Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An evaluation of a Diabetes Specialist Nurse prescriber on the system of delivering medicines to patients with diabetes.

AIM To evaluate the impact of a Diabetes Specialist Nurse prescriber on insulin and oral hypoglycaemic agent medication errors and length of stay. BACKGROUND The National Health Service has committed to a 40% reduction in the number of drug errors in the use of prescribed medicines. Drug errors in diabetes care are a common cause of significant morbidity and complications. Nurse prescribing creates an opportunity for nurses to improve care for these patients. DESIGN A quasi-experiment using six wards in a single hospital trust. METHODS Inpatient care of a convenience sample of patients with diabetes was evaluated before (n = 27) and after (n = 29) the intervention of a Diabetes Specialist Nurse prescriber. Prospective data were collected to measure insulin and oral hypoglycaemic medication errors and length of stay. RESULTS There was a significant reduction in the total number of errors between the pre-intervention and intervention group (mean reduction 21 errors) (p = 0.016). The median length of stay was reduced by three days. The total number of errors and length of stay were affected by admission category (p = 0.0004). CONCLUSIONS A medicines management intervention, provided by a Diabetes Specialist Nurse prescriber, had a positive effect on the system of delivering medicines to patients with diabetes and significantly reduced the number of errors. This reduction had some effect on length of stay. The cost saving was sufficient to finance a Diabetes Specialist Nurse prescriber post. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE (i) Errors frequently occur in the prescription and administration of medicines to patients with diabetes. (ii) The education of healthcare professionals is a factor contributing to these errors. (iii) Nurse prescribing provides a new system by which to educate patients and staff about their medicines. (iv) A Diabetes Specialist Nurse prescriber can reduce insulin and OHA MEs. This reduction had some effect on LOS.
Genetic Algorithms and Artificial Life

Genetic algorithms are computational models of evolution that play a central role in many artificial-life models. We review the history and current scope of research on genetic algorithms in artificial life, giving illustrative examples in which the genetic algorithm is used to study how learning and evolution interact, and to model ecosystems, immune system, cognitive systems, and social systems. We also outline a number of open questions and future directions for genetic algorithms in artificial-life research.
Effect of diclofenac on renal function and prostacyclin generation after surgery.

We have examined the effect of diclofenac on renal function after major surgery in a randomized, double-blind, controlled study of 20 patients undergoing oesophagogastrectomy. Diclofenac 75 mg or placebo was given i.m. 12-hourly for 2 days. I.v. fluid administration was standardized. Renal function was assessed by fluid balance and measurement of serum creatinine and electrolyte concentrations, creatinine and free water clearance, and urinary sodium and potassium excretion. Urinary 6-keto-prostaglandin F1 alpha (6-keto-PGF1 alpha) was measured by radioimmunoassay to assess renal prostacyclin production. After surgery, 6-keto-PGF1 alpha production increased, but this did not occur with diclofenac. On the first day after surgery, use of diclofenac was associated with a decreased urine flow rate, decreased urinary sodium and potassium excretion and a tendency to hyperkalaemia. Frusemide was required more often in the diclofenac group. One patient was withdrawn from the diclofenac group because of impaired renal function. Urine flow rate and blood potassium concentration should be monitored if diclofenac is used after major surgery.
Tumorigenesis and Neoplastic Progression Pathological and Molecular Progression of Astrocytomas in a GFAP: 12 V-Ha-Ras Mouse Astrocytoma Model

We previously characterized a genetically engineered mouse astrocytoma model with embryonic astrocyte-specific, activated 12 V-Ha-RAS (GFAP-RAS) transgenesis. The GFAP-RAS line Ras-B8 appears normal at birth, but 50% of mice die by 4 months from low-and high-grade astrocytomas. We examined the development and progression of astrocytomas in the Ras-B8 genetically engineered mouse. At embryonic day 16.5 (E16.5), there were no pathological differences compared to control littermates, aside from transgene expression. Diffuse astroglial hyperplasia was the first distinguishing feature in the 1-week-old Ras-B8 mice; however, these astrocytes were not transformed in vitro or in vivo . From 3 to 8 weeks the incidence of low-grade astrocytomas progressively increased with 85% of 12-week-old mice harboring low-or high-grade astrocytomas, the latter characterized by increased proliferation, nuclear atypia, and angiogenesis. Tp53 mutations were detected in both astrocytoma grades, with high-grade astrocytomas expressing elevated levels of epidermal growth factor receptor and vascular endothelial growth factor, plus decreased levels of PTEN and p16, similar to human astrocytomas. We postulate that expression of 12 V-Ha-RAS in astroglial precursors induces astroglial hyperplasia,
Efficient and Long-Time Accurate Second-Order Methods for Stokes-Darcy System

