Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of ramosetron and granisetron for the prevention of acute and delayed emesis in Cisplatin-based chemotherapy: a randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE A clinical study of ramosetron was carried out to evaluate its efficacy in preventing both acute and delayed emesis in cisplatin-based chemotherapy by using a double-blind method with granisetron as the comparative drug. METHODS Cisplatin at a dose of > or =70 mg/m(2) was administered as a single intravenous (i.v.) infusion over 4 h. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either ramosetron (0.3 mg i.v. bolus 30 min before cisplatin on Day 1 and a 0.1 mg tablet in the morning for Days 2 to 5 after completion of chemotherapy; n = 36) or granisetron (3 mg i.v. infusion 30 min before cisplatin on Day 1 and a 1 mg tablet in the morning for Days 2 to 5 after completion of chemotherapy; n = 37). The observation period started with the initiation of chemotherapy (0 h) and continued for 24 h after completion of the chemotherapy for acute emesis, and on Days 2 to 5 for delayed nausea and vomiting. RESULTS A total of 73 patients were eligible for evaluation, with 36 patients in the ramosetron group and 37 in the granisetron group. The efficacy of both drugs was analyzed in terms of the degree of achievement in each day of treatment. Ramosetron was as effective as granisetron in preventing nausea and vomiting (both acute and delayed emesis). The two drugs had a similar safety profile and adverse events were generally mild and transient. CONCLUSIONS Ramosetron is effective and safe for the control of acute and delayed emesis induced by cisplatin.
Incidence of broiler breast myopathies at 2 different ages and its impact on selected raw meat quality parameters

&NA; White striping (WS) and woody breast (WB) are 2 poultry meat quality defects that affect the acceptance of raw breast fillets as well as properties of cooked and further processed products. The present study was intended to evaluate the incidence of these conditions in broilers at different ages and to compare the properties of fillets with different degrees of WS and WB. For this study, 1,920 birds were processed, at 6 and 9 wk of age, in a standard commercial inline processing system. After chilling, carcasses were deboned and butterfly fillets were collected and weighed. Individual fillets were scored for normal, moderate, severe, and very severe degrees of WS and WB, and for petechial hemorrhagic lesions (PHEM, 0 ‐ no lesion to 2 ‐ severe lesion). Representative fillets with NORM‐WS/WB, SEV‐WS, SEV‐WB, and SEV‐WS/WB were selected and stored at 4°C. After 24 h, fillet length, width, cranial height, and caudal height, as well as pH, color, and drip loss were recorded. There was an increase in incidence of severe and very severe WS and WB conditions at 9 wk compared to 6 wk of age. The relationship between fillet weight and the myopathies plateaued at 9 wk of age with more fillets showing a higher score. Mean PHEM scores were higher (P < 0.05) in SEV‐WS, SEV‐WB, and SEV‐WS/WB compared to NORM‐WS/WB birds, both at 6 and 9 weeks. NORM‐WS/WB birds had lower (P < 0.05) live and breast weight, breast yield, and cranial and caudal heights, as well as b* value (yellowness) compared to SEV‐WS/WB. NORM‐WS/WB had lower (P < 0.05) pH while NORM‐WS/WB and SEV‐WS samples showed lower (P < 0.05) drip loss when compared to SEV‐WB and SEV‐WS/WB. The results from this study showed that the severe degrees of WS and WB are associated with heavier and older birds, and thicker breast fillets. Occurrence of severe degrees of WS and/or WB can affect various raw meat quality factors, mainly color and water holding capacity.
Predicting school achievement from motivation and personality.

Abstract. The present study aims at comparing the predictive power of motivation and broad personality traits for school performance and contributes to an understanding of the nomological network of personality. A sample of German adolescent students (N = 342 11th and 12th graders, age M = 16.94, SD = .71) gave self-reports of need for achievement, domain-specific ability self-concepts and task values in German and Math as well as the Big Five of personality. Grades in German and mathematics as well as grade-point average served as performance criteria. On a bivariate zero-order level, the motivational constructs showed the hypothesized positive associations with school achievement in Math, German, and GPA. With respect to personality, only Conscientiousness was consistently positively associated with grades, whereas Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Agreeableness were either not or weakly associated with one or two out of three performance criteria. Hierarchical and stepwise regressi.
Gender Differences in the Allocation of Assets in Retirement Savings Plans

