Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Source of Funding and Results of Studies of Health Effects of Mobile Phone Use: Systematic Review of Experimental Studies

Objectives There is concern regarding the possible health effects of cellular telephone use. We examined whether the source of funding of studies of the effects of low-level radiofrequency radiation is associated with the results of studies. We conducted a systematic review of studies of controlled exposure to radiofrequency radiation with health-related outcomes (electroencephalogram, cognitive or cardiovascular function, hormone levels, symptoms, and subjective well-being). Data sources We searched EMBASE, Medline, and a specialist database in February 2005 and scrutinized reference lists from relevant publications. Data extraction Data on the source of funding, study design, methodologic quality, and other study characteristics were extracted. The primary outcome was the reporting of at least one statistically significant association between the exposure and a health-related outcome. Data were analyzed using logistic regression models. Data synthesis Of 59 studies, 12 (20%) were funded exclusively by the telecommunications industry, 11 (19%) were funded by public agencies or charities, 14 (24%) had mixed funding (including industry), and in 22 (37%) the source of funding was not reported. Studies funded exclusively by industry reported the largest number of outcomes, but were least likely to report a statistically significant result: The odds ratio was 0.11 (95% confidence interval, 0.02–0.78), compared with studies funded by public agencies or charities. This finding was not materially altered in analyses adjusted for the number of outcomes reported, study quality, and other factors. Conclusion Conclusions: The interpretation of results from studies of health effects of radiofrequency radiation should take sponsorship into account.
Induction and Mentoring of Beginning Researchers at Academic Colleges of Education in Israel

Since 1997, as part of an effort to "upgrade" the role of teacher educators, a reform for professional advancement was introduced. Research and scholarship forms one of the criteria to move from one career position to the next. The change in culture and the growing importance of research, as part of the role of teacher educators at colleges of education in Israel, has necessitated the introduction of induction and mentoring for beginning researchers. This paper will investigate: who wants to be involved in research and why? How is the induction and mentoring done and by whom? How are they affecting individuals and the institution? The research methods included: a participatory observation of a year-long course in research methods for faculty, in addition to participation in a year-long individual guidance from the research unit and unstructured interviews with 20 teacher educators, all in one institution. From the findings it can be concluded that reasons for teacher educators wanting to be involved in research are numerous. The young and ambitious are looking for extrinsic rewards: additional pay, a doctoral degree and promotion. Others view research work as an activity that can contribute to their professional growth and self-actualisation. They look for intrinsic rewards such as esteem, need for affiliation, relatedness and job autonomy. Teacher educators, towards the end of their career, may be more concerned with passing on their life experience through research, and look for professional affiliation and relatedness. The induction process involved a central induction programme, or it was possible to obtain individual guidance from another officially designated mentor from the research unit. The different groups of participants went through some of the stages of induction. Some were exposed to the research culture, some achieved a level of competence by writing research proposals and conducting research and some went through a whole socialisation process, which enables them to function effectively in the research community, including the presentation of papers in conferences and for publication. A transition was made from an induction group being led by an expert (mentor) to a group providing peer support. Thus the course provided a practical support framework that helped the participants absorb some of the institution's research culture.
Monotherapy with boosted PIs as an ART simplification strategy in clinical practice.

BACKGROUND Data on the efficacy of simplifying therapy using darunavir/ritonavir and lopinavir/ritonavir monotherapy in clinical practice remain limited. METHODS A retrospective single-centre study including patients initiating darunavir/ritonavir or lopinavir/ritonavir monotherapy with a plasma HIV-1 viral load (pVL) <50 copies/mL and at least one subsequent follow-up visit. The primary endpoint was the percentage of patients remaining free of virological failure (VF; defined as a confirmed pVL >50 copies/mL or as any change in the regimen after a single determination with a pVL >50 copies/mL) during the follow-up. We also evaluated the percentage of patients remaining free of treatment failure (TF; defined as VF or the early discontinuation of monotherapy for any reason) and compared the effectiveness of the two regimens. Effectiveness was evaluated using cumulative survival analysis (at Weeks 48 and 96). Factors associated with VF and TF were analysed using Cox regression. RESULTS A total of 522 patients were included (309 receiving lopinavir/ritonavir and 213 receiving darunavir/ritonavir). The median follow-up was 64.3 (30.5-143.0) weeks. The percentage of patients free of VF and TF was 94% (95% CI 91%-96%) and 79% (95% CI 75%-82%) at 48 weeks, respectively, and 86% (95% CI 81%-89%) and 62% (95% CI 57%-67%) at 96 weeks, respectively. The risk of VF was similar for the two regimens (HR=1.0, 95% CI 0.6-1.8; P=0.962). Lopinavir/ritonavir monotherapy was associated with a 1.5-fold greater risk of TF (95% CI 1.1-2.1; P=0.012) and a 2.3-fold greater risk of discontinuation of therapy due to adverse events (95% CI 1.3-3.9; P=0.003). CONCLUSIONS The virological efficacy of darunavir/ritonavir and lopinavir/ritonavir monotherapy is high in clinical practice. Treatment discontinuation due to safety issues is more frequent with lopinavir/ritonavir.
OONI: Open Observatory of Network Interference

