Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparison of the temperature difference according to the placement of a nasopharyngeal temperature probe

Background The purpose of this study was to compare temperatures measured at three different sites where a nasopharyngeal temperature probe is commonly placed. Methods Eighty elective abdominal surgical patients were enrolled. After anesthesia induction, four temperature probes were placed at the nasal cavity, upper portion of the nasopharynx, oropharynx, and the esophagus. The placement of the nasopharyngeal temperature probes was evaluated using a flexible nasendoscope, and the depth from the nares was measured. The four temperatures were simultaneously recorded at 10-minute intervals for 60 minutes. Results The average depths of the probes that were placed in the nasal cavity, upper nasopharynx, and the oropharynx were respectively 5.7 ± 0.9 cm, 9.9 ± 0.7 cm, and 13.6 ± 1.7 cm from the nares. In the baseline temperatures, the temperature differences were significantly greater in the nasal cavity 0.32 (95% CI; 0.27-0.37)℃ than in the nasopharynx 0.02 (0.01–0.04)℃, and oropharynx 0.02 (−0.01 to 0.05)℃ compared with the esophagus (P < 0.001). These differences were maintained for 60 minutes. Twenty patients showed a 0.5℃ or greater temperature difference between the nasal cavity and the esophagus, but no patient showed such a difference at the nasopharynx and oropharynx. Conclusions During general anesthesia, the temperatures measured at the upper nasopharynx and the oropharynx, but not the nasal cavity, reflected the core temperature. Therefore, the authors recommend that a probe should be placed at the nasopharynx (≈ 10 cm) or oropharynx (≈ 14 cm) with mucosal attachment for accurate core temperature measurement.
Impact of thrombus aspiration during primary percutaneous coronary intervention on mortality in ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction.

AIMS To assess the impact of thrombus aspiration during primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI) on the mortality of patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients. METHODS AND RESULTS Retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data on 2567 consecutive PPCI-treated STEMI patients between 2008 and 2011. Cox proportional hazard models and multiple logistic regression analysis were used to adjust for known covariates. Thrombectomy was performed in 1095 patients (42.7%). Post-PPCI thrombolysis in myocardial infarction 3 flow was more frequently achieved in the thrombectomy group [adjusted odds ratio (OR); 1.92, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.34-2.76, P = 0.0004]. Overall in-hospital and longer term (mean follow-up 9.9 months) mortality rates were 4.5 and 9.0%, respectively. Thrombectomy was associated with a significant reduction in in-hospital (adjusted OR: 0.51, 95% CI: 0.29-0.93, P = 0.027) and longer term mortality [adjusted hazard ratio (HR): 0.69, 95% CI: 0.48-0.96, P = 0.028]. With propensity weighting, the adjusted HR for longer term mortality for thrombectomy was 0.43 (95% CI: 0.19-0.97; P = 0.042). The association between thrombectomy and reduced longer term mortality was only significant in those with a total ischaemic time ≤180min (P = 0.001) but not in patients with a total ischaemic time >180min (P = 0.99). CONCLUSION This study of real-world, unselected STEMI patients demonstrates that thrombus aspiration during PPCI is associated with a significant reduction in mortality, especially in those with a short total ischaemic time. These findings support the use of thrombectomy during PPCI in this group of patients.
Prevalence of External parasite of poultry in intensive and backyard chicken farm at Wolayta Soddo town, Southern Ethiopia -

A cross sectional study was conducted from Nov. 2008 to April 2009 to identify and estimate prevalence of ectoparisites of poultry in intensive and backyard chicken farm at Wolayta Soddo town southern nation nationalities and peoples region of Ethiopia. Three hundred eighty four chickens were selected using systematic random sampling technique. Ectoparasites were collected from different parts of the body including skin scraping from shank. Concomitantly age, sex as well as other risk factors recorded. The study result showed that four genus (lice, flea, mite and tick) and six species of ectoparasites recovered in back yard and none in intensive production system. The prevalence of external parasite infestation in backyard production system were 88% lice, 16.5% flea, 8.1% mite and 9.2% tick. Menopon gallinae 49 (139/284) the most prevalent ectoparasite species followed by Cuclotogaster heterographus 40%(115/284) while Cnemidocoptes mutans 8.1%(23/284) was the least identified. The finding in age group showed that there was a significant difference in prevalence of lice infestation between young and adult chicken (P 0.05) in both age and sex groups but it needs further study to find plausible explanation. The study indicated that external parasites are highly prevalent in backyard chicken, which is associated with poor hygienic system. There is a need to improve hygiene to increase chicken productivity in the area.
Early Childhood Educators' Perceptions of Play and Inquiry on a Nature Playscape

