Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Obesity in people with intellectual disabilities: the impact of nurse-led health screenings and health promotion activities.

BACKGROUND Obesity appears to be more common among people with intellectual disabilities, with few studies focusing on achieving weight reduction. AIM Firstly, to follow-up people identified as overweight and obese following special health screening clinics and to determine the actions taken. Secondly, to evaluate the impact of health promotion classes on participants' weight loss. METHODS A clinic led by two learning disability nurses was held for all people aged 10 years and over (n = 464) who attended special services within the area of one Health and Social Services Trust in Northern Ireland. In a second study, the nurses organized health promotion classes for 20 people over a 6- or 8-week period. FINDINGS The health screen identified 64% of adults and 26% of 10-19-year olds as being overweight or obese. Moreover, those aged 40-49 years who were obese had significantly higher levels of blood pressure. However, information obtained from a follow-up questionnaire sent after 3 months suggested that of the 122 people identified for weight reduction, action had been taken for only 34% of them and only three were reported to have lost weight. The health promotion classes, however, led to a significant reduction in weight and body mass index scores. CONCLUSIONS Health screening per se has limited impact on reducing obesity levels in this client group. Rather, health personnel such as general practitioners, nurses and health promotion staff need to work in partnership with service staff, carers and people with intellectual disabilities to create more active lifestyles.
Passive intermodulation on microstrip lines

The theory of passive intermodulation generation on printed transmission lines has been proposed. The new model for a terminated section of the transmission line with distributed nonlinear resistance has been developed and verified against the published experimental data. The closed form relation between the macroscopic nonlinear resistance and microscopic nonlinear surface resistivity of strip conductors has been obtained for microstrip lines. Effects of microstrip line width, length and matching on passive intermodulation generation have been studied in detail.
Long-Term Administration of Dehydroepiandrosterone Accelerates Glucose Catabolism via Activation of PI3K/Akt-PFK-2 Signaling Pathway in Rats Fed a High-Fat Diet

Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) has a fat-reducing effect, while little information is available on whether DHEA regulates glucose metabolism, which would in turn affect fat deposition. To investigate the effects of DHEA on glucose metabolism, rats were administered a high-fat diet containing either 0 (HCG), 25 (HLG), 50 (HMG), or 100 (HHG) mg·kg-1 DHEA per day via gavage for 8 weeks. Results showed that long-term administration of DHEA inhibited body weight gain in rats on a high-fat diet. No statistical differences in serum glucose levels were observed, whereas hepatic glycogen content in HMG and HHG groups and muscle glycogen content in HLG and HMG groups were higher than those in HCG group. Glucokinase, malate dehydrogenase and phosphofructokinase-2 activities in HMG and HHG groups, pyruvate kinase and succinate dehydrogenase activities in HMG group, and pyruvate dehydrogenase activity in all DHEA treatment groups were increased compared with those in HCG group. Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase and glycogen phosphorylase mRNA levels were decreased in HMG and HHG groups, whereas glycogen synthase-2 mRNA level was increased in HMG group compared with those in HCG. The abundance of Glut2 mRNA in HMG and HHG groups and Glut4 mRNA in HMG group was higher than that in HCG group. DHEA treatment increased serum leptin content in HMG and HHG groups compared with that in HCG group. Serum insulin content and insulin receptor mRNA level in HMG group and insulin receptor substrate-2 mRNA level in HMG and HHG group were increased compared with those in HCG group. Furthermore, Pi3k mRNA level in HMG and Akt mRNA level in HMG and HHG groups were significantly increased than those in HCG group. These data showed that DHEA treatment could enhance glycogen storage and accelerate glucose catabolism in rats fed a high-fat diet, and this effect may be associated with the activation of PI3K/Akt-PFK-2 signaling pathway.
External validity study of a personality disorders screening test in a community sample

Abstract Background: A screening test for personality disorders was recently developed in Brazil, the Dimensional Clinical Personality Inventory – screening version (IDCP-SV). However, no relationship between this screening measure and other scales or external criteria was tested. Objective: To seek for validity evidence based on related criteria ( e.g ., other psychological tests) and external criteria ( e.g ., sample demographics). Methods: Sample comprised 804 participants from Sao Paulo (Brazil), most female and college students, with mean age equal to 29.65 (SD = 10.73). They answered the IDCP-SV and another screening for personality disorders (IPDS), a depression measure (EBADEP-screening), a scale assessing reasoning for living (EMVIVER), and a self-report for personality disorders categories assessment (SCID-II-PQ). Results: IDCP-SV identified 46.4% of community sample as positive for personality disorders. The positive group showed the great mean for almost all comparisions, including psychological tests and the demographics characteristics, including large expressive effect sizes.
Population Pressures, Saving, and Investment in the Third World: Some Puzzles

