Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS) Identifies Critical Illness among Ward Patients in a Resource Restricted Setting in Kampala, Uganda: A Prospective Observational Study

Introduction Providing optimal critical care in developing countries is limited by lack of recognition of critical illness and lack of essential resources. The Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), based on physiological parameters, is validated in adult medical and surgical patients as a predictor of mortality. The objective of this study performed in Uganda was to determine the prevalence of critical illness on the wards as defined by the MEWS, to evaluate the MEWS as a predictor of death, and to describe additional risk factors for mortality. Methods We conducted a prospective observational study at Mulago National Referral Teaching Hospital in Uganda. We included medical and surgical ward patients over 18 years old, excluding patients discharged the day of enrolment, obstetrical patients, and patients who self-discharged prior to study completion. Over a 72-hour study period, we collected demographic and vital signs, and calculated MEWS; at 7-days we measured outcomes. Patients discharged prior to 7 days were assumed to be alive at study completion. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed. Results Of 452 patients, the median age was 40.5 (IQR 29–54) years, 53.3% were male, 24.3% were HIV positive, and 45.1% had medical diagnoses. MEWS ranged from 0 to 9, with higher scores representing hemodynamic instability. The median MEWS was 2 [IQR 1–3] and the median length of hospital stay was 9 days [IQR 4–24]. In-hospital mortality at 7-days was 5.5%; 41.4% of patients were discharged and 53.1% remained on the ward. Mortality was independently associated with medical admission (OR: 7.17; 95% CI: 2.064–24.930; p = 0.002) and the MEWS ≥ 5 (OR: 5.82; 95% CI: 2.420–13.987; p<0.0001) in the multivariable analysis. Conclusion There is a significant burden of critical illness at Mulago Hospital, Uganda. Implementation of the MEWS could provide a useful triage tool to identify patients at greatest risk of death. Future research should include refinement of MEWS for low-resource settings, and development of appropriate interventions for patients identified to be at high risk of death based on early warning scores.
Some Suggestions for Research on Entrepreneurial Traits and Characteristics

This article suggests that researchers submitting manuscripts on entrepreneurial traits and characteristics should: ground their studies in the context of previous research, articulate a specific theory about the nature of entrepreneurship and its relationship to the entrepreneur, define key ideas and variables, conscientiously identify and select samples, and use current social psychology and personality theory-based measurement instruments or provide construct validity evidence for newly constructed measures.
On the dynamics of the error floor behavior in regular LDPC codes

It is shown that dominant trapping sets of regular LDPC codes, so called absorption sets, undergo a two-phase dynamic behavior in the iterative message-passing (MP) decoding algorithm. Using a linear dynamic model for the iteration behavior of these sets, it is shown that they undergo an initial geometric growth phase which stabilizes in a final bit-flipping behavior where the algorithm reaches a fixed point. This analysis is shown to lead to very accurate numerical calculations of the error floor bit error rates down to error rates that are inaccessible by simulation. The topology of the dominant absorption sets of an example code, the IEEE 802.3an (2048, 1723) regular LDPC code, is identified and tabulated using topological relationships in combination with search algorithms.
Organizational justice: a potential facilitator or barrier to individual creativity

Organizational Justice: A Potential Facilitator or Barrier to Individual Creativity. (December 2006) Aneika L. Simmons, B.B.A., The University of Texas at Austin; M.A., University of Houston Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Richard W. Woodman In an effort to obtain and sustain competitive advantage via creative performance, organizations often seek individuals who possess traits known to improve the likelihood for creativity. Literature suggests that contextual factors may influence the level of creative performance of individuals with creative potential. The influence of organizational justice, a prominent and pervasive environmental factor, on creative output has been largely ignored. I assert that organizational justice (i.e., distributive, procedural, and interactional) may not only moderate the relationship between creativity enhancing traits and creative performance, it may also have a main effect relationship with creative performance. Therefore, I investigate the relationship between variables found to be precursors to individual creativity, distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, and creative performance in a laboratory setting utilizing undergraduate business students. Participants completed an in-basket exercise to help determine how justice issues may influence individuals with creative potential. The empirical evidence for the hypotheses is minimal. I found some support for a main effect relationship between procedural justice and individual creativity. The findings also
The gastroprokinetic and antiemetic drug metoclopramide is a substrate and inhibitor of cytochrome P450 2D6.