Abstract:Play serves an important function in early childhood, and more specifically, play in nature provides an optimal venue for holistic development. Teachers play a critical role in providing and protecting these experiences for young children. This study aimed to understand and make more explicit the perceived benefits of a nature playscape from the perspective of teachers. Participants in this phenomenological study were preschool teachers at an urban Midwestern university early childhood laboratory school (n=13). Surveys and interviews were used to answer the central research question: What benefits do early childhood educators attribute to experiences in an urban nature playscape for children and teachers who regularly access this environment? Findings suggest that both children and teachers demonstrated more relaxed behaviors in the playscape than the classroom, that children's holistic development was supported within the playscape environment, and that the playscape affordances fostered freedom and autonomy that sparked meaningful play and inquiry.
The Significance of Pulmonary Artery Size in Pulmonary Hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) has been found to have significant morbidity and mortality. The treatment of PH has advanced considerably with increasingly more effective and safer options. With an increasing effort to diagnose patients early, non-invasive techniques are often used to screen those patients likely to have PH. Computerized tomography (CT) chest scans are increasingly utilized in the evaluation of patients with exertional dyspnea, including those with suspected PH. The main role of the CT scan is to evaluate for any associated underlying diseases. There have been attempts to address the utility of CT to predict the presence of PH. This article reviews previously published investigations to summarize the relationship between pulmonary artery dimensions and PH to determine both the strength of the correlation and its discriminatory ability for use in clinical practice.
Semantically Based Inferences in Syntax

The proof theoretic approach to semantics “syntacticizes semantics”. Generative syntax does something similar when it employs features and functional heads that correspond to semantic properties such as “definite”, “negative”, “distributive”, “topic”, “telic”, “evidential”, etc. In a paper that recasts Beghelli—Stowell’s 1997 theory of quantifier scope in minimalist terms, Stabler (1997) proposes to treat features like “negative” and “distributive” in the spirit of Natural Logic: they play a syntactic role in triggering merger and movement, but they are also used to obtain semantic entailments without invoking Logical Form or model theory. This conception imposes at least a soundness requirement on the choice of such features: if they are to support valid inferences, they must correspond to semantically coherent properties. This opens up an important avenue of research, given that in the standard practice of generative syntax the semantic coherence of syntactic features is often not investigated. However, on this view the inferences that such features support use syntactic structure as a vehicle but are not part of the machinery of syntax. A slightly different approach builds grammar as a logic, in the sense that inferences of various sorts are part of the syntactic machinery itself. The present paper reports on a particular case study in this area. We have sought to find out to what extent the system of syntactic inferences pertaining to word order, scope, and polarity can incorporate a broader set of inferences based on the semantic inclusion relations among some of the expressions involved. As a first step, we propose a mini-syntax of quantifier scope in Hungarian that draws directly from the results of Szabolcsi 1997, Puskas 2000, Bernardi 2002, Nilsen 2002, and Brody—Szabolcsi 2003. Hungarian word order largely disambiguates quantifier scope and thus makes the syntax of scope directly observable. Another important property of Hungarian is that word order is determined not by grammatical function but by quantifier type (group denoting, distributive, counting, negative concord, etc. quantifiers). In our case study, quantifier scoping represents the checking of any interpretable feature in overt syntax in minimalist terms. Each quantifier type can be characterized with a pair of sentential types. The argument type is the kind of sentential type it selects (can be quantified into) and the value type is the sentential type resulting from quantifying in, to be notated as “value type / argument type”. An innovation introduced in Bernardi 2002 is that sentential types form a partially ordered set. This partial order is definable using the derivability relation within some logic. To make our proposal concrete, we use a so-called multi-modal categorial type logic of residuation (Moortgat 2002), but its details do not play a central role in the discussion. Two central points are as follows. (i) An operator OP1 can scope over OP2 iff the value type of OP2 derives the argument type of OP1: val2 → arg1.
THE SPINE OF THE COSMIC WEB

We present the SpineWeb framework for the topological analysis of the Cosmic Web and the identification of its walls, filaments, and cluster nodes. Based on the watershed segmentation of the cosmic density field, the SpineWeb method invokes the local adjacency properties of the boundaries between the watershed basins to trace the critical points in the density field and the separatrices defined by them. The separatrices are classified into walls and the spine, the network of filaments and nodes in the matter distribution. Testing the method with a heuristic Voronoi model yields outstanding results. Following the discussion of the test results, we apply the SpineWeb method to a set of cosmological N-body simulations. The latter illustrates the potential for studying the structure and dynamics of the Cosmic Web.
A regional analysis of willingness-to-pay in Asian cruise markets

