Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Knowledge and Practice Gaps among Pediatric Nurses at a Tertiary Care Hospital Karachi Pakistan

The advancement in medical science has created health care environments that require nursing professionals who posses specialized clinical knowledge and skills to provide care and deal with critically and acutely ill children. This study explored gaps between knowledge and practice as perceived by the registered nurses of pediatric units by further recommending the changes suggested by them. A descriptive exploratory study design under the quantitative research methodology was utilized using universal sampling of all pediatric nurses working at a tertiary care hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. The gaps between knowledge and practice, as perceived by the participants, were categorized into five major categories: (1) medication (34%), (2) skills (28.3%), (3) knowledge (13.36%), (4) handling of code blue and intubations (12.6%), and (5) operating medical devices (11.58%). As a result, anxiety and incompetency were notably seen in the participants which had great amount of impact on the level of care provided to the patients. The implications of the findings for quality patient care were also analyzed.
Accelerated Tooth Eruption in Children With Diabetes Mellitus

OBJECTIVE. The objective of this study was to evaluate tooth eruption in 6- to 14-year-old children with diabetes mellitus. METHODS. Tooth eruption status was assessed for 270 children with diabetes and 320 control children without diabetes. Data on important diabetes-related variables were collected. Analyses were performed using logistic regression models. RESULTS. Children with diabetes exhibited accelerated tooth eruption in the late mixed dentition period (10–14 years of age) compared to healthy children. For both case patients and control subjects the odds of a tooth being in an advanced eruptive stage were significantly higher among girls than boys. There was also a trend associating gingival inflammation with expedited tooth eruption in both groups. No association was found between the odds of a tooth being in an advanced stage of eruption and hemoglobin A1c or duration of diabetes. Patients with higher body mass index percentile demonstrated statistically higher odds for accelerated tooth eruption, but the association was not clinically significant. CONCLUSIONS. Children with diabetes exhibit accelerated tooth eruption. Future studies need to ascertain the role of such aberrations in dental development and complications such as malocclusion, impaired oral hygiene, and periodontal disease. The standards of care for children with diabetes should include screening and referral programs aimed at oral health promotion and disease prevention.
An improved LMI approach for Static Output Feedback Fault-Tolerant Control with application to flight tracking control

This paper proposes an improved Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) approach for the synthesis of Static Output Feedback (SOF) Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC). A novel slack variable is introduced into the matrix inequalities, which provides an additional degree of freedom to compute the numerical solution. Subsequently, an improved iterative algorithm is developed to obtain an optimal SOF gain with less conservativeness. In this paper, designs of the SOF gain are shown in the framework of tracking control. The nonlinear simulations of the ADMIRE aircraft are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Gadolinium induces macrophage apoptosis

Gadolinium (Gd) suppresses reticuloendothelial functions in vivo by unknown mechanisms. In vitro exposure of rat alveolar macrophages to GdCl3·6H2O caused cell death, as measured by trypan blue permeability, in both dose‐ and time‐dependent fashions. Even a 10‐min exposure to Gd caused significant cell death by 24 h. The morphology of Gd‐treated cells, pyknosis and karyorrhexis prior to loss of membrane integrity, suggested apoptosis. Upon flow cytometric examination, Gd‐treated propidium iodide‐excluding cells demonstrated light scatter changes characteristic of apoptotic cells (decreased forward and increased right angle scatter). Gel electrophoresis of DNA from Gd‐treated macrophages clearly showed the ladder pattern unique to apoptotic cells. Electron‐dense structures containing Gd were observed via electron spectroscopic imaging within phagosomes and also within nuclei (associated with condensed chromatin). Gadolinium, endocytosed by macrophages and distributed to nuclei, causes apoptosis of macrophages in vitro.
An efficient algorithm for simulating error vector magnitude in nonlinear OFDM amplifiers

