Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Management for improving patients’ knowledge and understanding about drug allergy

Background: Drug allergy a serious adverse drug reaction commonly concerned in healthcare practice. Inadequate documentation and communication between health providers, and limited health literacy and knowledge in patients could contribute to the re-occurrence of allergic reactions. Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of initiatives aiming to improve patients’ knowledge, understanding and behavior in preventing recurrent drug allergy. Methods: A before-and-after study was conducted at an 800-bed university teaching hospital, involving patients with a history of drug allergy. Questionnaires, completed at baseline and one month after receiving information were used to compare knowledge and understanding of drug allergy and behaviors in relation to drug allergy cards. Patients in Group 1 received a brochure only, but patients in Group 2 also received a pharmacist counseling intervention in addition to the brochure. Outcomes were evaluated within intervention group and between intervention groups. Results: The study included 299 (30.4%) and 100 patients (100.0%) in Groups 1 and 2 respectively who completed the baseline questionnaire, of whom 179 (59.8%) and 96 (96.0%) completed the follow-up questionnaire. At baseline, higher educational levels and possession of a drug allergy card were significantly associated with better knowledge about drug allergy. After intervention, Group 2 had significantly greater increases in mean overall knowledge scores than Group 1 (p<0.01) and also greater increases in the proportions self-reporting carrying and presenting drug allergy cards (p<0.05 and p<0.01). Conclusions: Pharmacist counseling plus brochure may be more effective than brochure alone in promoting patients’ knowledge of drug allergy and drug allergy card importance.
Molecular genetic study of novel biomarkers for early diagnosis of oral squamous cell carcinoma

Objectives: Early detection and treatment of an oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is critical because of its rapid growth, frequent lymph-node metastasis, and poor prognosis. However, no clinically-valuable methods of early diagnosis exist, and genetic analysis of OSCCs has yielded no biomarkers. Study Design: We investigated the expression of genes associated with inflammation in OSCCs via a quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) analysis of microarray data. Tumor and normal tissues from five patients with an OSCC were used for microarray analysis. Differentially-expressed genes, identified using permutation, local pooled error (LPE), t-tests, and significance analysis of microarrays (SAM), were selected as candidate genetic markers. Results: Two groups corresponding to tissue identity were evident, implying that their differentially-expressed genes represented biological differences between tissues. Fifteen genes were identified using the Student’s paired t-test (p<0.05) and the SAM, with a false discovery rate of less than 0.02. Based on gene expression, these 15 genes can be used to classify an OSCC. A genetic analysis of functional networks and ontologies, validated by using a qRT-PCR analysis of the tissue samples, identified four genes, ADAM15, CDC7, IL12RB2 and TNFRSF8, that demonstrated excellent concordance with the microarray data. Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that four genes (ADAM15, CDC7, IL12RB2 and TNFRSF8) had potential as novel biomarkers for the diagnosis and the treatment of an OSCC. Key words:Biomarker, microarray, quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, oral squamous cell carcinoma, gene expression profiling.
Global Supply Chains and Wage Inequality

A salient feature of globalization in recent decades is the emergence of "global supply chains" in which different countries specialize in different stages of a sequential production process. In Arnaud Costinot, Jonathan Vogel and Su Wang (2011), CVW hereafter, we have developed a simple theory of trade with sequential production to shed light on how global supply chains affect the interdependence of nations. In this paper we develop a multi-factor extension of CVW to explore how the emergence of global supply chains may affect wage inequality within countries. Our main theoretical prediction is that the emergence of global supply chains has opposite effects on wage inequality among workers employed at the bottom and the top of these chains. This suggests that the consequences of globalization on wage inequality may be very different in primary sectors like agriculture or mining than in manufacturing sectors.
The Impact of Texting/SMS Language on Academic Writing of Students- What do we need to panic about?

A B ST R A C T The growing concern about the profuse use of texting endangering the standard forms in language prompted the present research to determine the presence or absence of SMS features in the academic writing of the participants. Triangulation was used for data collection i.e. questionnaires for learners and educators and samples of the learners’ English written work were examined for SMS features. Suppliance in Obligatory Context was used for data recording. Simple average and ratio were used for descriptive analysis of the data. Contrary to the expectation, there were no significant evidences of these features in the sample. It seems being proficient in standard forms, these learners are context conscious and can switch to the appropriate register or style when writing formally . Thus the present study has de mystified the popular belief about texting adversely affecting writing and thus destroying Standard English. Moreover, the evidences of one punctuation mark used in place of another indicate there can be other factors like carelessness or lack of knowledge of students and the lack of training, feedback or emphasis by educators or the system. So the matter of concern should be the general neglect of punctuation even out of the context of texting.
Dominantly transmitted focal dystonia in families of patients with musician’s cramp

