Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Practising evidence-based medicine (EBM): a descriptive analysis of medical students’ whole-task EBM assignments

Researchers have suggested whole-task learning activities to practice and teach evidence-based medicine (EBM); however, limited description exists of their use in EBM curricula. This article describes medical students' execution of a whole-task EBM assignment and characterises themes emerging from assignment submissions. Between 2013 and 2015, Stanford University's paediatric clerkship students completed a whole-task EBM assignment based on a patient encounter. The assignment captured students' efforts to perform all EBM steps and describe their patient scenario and future knowledge needs strategies. Assignments were analysed using descriptive statistics and qualitative description. 123 students completed the assignment. Students formulated therapy (n=76), prognosis (n=18), diagnosis (n=15), harm (n=9) and aetiology (n=2) questions, and used a single (n=58) or multiple information resources (n=57). Based on evidence appraisal, 95 students indicated that the found evidence would inform future practice while 16 were sceptical of its conclusivity. 65 learners wanted to share evidence with colleagues; 33 with patients and families. To meet future knowledge needs, learners suggested using a structured approach (eg, PICO (patient, intervention, comparison and outcome); n=58), reading more primary literature (n=22) and creating question logs (n=21). This article provides a glimpse into students' EBM process and demonstrates the feasibility of whole-task activities for use in EBM training. Findings related to students’ clinical uncertainty and information sharing raise questions about coverage of these topics in current EBM training and suggest that further investigation is warranted.
Primary age-related tauopathy and the amyloid cascade hypothesis: the exception that proves the rule?

Extensive data supports the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which states that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) stems from neurotoxic forms of the amyloid-beta (Aβ) peptide. But the poor correlation between Aβ plaques and neurodegeneration/cognitive impairment, the spaciotemporal disparity between Aβ and tau pathology, and the disappointing results following several large clinical trials using Aβ-targeting agents are inconsistent with this explanation. The most perplexing inconsistency is the existence of AD-type dementia patients that develop abundant neurofibrillary tangles that are indistinguishable from those in early to moderate-stage AD in the absence of compelling evidence of amyloid toxicity. This neuropathological phenotype, which is distinct from other diseases with tangles, represents a conceptual disconnect, because it does not fall within any previously established category of tauopathy and ostensibly invalidates the amyloid cascade hypothesis. Instead, recent efforts have led to consensus criteria for a new alternative diagnostic category, which presupposes that these tangle-only dementia patients represent extreme examples of a distinct primary age-related tauopathy (PART) that is universally observed, albeit to varying degrees, in the aging brain. The cause of PART is unknown, but sufficient evidence exists to hypothesize that it stems from an Aβ-independent mechanism, such as mechanical injury. Should the PART hypothesis withstand further experimental testing, it would represent a shift in the way a subset of subjects with AD neuropathological change are classified and has the potential to focus and reaffirm the amyloid cascade hypothesis.
Nature of the genetic contribution to psychotic illness ‐ a continuum viewpoint

The recurrent psychoses, rather than, as Kraepelin supposed, constituting 2 major entities, manic depressive illness and schizophrenia, as separate diseases, may be distributed along a continuum that extends from unipolar depressive illness through bipolar and schizoaffective psychosis to schizophrenia with increasing severities of defect state. It is proposed that this continuum rests on a genetic base, variations in the form of the gene accounting for variations in form of psychosis. The simplest interpretation of the continuum is that such variation relates to changes at a single genetic locus. Evidence from a postmortem study of brain structure in schizophrenia suggests that this is the gene that determines the development of asymmetries in the human brain, i.e., the cerebral dominance gene or right shift factor of Annett; a possible genomic location is in the pseudoautosomal region of the sex chromosomes.
Indoor exposure to natural bright light prevents afternoon sleepiness.