Metoclopramide is increasingly prescribed for conditions previously treated with cisapride, but its metabolic enzymology and drug interactions are poorly understood. Using human liver microsomes (HLMs) and recombinant human cytochromes P450 (P450), we identified the major route of metoclopramide oxidation and the P450 isoforms involved. We also documented the ability of metoclopramide to inhibit the P450 system, using isoform-specific substrate reaction probes of CYP1A2, 2C19, 2C9, 2D6, 2E1, and 3A4. Metoclopramide was predominantly N-dealkylated to monodeethylmetoclopramide, a metabolite that has not so far been described in humans. Formation rate of this metabolite followed Michaelis-Menten kinetics (K(m), 68 +/- 16 microM; V(max), 183 +/- 57 pmol/min/mg of protein; n = 3 HLMs). Of the isoform-specific inhibitors tested, 1 microM quinidine was a potent inhibitor of metoclopramide (25 microM) monodeethylation [by an average of 58.2%; range, approximately 38% (HL09-14-99) to 78.7% (HL161)] with K(i) values highly variable among the HLMs tested (K(i), mean +/- S.D. , 2.7 +/- 2.8 microM; range, 0.15 microM in HL66, 2.4 microM in HL09-14-99, and 5.7 microM in HLD). Except troleandomycin, which inhibited metoclopramide metabolism in only one HLM (by approximately 23% in HL09-14-99), the effect of other inhibitors was minimal. Among the recombinant human P450 isoforms examined, monodeethylmetoclopramide was formed at the highest rate by CYP2D6 (V = 4.5 +/- 0.3 pmol/min/pmol of P450) and to a lesser extent by CYP1A2 (0.97 +/- 0.15 pmol/min/pmol of P450). The K(m) value derived (approximately 53 microM) was close to that from HLMs (68 microM). Metoclopramide is a potent inhibitor of CYP2D6 at therapeutically relevant concentrations (K(i) = 4.7 +/- 1.3 microM), with negligible effect on other isoforms tested. Further inhibition of CYP2D6 was observed when metoclopramide was preincubated with HLMs and NADPH-generating system before the substrate probe was added (maximum rate of inactivation, K(inact) = 0.02 min(-1), and the concentration required to achieve the half-maximal rate of inactivation, K'(i) = 0.96 microM), suggesting mechanism-based inhibition. Metoclopramide elimination is likely to be slowed in poor metabolizers of CYP2D6 or in patients taking inhibitors of this isoform, whereas metoclopramide itself could reduce the clearance of CYP2D6 substrate drugs.
Structure–function studies of a plant tyrosyl-DNA phosphodiesterase provide novel insights into DNA repair mechanisms of Arabidopsis thaliana

TDP1 (tyrosyl-DNA phosphodiesterase 1), a member of the PLD (phospholipase D) superfamily, catalyses the hydrolysis of a phosphodiester bond between a tyrosine residue and the 3′-phosphate of DNA. We have previously identified and characterized the AtTDP gene in Arabidopsis thaliana, an orthologue of yeast and human TDP1 genes. Sequence alignment of TDP1 orthologues revealed that AtTDP has both a conserved C-terminal TDP domain and, uniquely, an N-terminal SMAD/FHA (forkhead-associated) domain. To help understand the function of this novel enzyme, we analysed the substrate saturation kinetics of full-length AtTDP compared with a truncated AtTDP mutant lacking the N-terminal FHA domain. The recombinant AtTDP protein hydrolysed a single-stranded DNA substrate with Km and kcat/Km values of 703±137 nM and (1.5±0.04)×109M−1·min−1 respectively. The AtTDP-(Δ1–122) protein (TDP domain) showed kinetic parameters that were equivalent to those of the full-length AtTDP protein. A basic amino acid sequence (RKKVKP) within the AtTDP-(Δ123–605) protein (FHA domain) was necessary for nuclear localization of AtTDP. Analysis of active-site mutations showed that a histidine and a lysine residue in each of the HKD motifs were critical for enzyme activity. Vanadates, inhibitors of phosphoryl transfer reactions, inhibited AtTDP enzymatic activity and retarded the growth of an Arabidopsis tdp mutant. Finally, we showed that expression of the AtTDP gene could complement a yeast tdp1Δrad1Δ mutant, rescuing the growth inhibitory effects of vanadate analogues and CPT (camptothecin). Taken together, the results of the present study demonstrate the structure-based function of AtTDP through which AtTDP can repair DNA strand breaks in plants.
The Effects of a Course in Educational Psychology on Pre-Service Teachers' Epistemological Beliefs.