OONI, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, is a global observation network which aims to collect high quality data using open methodologies, using Free and Open Source Software (FL/OSS) to share observations and open data about the various types, methods, and amounts of network tampering in the world. Furthermore, OONI is a human rights observation project – observation is a fundamental requirement for the advancement of knowledge and OONI aims to ensure that the tools to make such observations are freely available to all. With the belief that unfettered access to information is an intrinsic human right, OONI seeks to observe levels of surveillance, censorship, and network discrimination in order for people worldwide to have a clearer understanding of the ways in which their access to information and speech is monitored, censored or otherwise filtered. The end goal of OONI is to collect data which will show an accurate topology of network surveillance, interference and outright censorship. Through this data, it will be possible to draw conclusions about how the internet functions from any location where an OONI probe is present. This data includes which websites are censored, or which services have been tampered with, and by whom. The data also includes information about the observer and will attempt to classify the results. We use the term filternet to describe network connections that are under measurable surveillance, tampering, or subject to censorship.
In Vivo PET Imaging of Adenosine 2A Receptors in Neuroinflammatory and Neurodegenerative Disease

Adenosine receptors are G-protein coupled P1 purinergic receptors that are broadly expressed in the peripheral immune system, vasculature, and the central nervous system (CNS). Within the immune system, adenosine 2A (A2A) receptor-mediated signaling exerts a suppressive effect on ongoing inflammation. In healthy CNS, A2A receptors are expressed mainly within the neurons of the basal ganglia. Alterations in A2A receptor function and expression have been noted in movement disorders, and in Parkinson's disease pharmacological A2A receptor antagonism leads to diminished motor symptoms. Although A2A receptors are expressed only at a low level in the healthy CNS outside striatum, pathological challenge or inflammation has been shown to lead to upregulation of A2A receptors in extrastriatal CNS tissue, and this has been successfully quantitated using in vivo positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and A2A receptor-binding radioligands. Several radioligands for PET imaging of A2A receptors have been developed in recent years, and A2A receptor-targeting PET imaging may thus provide a potential additional tool to evaluate various aspects of neuroinflammation in vivo. This review article provides a brief overview of A2A receptors in healthy brain and in a selection of most important neurological diseases and describes the recent advances in A2A receptor-targeting PET imaging studies.
High-Throughput Sequence Analysis of Turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) Transcriptome Using 454-Pyrosequencing for the Discovery of Antiviral Immune Genes

Background Turbot (Scophthalmus maximus L.) is an important aquacultural resource both in Europe and Asia. However, there is little information on gene sequences available in public databases. Currently, one of the main problems affecting the culture of this flatfish is mortality due to several pathogens, especially viral diseases which are not treatable. In order to identify new genes involved in immune defense, we conducted 454-pyrosequencing of the turbot transcriptome after different immune stimulations. Methodology/Principal Findings Turbot were injected with viral stimuli to increase the expression level of immune-related genes. High-throughput deep sequencing using 454-pyrosequencing technology yielded 915,256 high-quality reads. These sequences were assembled into 55,404 contigs that were subjected to annotation steps. Intriguingly, 55.16% of the deduced protein was not significantly similar to any sequences in the databases used for the annotation and only 0.85% of the BLASTx top-hits matched S. maximus protein sequences. This relatively low level of annotation is possibly due to the limited information for this specie and other flatfish in the database. These results suggest the identification of a large number of new genes in turbot and in fish in general. A more detailed analysis showed the presence of putative members of several innate and specific immune pathways. Conclusions/Significance To our knowledge, this study is the first transcriptome analysis using 454-pyrosequencing for turbot. Previously, there were only 12,471 EST and less of 1,500 nucleotide sequences for S. maximus in NCBI database. Our results provide a rich source of data (55,404 contigs and 181,845 singletons) for discovering and identifying new genes, which will serve as a basis for microarray construction, gene expression characterization and for identification of genetic markers to be used in several applications. Immune stimulation in turbot was very effective, obtaining an enormous variety of sequences belonging to genes involved in the defense mechanisms.
Intracranial volume and Alzheimer disease: evidence against the cerebral reserve hypothesis.