STUDY OBJECTIVES The present study examined the effects of indoor exposure to natural bright light on afternoon sleepiness. DESIGN Participants took part in 3 experimental conditions: (1) a natural bright light condition in which they carried out performance and arousal tests sitting near a window (3260.0 +/- 1812.43 lux) from 12:40 PM to 1:10 PM, (2) a nap condition in which they were provided a nap opportunity for 20 minutes from 12:45 PM, and (3) a control condition in which they performed the tests in less than 100 lux surroundings from 12:40 PM to 1:10 PM. Before and after each treatment, the same series of tests were administered. SETTING A temperature- and light-controlled sleep laboratory. PARTICIPANTS Sixteen healthy female paid volunteers aged 33 to 43 (38.1 +/- 2.68) years. INTERVENTIONS Indoor natural bright light and a short nap. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Arousal levels were measured by the Psychomotor Vigilance Task, Alpha Attenuation Test, Karolinska Drowsiness Test, and Karolinska Sleepiness Scale. The tests were repeated every 30 minutes from 11:00 AM to 4:10 PM. Ambient light intensity was maintained at less than 100 lux, except during natural bright light exposure. Short-term exposure to natural bright light significantly improved afternoon arousal levels, as measured by the Karolinska Drowsiness Test and Alpha Attenuation Test, the effects of which continued for at least 60 minutes (1:10-2:10 PM). However, no significant differences were observed between conditions for Psychomotor Vigilance Test performance. CONCLUSIONS Brief indoor exposure to natural bright light may decrease afternoon sleepiness. This technique of light could be used in work settings in which napping is not permitted.
Teaching reading comprehension: the effects of direct instruction and cognitive apprenticeship on comprehension skills and metacognition

Governments, organisations and educators agree that education should not just focus on basic skills, but also on more complex outcomes such as metacognition. Youngsters must be prepared to deal with the rapidly changing society; they need to become life-long learners. Schools must provide opportunities for active, self-directed and independent learning to prepare students for this life-long learning. Metacognition plays an important role in this lifelong learning. This study addressed the question how regular schoolteachers should structure their instruction when they want to stimulate the development of both basic skills and metacognition. For answering this question, we studied two research traditions, namely educational effectiveness and constructivism. From both traditions, one specific instructional model was chosen namely direct instruction and cognitive apprenticeship. The direct instruction model is strongly related to educational effectiveness research. There is substantial empirical evidence that teachers can be trained to implement this model in a regular classroom setting. Furthermore, the direct instruction model proved to have a positive effect on achievement in basic skills. Direct instruction can be used for subject matters that are well structured, such as technical reading, and arithmetic. The model appears to be effective for non-native pupils and pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. With respect to direct instruction, there is little evidence of the effectiveness in terms of more complex skills such as metacognition. Besides, differential effects of the model for pupils from different background are hardly studied. The cognitive apprenticeship model (Collins, Brown & Newman, 1989) is based on constructivist ideas about learning. It focuses on the active involvement of pupils in the instructional process and on the development of metacognition. This model combines effective elements of instruction-psychological models such as reciprocal teaching, procedural facilitation and modelling. Research shows positive effects on complex skills, such as metacognition. However, this model has hardly been studied in regular classroom settings. In most studies, the treatment takes place outside the regular classroom or is carried out by the researcher or a computer program. With respect to cognitive apprenticeship, it unclear whether regular teachers can use the model in their regular classrooms, and whether it is suitable for teaching more basic skills and for pupils with different background characteristics. This thesis studied the implementation of both direct instruction and cognitive apprenticeship in a regular classroom setting for the school subject of reading comprehension. The effects were studied both in terms of basic skills, i.e. reading comprehension skills, and complex skills, i.e. metacognition.
Church Marketing - Concept and Utility