This study examined the effects of a course in educational psychology on the epistemological beliefs of preservice teachers. Participants were preservice teachers enrolled in educational psychology and a control group of students recruited from other classes. The Epistemological Beliefs Scale, which measures beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning across four dimensions (knowledge is certain, knowledge is simple, learning is quick, and ability to learn is fixed) was administered at the beginning and end of a semester-long class and again at the end of the following semester. The epistemological beliefs of the preservice teachers were found to be no more naive, on average, than those of the othe'r students. Short-term change occurred across all four dimensions, with the greatest amount of change in the 'knowledge is simple' and 'learning is quick' dimensions. Although not all changes were maintained over time, long-term changes in beliefs about the simplicity of knowledge and the certainty of knowledge may be related to the course content and methods of instruction. (Author/SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Educational Psychology and Epistemological Beliefs 1 Running Head: Educational Psychology and Epistemological Beliefs The Effects of a Course in Educational Psychology on Pre-service Teachers' Epistemological Beliefs Catherine A. King, Maurice J. Levesque, Scott J. Weckerly, & Nicole L. Blythe
Identification and Inactivation of Genetic Loci Involved with Lactobacillus acidophilus Acid Tolerance

ABSTRACT Amino acid decarboxylation-antiporter reactions are one of the most important systems for maintaining intracellular pH between physiological limits under acid stress. We analyzed the Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM complete genome sequence and selected four open reading frames with similarities to genes involved with decarboxylation reactions involved in acid tolerance in several microorganisms. Putative genes encoding an ornithine decarboxylase, an amino acid permease, a glutamate γ-aminobutyrate antiporter, and a transcriptional regulator were disrupted by insertional inactivation. The ability of L. acidophilus to survive low-pH conditions, such as those encountered in the stomach or fermented dairy foods, was investigated and compared to the abilities of early- and late-stationary-phase cells of the mutants by challenging them with a variety of acidic conditions. All of the integrants were more sensitive to low pH than the parental strain. Interestingly, each integrant also exhibited an adaptive acid response during logarithmic growth, indicating that multiple mechanisms are present and orchestrated in L. acidophilus in response to acid challenge.
Streaming PRAM

Parallel random access memory, or PRAM, is a now venerable model of parallel computation that that still retains its usefulness for the design and analysis of parallel algorithms. Parallel computational models proposed after PRAM address short comings of PRAM in terms of modeling realism of actual machines. In this work, we propose a multiple instruction stream partitioned PRAM, or “stream PRAM. ” This model embodies the reality of a small number of parallel processors, each with local memory (which could also be small), where a problem is generally evenly distributed among all processing elements. Actual hardware configurations limit the number of shared memories which can be efficiently implemented. By allowing each shared memory to also act as an independent instruction stream, more functionality is possible with a small extra cost. The additional instruction streams provide limited asynchronous abilities and offer the flexibility of a reconfigurable network as well as allowing the processing elements to perform independent actions. Because the proposed stream PRAM allows variable sizes for processors, memory, and problem sizes, it is valuable for present as well as future parallelism.
Computing integrated information