Musician’s dystonia is generally considered a sporadic disorder. We present three families with the index patient affected by musician’s dystonia, but other forms of upper limb focal task–specific dystonia (FTSD), mainly writer’s cramp, in seven relatives. Our results suggest a genetic contribution to FTSD with phenotypic variability, including musician’s dystonia.
Psychological Contract Breach in the Anticipatory Stage of Change

This study examined the impact of two types of psychological contract breach (organizational policies and social atmosphere breach) on resistance to change and engagement in the anticipatory phase of change and assessed whether supervisory informational justice mitigated the negative effects of breach. Employees from three departments of a Dutch financial institution (n = 141) who were in the first phase of a change initiative participated in the study. Results showed that social atmosphere breach was positively related to affective resistance to change and negatively related to engagement, while organizational policies breach was positively related to cognitive resistance to change. These findings point to the importance of distinguishing between different types of psychological contract breach. In addition, it was found that supervisory informational justice mitigated the adverse effect of social atmosphere breach on cognitive resistance to change, pointing to the important role of managers in the first phase of change.
Initial Experience with Sildenafil, Bosentan, and Nitric Oxide for Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Patients with Elevated Pulmonary Vascular Resistance before and after Orthotopic Heart Transplantation

Background. Although pulmonary hypertension complicating dilated cardiomyopathy has been shown to be a significant risk factor for graft failure after heart transplantation, the upper limits of pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR) that would contraindicate pediatric heart transplantation are not known. Methods. A retrospective review of all pediatric orthotopic heart transplant (OHT) performed at our institution from 2002 to 2007 was performed. Seven patients with PVR > 6 Wood's units (WU) prior to transplant were compared pre- and postoperatively with 20 matched controls with PVR < 6 WU. All pulmonary vasodilator therapies used are described as well as outcomes during the first year posttransplant. Results. The mean PVR prior to transplantation in the 7 study cases was 11.0 ± 4.6 (range 6–22) WU, compared to mean PVR of 3.07 ± 0.9 WU (0.56–4.5) in the controls (P = .27 × 10−6). All patients with elevated PVR were treated pre-OHT with either Sildenafil or Bosentan. Post-OHT, case patients received a combination of sildenafil, iloprost, and inhaled nitric oxide. All 7 case patients survived one year post-OHT, and there was no statistical difference between cases and controls for hospital stay, rejection/readmissions, or graft right ventricular failure. Mean PVR in the cases at one and three months post-OHT was not significantly different between the two groups. Only one of the cases required prolonged treatment with iloprost after OHT. Conclusions. A PVR above 6 WU should not be an absolute contraindication to heart transplantation in children.
Smile Big or Not? Effects of Smile Intensity on Perceptions of Warmth and Competence

While previous works suggest the positive impact of smiles on interpersonal perceptions, this research proposes and finds that smile intensity differentially affects two fundamental dimensions of social judgments—warmth and competence. Compared to a slight smile, a marketer displaying a broad smile is more likely to be perceived by consumers as warmer but less competent. Furthermore, the facilitative effect of smile intensity on warmth perceptions is more prominent among promotion-focused consumers and in low-risk consumption contexts, while the detrimental effect of smile intensity on competence perceptions is more likely to occur among prevention-focused consumers and in high-risk consumption situations. Field observations in a crowdfunding context further indicate that the effects of smile intensity on warmth and competence perceptions have downstream consequences on actual consumer behaviors.
Quantitative morphological analysis of the Hubble Deep Field North and Hubble Deep Field South – I. Early- and late-type luminosity–size relations of galaxies out to z∼ 1

Based on drizzled F606W and F814W images, we present quantitative structural parameters in the V-band rest-frame for all galaxies with z 0.2 x 10 10 h -2 L ○. show a moderate decrease [∼30(±10) per cent] in size [or interpreted differently, a decrease of ∼0.77(±0.30) mag in the central surface brightness] at a given luminosity. Finally, we make a comparison of our results with the infall and hierarchical models.
The H i Distribution of the Milky Way

Neutral atomic hydrogen (Hi) traces the interstellar medium (ISM) over a broad range of physical conditions. Its 21-cm emission line is a key probe of the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way Galaxy. About 50 years after the first detection of the 21-cm line the exploration of the Hi distribution of the Milky Way has undergone a true renaissance. This was triggered by several large-scale 21-cm surveys that became available within the past decade. New all-sky surveys unravel the shape and volume density distribution of the gaseous disk up to its borders. High-resolution Galactic plane surveys disclose a wealth of shells, filaments, and spurs that bear witness to the recycling of matter between stars and the ISM. All these observational results indicate that the Hi gas traces a dynamical Galactic ISM with structures on all scales, from tens of astronomical units to kiloparsecs. The Galaxy can be considered to be a violent, breathing disk surrounded by highly turbulent extra-planar gas.
Pristine CNO abundances from Magellanic Cloud B stars - I. The LMC cluster NGC 2004 with UVES