The church mission and objectives are more and more difficult to accomplish because of the secularization of the today’s society. Church’s use of marketing is a sensitive issue that has both supporters and critics. This article subscribes to the positive point of view that suggests that religious organizations can apply marketing in order to fulfill their mission and to obtain better results. It also claims that the use of marketing by the church and clergy does not contradict the religious core values and that church marketing should develop a theoretical framework of its own and a specific set of methods, techniques and instruments. The present paper reveals the complexity of religious marketing. It presents a holistic view of the church marketing and proposes a specific conceptual framework for it. The article demonstrates that religious organizations’ marketing should be regarded as a form of social marketing and it briefly describes the church marketing process.
MODELO DE PERSONALIDAD HEXACO: RELACIONES CON PSICOPATOLOGÍA EMOCIONAL EN UNA MUESTRA ESPAÑOLA

This study examines the relationships between personality dimensions and obsessive-compulsive and depressive psychopathology signs, on the basis of the new 6-dimension HEXACO personality model:Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. Participants were 354 individuals from the general population, from which 21 were at risk of depression (r-DEP) and 29 at risk of obsessive-compulsive disorder (r-OCD). Jointly, the 6 personality dimensions explained 42% of the BDI-II score in the r-DEP group, and 37% of the C-BOCI score in the r-OCD group. The two at-risk groups differed from the no-risk participants in all the personality dimensions, with the only exception of Honesty-Humility. The correlations between the self-evaluation and the observer-evaluation were significant and high. To conclude,the relationships between emotional psychopathology and the HEXACO personality dimensions open an interesting new perspective, potentially useful in clinical practice.
Effects of text structure, reading goals and epistemic beliefs on conceptual change

We investigated the online and ofﬂine effects of learner and instructional characteristicson conceptual change of a robust misconception in science. Fifty-nine undergraduateuniversity students with misconceptions about evolution were identiﬁed as espousingevaluativist or non-evaluativist epistemic beliefs in science. Participants were randomlyassigned to receive a traditional or refutational text that discussed a misconception inevolution and a general comprehension or elaborative interrogation reading goal.Participants’ cognitive and metacognitive processes while readingwere measured usinga think-aloud protocol. Postreading, participants’ correct and incorrect conceptualknowledge were separately assessed with a transference essay. Results showed that textstructure and reading goals affected cognitive conﬂict, coherence-building andelaborative processing while reading and promoted correct conceptual knowledgeincluded in essays but failed to affect the inclusion of misconceptions. Further,participants with evaluativist epistemic beliefs engaged in fewer comprehensionmonitoring processes and were more likely to adapt their coherence-building processesaccording to reading goals than their non-evaluativist counterparts, but epistemic beliefgroups did not differ in the content of the posttest essay. Theoretical and educationalimplications of these ﬁndings are discussed.Students encounter and study complex and often counterintuitive science concepts throughouttheir educational careers. Increasingly, such science concepts such as evolutionary medicineand the global carbon cycle are playing a signi ﬁcant role in students’ reasoning about personaland global issues. Therefore, how students manage the complexity of these concepts and theiroften inaccurate prior knowledge is unquestionably vital. Often, to successfully learn thesescience concepts requires students to undertake a challenging process: revising intuitive butinaccurateknowledgetowardsscientiﬁcallyvalidknowledge,referredtoasconceptualchange.We examine the possibility of conceptual change occurring on robust misconceptionsabout biological evolution, a foundational yet difﬁcult science concept, within the contextof text-based instruction. As Sinatra and others have described (Dole & Sinatra, 1998;Limon, 2001; Sinatra, 2005; Sinatra & Pintrich, 2003), the traditional approach to text-based conceptual change research has been to induce cognitive conﬂict, which is viewedas a necessary but insufﬁcient step to achieve change. Sinatra and Pintrich (2003) haveargued that conceptual change remains an unlikely outcome of instruction even whenenvironments are designed to promote knowledge restructuring. Therefore, in the currentstudy, we examine additional variables that theoretically support other cognitive and
Sparse Recovery With Orthogonal Matching Pursuit Under RIP