We propose and study two second-order in time implicit-explicit (IMEX) methods for the coupled Stokes-Darcy system that governs flows in karst aquifers. The first is a combination of a second-order backward differentiation formula and the second-order Gear's extrapolation approach. The second is a combination of the second-order Adams-Moulton and second-order Adams-Bashforth methods. Both algorithms only require the solution of two decoupled problems at each time step, one Stokes and the other Darcy. Hence, these schemes are very efficient and can be easily implemented using legacy codes. We establish the unconditional and uniform in time stability for both schemes. The uniform in time stability leads to uniform in time control of the error which is highly desirable for modeling physical processes, e.g., contaminant sequestration and release, that occur over very long time scales. Error estimates for fully-discretized schemes using finite element spatial discretizations are derived. Numerical examples are provided that illustrate the accuracy, efficiency, and long-time stability of the two schemes.
Validation of a Korean Version of the Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaire

Objectives The goal of the present study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Korean version of the tinnitus handicap questionnaire (THQ-K). Methods A total of 60 patients were included in this study. Patients responded to the THQ-K, the tinnitus handicap inventory (THI), Beck's depression index (BDI), and the visual analogue scale (VAS) for loudness and pitch, loudness match, and minimum masking level (MML) test were performed. Results Internal consistency of the THQ-K was examined using Cronbach coefficient alpha. Cronbach alpha was 0.96. The THQ-K showed a significant correlation with THI, BDI, VAS for distress, and VAS for loudness, but no significant correlation with psychoacoustic measurement of tinnitus, such as loudness match, pitch match, and MML. Conclusion The THQ-K is a reliable and valid test for evaluating the degree of handicap due to tinnitus for both research and clinical use.
Formative design evaluation of superbook

SuperBook is a hypertext browsing system designed to improve the usability of conventional documents. Successive versions of SuperBook were evaluated in a series of behavioral studies. Students searched for information in a statistics text. presented either in conventional printed form or in SuperBook form. The best version of SuperBook enabled students to answer search questions more quickly and accurately than they could with the conventional text. Students wrote higher quality “open-book” essays using SuperBook than they did with the conventional text, and their subjective ratings of the documentation strongly favored SuperBook. This work is a case study of formative design-evaluation. Behavioral evaluation of the first version of SuperBook showed how design factors and user strategies affected search and established baseline performance measures with printed text. The second version of SuperBook was implemented with the goal of improving search accuracy and speed. User strategies that had proved effective in the first study were made very easy and attractive to use. System response time for common operations was greatly improved. Behavioral evaluation of the new SuperBook demonstrated its superiority to printed text and suggested additional improvements that were incorporated into “MiteyBook,” a SuperBook implementation for PC-size screens. Search with MiteyBook proved to be approximately 25 percent faster and 25 percent more accurate than that obtained with a conventional printed book.
Examining Student Cognitive and Affective Engagement and Reading Instructional Activities: Spanish-Speaking English Learners’ Reading Profiles

ABSTRACT Recent research has emphasized the key role of engagement in helping students succeed in school and beyond. Given the academic struggles that many English learners (ELs) face as they transition to middle school, exploring the facets of engagement in middle school ELs is needed. We established reader profiles for eight sixth grade Hispanic ELs and examined the relationship between these students’ profiles and their engagement using teacher-, student-, and observer-reported data. We further examined the observer data (i.e., coded video) to determine if there were differences in individual students’ cognitive and affective engagement in four different reading activities. We found that, although engagement in the different activities varied by student, guided reading seemed to be the most engaging activity for most of the ELs in the study.
Evaluation of blood vessel ingrowth in fibrin gel subject to type and concentration of growth factors

Our aim was to quantitatively assess the angiogenetic effects of VEGF and bFGF immobilized in a fibrin‐based drug delivery system in a suitable subcutaneous rat model. After evaluation of a suitable implantation technique (6 rats), four teflon isolation chambers containing fibrin gel matrices were implanted subcutaneously in an upside‐down fashion on the back of 30 Lewis rats. The matrices consisted of 500 μl fibrin gel with two different fibrinogen concentrations (10 mg/ml or 40 mg/ml fibrinogen) and 2 I.U. /ml thrombin and contained VEGF and bFGF in five different concentrations (0 to 250 ng/ml each). At 3, 7 and 14 days after implantation, matrices were explanted and subjected to histological and morphometrical analysis. At 1 week, the volume of the fibrin clots was significantly smaller in the 100 and 250 ng/ml VEGF and bFGF groups in comparison to lower concentrated growth factors. At 1 and 2 weeks, the use of growth factors in low concentrations (25 ng/ml VEGF and bFGF) significantly increased the amount of fibrovascular tissue, average fraction of blood vessels and number of blood vessels at the matrix–host interface in comparison to growth factor‐free controls. Higher concentrations were neither associated with further increase of tissue formation nor with increased sprouting of blood vessels in this model. This study demonstrates that fibrin gel‐immobilized angioinductive growth factors efficiently stimulate generation of fibrovascular tissue and sprouting of blood vessels in a newly developed subcutaneous upside‐down isolation chamber model with an optimum between 25 and 100 ng/ml.
Comprehensive genome analysis of 203 genomes provides structural genomics with new insights into protein family space