This article tests whether the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of cruise tourists is affected by multivariables, namely regional level variables, socio-demographic variables, cruise perception variables, cruise motivations and cruise preferences. Our research aims to measure the influence of the multivariables on the WTP of cruise tourists, in order to trace the determinants of WTP. Using a censored regression model, the following variables are found to be highly associated with the WTP of cruise tourists: income, education, family structure, occupation, cruise experience, cruise duration and cruise preferences. The results of the modelling not only fill in existing research gaps in the theory of WTP but also shed new light on the comparison of multiple regions in terms of the difference of WTP of cruise tourists. A latent cluster analysis is further conducted to identify market segments with different cruise WTPs, and this knowledge can be used to improve the marketing performance of cruise companies in the growing Asian markets.
Monte Carlo simulations of the disk white dwarf population

In order to understand the dynamical and chemical evolution of our Galaxy it is of fundamental importance to study the local neighborhood. White dwarf stars are ideal candidates to probe the history of the solar neighborhood, since these “fossil” stars have very long evolutionary time-scales and, at the same time, their evolution is relatively well understood. In fact, the white dwarf luminosity function has been used for this purpose by several authors. However, a long standing problem arises from the relatively poor statistics of the samples, especially at low luminosities. In this paper we assess the statistical reliability of the white dwarf luminosity function by using a Monte Carlo approach.
Prostate cancer chemoprevention by green tea: in vitro and in vivo inhibition of testosterone-mediated induction of ornithine decarboxylase.

Recently, we have shown that ornithine decarboxylase (ODC), a rate-controlling enzyme in the polyamine biosynthetic pathway, is overexpressed in prostate cancer (PCA) and prostatic fluid in humans (R. R. Mohan et al., Clin. Cancer Res., 5: 143-147, 1999). ODC is also characterized as an androgen-responsive gene, and the androgenic stimulation regulates the development and growth of both normal and tumorigenic prostate cells. Thus, chemopreventive approaches aimed toward the modulation of ODC could be effective against PCA. Green tea polyphenols (GTPs) possess strong chemopreventive properties against a variety of animal tumor models and in some human epidemiological studies. At least two epidemiological studies have suggested that people who consume tea regularly may have a decreased risk of PCA. In this study, we investigated the effect of GTPs against testosterone-mediated induction of ODC in human prostate carcinoma cells, LNCaP as an in vitro model, and in Cpb:WU rats and C57BL/6 mice as in vivo models. Treatment of LNCaP cells with testosterone resulted in induction of ODC activity in a dose-dependent manner. Pretreatment of the cells with GTPs resulted in a significant inhibition of testosterone-caused induction of ODC activity in a dose-dependent manner. Similar effects of GTPs were observed in anchorage-independent growth assay of LNCaP cells where pretreatment of the cells with GTP was found to result in dose-dependent inhibition of colony formation. Testosterone treatment of the cells resulted in a significant increase in the level of ODC mRNA, and this increase was almost completely abolished by prior treatment of the cells with GTPs. The administration of testosterone (10 mg/kg body weight, i.p.) to sham-operated and castrated Cpb:WU rats resulted in 2- and 38-fold increases in ODC activity, respectively, in the ventral prostate. Oral feeding of 0.2% GTPs in drinking water for 7 days before testosterone administration resulted in 20 and 54% decreases in testosterone-caused induction of ODC activity in sham-operated and castrated rats, respectively. Similar results were obtained with C57BL/6 mice, where testosterone treatment at similar dosage resulted in a 2-fold increase in ODC activity in the ventral prostate and prior oral feeding with 0.2% GTPs resulted in 40% inhibition in this induction.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. In-House HPC Platform: A Cost Analysis

Since its advent in the middle of the 2000's, the Cloud Computing (CC) paradigm is increasingly advertised as THE solution to most IT problems. While High Performance Computing (HPC) centers continuously evolve to provide more computing power to their users, several voices (most probably commercial ones) emit the wish that CC platforms could also serve HPC needs and eventually replace in-house HPC platforms. If we exclude the pure performance point of view where many previous studies highlight a non-negligible overhead induced by the virtualization layer at the heart of every Cloud middleware when submitted to an High Performance Computing (HPC) workload, the question of the real cost-effectiveness is often left aside with the intuition that, most probably, the instances offered by the Cloud providers are competitive from a cost point of view. In this article, we wanted to assert (or infirm) this intuition by evaluating the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the in-house HPC facility we operate since 2007 within the University of Luxembourg (UL), and compare it with the investment that would have been required to run the same platform (and the same workload) over a competitive Cloud IaaS offer. Our approach to address this price comparison is two-fold. First we propose a theoretical price - performance model based on the study of the actual Cloud instances proposed by one of the major Cloud IaaS actors: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Then, based on our own cluster TCO and taking into account all the Operating Expense (OPEX), we propose a hourly price comparison between our in-house cluster and the equivalent EC2 instances. The results obtained advocate in general for the acquisition of an in-house HPC facility, which balance the common intuition in favor of Cloud Computing (CC) platforms, would they be provided by the reference Cloud provider worldwide.
Effects of Cover Crop Mixtures on Biological Indicators of Soil Health under Conservation Systems