This paper presents a new analysis for the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm. It is shown that if the restricted isometry property (RIP) is satisfied at sparsity level <i>O</i>(k̅), then OMP can stably recover a <i>k̅</i>-sparse signal in 2-norm under measurement noise. For compressed sensing applications, this result implies that in order to uniformly recover a <i>k̅</i>-sparse signal in R<i>d</i>, only <i>O</i>(<i>k̅</i> ln<i>d</i>) random projections are needed. This analysis improves some earlier results on OMP depending on stronger conditions that can only be satisfied with Ω(<i>k̅</i><sup>2</sup> ln<i>d</i>) or Ω(<i>k̅</i><sup>1.6</sup> ln<i>d</i>) random projections.
Delay Distribution Analysis of IEEE 802.11 with Variable Packet Length

The distribution of the delay is a very important measure to determine the performance of a WLAN. Indeed, real-time applications typically require that their packets reach their destination within a certain delay with a given probability, and to guarantee this it is necessary to perform the computation of the delay distribution. In this paper we develop a novel method to compute the delay distribution of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) for a WLAN where the stations transmit packets of variable length. We develop an analytical model that applies to basic, RTS/CTS, and hybrid (coexistence of basic and RTS/CTS) access modes. A simulation model is used to validate the analysis.
The Nuclear Stellar Cluster in the Seyfert 1 Galaxy NGC 3227: High Angular Resolution Near-Infrared Imaging and Spectroscopy

Near-infrared (NIR) high angular resolution speckle imaging and imaging spectroscopy of the nuclear region (~10′′ ≈ 840 pc) of the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 3227 are presented. The images reveal an unresolved nuclear source in the K band in addition to a nuclear stellar cluster that is slightly resolved in the J and H bands. The contribution of this stellar cluster to the NIR continuum is increasing from the K to the J bands. The stellar absorption lines are extended compared to the neighboring continuum suggesting a nuclear stellar cluster size of ~70 pc FWHM. Analysis of the stellar absorption lines suggests that the stars are contributing about 65% (40%) of the total continuum emission in the H (K) band in a 3. ″6 aperture. The dominant stellar type is cool M-type stars. Population synthesis in conjunction with NIR spectral synthesis indicates that the age of the mapped nuclear stellar cluster is in the range of 25-50 Myr when red supergiants contribute most to the NIR light. This is supported by published optical data on the Mg I b line and the Ca II triplet. Although a higher age of ~0.5 Gyr where asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars dominate the NIR light cannot be excluded, the observed parameters are at the limit of those expected for a cluster dominated by AGB stars. However, in either case the resolved stellar cluster contributes only about ~15% of the total dynamical mass in the inner 300 pc. This immediately implies at least one other much older stellar population that contributes to the mass but not the NIR luminosity. Pure constant star formation over the last 10 Gyr can be excluded based on the observational fact that in such a scenario the total observed (spatially unresolved and spectrally resolved) Brγ flux would be of stellar origin that is spatially extended. Therefore, at least two star formation/starburst events took place in the nucleus of NGC 3227. Since such sequences in the nuclear star formation history are also observed in the nuclei of other galaxies a link between the activity of the star formation and the AGN itself seems likely.
The Story Of Earth And Life: A Southern African Perspective on a 4.6-Billion-Year Journey (review)