We present chemical abundances for four main sequence B stars in the young cluster NGC 2004 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Apart from H II regions, unevolved OB-type stars are currently the only accessible source ofpresent-day CNO abundances for the MCs not altered by stellar evolution. Using UVES on the VLT, we obtained spectra of sufficient resolution (R = 20 000) and signal-to-noise (S/N ≥ 100) to derive abundances for a variety of elements (He, C, N, O, Mg and Si) with NLTE line formation. This study doubles the number of main sequence B stars in the LMC with detailed chemical abundances. More importantly and in contrast to previous studies, we find no CNO abundance anomalies brought on by e.g. binary interaction or rotational mixing. Thus, this is the first time that abundances from H II regions in the LMC can sensibly be cross-checked against those from B stars by excluding evolutionary effects. We confirm the H II-region CNO abundances to within the errors, in particular the extraordinarily low nitrogen abundance of e(N) ≃ 7.0. Taken at face value, the nebular carbon abundance is 0.16 dex below the B-star value which could be interpreted in terms of interstellar dust depletion. Oxygen abundances from the two sources agree to within 0.03 dex. In comparison with the Galactic thin disk at MC metallicities, the Magellanic Clouds are clearly nitrogen-poor environments.
The Pearl of FDG PET/CT in Preoperative Assessment of Patients with Potentially Operable Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer and its Clinical Impact

The aim of this retrospective study is to evaluate the clinical impact and efficacy of fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography–computed tomography (PET/CT) on management decisions for patients suffering from clinically operable non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A retrospective review of 186 potentially operable NSCLC patients who underwent whole-body PET/CT examination in 2012 was performed. The patients were further analyzed via the electronic patient record (ePR) system for relevant findings. Overall change in management was assigned if a patient avoided unnecessary surgery due to disease upstaging or if a patient underwent further neoadjuvant treatment or investigation before the curative surgery. Of all 186 subjects, 65 (34.9%) became inoperable after PET/CT due to disease upstaging. The remaining 121 (65.1%) of patients remained operable after PET/CT examination. Nineteen out of 121 potentially operable patients did not receive curative surgery eventually, as 11 patients had poor clinical condition and 8 patients refused surgery. One hundred two out of 186 (54.8%) patients received curative operation following PET/CT. Among these 102 individuals, 97 patients (95%) proceeded to surgery without further neoadjuvant treatment or other investigatory procedures. Of the remaining 5 patients, 4 (3.9%) received neoadjuvant treatment and 1 (1.0%) had further investigation after PET/CT. Seventy of the 186 (37.6%) patients underwent changes in management plans after PET/CT study. Out of the 186 individuals, a subgroup of 141 (75.8%) patients underwent dedicated CT thorax before PET/CT examination. Forty-seven (33.3%) patients had avoided futile surgery due to disease upstaging. Fifty-one of the 141 (36.2%) patients underwent changes in management plans after PET/CT. PET/CT had great clinical impact, with significant reduction of futile curative surgery.
Persistence-Based Structural Recognition

This paper presents a framework for object recognition using topological persistence. In particular, we show that the so-called persistence diagrams built from functions defined on the objects can serve as compact and informative descriptors for images and shapes. Complementary to the bag-of-features representation, which captures the distribution of values of a given function, persistence diagrams can be used to characterize its structural properties, reflecting spatial information in an invariant way. In practice, the choice of function is simple: each dimension of the feature vector can be viewed as a function. The proposed method is general: it can work on various multimedia data, including 2D shapes, textures and triangle meshes. Extensive experiments on 3D shape retrieval, hand gesture recognition and texture classification demonstrate the performance of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, our approach yields higher recognition accuracy when used in conjunction with the bag-of-features.
The devil's advocate: Secular arguments diminish both implicit and explicit religious belief

Th e religion-science debate has heated up in recent years, with polemical arguments on both side decrying the other. Given that the dominant view is of religiousness as a relatively fi xed personality trait, all of this furor seems excessive. Interested in just how malleable religiousness is, we exposed half of our participants to an argument against the existence of God by Richard Dawkins. Th ose exposed to Dawkins’ arguments showed lower self-reported religiousness, as well as less implicit association between religion and truth. Th ese results demonstrate the fl exibility of trait religiousness.
The Effects of Traditional Chinese Exercise in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Meta-Analysis