We present an analysis of 203 completed genomes in the Gene3D resource (including 17 eukaryotes), which demonstrates that the number of protein families is continually expanding over time and that singleton-sequences appear to be an intrinsic part of the genomes. A significant proportion of the proteomes can be assigned to fewer than 6000 well-characterized domain families with the remaining domain-like regions belonging to a much larger number of small uncharacterized families that are largely species specific. Our comprehensive domain annotation of 203 genomes enables us to provide more accurate estimates of the number of multi-domain proteins found in the three kingdoms of life than previous calculations. We find that 67% of eukaryotic sequences are multi-domain compared with 56% of sequences in prokaryotes. By measuring the domain coverage of genome sequences, we show that the structural genomics initiatives should aim to provide structures for less than a thousand structurally uncharacterized Pfam families to achieve reasonable structural annotation of the genomes. However, in large families, additional structures should be determined as these would reveal more about the evolution of the family and enable a greater understanding of how function evolves.
Cross-modal semantic and homograph priming in healthy young, healthy old, and in Alzheimer's disease individuals

Two experiments are reported that explore the influence of strength of the prime–target relationship on the observed priming effects in young, healthy old, and individuals diagnosed with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). In Experiment 1, participants were auditorily presented primes (FURNITURE) and after varying delays presented visual targets that were (1) high-strength related (e.g., SOFA), (2) low-strength related (e.g., RUG), or (3) unrelated control words (e.g., COW or DEER). The results indicated that the DAT individuals produced relatively larger priming effects than both the young and the healthy old, but these data could be accommodated by increases in effect size due to general slowing of response latencies. In Experiment 2, the same cross-modal priming paradigm was used with ambiguous words presented as primes (e.g., BANK) and either high-dominant (e.g., MONEY) or low-dominant (e.g., RIVER) words as targets. The results of Experiment 2 produced a qualitatively distinct pattern of priming that indicated DAT individuals only produced priming for high-dominant targets and not for low-dominant targets, whereas, the healthy control groups produced equivalent priming for both high- and low-dominant targets. The discussion focuses on the implication that these results have for the interpretation of semantic priming effects, in general, along with implications for the apparent semantic memory loss in DAT individuals. (JINS, 1999, 5, 626–640.)
Antecedents of continuance intentions towards e-shopping: the case of Saudi Arabia

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to clarify the theoretical problem and identify factors that could explain the level of continuance intentions towards e-shopping. It aims to propose a revised technology acceptance model that integrates expectation confirmation theory to measure age differences with regard to continuance intentions towards e-shopping in Saudi Arabia. Design/methodology/approach – The sample (n ¼ 465) consists of 68.8 per cent women and 31.4 per cent men, 348 younger than 35 years old and 117 older than 35. A structural equation model confirms model fit. The model explains 65 per cent of the intention to continue shopping online. Findings – Perceived usefulness, enjoyment, and subjective norms are determinants of online shopping continuance. The structural weights are mostly equivalent between the young and old groups, but the regression path from subjective norms to perceived usefulness is not invariant, with that relationship being stronger for the younger respondents. Research limitations/implications – The research findings imply that usefulness and subjective norm contribute to continuance intentions to some extent, but it is enjoyment that leads to a higher level of continuance intentions. Online strategies cannot ignore either the direct or the indirect effects on continuance intentions in Saudi Arabia. Originality/value – The paper adds to the understudied area of online shopping continuance intentions in the Arab World in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular, by examining the effects of usefulness, enjoyment, and subjective norms on continuance intentions.
A Practical Segmentation Method for Automated Screening of Cervical Cytology