For over 25 years economists and population specialists have generally embraced the plausible notion that rapid rates of population growth exert a quantitatively significant adverse impact on the pace of economic growth through the effects of age dependency capital shallowing and investment diversion. However empirical research has not sustained these hypotheses individually or collectively. One general factor appears to account for this variance between theory and facts--the tendency to develop analyses with simplifying assumptions that are not then subjected to adequate empirical tests. At its most fundamental level economics is about making choices in the face of scarcity. In the literature relating population growth savings and investment and modeling of choices has been amazingly narrow--indeed almost a-economic. At the household level population pressures are usually modeled by engineering-like fixed-coefficient formulae. In contrast trade-offs between quantities or qualities of consumption are seldom admitted parents work force behavior is usually taken to be uninfluenced by family size and children are typically assumed to contribute nothing productively. Similarly at the government level population pressures are modeled to show population-sensitive expenditures taking priority and crowding out more productive spending. In reality governments respond with more flexibility than the models suggest and some of the population-sensitive expenditures may be growth-enhancing. More elaborate analyses reveal 2nd-order effects: economizing on scarce resources and an expansion in supply.
Alkaloids of Ochrosia maculata Jacq. (Ochrosia borbonica Gmel.). Isolation of the alkaloids and study of the antitumor properties of 9-methoxyellipticine.

Inclusion in the authors' phytochemical screening program of plants of the family Apocynaceae related to Catharanthus roseus G. Don seemed logical in view of the success realized with the Madagascan periwinkle. Screening of the appropriate extracts of Ochrosia maculata elicited both oncolytic and neurosedative activities. The former was found to be associated with 9-methoxyellipticine, the latter with reserpine. While 9-methoxyellipticine possesses experimental antitumor activity of a somewhat lesser order than some of the available clinically active agents, it does exhibit a broader spectrum than most of these compounds. Its moderate degree of potency as an antitumor agent is expressed by its activity against several of the solid mouse neoplasms maintained in these laboratories.
Assessing International Evaluations

Each year, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in international and bilateral aid programs to assist developing countries in expanding democratic governance. Evaluating these efforts’ effectiveness is important given the vast needs of the client population. This article reviews a sample of evaluations of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) democracy and governance (DG) programming. The authors devise a standardized template to assess the quality of evaluations and find that the evaluations commissioned by USAID need major improvement. They find a lack of methodological accuracy and inadequate coverage of important information about the impact of assistance interventions. Given the importance of the substantive issue, high-quality evaluations are needed to provide reliable information for future programs and policies. The authors consider obstacles to obtaining high-quality international evaluations and provide recommendations for improvements. Although their focus is USAID’s DG programming, much of the authors’ discussion could apply to other assessments of international and domestic evaluations.
Deep learning Parkinson's from smartphone data

The cloudUPDRS app is a Class I medical device, namely an active transient non-invasive instrument, certified by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK for the clinical assessment of the motor symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. The app follows closely the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale which is the most commonly used protocol in the clinical study of PD; can be used by patients and their carers at home or in the community; and, requires the user to perform a sequence of iterated movements which are recorded by the phone sensors. This paper discusses how the cloudUPDRS system addresses two key challenges towards meeting essential consistency and efficiency requirements, namely: (i) How to ensure high-quality data collection especially considering the unsupervised nature of the test, in particular, how to achieve firm user adherence to the prescribed movements; and (ii) How to reduce test duration from approximately 25 minutes typically required by an experienced patient, to below 4 minutes, a threshold identified as critical to obtain significant improvements in clinical compliance. To address the former, we combine a bespoke design of the user experience tailored so as to constrain context, with a deep learning approach used to identify failures to follow the movement protocol while at the same time limiting false positives to avoid unnecessary repetition. We address the latter by developing a machine learning approach to personalise assessments by selecting those elements of the UPDRS protocol that most closely match individual symptom profiles and thus offer the highest inferential power hence closely estimating the patent's overall UPRDS score.
Private-Collective Innovation and the Fragility of Knowledge Sharing

