Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vitamin Intervention for Stroke Prevention Trial: An Efficacy Analysis

Background and Purpose— The Vitamin Intervention for Stroke Prevention trial (VISP) intention-to-treat analysis did not show efficacy of combined vitamin therapy for recurrent vascular events in patients with nondisabling stroke. Reasons for lack of efficacy may have included folate fortification of grain products, inclusion of the recommended daily intake for B12 in the low-dose arm, treatment with parenteral B12 in patients with low B12 levels in both study arms, a dose of B12 too low for patients with malabsorption, supplementation with nonstudy vitamins, and failure of patients with significant renal impairment to respond to vitamin therapy. We conducted an efficacy analysis limited to patients most likely to benefit from the treatment, based on hypotheses arising from evidence developed since VISP was initiated. The criteria for this subgroup were defined before any data analysis. Methods— For this analysis, we excluded patients with low and very high B12 levels at baseline (<250 and >637 pmol/L, representing the 25th and 95th percentiles), to exclude those likely to have B12 malabsorption or to be taking B12 supplements outside the study and patients with significant renal impairment (glomerular filtration rate <46.18; the 10th percentile). Results— This subgroup represents 2155 patients (37% female), with a mean age of 66±10.7 years. For the combined end point of ischemic stroke, coronary disease, or death, there was a 21% reduction in the risk of events in the high-dose group compared with the low-dose group (unadjusted P=0.049; adjusted for age, sex, blood pressure, smoking, and B12 level P=0.056). In Kaplan–Meier survival analysis comparing 4 groups, patients with a baseline B12 level at the median or higher randomized to high-dose vitamin had the best overall outcome, and those with B12 less than the median assigned to low-dose vitamin had the worst (P=0.02 for combined stroke, death, and coronary events; P=0.03 for stroke and coronary events). Conclusions— In the era of folate fortification, B12 plays a key role in vitamin therapy for total homocysteine. Higher doses of B12, and other treatments to lower total homocysteine may be needed for some patients.
International Journal of Hospitality Management the Exploration of Hotel Reference Prices under Dynamic Pricing Scenarios and Different Forms of Competition

The reference price, used by consumers to evaluate market prices, has tremendous relevance in dynamic pricing. Reconciling current heterogeneous theories and studies on reference prices, this paper analyzes the impact of hotel price sequences on consumers' reference prices through a lab and a field experiment. Experiment 1 tests the importance of retrospective price evaluations, while Experiment 2 evaluates the impact of three forms of competition: (i) simultaneous behavior, where firms adjust prices simultaneously ; (ii) leader–follower behavior, where one firm acts as the leader; and (iii) independent behavior, where each player takes its rival's strategy as given and seeks to maximize its own profits. The results show that consumers decrease their reference price when competing hotels adjust their prices simultaneously. Relevant managerial implications are drawn for the hospitality industry, which is affected by the presence of online travel agencies that announce the daily rates offered by each competitor.
Controlling collective tasks with an ALN

In this paper, the authors explore the idea of using an adaptive logic network (ALN) for behavior arbitration. Their approach is to define the collective task, to be performed by multiple robots, as a group behavior. The group behavior is a set of behaviors, each of which specifies a single step in the collective task. An environmental cue can be used to control the transition between behaviors, thus allowing the progress of the collective task to self-govern its execution. The authors simplify the behavior arbitration in the collective task by training an ALN implemented using simple combinational logic. They provide a description of the Collective Robotic Intelligence Project (CRIP) including the simulation results and the multi-robot system on which these results will be deployed.
HIV: primary and secondary prophylaxis for opportunistic infections.

INTRODUCTION Opportunistic infections can occur in up to 40% of people with HIV infection and a CD4 count less than 250/mm(3), although the risks are much lower with use of highly active antiretroviral treatment. METHODS AND OUTCOMES We conducted a systematic review and aimed to answer the following clinical questions: What are the effects of prophylaxis for Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia (PCP) and toxoplasmosis? What are the effects of antituberculosis prophylaxis in people with HIV infection? What are the effects of prophylaxis for disseminated Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) disease for people with, and without, previous MAC disease? What are the effects of prophylaxis for cytomegalovirus (CMV), herpes simplex virus (HSV), and varicella zoster virus (VZV)? What are the effects of prophylaxis for invasive fungal disease in people with, and without, previous fungal disease? What are the effects of discontinuing prophylaxis against opportunistic pathogens in people on highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART)? We searched: Medline, Embase, The Cochrane Library, and other important databases up to March 2008 (Clinical Evidence reviews are updated periodically, please check our website for the most up-to-date version of this review). We included harms alerts from relevant organisations such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). RESULTS We found 43 systematic reviews, RCTs, or observational studies that met our inclusion criteria. CONCLUSIONS In this systematic review we present information relating to the effectiveness and safety of the following interventions: aciclovir; antituberculosis prophylaxis; atovaquone; azithromycin (alone or plus rifabutin); clarithromycin (alone, or plus rifabutin and ethambutol); discontinuing prophylaxis for CMV, MAC, and PCP; ethambutol added to clarithromycin; famciclovir; fluconazole; isoniazid; itraconazole; oral ganciclovir; rifabutin (alone or plus macrolides); trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole; and valaciclovir.
THE EFFECT OF A MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING STYLE IN COGNITIVE THERAPY FOR DEPRESSION