In a full automatic cervical cytology screening process, one of the essential steps is the segmentation of cervical nuclei. Despite some progress, there is a need to improve sensitivity, speed, level of automation, and to reduce non-cellular artifacts. This paper presents a practical nuclei segmentation algorithm for solving these problems. The proposed approach first preprocess the V channel image from the HSV color space thus allowing accentuating the contrast between nuclei/leukocyte and cytoplast. In order to overcome the non-uniform illumination, the adaptive thresholding algorithm is utilized. Two characteristics named shape factor and roundness are introduced to validate if a segmented region is overlapped nuclei. Further, by exploring a concave-point based segmentation algorithm, overlapped even multi-overlapped nucleus can be separated. Experiment results carried out on 200 images (100 malignant and 100 normal) show that comparing with the past work [7], our approach can detect more malignant nuclei, less under-segmented normal nuclei, less debris/inflammatory cells and binarization error. Currently, our implementation on 1.9GHz dual-core computer takes 0.56s/image, on average. The proposed segmentation algorithm has potential application in full automated screening of cervical cytology. Furthermore, our algorithm shows promising performance when comparing with [14] on histopathological images.
Streaming Gibbs Sampling for LDA Model

Streaming variational Bayes (SVB) is successful in learning LDA models in an online manner. However previous attempts toward developing online Monte-Carlo methods for LDA have little success, often by having much worse perplexity than their batch counterparts. We present a streaming Gibbs sampling (SGS) method, an online extension of the collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS). Our empirical study shows that SGS can reach similar perplexity as CGS, much better than SVB. Our distributed version of SGS, DSGS, is much more scalable than SVB mainly because the updates' communication complexity is small.
LIMIT LAWS FOR PARTIAL MATCH QUERIES IN QUADTREES

It is proved that in an idealized uniform probabilistic model the cost of a partial match query in a multidimensional quadtree after normalization converges in distribution. The limiting distribution is given as a fixed point of a random affine operator. Also a first-order asymptotic expansion for the variance of the cost is derived and results on exponential moments are given. The analysis is based on the contraction method.
Mass Psychogenic Illness: Demography and Symptom Profile of an Episode

Background. Mass psychogenic illness has been a recurrent phenomenon in Bangladesh over recent times. Objectives. This study was aimed at investigating the demographic characteristics and symptom profile of an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness occurring in a girls' high school. Methods and Materials. In 14 April 2013, a total of 93 students of a girls' high school suddenly developed various symptoms following intake of tiffin cake which resulted in panic and hospital admission. A descriptive, cross-sectional observational survey was done to define various characteristics of the outbreak. Results. No organic explanation for the reported illnesses was found. 93 female students were included who were hospitalized during the incident. Trigger factor was found in 98% of students. Most of the students were 13 years old. Average interval between exposure to the trigger and onset of symptoms was 151.5 minutes. Commonest symptoms were abdominal pain (83%), headache (73%), chest pain (69%), body ache (63%), nausea (69%), and generalized weakness and fatigue (61%). Hospital stay following the incident was about 12 hours on average. Conclusion. To avoid unnecessary panic in the community a prompt, coordinated response is important in resolving widespread community anxiety surrounding these episodes.
The Effect of a Nature Camp on Children’s Conceptions of Nature

Normal 0 21 false false false TR X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In this study, a nature camp which provides authentic learning opportunities for children was conducted. Twenty-four 4th and 5th graders (9 girls, 15 boys) participated to the camp. The camp program started with observations in the forest nearby. More focused observations were also made. Children discussed their observations with their friends and scientists. A questionnaire was applied at the beginning and end of the camp. The results showed that the nature camp program was effective in extending the children’s conception of the nature by including both living and non-living things. Most of them started the camp with a conception of the nature which consisted of only living things whereas only four children left with this conception at the end. Biological aspects of the nature also increased. Children generally stated that living or non-living things exist or live together at the nature, but relationships between them were noticed by fewer children.
Tramadol and Tramadol+Caffeine Synergism in the Rat Formalin Test Are Mediated by Central Opioid and Serotonergic Mechanisms

Different analgesic combinations with caffeine have shown this drug to be capable of increasing the analgesic effect. Many combinations with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have been carried out, but, in regard to opioids, only combinations with morphine and tramadol have been reported. The antinociceptive synergism mechanism of these combinations is not well understood. The purpose of the present study was to determine the participation of spinal and supraspinal opioidergic and serotonergic systems in the synergic effect of the tramadol+caffeine combination in the rat formalin test. At the supraspinal level, the opioid antagonist, naloxone, completely reversed the effect of the drug combination, whereas ketanserin, a 5-HT2 receptor antagonist, inhibited the effect by 60%; however, ondansetron, a 5-HT3 receptor antagonist, did not alter the combination effect. When the antagonists were intrathecally administered, there was a significant reduction in all tramadol-caffeine combination effects. With respect to tramadol alone, there was significant participation of the opioid system at the supraspinal level, whereas it was the serotonergic system that participated at the spinal level by means of the two receptors studied. In conclusion, the tramadol+caffeine combination synergically activated the opioid and serotonergic systems at the supraspinal level, as well as at the spinal level, to produce the antinociception.