In 1995, 40 percent of working men and 32 percent of working women were covered by a defined contribution (DC) plan. A distinguishing characteristic of these plans is that workers can generally choose how their assets are invested. Using data from the 1992 and 1995 Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCF), this paper examines whether workers differ systematically by gender in the allocation of assets in DC plans. Previous researchers have reported that many workers tend to invest their retirement assets too conservatively, and in particular that women are less likely than men to invest in risky assets such as stocks. In the presence of an equity premium, a lower propensity by women to invest in stocks could translate into large differences in the accumulation of financial wealth for retirement. We establish that gender differences in investment decisions exist, though they are more complicated than previous studies have suggested. We show that these differences are not completely explained by differences in individual or household characteristics. A few studies have examined gender differences in investment decisions (Vickie L. Bajtelsmit and Jack L. VanDerhei, 1997; Richard P. Hinz et al., 1997). These studies use administrative data and report that women tend to invest their retirement funds in less risky vehicles than men. Michael Haliassos and Carol C. Bertaut (1995) use the 1983 SCF to examine why such a large fraction of households do not own any stock. They report that gender does not have a significant effect on the probability of owning stock, though gender differences are not the focus of their paper. What these data sources lack (Haliassos and Bertaut being the exception) is a rich set of demographic and other variables on households that theory predicts should affect investment behavior. This paper adds to the literature by examining gender differences in investment decisions conditioning on such variables. The results highlight the importance of including marital status, risk-aversion measures, and the portfolio of assets held outside DC plans when examining gender differences in investment decisions in these plans.
Listening through the native tongue: A review essay on Cutler's Native listening: Language experience and the recognition of spoken words

Speech perception has been a very productive and important area in psycholinguistics. In this review easy, I discuss Cutler's new book on native language listening. Cutler argues for a theory of speech perception, where all speech perception is accomplished by competence in native speech. I review this book and attempt to situate its main contributions in the broader context of cognitive science.
Superintendent Turnover and School Board Member Defeat: A New Perspective and Interpretation

The study investigated popular election results regarding the relationship between the variables of county board member defeat or re‐election and the reappointment or dismissal of county school superintendents, in the state of North Carolina, within a one, two, three or four year time frame. All 100 county school districts were studied over a 12‐year period of time in which an ex post facto quasi‐experimental research design was used to determine the relationship between incumbent board member defeat and superintendent turnover following six general elections. Results of the study show there was stability in both superintendent reappointment and incumbent school board member re‐election. These findings do not support previous research regarding the dissatisfaction theory in that previous studies found significant differences between superintendent turnover and incumbent school board member defeat. This study, unlike others, focused on county public superintendent turnover and county board member election .
Counting blessings versus misfortunes: positive interventions and subjective well-being of Chinese school teachers in Hong Kong

This study compared a gratitude intervention approach with a coping intervention approach in promoting subjective well-being in a sample of 78 Hong Kong Chinese school teachers. Forty teachers were randomly assigned to the eight-week count-your-blessings condition and 38 teachers to the eight-week count-your-misfortunes condition. Increases in life satisfaction were observed in the post-intervention assessment for both approaches. However, statistically significant changes were observed on life satisfaction and the experience of negative and gratitude-related emotions only for the gratitude intervention approach, suggesting the relative effectiveness of the count-your-blessings exercise. Implications of the findings on developing intervention approaches that encompass counting positive and negative events for promoting subjective well-being are discussed.
Terrorism perception and its consequences following the 7 July 2005 London bombings

Recent work on terrorism has identified a number of individual and group level factors that might contribute to terrorism anxiety and its implication for behaviour and cognition. However, few studies have tried to combine these factors into a coherent model. In this study we examined psychological responses to terrorism threats in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings in July 2005. Four‐hundred and twenty‐nine general public participants completed an inventory assessing terrorism anxiety, perceived likelihood of further attacks and their behavioural and cognitive consequences. Age, sex, normative expectations, values and personal control all predicted anxiety or perceived likelihood of attack. Anxiety was a significant predictor of negative coping, workplace distraction and increased interpersonal contacts. Implications of these findings are discussed in the light of continuing terrorist threats.
Developmental Psychology: Incorporating Piaget's and Vygotsky's Theories in Classrooms

principles relevant in different applications,” mattered to Piaget (Garner, 2008, p. 32). He believed in operative knowledge, which implies that change and transformation produce knowledge. While working at Alfred Binet’s laboratory, he became interested in studying students’ wrong responses. Piaget wanted to study the errors children made, and the possibility that the errors were not random. His theory purports the process of coming to know, and the stages we move through as we gradually acquire this ability. Piaget Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Education Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 2008) 59 67 60 “belongs to the constructivism perspective that sees learning as construction (Dahl, 1996, p. 2). Piaget identified four stages in cognitive development: sensori-motor, pre-operational, concrete, and formal. Children in the sensori-motor stage, also called infancy, are likely to learn by using their five senses, object permanence, and actions that are goal-directed. Infants and children do not think the way adults do. Young children experience egocentrism because they fail to understand how someone else's point of view might be different from their own--or they fail to coordinate their point of view with that other person's (Campbell, 2006, p. 5). The preoperational stage spans ages two through seven. During this period, children are able to do one-step logic problems, develop language, continue to be egocentric, and complete operations. Children in this stage, however, struggle with centering and conservation. The concrete stage occurs during ages seven through eleven. From age twelve to adulthood, children enter the formal operations stage, which allows them to think logically and show lingering egocentrism.
Examining the Association Between Co-Occurring Disorders and Seriousness of Misconduct by Female Prison Inmates