BACKGROUND Total intracranial volume (TIV) measurement commonly is used to correct for variations in premorbid brain size in imaging studies of cerebral structures in Alzheimer disease (AD). This assumes no intrinsic difference in TIV between patients and control subjects and that TIV measurements are unaffected by cerebral atrophy. However, an autopsy study has suggested that a larger premorbid brain may protect against AD onset. A recent computed tomographic study lent support to this by finding a correlation between intracranial size and age at onset of AD in women. OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between TIV and sporadic and familial AD. DESIGN Retrospective case study. SETTING Specialist dementia clinic. PATIENTS Eighty-five patients with AD and 52 healthy volunteers. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Age at symptom onset and TIV measured using a semiautomatic interactive thresholding technique on magnetic resonance imaging spanning the entire intracranial cavity. RESULTS Reproducibility measurement was high (intrarater coefficient of variation, 1.2%; interrater coefficient of variation, 0.7%). Unlike brain atrophy in the patients with AD, TIV did not vary over time. Mean TIV did not differ significantly between any of the subject groups. There was no association between TIV and age or age at symptom onset. The only significant predictor of TIV was sex. CONCLUSIONS Measurements of TIV are independent of atrophy and can be used safely to adjust for differences in head size in studies of cerebral structure in AD. Premorbid brain size does not differ between patients with familial and sporadic AD and controls and does not delay disease onset.
Computation of the Phase Response Curve: A Direct Numerical Approach

Neurons are often modeled by dynamical systemsparameterized systems of differential equations. A typical behavioral pattern of neurons is periodic spiking; this corresponds to the presence of stable limit cycles in the dynamical systems model. The phase resetting and phase response curves (PRCs) describe the reaction of the spiking neuron to an input pulse at each point of the cycle. We develop a new method for computing these curves as a by-product of the solution of the boundary value problem for the stable limit cycle. The method is mathematically equivalent to the adjoint method, but our implementation is computationally much faster and more robust than any existing method. In fact, it can compute PRCs even where the limit cycle can hardly be found by time integration, for example, because it is close to another stable limit cycle. In addition, we obtain the discretized phase response curve in a form that is ideally suited for most applications. We present several examples and provide the implementation in a freely available Matlab code.
Maximum Likelihood DOA Estimation of Multiple Wideband Sources in the Presence of Nonuniform Sensor Noise

We investigate the maximum likelihood (ML) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple wideband sources in the presence of unknown nonuniform sensor noise. New closed-form expression for the direction estimation Cramér-Rao-Bound (CRB) has been derived. The performance of the conventional wideband uniform ML estimator under nonuniform noise has been studied. In order to mitigate the performance degradation caused by the nonuniformity of the noise, a new deterministic wideband nonuniform ML DOA estimator is derived and two associated processing algorithms are proposed. The first algorithm is based on an iterative procedure which stepwise concentrates the log-likelihood function with respect to the DOAs and the noise nuisance parameters, while the second is a noniterative algorithm that maximizes the derived approximately concentrated log-likelihood function. The performance of the proposed algorithms is tested through extensive computer simulations. Simulation results show the stepwise-concentrated ML algorithm (SC-ML) requires only a few iterations to converge and both the SC-ML and the approximately-concentrated ML algorithm (AC-ML) attain a solution close to the derived CRB at high signal-to-noise ratio.
Prognostic value of red blood cell distribution width in prediction of in-hospital mortality in patients with acute myocardial infarction.

BACKGROUND Red blood cell indices may add important prognostic information to risk stratification scores, such as Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE) risk score. However, the incremental predictive value of red blood cell distribution width (RDW) on this score has not been assessed. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess whether the RDW has additional prognostic value on the GRACE risk score in prediction of in-hospital mortality in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). METHODS A historic cohort was investigated at the University Hospital in Santa Maria city, Brazil. The laboratory database and medical registry were used to identify patients with AMI. A total of 109 patients were eligible for the present study. Cox regression models were calculated including GRACE risk score variables plus RDW. Moreover, measures of discrimination and calibration were also calculated. The primary outcome evaluated was all-cause in-hospital mortality. RESULTS When included in a predictive model based on the GRACE risk score, RDW became an independent predictor of in-hospital mortality (HR 1.358, 95% CI 1.04 - 1.77; p = 0.023). The addition of RDW to the original model showed adequate calibration (Hosmer-Lemeshow p-value 0.174) and produced a slight improvement in its discriminatory power (AUC 0.769, 95% CI 0.677 - 0.847; p = < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS We suggest that RDW might provide additional information over the GRACE risk score in patients with AMI.
Radiotherapy of choroidal metastases 1

