crucial pour la croissance economique et le bien-etre de la population en general. Le succes de l'Internet depend de son ouverture et de la confiance des utilisateurs. Concevoir des politiques qui protegent les utilisateurs et la societe, mais aussi qui permettent que les grands avantages de l'Internet soit pleinement recoltes est une tâche difficile. Cette etude discute quelques-uns des defis lies au developpement d’Internet et fait le bilan de la reglementation en vigueur dans l'OCDE et certains pays non membres de l'OCDE dans des domaines specifiques lies de l'economie numerique. Il constate que, malgre les difficultes reglementaires, l'Internet est loin d'etre un espace "libre de reglementation". Il existe diverses normes de l'industrie, des accords de co-regulation entre l'industrie et le gouvernement, et dans certains cas, la reglementation de l'Etat. La plupart de ces regles visent a proteger les donnees personnelles et plus generalement les consommateurs. Dans de nombreux cas des lois et reglements d'application generale existent qui adressent les questions de confidentialite, de securite et de protection des consommateurs a la fois dans l’economie traditionnelle et numerique.