Abstract Integrated information theory (IIT) has established itself as one of the leading theories for the study of consciousness. IIT essentially proposes that quantitative consciousness is identical to maximally integrated conceptual information, quantified by a measure called Φmax, and that phenomenological experience corresponds to the associated set of maximally irreducible cause–effect repertoires of a physical system being in a certain state. With the current work, we provide a general formulation of the framework, which comprehensively and parsimoniously expresses Φmax in the language of probabilistic models. Here, the stochastic process describing a system under scrutiny corresponds to a first-order time-invariant Markov process, and all necessary mathematical operations for the definition of Φmax are fully specified by a system’s joint probability distribution over two adjacent points in discrete time. We present a detailed constructive rule for the decomposition of a system into two disjoint subsystems based on flexible marginalization and factorization of this joint distribution. Furthermore, we show that for a given joint distribution, virtualization is identical to a flexible factorization enforcing independence between variable subsets. We then validate our formulation in a previously established discrete example system, in which we also illustrate the previously unexplored theoretical issue of quale underdetermination due to non-unique maximally irreducible cause–effect repertoires. Moreover, we show that the current definition of Φ entails its sensitivity to the shape of the conceptual structure in qualia space, thus tying together IIT’s measures of quantitative and qualitative consciousness, which we suggest be better disentangled. We propose several modifications of the framework in order to address some of these issues.
Cooperative transmission game for smart grid communication

Smart grid has been widely considered to be the next generation of power grid, which incorporates smart meters and two-way communications to improve the agility, reliability, efficiency, security, economy and environmental friendliness. One of the key foundations of smart grid is real-time access to meter data via a reliable communication infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce promising wireless communication technologies to fundamentally improve the meter data transmission within smart grid. Furthermore, we propose a cooperative transmission game which aims to improve the reliability of smart grid communication. Numerical results evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Nonlinear Diffusion: Geodesic Convexity is Equivalent to Wasserstein Contraction

It is well known that nonlinear diffusion equations can be interpreted as a gradient flow in the space of probability measures equipped with the Euclidean Wasserstein distance. Under suitable convexity conditions on the nonlinearity, due to McCann [12], the associated entropy is geodesically convex, which implies a contraction type property between all solutions with respect to this distance. In this note, we give a simple straightforward proof of the equivalence between this contraction type property and this convexity condition, without even resorting to the entropy and the gradient flow structure.
The dynamics of E-government enactment in a developing country public sector organization: Evidence from Ghana.

The demand for accountability, transparency and efficient service delivery by citizens in many countries is pushing many governments to adopt e-government initiatives in achieving timely and efficient information dissemination. However, research shows that many public organisations in developing countries have been slow in responding to these developments. This study investigates how organisational level factors shape e-government implementation in public organisations in a developing country. Participants were purposively selected and one-on-one in-depth interviews were used to collect data. The study identified inadequate financial and human resources, leadership support, low information communication technology (ICT) literacy as well as inadequate ICT equipment and low internet connectivity to be the factors militating against the effective implementation of the computer based technology (CBT) program at the driver and vehicle licensing authority (DVLA). The study concludes that e-government has the potential to enhance the delivery of services in public organisations if these challenges are addressed.
Structures in Galaxy Clusters

The analysis of the presence of substructures in 16 well-sampled clusters of galaxies suggests a stimulating hypothesis: Clusters could be classified as unimodal or bimodal, on the basis of to the sub-clump distribution in the {\em 3-D} space of positions and velocities. The dynamic study of these clusters shows that their fundamental characteristics, in particular the virial masses, are not severely biased by the presence of subclustering if the system considered is bound.
Online Inference for Relation Extraction with a Reduced Feature Set