Purpose: This retrospective study was undertaken to clarify the role of high energy external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) and to determine its safety and efficacy on local control and visual acuity in patients suffering from choroidal metastases (CM). Materials and methods : The records of 58 consecutive patients treated with EBRT between 1970 and 1993 were analyzed. The female to male ratio was 2.9 and the median age was 59 years (range 40–81 years). Thirty-six patients (62%) had unilateral CM and 22 patients had bilateral CM. The mean number of lesions per eye was two. Retinal detachment was present in 65% of cases. The primary tumour (PT) was breast carcinoma for 38 patients (75%), lung carcinoma for 10 patients (17%) and gastrointestinal, genitourinary or unknown PT for the remaining 10 patients. The median interval of time between the PT and the CM was 55 months (range 0–228 months). All patients were treated with megavoltage irradiation. The median prescribed dose was 35.5 Gy (range 20–53 Gy) normalized at a 2 Gy per fraction schedule with ana/b value of 10 Gy. Various techniques were used and whenever possible the lens was spared. Ten patients with unilateral disease were treated in both eyes. Results: The tumour response was slow. When assessed after 3 months or more, the complete response rate was 53% with significantly better results for doses higher than 35.5 Gy (72 versus 33%; P = 0.009). Visual acuity was improved or stabilized in 62% of patients, with also significantly better results when doses higher than 35.5 Gy ( P = 0.014) were administered. Amongst 26 patients with unilateral CM who had no elective contralateral irradiation, three developed metastasis in the opposite eye versus none of the 10 patients who had bilateral irradiation. Five complications occurred (three cataracts, one retinopathy and one glaucoma). Conclusion: Radiation therapy is an efficient and safe palliative treatment for choroidal metastases and it helps the preservation of vision. Thus, there is a major impact on the quality of life in a group of patients with an almost uniformly fatal prognosis. Both tumour response and visual acuity are significantly improved if doses higher than 35.5 Gy are administered. Whenever possible, a lens sparing technique should be used.  1998 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.
Remapping Latinidad: A Performance Cartography of Latina/o Identity in Rural Nebraska

This essay argues that the cartography of latinidad generally locates US Latinas/os in either urban or border regions. In order to disrupt that spatial placing, this essay proposes “performance cartography,” a method that relies on storytelling, to disrupt the dominant configuration of latinidad. Through a series of family stories about being Latina/o in rural Nebraska, this essay shifts understandings of Latina/o performativity by emphasizing the importance space makes in producing different kinds of subjects. Although the author notes connections between urban, border, and rural conceptions of latinidad, this essay urges a more careful consideration of alternative spaces.
Costs and Offset Effect in Panic Disorders

Background. The study is aimed at assessing the costs before and after the diagnosis and the provision of effective treatment for panic disorder (PD), and the offset effect related to the psychiatric encounter. Method. A 24-month prepost design was used to collect data on clinical status and health care services utilisation in a natural environment. The 61 PD patients' assessment included the SCID-UP, ratings on general functioning, improvement, severity of symptoms and level of disability. All health care services used and lost workdays were recorded. Results. Both sociodemographic characteristics and the outcome show that this was a standard group of PD patients, who received effective treatment for their condition. The total direct costs of health care use during the previous year and the year after the diagnosis were, respectively, US$ 29 1 58 and US$ 46 256. The indirect costs of lost productivity were US$ 65 643 in period I and US$ 13 883 in period II. Conclusions. A strong offset effect (94%) has been found in this study, significantly greater than the one described for psychiatric disorders as a whole. The costs of nondiagnosis are usually overlooked when estimating the global costs of PD. Methods for improving early detection of PD may substantially reduce the costs incurred before diagnosis.
L'échelle de Disposition à l'Ennui (EDE): Adaptation française et validation du Boredom Proneness Scale(BP)

This research presents a validation of an adaptation in French of the Boredom Proneness Scale (BP) intitled «Echelle de disposition a l'ennui» (EDE). Three studies were conducted to evaluate psychometric properties, construct validity and structural validity. A first study with student participants demonstrated acceptable fidelity (test-retest reliability, internal consistency.) and validity indices. However a confirmatory factor analysis did not support the unidimensional structure of the Boredom Proneness Scale. The second study with a sample of drug addicts assessed the validity of the scale using the « Known- Groups» method. Results supported the construct validity of the scale. A third study examined elderly persons. Results of this study point to the reliability and validity of the french version of the Boredom Proneness Scale. Furthermore, a bidimensionality of the boredom construct was found through an exploratory factor analysis.
Social policy recommendations to alleviate stress among informal providers of elder care

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine social policy recommendations to deal with the high level of pressure placed upon informal providers of elder care.Design/methodology/approach – The paper investigates this subject of elder care by first establishing the significance of the problem. The paper provides an examination of how this problem is dealt with in several countries, both at the governmental level and by private enterprise. This forms the basis of a discussion of social (and enterprise) policy implications in particular for the USA. A focus on flexible work scheduling as a viable means to help alleviate the problem is recommended. In particular an approach of voluntary compliance is proposed to encourage wider acceptance by corporations.Findings – The paper finds that priority needs to be given to developing a social policy agenda that focuses on flexible work scheduling. In addition, meaningful effort must be expended to capture input from various stakeholders, and to educate and prom.