We have developed an algorithm for evaluating the error vector magnitude (EVM) from the single-tone distortion of power amplifiers in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The developed formulas allow us to simulate EVM using only the single-tone response i.e. without modulation and demodulation; this enables us to easily calculate the EVM using a standard harmonic-balance (HB) simulator. This simulation scheme reduces the processing time by a factor of ten compared with conventional system-level (SL) simulation. The EVM obtained using this scheme agreed well with the results of SL simulation (0.6% error).
Effect of Tegaserod on Recto-Sigmoid Tonic and Phasic Activity in Constipation-Predominant Irritable Bowel Syndrome

OBJECTIVES:In irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), the modulation of neural pathways may be altered and we have recently shown that postprandial recto-sigmoid tone modification is impaired. On pathophysiological grounds, we do not know whether this alteration may have a role in symptom onset and, in particular, whether an effective drug, such as tegaserod, can improve this response together with symptom severity.METHODS:Twenty-two female patients with constipation-predominant IBS (IBS-C), diagnosed according to Rome II criteria, were studied. All subjects underwent an evaluation of the presence and severity of IBS symptoms and the recto-sigmoid barostat test to measure fasting and postprandial recto-sigmoid tone and phasic contractility. They were then randomly assigned to receive either tegaserod 6 mg b.i. d (12 patients) or placebo tablets (10 patients) for 4 wk, according to a double-blind protocol. Symptom assessment and recto-sigmoid tone and contractility were re-evaluated at the end of the treatment.RESULTS:Both symptom severity and postprandial modification of recto-sigmoid tone improved only in the tegaserod group and a significant correlation was evident between the improvement of bloating and the improvement of postprandial recto-sigmoid tone modification. No effect of tegaserod on recto-sigmoid motility index or correlation between motility index and symptom improvement was evident.CONCLUSIONS:In IBS-C female patients, the administration of tegaserod improves symptom severity and is accompanied by an improvement of recto-sigmoid tone response to a meal.
Importance of Inhaler Device Use Status in the Control of Asthma in Adults: The Asthma Inhaler Treatment Study

BACKGROUND: Proper education and training in correct inhalation technique has been reported to have a substantial role in the achievement of optimal therapeutic benefit and asthma control. The present study was designed to evaluate inhaler technique and the role of education in relation to asthma control among patients with persistent asthma in Turkey. METHODS: A total of 572 patients with persistent asthma (mean ± SD age 42.7 ± 12.2 y, 76% females) were included in this non-interventional, observational, registry study conducted across Turkey. Data on the effective and correct use of inhaler devices were collected via the Ease of Use for the Inhaler Device Questionnaire to patients and physicians. RESULTS: Asthma control (overall 61.5% at baseline, and increased to 87.3% during follow-up) was better, with significant improvement in technique and decrease in basic errors to the range 0–1, regardless of the inhaler type. Overall, the most common basic error associated with inhalation maneuvers was failure to exhale before inhaling through the device (18.9%). There was concordance between the patients and physicians in the ratio of correct inhaler technique only for spray-type inhalers. CONCLUSIONS: Close follow-up with repeated checking of the patient's inhaler technique and correction of errors each time by a physician seem to be associated with a significant decrease in the percent of patients who make basic errors in inhalation maneuvers and device-independent errors, and with better control of persistent asthma.
State-of-the-art in detecting academic plagiarism

The problem of academic plagiarism has been present for centuries. Yet, the widespread dissemination of information technology, including the internet, made plagiarising much easier. Consequently, methods and systems aiding in the detection of plagiarism have attracted much research within the last two decades. Researchers proposed a variety of solutions, which we will review comprehensively in this article. Available detection systems use sophisticated and highly efficient character-based text comparisons, which can reliably identify verbatim and moderately disguised copies. Automatically detecting more strongly disguised plagiarism, such as paraphrases, translations or idea plagiarism, is the focus of current research. Proposed approaches for this task include intrinsic, cross-lingual and citation-based plagiarism detection. Each method offers unique strengths and weaknesses; however, none is currently mature enough for practical use. In the future, plagiarism detection systems may benefit from combining traditional character-based detection methods with these emerging detection approaches.
Down-expression of circulating micro ribonucleic acid (miRNA)-148/152 family in plasma samples of non-small cell lung cancer patients.