Access to web-scale corpora is gradually bringing robust automatic knowledge base creation and extension within reach. To exploit these large unannotated---and extremely difficult to annotate---corpora, unsupervised machine learning methods are required. Probabilistic models of text have recently found some success as such a tool, but scalability remains an obstacle in their application, with standard approaches relying on sampling schemes that are known to be difficult to scale. In this report, we therefore present an empirical assessment of the sublinear time sparse stochastic variational inference (SSVI) scheme applied to RelLDA. We demonstrate that online inference leads to relatively strong qualitative results but also identify some of its pathologies---and those of the model---which will need to be overcome if SSVI is to be used for large-scale relation extraction.
Toll-like receptor 2 and 4 genes influence susceptibility to adverse effects of traffic-related air pollution on childhood asthma

Background Epidemiological studies have reported adverse effects of ambient air pollution on the prevalence of asthma. Laboratory studies have suggested that innate immune responses are involved. Objective A study was undertaken to determine whether the Toll-like receptor 2 and 4 genes (TLR2 and TLR4) influence the susceptibility to adverse effects of traffic-related air pollution with respect to the prevalence of childhood asthma. Methods Haplotype tagging single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the TLR2 (n=4) and TLR4 genes (n=9) were genotyped in 916 children from the Prevention and Incidence of Asthma and Mite Allergy (PIAMA) birth cohort. Exposure to particulate matter (PM2.5), soot and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) at the birth address was estimated by land use regression models. Interactions between levels of pollutants and SNPs in relation to annual questionnaire reports of asthma diagnosis and symptoms from birth up to 8 years of age were analysed longitudinally by generalised estimating equations. Results Two TLR2 SNPs and four TLR4 SNPs significantly modified the effect of air pollution on the prevalence of doctor-diagnosed asthma from birth up to 8 years of age. The risk of having doctor-diagnosed asthma increased with increasing PM2.5 levels in children with at least one copy of the TLR2 rs4696480 A allele (OR 2.0 (95% CI 1.2 to 3.1) for an interquartile range increase in exposure). Similar observations were present with the following TLR4 genotypes: rs2770150 TC (OR 2.0 (95% CI 1.1 to 3.6)), rs10759931 GG (OR 2.6 (95% CI 1.4 to 4.9)), rs6478317 GG (OR 2.2 (95% CI 1.2 to 4.3)), rs10759932 CT or CC (OR 2.9 (95% CI 1.2 to 6.9)) and rs1927911 TT (OR 4.4 (95% CI 1.7 to 11.7)). Conclusions Variant alleles of TLR2 and TLR4 genes influence the susceptibility to adverse effects of traffic-related air pollution on childhood asthma.
Lower bounds for resonances of infinite-area Riemann surfaces

For infinite area, geometrically finite surfaces X = Γ\H, we prove new lower bounds on the local density of resonances D(z) when z lies in a logarithmic neighborhood of the real axis. These lower bounds involve the dimension δ of the limit set of Γ. The first bound is valid when δ > 1 2 and shows logarithmic growth of the number D(z) of resonances at high energy i.e. when |Re(z)| → +∞. The second bound holds for δ > 3 4 and if Γ is an infinite index subgroup of certain arithmetic groups. In this case we obtain a polynomial lower bound. Both results are in favor of a conjecture of Guillope-Zworski on the existence of a fractal Weyl law for resonances.
What is cerebral palsy?: examining elementary school students’ knowledge on the phenomenon

Cerebral palsy is the most prevalent physical disability during childhood. Globally, the number of children with disabilities being integrated into the general school system is raising. Still, previous studies have reported that these children are not always well integrated in school and that negative attitudes towards people with these conditions may be linked to lack of knowledge. This research aims to analyze elementary school students' knowledge about cerebral palsy. Eighty definitions of cerebral palsy were provided by students from the 4th and 5th grades. Findings indicate that the majority of responses are incorrect because the participants confounded cerebral palsy with other conditions or indicated the origin of the impairments is in a brain which is paralyzed. Conversely, the correct responses were very incomplete regarding their content. Data also showed that students with personal experience with someone with cerebral palsy provided more correct definitions than their counterparts without this experience. These results indicate the need to provide information to students about cerebral palsy and the difficulties of children with this condition. Raising students’ knowledge on cerebral palsy is expected to help integrate children with this condition in school and promote their school engagement.