Although studies have consistently demonstrated mentally ill offenders to be disproportionately involved in misconduct within correctional facilities, research is limited on the potential exacerbating effects of co-occurring disorders (CODs) on inmate behavior. With the vast number of offenders who have comorbid psychiatric and substance use disorders, it is essential that we understand whether the clinically interactive nature of CODs may present increased security and management challenges for correctional administrators. Using data from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PADOC), we compared the institutional misconduct experiences of female inmates with CODs to those for inmates with singular disorders or no disorders. The findings of our study support prior research showing mental illness as a risk factor for prison misconduct. The results further suggest that the presence of both a substance use disorder and a mental illness exacerbates the risk of negative behaviors beyond the singular disorder of mental illness.
Family leave for employed women: Interaction effects of gender discrimination and household responsibilities in South Korea

Family leave policies are among the approaches used by employers across the globe to ease work–family strains among employed women, and enhance employee engagement and productivity. Yet some research suggests a critical dilemma facing some women: taking advantage of family leave may improve their ability to maintain both job and family, while lessening their status as valued employees in the eyes of employers that discriminate. This study utilizes secondary data from a sample of 1630 employed women from the 2008 Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families to examine the moderating roles of perceived gender discrimination on the relationships between family leave provisions and work–family conflict; and the moderating role of housework responsibilities on the relationships between family leave provisions and work–family conflict of women employees. The results suggest that the availability of leave policies is more strongly associated with decreased work–family conflict for women employees who report less perceived gender discrimination at the workplace, and who have greater housework responsibilities.
Intuitions About Origins: Purpose and Intelligent Design in Children's Reasoning About Nature

Two separate bodies of research suggest that young children have (a) a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena in terms of a purpose (e.g., Kelemen, 1999c) and (b) an orientation toward "creationist" accounts of natural entity origins whether or not they come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds (e.g., Evans, 2001). This study extends this prior work to examine whether children's purpose-based reasoning about nature is actively related to their intelligent design reasoning in any systematic fashion. British elementary school children responded to 3 tasks probing their intuitions about purpose and intelligent design in context of their reasoning about the origins of natural phenomena. Results indicated that young children are prone to generating artifact-like teleo-functional explanations of living and nonliving natural entities and endorsing intelligent design as the source of animals and artifacts. They also reveal that children's teleo-functional and intelligent design intuitions about natural phenomena are interconnected.
STAT6 activation in ulcerative colitis: A new target for prevention of IL‐13‐induced colon epithelial cell dysfunction

Background: Interleukin 13 (IL‐13) is upregulated in ulcerative colitis (UC) and increases colon epithelial permeability by inducing apoptosis and expression of the pore‐forming tight junction protein claudin‐2. IL‐13 induces activation of signal transducer and activator of transcription 6 (STAT6). However, the STAT6 phosphorylation status in patients with UC is unknown, as is the effect of STAT6 inhibition on colonic epithelium exposed to IL‐13. The study aims were to determine if mucosal STAT6 phosphorylation is increased in patients with UC, and if STAT6 inhibition attenuates IL‐13‐induced colon epithelial cell dysfunction. Methods: Immunohistochemical staining for phosphorylated (p) STAT6 was performed on colonic tissue from newly diagnosed pediatric subjects with UC (early UC) or Crohn's disease (CD), colectomy tissue from adults with UC (advanced UC), and controls. Colon HT‐29 and T84 cells were transfected with STAT6 small interfering RNA (siRNA), or treated with suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA), a histone deacetylase inhibitor that inhibits STAT6, prior to IL‐13 treatment. Results: The median score for epithelial pSTAT6 was 0 in control subjects, 2 in early UC (versus control P = 0.019), 4 in advanced UC (P = 0.003), and 0 in CD (P = 0.4). Cell transfection with STAT6 siRNA prevented IL‐13‐induced apoptosis and claudin‐2 expression. SAHA inhibited IL‐13‐induced STAT6 phosphorylation, apoptosis, and claudin‐2 expression, and mitigated IL‐13‐induced reductions in transepithelial resistance. Conclusions: UC is associated with increased colonic epithelial STAT6 phosphorylation, and STAT6 inhibition prevents IL‐13‐induced apoptosis and barrier disruption. These data identify STAT6 as a novel target for UC treatment and support further study of SAHA as a therapeutic agent. (Inflamm Bowel Dis 2011;)
The return of the board? 'Parent power' and participation in the Scottish school system

