Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute impairment of the endothelial function by maximal treadmill exercise in patients with intermittent claudication, and its improvement after supervised physical training.

AIM The aim of this study was to determine the effects of maximal exercise and of physical training on endothelial function (EF) of patients with intermittent claudication (IC). METHODS EF, assessed by ultrasonography of the brachial artery, has been measured in 22 male patients with IC before (pre-exercise EF) and after (postexercise EF) maximal treadmill test. Absolute claudication distance (ACD) and ankle brachial index (ABI) have been measured too. The measurements have been repeated after 18 days (3 times weekly, for 6 weeks) of supervised physical training. RESULTS Before training, the pre-exercise EF was 7.6+/-2.94 and postexercise EF 5.28+/-3.3 (-33.2%) (P<0.01). After training, the pre-exercise EF was 10.3+/-4.04, whilst postexercise EF was 7.79+/-2.56 (-18.97%) (P<0.01). The differences between the pre-exercise value before and after training and between the postexercise value before and after training were significant (P<0.01). ACD and ABI after training increased respectively from 93.95 to 166.55 m and from 0.67 to 0.71 (P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS Endothelial dysfunction takes a relevant part in the pathophysiology of IC, with 2/3 of the patients showing an EF lower than the pathological cut-off. Maximal exercise worsens the EF, according to the trend associated with the acute inflammatory response. All these features suggest that physical activity in IC should not utilize the maximal working load, in order to avoid the high inflammatory activation and the acute complications of atherosclerotic plaque. The supervised physical training, besides confirming itself as the most effective means to increase the walking ability, also proved to be able to improve the EF of these patients, as described about other diseases. It is probable that moderate hemodynamic stress reduces the levels of the inflammatory markers and increases the flow-mediated vasodilation through an ischemic preconditioning. The increased walking ability, associated with the improvement of EF could improve the heavy systemic outcome of claudicant patients, as it has been demonstrated in patients with coronary heart disease. Further prospective survival studies on cardiovascular outcomes of trained claudicant patients are needed.
Distributed shared memory with versioned objects

Distributed Object Memory (DOM) is an abstraction that represents a distributed-memory system as a single shared container of language-level objects. The goal of DOM is to simplify programming of parallel applications for such systems. All accesses to shared memory are made relative to objects that reside in one or more node-local memories. For example, in Amber, a DOM system for a network of workstations, remote references are transparent at the language level and are implemented using either remote procedure call or object replication and migration. While DOM can greatly simplify distribution for many application classes, it is not well suited for all domains (parallel-scientific codes, in particular). To address the shortcomings of DOM for such domains, we introduce Versioned DOM (VDOM). In VDOM a version number is associated with each object. Multiple versions of objects can coexist and may be cached in local memories as needed to increase concurrency. Object coherence is driven by synchronization methods implicitly associated with each object. Explicit versioning is used as the basis for a memory consistency model that facilitates efficient fine-grain sharing of objects. The units This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. CCR-8619663 and CCR8907666, by the Washington Technology Center, and by the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center and External Research Program. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. @ 1992 ACM O-89791-539-9/92/001 0/0247. $1.50 of VDOM coherence are fragment objects, from which language-level objects are constructed; this fragmentation solves the false-sharing problem for language-level objects. The performance of VDOM primitives compared to standard DOM coherence is presented along with speedup results for two parallel applications implemented using VDOM.
Trust and suspicion

Whenever philosophers, poets, statesmen, or theologians have written about man's relationship to his fellow man, to nature, or to animals, the phenomena of trust and betrayal, faith and suspicion, responsibility and irresponsibility, have been discussed. The significance of the phenomena of trust and suspicion in human life is attested to not only by past preoccupations but also by current concerns. Discussion of such problems as the armaments race, mental illness, the "hidden persuaders," and juvenile delinquency frequently employ such terms as "trust," "suspicion," "betrayal," "faith. " Past preoccupations and current concerns make it apparent that the concept of "trust" and its related concepts are vital to the understanding both of social life and of personality development. Yet an examination of a half-dozen or more of the leading textbooks in social psychology (e.g., texts by Cartwright and Zander, Homans, Krech and Crutchfield, Lewin, Lindsey, Newcomb) reveals that the word "trust" does not appear in any of their indexes. So far as we know, the research summarized in this paper represents the first attempt to investigate experimentally the phenomena of trust.
Handling sink group mobility in wireless sensor networks