AIMS Circulating extracellular micro ribonucleic acids (miRNAs) are considered as potential biomarkers for malignancy detection and diagnosis. The aim of this study was to determine whether circulating miRNA-148/152 family (miR-148a, miR-148b, and miR-152) expression in plasma could be used as potential biomarkers for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients and healthy individuals. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The levels of miRNA-148/152 family were detected by TaqMan quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay in plasma of 20 NSCLC patients and 10 healthy individuals. The miRNA expression level of each sample was normalized to that of miR-16 and expressed as relative expression (2-ΔΔCt). RESULTS The circulating level of all three members of miRNA-148/152 family were significantly lower in plasma samples of NSCLC patients compared with those of healthy controls (P = 0.007, P = 0.003, and P = 0.000, respectively). The expression levels of miR-148a, miR-148b, and miR-152 in the late-stage NSCLC group were all lower than the early-stage NSCLC group (all P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS The present study suggests that the expression levels of miR-148/152 family in plasma might be useful biomarkers for NSCLC patients samples in the early diagnosis of NSCLC and monitoring of tumour development.
CTrigger: exposing atomicity violation bugs from their hiding places

Multicore hardware is making concurrent programs pervasive. Unfortunately, concurrent programs are prone to bugs. Among different types of concurrency bugs, atomicity violation bugs are common and important. Existing techniques to detect atomicity violation bugs suffer from one limitation: requiring bugs to manifest during monitored runs, which is an open problem in concurrent program testing. This paper makes two contributions. First, it studies the interleaving characteristics of the common practice in concurrent program testing (i.e., running a program over and over) to understand why atomicity violation bugs are hard to expose. Second, it proposes CTrigger to effectively and efficiently expose atomicity violation bugs in large programs. CTrigger focuses on a special type of interleavings (i.e., unserializable interleavings) that are inherently correlated to atomicity violation bugs, and uses trace analysis to systematically identify (likely) feasible unserializable interleavings with low occurrence-probability. CTrigger then uses minimum execution perturbation to exercise low-probability interleavings and expose difficult-to-catch atomicity violation. We evaluate CTrigger with real-world atomicity violation bugs from four sever/desktop applications (Apache, MySQL, Mozilla, and PBZIP2) and three SPLASH2 applications on 8-core machines. CTrigger efficiently exposes the tested bugs within 1--235 seconds, two to four orders of magnitude faster than stress testing. Without CTrigger, some of these bugs do not manifest even after 7 full days of stress testing. In addition, without deterministic replay support, once a bug is exposed, CTrigger can help programmers reliably reproduce it for diagnosis. Our tested bugs are reproduced by CTrigger mostly within 5 seconds, 300 to over 60000 times faster than stress testing.
The Emerging Neuroscience of Intrinsic Motivation: A New Frontier in Self-Determination Research

Intrinsic motivation refers to people’s spontaneous tendencies to be curious and interested, to seek out challenges and to exercise and develop their skills and knowledge, even in the absence of operationally separable rewards. Over the past four decades, experimental and field research guided by self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan and Deci, 2017) has found intrinsic motivation to predict enhanced learning, performance, creativity, optimal development and psychological wellness. Only recently, however, have studies begun to examine the neurobiological substrates of intrinsic motivation. In the present article, we trace the history of intrinsic motivation research, compare and contrast intrinsic motivation to closely related topics (flow, curiosity, trait plasticity), link intrinsic motivation to key findings in the comparative affective neurosciences, and review burgeoning neuroscience research on intrinsic motivation. We review converging evidence suggesting that intrinsically motivated exploratory and mastery behaviors are phylogenetically ancient tendencies that are subserved by dopaminergic systems. Studies also suggest that intrinsic motivation is associated with patterns of activity across large-scale neural networks, namely, those that support salience detection, attentional control and self-referential cognition. We suggest novel research directions and offer recommendations for the application of neuroscience methods in the study of intrinsic motivation.
Sparsity-Aware Filtered-X Affine Projection Algorithms for Active Noise Control