While cognitive therapy (CT) is one of the most well-validated and widely used treatments for patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), many individuals remain symptomatic at the end of treatment or drop out prematurely (Cuijpers, van Straten, Anderson, & van Oppen, 2008; Vittengl, Clark, Dunn, & Jarrett, 2007). Evidence suggests that certain types of therapist relational styles, such as one characterized by empathy and support, are facilitative of better therapeutic outcomes (Keijsers, Schaap, & Hoogduin, 1997) and motivational interviewing (MI; Miller & Rollnick, 2002) is a therapeutic approach which emphasizes this type of relational stance. The present study examined whether cognitive therapists exhibit a relational stance that is emphasized in motivational interviewing and whether this relational stance is associated with greater symptomatic improvement in cognitive therapy for depression. The Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity Skills Code (MITI; Moyers, Martin, Manuel, Miller, & Ernst, 2007), an observational coding system originated for assessing fidelity to MI, was used to assess three aspect of MI relational stance (MI Spirit, MI Adherent behaviors, and MI Nonadherent behaviors) among cognitive therapists in a randomized-controlled of CT for individuals with moderate to severe depression. Multilevel modeling was employed to examine the effect of MI relational stance on overall symptom trajectories throughout treatment and subsequent symptom reduction immediately after the use of MI relational stance. In order to rule out early symptom reduction as a potential confound, shared variance between MI relational stance and early symptom reduction was removed. The
Rate-independent dissipation and loading direction effects in compressed carbon nanotube arrays

Arrays of nominally-aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs) under compression deform locally via buckling, exhibit a foam-like, dissipative response, and can often recover most of their original height. We synthesize millimeter-scale CNT arrays and report the results of compression experiments at different strain rates, from 10−4 to 10−1 s−1, and for multiple compressive cycles to different strains. We observe that the stress–strain response proceeds independently of the strain rate for all tests, but that it is highly dependent on loading history. Additionally, we examine the effect of loading direction on the mechanical response of the system. The mechanical behavior is modeled using a multiscale series of bistable springs. This model captures the rate independence of the constitutive response, the local deformation, and the history-dependent effects. We develop here a macroscopic formulation of the model to represent a continuum limit of the mesoscale elements developed previously. Utilizing the model and our experimental observations we discuss various possible physical mechanisms contributing to the system’s dissipative response.
The Use of Humor in Counseling: The Laughing Cure

The benefits of humor are briefly reviewed, and the ways in which humor can be effectively used in the client—counselor relationship are explored (i.e., using humor as a diagnostic tool and as a therapeutic tool). Finally counseling vignettes are provided and admonitions regarding the improper application of humor in counseling are reviewed.
Interactive Book Reading to Accelerate Word Learning by Kindergarten Children With Specific Language Impairment: Identifying an Adequate Intensity and Variation in Treatment Response.

Purpose This study sought to identify an adequate intensity of interactive book reading for new word learning by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and to examine variability in treatment response. Method An escalation design adapted from nontoxic drug trials (Hunsberger, Rubinstein, Dancey, & Korn, 2005) was used in this Phase I/II preliminary clinical trial. A total of 27 kindergarten children with SLI were randomized to 1 of 4 intensities of interactive book reading: 12, 24, 36, or 48 exposures. Word learning was monitored through a definition task and a naming task. An intensity response curve was examined to identify the adequate intensity. Correlations and classification accuracy were used to examine variation in response to treatment relative to pretreatment and early treatment measures. Results Response to treatment improved as intensity increased from 12 to 24 to 36 exposures, and then no further improvements were observed as intensity increased to 48 exposures. There was variability in treatment response: Children with poor phonological awareness, low vocabulary, and/or poor nonword repetition were less likely to respond to treatment. Conclusion The adequate intensity for this version of interactive book reading was 36 exposures, but further development of the treatment is needed to increase the benefit for children with SLI.
The effect of climate on bone collagen stable nitrogen isotope enrichment in modern South Australian mammals