Communications for mobile sink groups such as rescue teams or platoons bring about a new challenging issue for handling mobility in wireless sensor networks. Recently, a group region-based approach has been proposed to send data to a mobile sink group. However, it uses flooding for discovering and notifying group region information and flooding or long distance forwarding for disseminating data. Thus, it causes high energy consumption and data delivery failure. Moreover, its per-sink mobility supporting scheme makes energy consumption and data delivery failure more serious. Thus, this letter proposes an Energy-efficient and Reliable Mobile Group communication protocol (ERMG) to support a mobile sink group, which exploits a virtual grid structure. For the group region discover and notification and the data dissemination, ERMG uses communications with only cell heads of grid cells that manages group sinks. ERMG also uses a per-grid based scheme to support sink mobility. Simulation results show that ERMG has better performance than the existing protocols.
Distinct brain regions associated with syllable and phoneme

The syllable and the phoneme are two important units in the phonological structure of speech sounds. In the brain mapping literature, it remains unsolved as to whether there are separate brain regions mediating the processing of syllables and phonemes. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the neural substrate of these phonological units with Chinese subjects. Results revealed that the left middle frontal cortex contributes to syllabic processing, whereas the left inferior prefrontal gyri contributes to phonemic processing. This pattern of findings offers compelling evidence for distinct cortical areas relevant to the representation of syllables and phonemes. Hum. Brain Mapping 18:201–207, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Association between the Firm Characteristics and Corporate Mandatory Disclosure the Case of Greece

— The main thrust of this paper is to assess the level of disclosure in the annual reports of non-financial Greek firms and to empirically investigate the hypothesized impact of several firm characteristics on the extent of mandatory disclosure. A disclosure checklist consisting of 100 mandatory items was developed to assess the level of disclosure in the 2009 annual reports of 43 Greek companies listed at the Athens stock exchange. The association between the level of disclosure and some firm characteristics was examined using multiple linear regression analysis. The study reveals that Greek companies on general have responded adequately to the mandatory disclosure requirements of the regulatory bodies. The findings also indicate that firm size was significant positively associated with the level of disclosure. The remaining variables such as age, profitability, liquidity, and board composition were found to be insignificant in explaining the variation of mandatory disclosures. The outcome of this study is undoubtedly of great concern to the investment community at large to assist in evaluating the extent of mandatory disclosure by Greek firms and explaining the variation of disclosure in light of firm-specific characteristics.
Memory bandwidth reduction for H.264 and HEVC encoders using lossless reference frame coding

This paper presents a hardware-efficient algorithm for external memory bandwidth reduction focusing on the state-of-the-art video encoders, like H.264/AVC and HEVC. The proposed approach is a lossless solution based on an adaptation of the traditional Huffman algorithm. This solution is entitled RFCAVLC8T (Reference Frame Context Adaptive Variable-Length Coder with 8 Tables) and is based on the use of off-line defined static Huffman tables. The RFCAVLC8T is a hardware-efficient version of the Huffman algorithm that employs eight static tables to avoid the cost of the on-the-fly Huffman statistical analysis. The best table to encode a block is selected at run time using a context evaluation, resulting in a context-adaptive configuration. The use of RFCAVLC8T reaches an average compression rate higher than 35% for the evaluated video sequences, with computational cost of a single VLC.
Treatment of chronic lumbar diskogenic pain with intradiskal electrothermal therapy: a prospective outcome study.

OBJECTIVE To determine the clinical efficacy of intradiskal electrothermal annuloplasty in treating patients with chronic constant lumbar diskogenic pain who have not responded to at least 6 months of aggressive nonoperative care. DESIGN Prospective case series. SETTING Academic-affiliated private physiatry practice. PARTICIPANTS Thirty-three patients with chronic constant lumbar diskogenic pain of more than 6 months in duration diagnosed with history and physical examination, with concordant pain on provocative pressure-controlled lumbar diskography, and with symptomatic annular tears and/or protrusions less than 5mm, who did not respond to aggressive nonoperative care. INTERVENTION Intradiskal electrothermal annuloplasty. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Visual analog scale (VAS) pain scores for the back and for the lower extremity, the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ), and the North American Spine Society Patient Satisfaction Index. RESULTS A total of 33 patients, with mean age of 40 years and a mean duration of symptoms of 46 months, were observed with a mean follow-up of 15 months. Relief of pain and improvement in physical function were associated with a mean change in the VAS score of 3.9 (P<.001), a mean change in the lower-extremity VAS score of 3.7 (P<.001), and a mean change in the RMDQ of 7.3 (P<.001). For patient satisfaction, 75.7% reported that they would undergo the same procedure for the same outcome. Complete pain relief was achieved in 24% of the patients, and partial pain relief in 46% of the patients. CONCLUSIONS Intradiskal electrothermal annuloplasty offers a safe, minimally invasive treatment option for carefully selected patients with chronic lumbar diskogenic pain who have not responded to aggressive nonoperative care.
Transitory and activity‐dependent expression of neurogranin in olfactory bulb tufted cells during mouse postnatal development