When School Councils were set up in Scotland in the 1970s, their attendance sub-committees became popularly known in some areas of Glasgow as ’the board’. This was a primarily pejorative reference to the often harshly exercised control functions of the old school boards. These, similarly composed of locally elected members, including parents, had lasted from 1872 until 1918. The memory lingers on, however, perhaps aided by the fact that today many of the older school buildings still bear the word ’board’ sculpted deep into the red Victorian sandstone. But now the School Councils, set up with the regionalisation of Scotland and made up of representatives of several schools in a given area, are being replaced by new representative committes, under the old name of ’school
Duodenal eosinophilia and early satiety in functional dyspepsia: Confirmation of a positive association in an Australian cohort

Functional dyspepsia (FD), defined by unexplained pain or discomfort centered in the upper abdomen, is common. Diagnosis and treatment of FD based on the symptom‐based Rome criteria remains challenging. Recently, eosinophilia in the duodenum has been implicated in the pathophysiology of FD in adults, specifically increased eosinophils in early satiety and postprandial distress, but the association remains controversial. The aim of this study was to characterize upper gastrointestinal (GI) tract pathology, specifically duodenal eosinophilia, in an Australian cohort of patients with FD.
Adaptive predictive power control for the uplink channel in DS-CDMA cellular systems

In this paper, we analyze the conventional closed-loop power-control system. We explain that the system behaves essentially as a companded delta modulator and then derive an expression for the power-control error in terms of the channel fading, which suggests methods for reducing the error variance. This is achieved by using a prediction technique for estimating the channel-power fading profile. The prediction module is combined with several proposed schemes for closed-loop power control. The resulting architectures are shown to result in improved performance in simulations.
Alterations in left ventricular torsion in tachycardia-induced dilated cardiomyopathy.

OBJECTIVE Left ventricular torsion reduces transmural systolic gradients of fiber strain, and torsional recoil in early diastole is thought to enhance left ventricular filling. Left ventricular remodeling in dilated cardiomyopathy may result in changes in torsion dynamics, but these effects are not yet characterized. Tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy is accompanied by systolic and diastolic heart failure and left ventricular remodeling. We hypothesized that cardiomyopathy would alter systolic and diastolic left ventricular torsion mechanics, and this hypothesis was tested by studying sheep before and after the development of tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy. METHODS Implanted miniature radiopaque markers were used in 8 sheep to measure left ventricular geometry and function, maximal torsional deformation, and early diastolic recoil before and after rapid ventricular pacing was used to create tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy. RESULTS All animals had significant heart failure with ventricular dilatation and remodeling. With tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy, maximum torsion relative to control conditions decreased (1.69 degrees +/- 0.61 degrees vs 4.25 degrees +/- 2.33 degrees ), and early diastolic recoil was completely abolished (0.53 degrees +/- 1.19 degrees vs -1.17 degrees +/- 0.94 degrees ). CONCLUSIONS Cardiomyopathy is accompanied by decreased and delayed systolic left ventricular torsional deformation and loss of early diastolic recoil, which may contribute to left ventricular dysfunction by increasing systolic transmural strain gradients and impairing diastolic filling. Analysis of left ventricular torsion with radiofrequency-tagging magnetic resonance imaging should be explored to elucidate the role of torsion in patients with cardiomyopathy.
Value of computed tomography‐derived estimated liver volume/standard liver volume ratio for predicting the prognosis of adult fulminant hepatic failure in Japan

Background and Aims: The prognosis of fulminant hepatic failure (FHF) has been improved but is still unsatisfactory, and liver atrophy has been reported as a poor prognostic factor for this disease. The aim of this study was to assess the clinical value of the estimated liver volume (ELV) compared to the standard liver volume (SLV) in patients with FHF.
Rejoinder: Infusing indigenous science into western modern science for a sustainable future

Article intervenant dans le debat sur une approche multiculturelle en classe de science, permettant de developper la conscience de l'eleve concernant l'environnement, l'ecologie. Les auteurs definissent le role de l'enseignant dans cette nouvelle orientation pedagogique de la transmission des connaissances et montrent les benefices potentiels d'une telle demarche.
A grounded theory analysis of sexual sadism in females

Abstract Although there has been a great deal of research conducted on sex offenders, a majority of studies have focused on male perpetrators. The general consensus is that very little is known about female sexual perpetrators due primarily to the small number of identified offenders and sociocultural factors. These issues are even more prominent for subtypes of female perpetrators such as those whose offences involve sexual sadism. The following paper examined five incarcerated female offenders, diagnosed with sexual sadism. Grounded theory analysis was used to identify psychological characteristics and behavioural patterns related to the sadistic behaviours that are not currently included in diagnostic criteria.