This paper describes a novel technique for promoting sparsity in the modified filtered-x algorithms required for active noise control. The proposed algorithms are based on recent techniques incorporating approximations to the \ell_0-norm in the cost functions that are used to derive adaptive filtering algorithms. In particular, zero-attracting and reweighted zero-attracting filtered-x adaptive algorithms are developed and considered for active noise control problems. The results of simulations indicate that the proposed techniques improve the convergence of the existing modified algorithm in the case where the primary and secondary paths exhibit a degree of sparsity.
Correlation between cortisol and insulin‐like growth factor‐binding proteins (IGFBPs) under physiological conditions in children

A positive correlation between 24‐h spontaneous growth hormone (GH) and cortisol secretion was previously reported in children. This observation prompted us to examine the relationship between physiological diurnal cortisol variation and the levels of insulin‐like growth factors (IGFs) and IGF‐binding proteins (IGFBPs) under physiological conditions.
Evaluation of the Influence of Corneal Biomechanical Properties on Intraocular Pressure Measurements Using the Ocular Response Analyzer

PurposeThe Ocular Response Analyzer (ORA) proposes to measure corneal biomechanical properties in vivo by monitoring and analyzing the corneal behavior when this structure is submitted to a force induced by an air jet. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between corneal biomechanical properties and corneal-compensated intraocular pressure (IOPCC) measurements as obtained by the ORA and Goldmann applanation tonometry (GAT) measurements. DesignObservational clinical study. MethodsThe study included 153 eyes of 78 subjects. All subjects underwent IOP evaluation with the ORA and GAT, and also measurements of central corneal thickness (CCT), corneal curvature, and axial length. Univariable and multivariable regression analysis were used to evaluate the associations between IOP (as measured with GAT and ORA) and CCT, corneal curvature, axial length, and age. Bland and Altman plots were used to evaluate the agreement between IOP measurements obtained by GAT and ORA. ResultsGAT IOP measurements were significantly associated with CCT (P=0.001) and corneal curvature (P<0.001), whereas ORA IOPCC measurements were not associated with any of the ocular variables. The difference between GAT and IOPCC measurements was significantly influenced by corneal thickness. Patients with thicker corneas tended to have higher GAT IOP measurements compared with IOPCC, whereas in patients with thin corneas, GAT IOP measurements tended to be lower than IOPCC. ConclusionsORA IOPCC measurements seem to provide an estimate of IOP that is less influenced by corneal properties than those provided by GAT.
Physical Layer Security of TAS/MRC With Antenna Correlation

We analyze the impact of antenna correlation on secrecy performance of multiple-input multiple-output wiretap channels where transmitter employs transmit antenna selection while receiver and eavesdropper perform maximal-ratio combining with arbitrary correlation. New closed-form expressions are derived for the exact and asymptotic (high signal-to-noise ratio in transmitter-receiver channel) secrecy outage probability.
Queries with Guarded Negation

A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL, called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation, called GN-Datalog, that allow only guarded negation, and we show that these query languages are computationally well behaved, in terms of testing query containment, query evaluation, open-world query answering, and boundedness. GN-SQL and GN-Datalog subsume a number of well known query languages and constraint languages, such as unions of conjunctive queries, monadic Datalog, and frontier-guarded tgds. In addition, an analysis of standard benchmark workloads shows that many uses of negation in SQL in practice are guarded.
Switching Dynamics Between Two Movement Patterns Varies According to Time Interval