Earth and Life is an unusual textbook in several respects. The coverage includes not only geology but also prehistory, the text includes contributions from no fewer than eighteen scholars, and the volume is subsidized by Kumba Resources, a South African mining company. This felicitous partnership brings the price of a full-color book down to an affordable level for students, which will help guarantee its widespread use in the classroom. After a brief summary of the history of research and of basic methods, the book follows a logical progress through time, beginning with the formation of the earth from a global perspective. From broad processes, we move on to the formation of the continents and the oldest geological formations in southern Africa, which date to over 3600 million years ago. Here, as throughout the book, the graphics, maps, tables, and photographs are carefully designed, graphically stunning, and beautifully reproduced. "Route Maps" at the beginning of each chapter provide signposts to the topics that follow as well as chronological information. Chapter 4 describes the rich mineral deposits of the Kaapvaal Craton, part of the world's oldest continent, and the formation of the most extensive gold and platinum deposits anywhere from the collision of small continents and massive sediment accumulation. Then came Panagea and the ancestors of the present continents—the life and death of the supercontinents. Chapter 7 provides a description of the geology of Gondwana, as revealed in southern African strata, the remains of the supercontinent that supplies over 60 percent of the world's minerals, including evidence for a mass extinction of 251 million years ago that exterminated 96 percent of then-living species. The next chapter turns to paleontology and describes the life of Gondwana, known from major fossil discoveries in southern Africa, with occasional excursions further afield.
Shining a Light on Dark Sequencing: Characterising Errors in Ion Torrent PGM Data

The Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM) is a new sequencing platform that substantially differs from other sequencing technologies by measuring pH rather than light to detect polymerisation events. Using re-sequencing datasets, we comprehensively characterise the biases and errors introduced by the PGM at both the base and flow level, across a combination of factors, including chip density, sequencing kit, template species and machine. We found two distinct insertion/deletion (indel) error types that accounted for the majority of errors introduced by the PGM. The main error source was inaccurate flow-calls, which introduced indels at a raw rate of 2.84% (1.38% after quality clipping) using the OneTouch 200 bp kit. Inaccurate flow-calls typically resulted in over-called short-homopolymers and under-called long-homopolymers. Flow-call accuracy decreased with consecutive flow cycles, but we also found significant periodic fluctuations in the flow error-rate, corresponding to specific positions within the flow-cycle pattern. Another less common PGM error, high frequency indel (HFI) errors, are indels that occur at very high frequency in the reads relative to a given base position in the reference genome, but in the majority of instances were not replicated consistently across separate runs. HFI errors occur approximately once every thousand bases in the reference, and correspond to 0.06% of bases in reads. Currently, the PGM does not achieve the accuracy of competing light-based technologies. However, flow-call inaccuracy is systematic and the statistical models of flow-values developed here will enable PGM-specific bioinformatics approaches to be developed, which will account for these errors. HFI errors may prove more challenging to address, especially for polymorphism and amplicon applications, but may be overcome by sequencing the same DNA template across multiple chips.
Should Banks Be Diversified? Evidence from Individual Bank Loan Portfolios

We study empirically the effect of focus (specialization) vs. diversification on the return and the risk of banks using data from 105 Italian banks over the period 1993-1999. Specifically, we analyze the tradeoffs between (loan portfolio) focus and diversification using a unique data set that is able to identify individual bank loan exposures to different industries, to different sectors, and to different geographical regions. Our results are consistent with a theory that predicts a deterioration in bank monitoring quality at high levels of risk and a deterioration in bank monitoring quality upon lending expansion into newer or competitive industries. Our most important findings are that industrial loan diversification reduces bank return while endogenously producing riskier loans for all banks in our sample (this effect being most powerful for high risk banks), sectoral loan diversification produces an inefficient risk-return tradeoff only for high risk banks, and geographical diversification results in an improvement in the risk-return tradeoff for banks with low levels of risk. A robust result that emerges from our empirical findings is that diversification of bank assets is not guaranteed to produce superior performance and/or greater safety for banks.
X-masking during logic BIST and its impact on defect coverage

We present a technique for making a circuit ready for logic built-in self test by masking unknown values at its outputs. In order to keep the silicon area cost low, some known bits in output responses are also allowed to be masked. These bits are selected based on a stuck-at n-detection based metric, such that the impact of masking on the defect coverage is minimal. An analysis based on a probabilistic model for resistive short defects indicates that the coverage loss for unmodeled defects is negligible for relatively low values of n.