Incentives to innovate is a central element of innovation theory. In the private-investment model, innovators privately fund innovation and then use intellectual property protection mechanisms to appropriate returns from these investments. In the collective-action model, public subsidy funds public goods innovations, characterized by non-rivalry and non-exclusivity. Recently, these models have been compounded in the privatecollective innovation model where innovators privately fund public goods innovations (von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003). Private-collective innovation can be illustrated in the case of open source software development. The current paper contributes to the work on private-collective innovation by investigating incentives that motivate innovators to share their knowledge in an initial situation devoid of community activity. We use game theory to predict knowledge sharing behavior, and test these predictions in a laboratory setting. The results show that knowledge sharing is a coordination game with multiple equilibria, reflecting the fragility of knowledge sharing between innovators with conflicting interests. The experimental results demonstrate important asymmetries in the fragility of knowledge sharing and, in some situations, much more knowledge sharing than theoretically predicted. A behavioral analysis suggests that knowledge sharing is not only affected by the material incentives, but also by social preferences. The results offer general insights into the relationship between incentives and knowledge sharing and contribute to a better understanding of the inception of privatecollective innovation.
Conversion of organic material by black soldier fly larvae: establishing optimal feeding rates

Larvae of the black soldier fly, Hermetia illucens (Diptera: Stratiomyidae), are voracious feeders of organic material and may thus be used in simple engineered systems to reduce organic waste in low- and middle-income countries. Controlled feeding experiments with standard fodder were conducted to assess the optimum amount of organic waste to be added to a CORS system (Conversion of Organic Refuse by Saprophages). A daily feeding rate of 100 mg chicken feed (60% moisture content) per larva resulted in an optimum trade-off between material reduction efficiency (41.8%, SE 0.61) and biomass production (prepupal dry weight: 48.0 mg, SE 2.0). Applied to market waste and human faeces, this corresponds to a potential daily feeding capacity of 3—5 kg/m2 and 6.5 kg/m2, respectively. In addition, H. illucens prepupae quality was assessed to determine their suitability to substitute fishmeal in animal feed production. The chitin-corrected crude protein content ranged from 28.2 to 42.5%, depending on the amount of food provided to the larvae. Based on our study, a waste processing unit could yield a daily prepupal biomass of 145 g (dry mass) per m2. We conclude that larvae of the black soldier fly are potentially capable of converting large amounts of organic waste into protein-rich biomass to substitute fishmeal, thereby contributing to sustainable aquaculture.
The personal and professional development of the counsellor: The relationship between personal philosophy and theoretical orientation

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between visions of reality held by counsellors and their professed theoretical orientations. It is suggested that there exist a number of states of congruence between the tow variables and that there are potential problems when the two are not in harmony. The implications for the training and continued professional development of counsellors are explored. Finally, Some provesional findings are offered from the authors' own research.
Event-related Potentials Associated with Masked Priming of Test Cues Reveal Multiple Potential Contributions to Recognition Memory

The relationship between recognition memory and repetition priming remains unclear. Priming is believed to reflect increased processing fluency for previously studied items relative to new items. Manipulations that affect fluency can also affect the likelihood that participants will judge items as studied in recognition tasks. This attribution of fluency to memory has been related to the familiarity process, as distinct from the recollection process, that is assumed by dual-process models of recognition memory. To investigate the time courses and neural sources of fluency, familiarity, and recollection, we conducted an event-related potential (ERP) study of recognition memory using masked priming of test cues and a remember/know paradigm. During the recognition test, studied and unstudied words were preceded by a brief, masked word that was either the same or different. Participants decided quickly whether each item had been studied (old or new), and for items called old, indicated whether they remembered (R) the encoding event, or simply knew (K) the item had been studied. Masked priming increased the proportion of K, but not R, judgments. Priming also decreased response times for hits but not correct rejections (CRs). Four distinct ERP effects were found. A medial-frontal FN400 (300500 msec) was associated with familiarity (R, K Hits > CRs) and a centro-parietal late positivity (500800 msec) with recollection (R Hits > K Hits, CRs). A long-term repetition effect was found for studied items judged new (Misses > CRs) in the same time window as the FN400, but with a posterior distribution. Finally, a centrally distributed masked priming effect was visible between 150 and 250 msec and continued into the 300500 msec time window, where it was topographically dissociable from the FN400. These results suggest that multiple neural signals are associated with repetition and potentially contribute to recognition memory.
Three essays on the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurship

THREE ESSA YS ON THE INFLUENCE OF FORMAL INSTITUTIONS ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP Michael David Crum September 30,2011 This dissertation is composed of three essays in which I examine the influence of formal institutions on entrepreneurs and new firms. In the first essay, "The Influence of Institutions on the Likelihood of Self-Employment: A Multilevel Analysis," I examine how institutions at the country-level are related to the likelihood that individuals in those country are self-employed. Country-level measures of formal institutions are paired with individual-level data on self-employment from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Reynolds et aI., 2005). Using the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index and the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom separately as measures of institutions, I find that sound money in a country is positively associated with individual self-employment with both indices. Property rights and trade freedom are positively related to self-employed using the Economic Freedom of the World index. In the second essay, "Labor Market Institutions and New Firm Employment Growth,'" I examine how state-level labor market characteristics such as minimum wages, union densities, and unemployment insurance premiums influence employment growth in new firms. I use firm-level data from the Kauffman Firm Survey (DesRoches, Robb, &
Madagascar nursing needs assessment: education and development of the profession.

PURPOSE To address how Madagascar is improving nursing education and the profession to strengthen their nursing workforce. BACKGROUND The sub-Saharan Africa nursing workforce shortage is more than 600,000. Madagascar measures among affected countries. Nursing in Madagascar with reference to the Malagasy Lutheran Church Health Department (SALFA) is examined in this paper. The Malagasy Lutheran Nursing School (SEFAM) was established in 1956 to prepare nurses and midwives. The school recently relocated to better meet SALFA goals to increase nurses in the system and improve nursing education. A US nursing faculty and the SEFAM director proposed to conduct programme assessment to ensure that nursing and midwifery education meet health, social and community needs in Madagascar. DATA SOURCE/METHODS: An in-depth needs assessment of the school programme, facilities and resources occurred. Site visits and informal interviews were held. Field study visits to nursing schools and health-care facilities in Kenya and Tanzania assisted the authors in learning how nursing developed in those countries. Data analysis included comparison of the authors' comprehensive notes for congruity and accuracy. OUTCOMES Strategies are needed to support and maintain quality education, improve quality and quantity of nursing care services in hospitals and dispensaries, and improve conditions for nurses and other health-care workers. Compared with Madagascar, Kenya and Tanzania have more well-developed systems of nursing education and professional development. LIMITATIONS There were limited written sources for some information but methods, such as verbal accounts, compensated for this limitation. IMPLICATIONS/CONCLUSIONS Implications include advantages, disadvantages, facilitators and barriers to nursing educational and professional development in Madagascar. Development of nursing education, regulation and the profession will continue with support from key stakeholders. Kenya and Tanzania can serve as role models for Madagascar nurses. Countries with similar nursing education and professional development issues can be informed by lessons learned in this project.
Can All Schools be Successful? An exploration of the determinants of school ‘success’

ABSTRACT This paper aims to shed light on some of the issues raised in the often polarised debate around effective schooling by exploring the complexities involved in trying to uncover the determinants of the differential ‘success’ of schools. In doing so, the paper challenges the oversimplification which characterises many of the arguments around school improvement by demonstrating that it is not a question, of either management and teaching or the social context of schooling determining the success or otherwise of schools. Drawing on in‐depth qualitative research, the paper demonstrates the intricate and intimate connections between what school managers and teachers do and the socio‐economic and discursive environments within which they operate.
A uterine decidual cell cytokine ensures pregnancy-dependent adaptations to a physiological stressor

In the mouse, decidual cells differentiate from uterine stromal cells in response to steroid hormones and signals arising from the embryo. Decidual cells are crucially involved in creating the intrauterine environment conducive to embryonic development. Among their many functions is the production of cytokines related to prolactin (PRL), including decidual prolactin-related protein (DPRP). DPRP is a heparin-binding cytokine, which is abundantly expressed in uterine decidua. In this investigation, we have isolated the mouse Dprp gene, characterized its structure and evaluated its biological role. Dprp-null mice were made by replacing exons 2 to 6 of the Dprp gene with an in-frame enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) gene and a neomycin (neo) resistance cassette. Heterozygous intercross breeding of the mutant mice yielded the expected mendelian ratio. Pregnant heterozygote females expressed EGFP within decidual tissue in locations identical to endogenous Dprp mRNA and protein expression. Homozygous Dprp-null mutant male and female mice were viable, exhibited normal postnatal growth rates, were fertile and produced normal litter sizes. A prominent phenotype was observed when pregnant Dprp-null mice were exposed to a physiological stressor. DPRP deficiency interfered with pregnancy-dependent adaptations to hypoxia resulting in pregnancy failure. Termination of pregnancy was associated with aberrations in mesometrial decidual cells, mesometrial vascular integrity, and disruptions in chorioallantoic placenta morphogenesis. The observations suggest that DPRP participates in pregnancy-dependent adaptations to a physiological stressor.