Neurogranin (Ng) is a brain‐specific postsynaptic calmodulin‐binding protein involved in synaptic activity‐dependent plasticity. In the adult olfactory bulb (OB), Ng is expressed by a large population of GABAergic interneurons in the granule cell layer. We show here that, during postnatal development, Ng is also expressed by OB neurons in the superficial external plexiform layer (sEPL) and glomerular layer (GL). These Ng‐positive neurons display morphological and neurochemical features of superficial and external tufted cells. Ng expression in these cells is transient during OB development: few elements express Ng at postnatal day (P) 5, increasing in number and reaching a peak at P10, then progressively decreasing. At P30, Ng is rarely detectable in these neurons. Ng expression in developing tufted cells is also modulated at the cellular level: at earlier stages, Ng labeling is distributed throughout the cell body and dendritic arborization in the GL, but, at P20, when the glomerular circuits are fully matured, Ng becomes restricted to the soma and proximal portion of tufted cell apical dendrites. We show that olfactory deprivation at early postnatal stages induces a strong increase in Ng‐positive tufted cells from P10 to P20, whereas no changes have been observed following olfactory deprivation in adult mice. These findings demonstrate that Ng expression in sEPL‐GL is restricted to developmental stages and indicate its activity‐dependent regulation in a time window critical for glomerular circuit development, suggesting a role for Ng in maturation and dendritic remodeling of tufted cells. J. Comp. Neurol. , 520:3055–3069, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
First impressions: Children’s knowledge of words gained from a single exposure

ABSTRACT Two experiments examined factors affecting the initial phase of word learning. Four- to 11-year-olds heard new words in three presentation conditions: A conversation, a story, and paired with a definition. Overall the results indicate that children at all ages could identify the new words as “words,” were sensitive to correct usage, and could acquire a partial semantic representation from a single exposure. Older children benefited more than younger ones from explicit definitions, suggesting that metalinguistic awareness and memory strategies affect word learning. Evidence also suggests that meanings for new words are better learned if the exemplar is peripheral to previously named categories than if the word is central to a previously named category.
Culture Industries in a Postindustrial Age: Entertainment, Leisure, Creativity, Design

This article reviews the evolution of the concept of culture industries, when neither industry nor culture themselves are today what they were at the time when the term was coined. It attempts to explain the dilution of the term into more nebulous terms (“leisure industries,” “entertainment industries” or “creative industries”) and suggests new challenges for the research on culture industries. What is at stake is no longer an application of a Fordist production to culture, a one-directional mass communication and a mediation by experts, but rather: (1) a cultural experience which is no longer clearly separated from other activities (leisure in general, consumption and even work); (2) the communicative explosion of all industrial production in a media environment, where industrialized symbolic products are mixed with culturalized industrial products; and (3) the empowerment of the recipient, which on one hand ignores the traditional experts and on the other leads to post-productive (recreational and even creative) cultural practices.
Scalable hands-free transfer learning for online advertising

Internet display advertising is a critical revenue source for publishers and online content providers, and is supported by massive amounts of user and publisher data. Targeting display ads can be improved substantially with machine learning methods, but building many models on massive data becomes prohibitively expensive computationally. This paper presents a combination of strategies, deployed by the online advertising firm Dstillery, for learning many models from extremely high-dimensional data efficiently and without human intervention. This combination includes: (i)~A method for simple-yet-effective transfer learning where a model learned from data that is relatively abundant and cheap is taken as a prior for Bayesian logistic regression trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) from the more expensive target data. (ii)~A new update rule for automatic learning rate adaptation, to support learning from sparse, high-dimensional data, as well as the integration with adaptive regularization. We present an experimental analysis across 100 different ad campaigns, showing that the transfer learning indeed improves performance across a large number of them, especially at the start of the campaigns. The combined "hands-free" method needs no fiddling with the SGD learning rate, and we show that it is just as effective as using expensive grid search to set the regularization parameter for each campaign.
Leadership in an Age of Ambiguity and Risk

Those who were responsible for the establishment of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration (CCEA) in the early 1960s and 1970s were clearly leaders. All had vision, were entrepreneurial and tenacious, sensitive to situational and political pressures and highly ethical in their relationships with others. Yet each displayed a unique style of leader behaviour. Thus the three key elements in their behavioural setting were the traits they possessed, the sensitivity to the environment they demonstrated and the style they adopted. Ansoff has described contemporary society as being typified by paradox, ambiguity and risk. These characteristics continue to typify the business and government environments of advanced Western nations. Are the characteristics of leader behaviour demonstrated by CCEA′s founders adequate to meet the turbulence of future societal change? The answer is “yes”. When the extensive literature on leader behaviour is analysed and the politics of scholarship are taken into accou.
Curriculum Reform in South Africa: A Critical Analysis of Outcomes-based Education.