This study investigated the regularity that characterizes the behavior of dissipative dynamical systems excited by external temporal inputs for pointing movements. Right-handed healthy male participants were asked to continuously point their right index finger at two light-emitting diodes (LEDs) located in the oblique left and right directions in front of them. These movements were performed under two conditions: one in which the direction was repeated and one in which the directions were switched on a stochastic basis. These conditions consisted of 12 tempos (30, 36, 42, 48, 51, 54, 57, 60, 63, 66, 69, and 72 beats per minute). Data from the conditions under which the input pattern was repeated revealed two different trajectories in hyper-cylindrical state space ℳ, whereas the conditions under which the inputs were switched induced transitions between the two trajectories, which were considered to be excited attractors. The transitions between the two excited attractors were characterized by a self-similar structure. Moreover, the correlation dimensions increased as the tempos increased. These results suggest a relationship of D ∝ 1/T (T is the switching-time length; i.e. the condition) between temporal input and pointing behavior and that continuous pointing movements are regular rather than random noise.
Effects of Lateral Charge Spreading on the Reliability of TANOS (TaN/AlO/SiN/Oxide/Si) NAND Flash Memory

It was found that the charge loss behavior of TANOS (TaN-Al2O3-nitride-oxide-silicon) cells for NAND flash memory application is highly dependent on the gate structures for the first time. The gate structures with trap layers remained on source and drain regions showed increased charge loss compared to the one with trap layers separated between different gate lines. The improvement by removing the trap layers between gate lines suggests that the lateral charge spreading via trap layers from the programmed cells to the adjacent erased cells contributes to the charge loss of the TANOS cells.
Safety issues and drug–drug interactions with commonly used quinolones

Introduction: Quinolones are widely used antimicrobials with good efficacy and favourable safety. Recently, forms of quinolone toxicity such as peripheral neuropathy, retinal detachment or QTc-prolongation have attracted attention. Areas covered: Data on different aspects of direct quinolone toxicity are reviewed and consider risk factors and predisposing structural properties. Indirect forms of quinolone toxicity such as Clostridium difficile infections or adverse reactions associated with drug–drug interactions are also discussed. Finally, the role of transporters in the pharmacokinetics of these antimicrobials and their utilisation in critically ill patients are illustrated. A MEDLINE PubMed search for articles published in English from January 1960 to June 2014 was completed using the terms: quinolone, quinolone-induced toxicity, quinolone pharmacokinetics, quinolone and critically ill, drug–drug interactions. Expert opinion: Quinolones exhibit an important component of the antibiotic arsenal. Although several adverse events have been associated with their use, taking into consideration risk factors, contraindications and potential drug–drug interactions can drastically reduce the respective risks.
Trehalose-6-P synthase is dispensable for growth on glucose but not for spore germination in Schizosaccharomyces pombe

Trehalose-6-P inhibits hexokinases in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (M. A. Blázquez, R. Lagunas, C. Gancedo, and J. M. Gancedo, FEBS Lett. 329:51-54, 1993), and disruption of the TPS1 gene (formerly named CIF1 or FDP1) encoding trehalose-6-P synthase prevents growth in glucose. We have found that the hexokinase from Schizosaccharomyces pombe is not inhibited by trehalose-6-P even at a concentration of 3 mM. The highest internal concentration of trehalose-6-P that we measured in S. pombe was 0.75 mM after heat shock. We have isolated from S. pombe the tps1+ gene, which is homologous to the Saccharomyces cerevisiae TPS1 gene. The DNA sequence from tps1+ predicts a protein of 479 amino acids with 65% identity with the protein of S. cerevisiae. The tps1+ gene expressed from its own promoter could complement the lack of trehalose-6-P synthase in S. cerevisiae tps1 mutants. The TPS1 gene from S. cerevisiae could also restore trehalose synthesis in S. pombe tps1 mutants. A chromosomal disruption of the tps1+ gene in S. pombe did not have a noticeable effect on growth in glucose, in contrast with the disruption of TPS1 in S. cerevisiae. However, the disruption prevented germination of spores carrying it. The level of an RNA hybridizing with an internal probe of the tps1+ gene reached a maximum after 20 min of heat shock treatment. The results presented support the idea that trehalose-6-P plays a role in the control of glycolysis in S. cerevisiae but not in S. pombe and show that the trehalose pathway has different roles in the two yeast species.