Background Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major public health problem worldwide. However, several studies that have assessed the role of traditional Chinese exercise in the management of this disease include broad variations in sample sizes and results. Therefore, this meta-analysis was conducted to assess the effects of traditional Chinese exercise on patients with COPD. Methods Two investigators independently identified and extracted data from selected articles. A computerized search of electronic databases through August 2015 was conducted. Mean differences (MDs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated to analyze the combined data. The methodological quality was evaluated using the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool. Heterogeneity was assessed with the I2 test. Results Ten randomized, controlled trials (RCTs) involving 622 patients met the inclusion criteria. There were significant improvements in the 6-minute walking distance test (6 MWD;MWD = 12.10 m; 95% CI, 7.56–16.65 m; p<0.001); forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1% predicted; WMD = 9.02; 95% CI, 6.80–11.23; p<0.00001); forced expiratory volume in 1 second/forced vital capacity (FEV(1)/FVC) ratio (Tiffenau Index; WMD = 6.67; 95% CI, 5.09–8.24; p<0.00001); and quality of life, as evaluated by the Chronic Respiratory Disease Questionnaire (CRDQ; WMD = 0.85 score; 95% CI, 0.52–1.18; p<0.00001). Conclusions Traditional Chinese exercise could provide an effective alternative method for managing COPD. Larger and higher-quality trials are required.
Perspectives on Effective Coaching by Those Who Have Been Coached

Studies on coaching have largely explored effectiveness from the perspective of a coach or employing organization rather than that of the employee or coachee. There has also been a focus on ‘successful’ coaching, but little is known about unsuccessful coaching or the hindrances to achieving coaching success. Many empirical studies on training interventions have found that support and help for employees from managers and others within the workplace enhances training effectiveness and there is an assumption in coaching studies that this will also be true for coaching interventions. This study addresses the gap in academic literature by exploring survey responses from 296 industry professionals in 34 countries who had been, or were currently being, coached. The study found that facing barriers during the period of coaching engagements was common and we present a categorization framework of six barrier categories. Our analysis suggests that three of these barrier categories may be predictive of coachee perceptions of limited coaching effectiveness: difficulties with a coach; coaching relationships and overall coaching experience. The study also provides empirical evidence that suggests a lack of support from within an employing organization is not predictive of limited coaching effectiveness.
FDI in Chinese Cities: Spillovers and Impact on Growth

This study reconsiders the question of impact of FDI on growth performance. We rely on a dataset of Chinese cities between 1990 and 2002 to investigate the effects of FDI in the traditional growth regression framework using the GMM estimator for dynamic panels. Our growth model incorporates an explicit consideration of spatial dependence effects in the form of spatially lagged income and FDI. Our results reveal that Chinese cities take advantage not only of FDI flows received locally but also of FDI flows received by their neighbours.
An Empirical Study of Automatic Chinese Word Segmentation for Spoken Language Understanding and Named Entity Recognition

Word segmentation is usually recognized as the first step for many Chinese natural language processing tasks, yet its impact on these subsequent tasks is relatively under-studied. For example, how to solve the mismatch problem when applying an existing word segmenter to new data? Does a better word segmenter yield a better subsequent NLP task performance? In this work, we conduct an initial attempt to answer these questions on two related subsequent tasks: semantic slot filling in spoken language understanding and named entity recognition. We propose three techniques to solve the mismatch problem: using word segmentation outputs as additional features, adaptation with partial-learning and taking advantage of n-best word segmentation list. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques for both tasks and we achieve an error reduction of about 11% for spoken language understanding and 24% for named entity recognition over the baseline systems.
The effect of irrigating solutions on the apical sealing ability of MTA Fillapex and Adseal root canal sealers

Background. Maximum sealing ability or adhesion of endodontic sealers can be achieved after effective removal of the smear layer. Endodontic irrigants assist in adequate removal of the smear layer, improving the retention mechanism. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of two different root canal irrigation solutions (5.25% NaOCl followed by 17% EDTA and QMix) on the apical sealing ability of two different root canal sealers (MTA Fillapex and Adseal). Methods. Forty-six single-canal teeth were divided into 4 experimental groups of 10 teeth each and a positive and negative group of 3 teeth each. The root canals were prepared using step-back technique. The teeth in groups 1 and 2 were irrigated with 5.25% NaOCl followed by 17% EDTA and the teeth in groups 3 and 4 were irrigated with QMix. Finally all the teeth were flushed with sterile saline and dried using paper points. Obturation was accomplished by gutta-percha using lateral condensation technique. MTA Fillapex sealer was used in groups 1 and 3 whereas Adseal was used in groups 2 and 4. Dye penetration method was used to evaluate apical leakage. Data were analyzed with Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests using SPSS 14. Statistical significance was set at P < 0.05. Results. Group 3 showed maximum amount of apical leakage (3.7±0.3 mm) whereas group 2 exhibited the least amount of apical leakage (2.1 ± 0.4 mm) among all the experimental groups. Significant differences were found in the amount of apical leakage between all the groups (P = 0.00001). Conclusion. Within the limitations of this study, 5.25% sodium hypochlorite followed by 17% EDTA and Adseal resulted in the best apical seal.