Archaeologists have used stable nitrogen (I´ 15 N) isotope ratios in bone collagen as a supplementary method of identifying dietary and climatic influences on excavated bone materials. However, baseline isotopic values for modem ecosystems are required to make inferences about the past. Previous research has concentrated on the use of stable nitrogen isotopes as a means of differentiating between a marine and terrestrial diet in prehistoric humans. It has been observed that bone collagen I´ 15 N values of mammals become more negative with a decreasing component of seafood in the diet (Schoeninger et al. 1983; Schoeninger and DeNiro 1984; Walker and DeNiro 1986). Thus, in general, marine mammals have more positive I´ 15 N values than terrestrial mammals. The principal objectives of this study were to identify, in Australia, a relationship observed on other continents whereby climatic influences affect stable I´ 15 N isotope uptake in the bone collagen of modern mammals. It has been observed that bone collagen I´ 15 N values become more positive with increasing aridity. This suggests a marine influence on an obviously non-marine environment. Theories explaining this irregular situation include the effects of arid zone vegetation and soil as well as arid zone mammals' physiological adaptations to moisture restrictions. This study independently replicated the observations of researchers on other continents, namely Africa and North America, who have identified the above mentioned anomalies. To test this, modem mammalian bone was collected from a transect which covered a range of climatic regimes. In this case the South Australian eastern border with Victoria and New South Wales was used. The southernmost collection zone, which included the locales of Mount Gambier and Cape Northumberland, has a mean annual rainfall ranging from 700 to 800 mm. This contrasts with the more arid collection zone of Innamincka some 1200 km to the north where the mean annual rainfall ranges from 150 to 200 mm. A number of collection zones between these two extremes were also sampled in order to identify a point at which the effects of aridity begin to act on bone collagen I´ 15 N values. Mammal bone collagen I´ 15 N values collected in this study were found to comply with the Wends observed in other studies of this nature. Mean I´ 15 N values for herbivores ranged from 7.05 Â±2.19% Â at Mount Gambier on the high-rainfall southern coast, to 11. 42Â±1.93% at Innamincka. In South Australia, significant bone collagen I´ 15 N enrichment does not occur until the 200-300 mm rainfall zone at approximately 325 km from the Adelaide coast. Thus, in most cases bone collagen I´ 15 N values should differentiate marine and terrestrial components in prehistoric human diets along the South Australian coast and adjacent inland regions. Â
Addressing the ‘quiet crisis’: Gifted identification with Aurora

One of the key issues in the field of gifted education is the identification of children with high abilities, as identification is the first step in giving these students the opportunities they need to develop their potential. The Aurora Battery, based on Sternberg’s Theory of Successful Intelligence, is an assessment designed to identify children with high ability in areas that are typically ignored with the instruments that are currently used in gifted identification. In this study we examine Aurora’s convergent and divergent validity using the TerraNova, a conventional assessment of academic achievement. We then explore the overlap of these assessments with regard to whom they identify as gifted. Results suggest Aurora’s sound psychometric properties and ability to discriminate a more encompassing form of giftedness. We finally discuss the premise and implications of the Aurora Battery for gifted identification and education.
Context-dependent hybrid HME/HMM speech recognition using polyphone clustering decision trees

This paper presents a context-dependent hybrid connectionist speech recognition system that uses a set of generalized hierarchical mixtures of experts (HME) to estimate context-dependent posterior acoustic class probabilities. The connectionist part of the system is organized in a modular fashion, allowing the distributed training of such a system on regular workstations. Context classes are based on polyphonic contexts, clustered using decision trees which we adopt from our continuous density HMM recognizer JANUS (Waibel et al., 1996). The system is evaluated on ESST, an English speaker-independent spontaneous speech database. Context dependent modeling is shown to yield significant improvements over simple context-independent modeling, requiring only small additional overhead in terms of training and decoding time.
Measuring the non-asymptotic convergence of sequential Monte Carlo samplers using probabilistic programming

A key limitation of sampling algorithms for approximate inference is that it is difficult to quantify their approximation error. Widely used sampling schemes, such as sequential importance sampling with resampling and Metropolis-Hastings, produce output samples drawn from a distribution that may be far from the target posterior distribution. This paper shows how to upper-bound the symmetric KL divergence between the output distribution of a broad class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers and their target posterior distributions, subject to assumptions about the accuracy of a separate gold-standard sampler. The proposed method applies to samplers that combine multiple particles, multinomial resampling, and rejuvenation kernels. The experiments show the technique being used to estimate bounds on the divergence of SMC samplers for posterior inference in a Bayesian linear regression model and a Dirichlet process mixture model.
Role of Catechol-O-Methyltransferase in the Disposition of Luteolin in Rats