ii Acknowledgments. iv List of Tables . vi List of Figures . viii List of Abbreviations . xi I. Literature Review . 1 II. Effects of Cover Crop Mixtures on Biological Indicators of Soil Health under Conservation Systems . 25 Introduction . 25 Materials and Methods . 26 Results . 32 Discussion . 38 Conclusion and Future Directions . 47 References . 75 Appendix A . 97 Appendix B . 99 Appendix C . 101 Appendix D . 105
Lyapunov Stability of Complementarity and Extended Systems

A linear complementarity system (LCS) is a piecewise linear dynamical system consisting of a linear time-invariant ordinary differential equation (ODE) parameterized by an algebraic variable that is required to be a solution to a finite-dimensional linear complementarity problem (LCP), whose constant vector is a linear function of the differential variable. Continuing the authors’ recent investigation of the LCS from the combined point of view of system theory and mathematical programming, this paper addresses the important system-theoretic properties of exponential and asymptotic stability for an LCS with a C$^1$ state trajectory. The novelty of our approach lies in our employment of a quadratic Lyapunov function that involves the auxiliary algebraic variable of the LCS; when expressed in the state variable alone, the Lyapunov function is piecewise quadratic, and thus nonsmooth. The nonsmoothness feature invalidates standard stability analysis that is based on smooth Lyapunov functions. In addition to providing sufficient conditions for exponential stability, we establish a generalization of the well-known LaSalle invariance theorem for the asymptotic stability of a smooth dynamical system to the LCS, which is intrinsically a nonsmooth system. Sufficient matrix-theoretic copositivity conditions are introduced to facilitate the verification of the stability properties. Properly specialized, the latter conditions are satisfied by a passive-like LCS and certain hybrid linear systems having common quadratic Lyapunov functions. We provide numerical examples to illustrate the stability results. We also develop an extended local exponential stability theory for nonlinear complementarity systems and differential variational inequalities, based on a new converse theorem for ODEs with B-differentiable right-hand sides. The latter theorem asserts that the existence of a “B-differentiable Lyapunov function” is a necessary and sufficient condition for the exponential stability of an equilibrium of such a differential system.
Effects of Distant Intention on Water Crystal Formation: A Triple-Blind Replication

An experiment tested the hypothesis that water exposed to distant intentions affects the aesthetic rating of ice crystals formed from that water. Over three days, 1,900 people in Austria and Germany focused their intentions towards water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. Water samples located near the target water, but unknown to the people providing intentions, acted as ''proximal'' controls. Other samples located outside the shielded room acted as distant controls. Ice drops formed from samples of water in the different treatment conditions were photographed by a technician, each image was assessed for aesthetic beauty by over 2,500 independent judges, and the resulting data were analyzed, all by individuals blind with respect to the underlying treatment conditions. Results suggested that crystal images in the intentionally treated condition were rated as aesthetically more beautiful than proximal control crystals (p ¼ 0.03, one-tailed). This outcome replicates the results of an earlier pilot test.
Analyzing a Heuristic Strategy for Constraint-Satisfaction and Scheduling

This paper describes a simple heuristic approach to solving large-scale constraint satisfaction and scheduling problems. In this approach one starts with an inconsistent assignment for a set of variables and searches through the space of possible repairs. The search can be guided by a value-ordering heuristic, the min-connicts heuristic, that attempts to minimize the number of constraint violations after each step. The heuristic can be used with a variety of diierent search strategies. On the n-queens problem, a technique based on this approach performs orders of magnitude better than traditional backtracking techniques. The technique has also been used for scheduling the Hubble Space telescope. A theoretical analysis is presented both to explain why this method works well on certain types of problems and to predict when it is likely to be most eeective.
Social Neuroscience: Progress and Implications for Mental Health

Social neuroscience is a new, interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior. Social neuroscience capitalizes on biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social behavior, and it uses social and behavioral constructs and data to inform and refine theories of neural organization and function. We focus here on the progress and potential of social neuroscience in the area of mental health. Research in social neuroscience has grown dramatically in recent years. Among the most active areas of research we found are brain-imaging studies in normal children and adults; animal models of social behavior; studies of stroke patients; imaging studies of psychiatric patients; and research on social determinants of peripheral neural, neuroendocrine, and immunological processes. We also found that these areas of research are proceeding along largely independent trajectories. Our goals in this article are to review the development of this field, examine some currently promising approaches, identify obstacles and opportunities for future advances and integration, and consider how this research can inform work on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.