Abstract> Since South Africa's first national democratic elections in 1994, the Government of National Unity has issued several curriculum‐related reforms intended to democratise education and eliminate inequalities in the post‐apartheid education system. The most comprehensive of these reforms has been labelled outcomes‐based education (OBE), an approach to education which underpins the new Curriculum 2005. While the anticipated positive effects of the new curriculum have been widely heralded, there has been little criticism of these proposals given the social and educational context of South African schools. In this article the philosophical, political and implementational dilemmas of OBE are systematically analysed and assessed. [1] An earlier version of this article, entitled Why OBE will Fail, was presented at a National Conference on outcomes‐based education held at the University of Durban Westville in March 1997. I am grateful to Renuka Vithal and Ben Parker for critical comments on the original p.
Effect of Endogenous GLP-1 on Insulin Secretion in Type 2 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE The incretins glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) account for up to 60% of postprandial insulin release in healthy people. Previous studies showed a reduced incretin effect in patients with type 2 diabetes but a robust response to exogenous GLP-1. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether endogenous GLP-1 regulates insulin secretion in type 2 diabetes. METHODS Twelve patients with well-controlled type 2 diabetes and eight matched nondiabetic subjects consumed a breakfast meal containing d-xylose during fixed hyperglycemia at 5 mmol/l above fasting levels. Studies were repeated, once with infusion of the GLP-1 receptor antagonist, exendin-(9–39) (Ex-9), and once with saline. RESULTS The relative increase in insulin secretion after meal ingestion was comparable in diabetic and nondiabetic groups (44 ± 4% vs. 47 ± 7%). Blocking the action of GLP-1 suppressed postprandial insulin secretion similarly in the diabetic and nondiabetic subjects (25 ± 4% vs. 27 ± 8%). However, Ex-9 also reduced the insulin response to intravenous glucose (25 ± 5% vs. 26 ± 7%; diabetic vs. nondiabetic subjects), when plasma GLP-1 levels were undetectable. The appearance of postprandial ingested d-xylose in the blood was not affected by Ex-9. CONCLUSIONS These findings indicate that in patients with well-controlled diabetes, the relative effects of enteral stimuli and endogenous GLP-1 to enhance insulin release are retained and comparable with those in nondiabetic subjects. Surprisingly, GLP-1 receptor signaling promotes glucose-stimulated insulin secretion independent of the mode of glucose entry. Based on rates of d-xylose absorption, GLP-1 receptor blockade did not affect gastric emptying of a solid meal.
Midazolam premedication and thiopental induction of anaesthesia: interactions at multiple end-points.

We have studied the effects of midazolam premedication on multiple anaesthetic end-points (hypnotic, loss of verbal contact (LVC); motor, dropping an infusion flex or bag (DF); analgesic, loss of reaction to painful stimulation (LRP); and EEG, attainment of burst suppression (BUR)) during induction by slow thiopental infusion at a rate of 55 mg kg-1 h-1. Patients received midazolam 0.05 mg kg-1 i.v. (group TM, n = 12) or no midazolam (group T0, n = 13). ED50 and ED95 values and group medians for times and doses at the end-points were measured. Midazolam premedication reduced significantly thiopental ED50 and ED95 values at all end-points (exception for ED95 for BUR). Potentiation was greatest for the motor end-point (dropping the infusion bag (DF)) (ED95 +52%, ED50 +23%, median +39%), and smallest for painful stimulation (LRP) (median +18%; ED50 +13%). For LRP and DF, premedication was associated with significant, non-parallel increases in the slope of the thiopental dose-response curves, resulting in marked potency ratio changes from ED50 to ED95 (LRP +31%, DF +29%). There were no such increases for LVC or BUR. The interaction between midazolam and thiopental varied with the anaesthetic end-point and may also depend on the dose of thiopental. Our data suggest that the mechanism of interaction between midazolam premedication and thiopental was different for motor effects or analgesia (DF, LRP) compared with hypnotic effects or cortical depression (LVC, BUR), in agreement with the different central nervous system substrates underlying these distinct anaesthetic end-points.
Caregiver Burden and Coping in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder: A Qualitative Study

Caregivers of people with severe mental disorders suffer from having a considerable burden as a result of their caregiving role. They develop different kinds of coping strategies to deal with this burden. There has been a lack of qualitative studies on caregiver burden and coping, especially from non-Western populations. The present paper reports findings of a longitudinal study of burden and coping in a group of caregivers of people suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder (BAD). Qualitative assessments were done by focus group discussions (FGDs) with the caregivers over a period of about a year. Caregivers reported burden in different areas including effects on family functioning, social isolation, financial problems, and health. They used multiple coping strategies including developing compassion in caregiving, hoping for a better future, developing faith in God, participating in religious practices, and helping others with a similar problem.