Luteolin is mainly metabolized by phase II enzymes in animals and humans with glucuronidation and sulfation as the two known metabolic pathways. Although methylation of luteolin was reported previously, the structure of the methylated metabolites and the enzymes involved in the process have not been clarified. In our study, two methylated metabolites, M1 (chrysoeriol) and M2 (diosmetin), were identified in the urine after intravenous administration of luteolin to rats, and the data suggested that the methylation was mediated by catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT). When luteolin was coadministered with a specific COMT inhibitor, entacapone, the formation of M1 and M2 was significantly reduced, whereas the plasma concentration of luteolin increased. Methylation of luteolin was also studied in vitro using rat tissue homogenates. The apparent kinetic parameters associated with the formation of M1 and M2 in vitro were estimated, and regioselectivity of methylation of luteolin was observed. In the in vitro experiment, there was a preference for the formation of M2 over M1. In contrast, accumulation of M1 was preferred in vivo in both rat plasma and urine after an intravenous dose of luteolin. In conclusion, COMT played a crucial role in the disposition of luteolin in rats. Our results indicated that the methylation pathway in rats was significantly reduced when luteolin was coadministered with a specific COMT inhibitor. Therefore, COMT-associated drug-drug interactions need be considered in the future in luteolin clinical trials because the plasma concentrations and related therapeutic effects may be altered in vivo in the presence of a COMT inhibitor.
Expression of MAGE-C1/CT7 and MAGE-C2/CT10 Predicts Lymph Node Metastasis in Melanoma Patients

MAGE-C1/CT7 and MAGE-C2/CT10 are members of the large MAGE family of cancer-testis (CT) antigens. CT antigens are promising targets for immunotherapy in cancer because their expression is restricted to cancer and germ line cells and a proportion of cancer patients presents with immune responses against CT antigens, which clearly demonstrates their immunogenicity. This study investigates the expression of MAGE-C1/CT7 and MAGE-C2/CT10 in primary and metastatic melanoma. Immunohistochemical staining of tissue microarrays that consisted of 59 primary malignant melanomas of the skin, 163 lymph node and distant melanoma metastases and 68 melanoma cell lines was performed. We found MAGE-C1/CT7 expression in 15 out of 50 (24%) primary melanomas and 15 out of 50 (24%) cell lines, whereas MAGE-C2/CT10 was detected in 17 out of 51 (33%) primary melanomas and 14 out of 68 (17%) cell lines. MAGE-C1/CT7 and MAGE-C2/CT10 were both detected in 40% of melanoma metastases. Patients with MAGE-C1/CT7 or MAGE-C2/CT10 positive primary melanoma had significantly more lymph node metastases (p = 0.005 and p<0.001, resp.). Prediction of lymph node metastasis by MAGE-C1/CT7 and MAGE-C2/CT10 was independent of tumor cell proliferation rate (Ki67 labeling index) in a multivariate analysis (p = 0.01). Our results suggest that the expression of MAGE-C1/CT7 and MAGE-C2/CT10 in primary melanoma is a potent predictor of sentinel lymph node metastasis.
The Moral High Ground: An Experimental Study of Spectator Impartiality

This paper proposes and tests an empirical model of impartiality, inspired by Adam Smith (1759), that is based on the moral judgments of informed third parties (or spectators). The model predicts that spectatorship produces properties widely considered desirable in both the normative and descriptive literature of philosophy and the social sciences, namely, unbiasedness and consensus. This informs a vignette experiment that elicits moral judgments about real world policy issues while varying the information conditions (relevant and irrelevant information) and roles (spectator and stakeholder) of respondents across treatments. The results indicate that spectator views are unbiased, and that relevant information reduces stakeholder bias to insignificance, whereas irrelevant information reduces bias but does not eliminate it. Relevant information promotes a kind of consensus among both spectators and stakeholders. I argue that this model can inform descriptive and prescriptive political analysis and that it complements empirical work on deliberation and public opinion.
Extinction and Introgression in a Community of Partially Cross‐Fertile Plant Species

We develop a model to study the demography and genetics of an encounter between two partially cross‐fertile plant species. We assume prezygotic reproductive isolation between the species, a common situation when the species differ by their phenology or floral traits that cause assortative mating. Three outcomes are possible: coexistence of both species with minimal introgression; domination by one species, with the other becoming extinct or surviving only through recurrent migration; or domination of the community by hybrid derivatives, with both species surviving but with a rather high level of introgression between them. The first situation is reached when interfertility is low, while the third requires high interfertility to develop. Occurrence of the second situation is observed with intermediate values of interfertility. Gene flow from nearby monospecific populations can prevent both introgression and the domination of the community by one species. Conversely, increasing the number of loci that determine the reproductive isolation between species or decreasing the degree of nonadditive interactions (epistasis and/or dominance) between alleles and loci makes introgression more likely. We found that hybridization can create positive frequency dependence and make extinction possible, even when hybrid individuals have no intrinsic fitness advantage.