Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute myeloblastic leukaemias in adult patients: ESMO Clinical Practice Guidelines for diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.

The diagnosis of AML requires the examination of peripheral blood and bone marrow specimens. The work-up of these specimens should include morphology, cytochemistry, immunophenotyping, cytogenetics and molecular genetics [chiefly polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) techniques]. See Table 1. Whilst historically sorted by the largely descriptive FrenchAmerican-British (FAB) criteria [1], AML are now classified according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) classification from 2001, revised in 2008 [2–4]. The WHO classification incorporates, in addition to morphological criteria, cytogenetic data, molecular genetics, immunophenotype data and clinical information into a diagnostic algorithm to delineate clinically significant disease entities. In the WHO classification the term ‘myeloid’ includes all cells belonging to the granulocytic, monocyte/macrophage, erythroid, megakaryocytic and mast cell lineage. The percentage of blast cells in the bone marrow is a practical tool for categorising myeloid neoplasms into AML or myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), respectively, where myeloid neoplasms with more than 20% blasts in the peripheral blood or bone marrow are considered AML, either de novo, or having evolved from a pre-existing MDS. Blasts are defined using the criteria recently proposed by the International Working Group on Morphology of MDS. risk assessment and prognostic factors
Is the Learning Organisation Still Alive

Purpose It has recently been suggested that the learning organisation (LO) is dead (Pedler, 2013). The authors make the case here that it is still alive. This paper provides a brief history of LO and organisational learning, follows this with some survey findings, a discussion and an exploration of some related contemporary issues and concludes with an overview and summary of the conclusions. Design/methodology/approach Survey of practitioners. Findings From this small survey, whilst some of the 16 respondents are still excited by the idea, a larger group sees the learning organisation as more of a background concept, performed in ways that might not fit with the aspirations of 20 years ago. Research limitations/implications The authors started with the question: is the LO idea still alive in 2016? No clear answer emerges. Given the variety of the responses, it is difficult to sum them up in a simple way. The yea-sayer will find plenty of evidence for the LO’s continued existence and relevance, but the nay-sayers will also feel at least partly vindicated. What does emerge clearly arise from the mixed messages, are the opportunities for further research. Practical implications This paper calls for further research and suggests useful directions. Social implications LO is still seen as socially useful. Originality/value The paper is based on small empirical sample of practitioners who display multivocality on this concept.
Sector Organization, Governance, and the Inefficiency of African Water Utilities

The authors analyze the determinants of the efficiency levels reached by twenty one African water utilities. They assess efficiency through the estimation of a production frontier for the sector in Africa. The efficiency estimates confirm much of the common perceptions from partial productivity indicators. They point to a great heterogeneity in the African water utilities' performances, the predominance of constant returns to scale, and the great rate of technological progress. And the authors show that the institutional capacity of the country, as well as its governance quality, are significant driving factors in the performance of each firm.
Behavioral interactions between leaders and followers: The effectiveness of transactional and transformational leadership behavior through the lens of lag sequential analysis

Leadership research scholars have called to spend more attention on the topic of followership in the leadership equation. This study included the role of followers, while also contributing to conventional leadership research. The effectiveness of transformational and transactional leadership was studied based on dominance complementarity theory and value congruence theory. The followers were included by analyzing behavioral interactions between followers and their leader instead of relying on survey data. Team meetings were filmed and the behaviors from the leaders and the followers were minutely coded based on a codebook containing 17 mutually exclusive behaviors. The sample size consisted of 75 teams (75 leaders and 917 followers). Survey data provided the team effectiveness ratings, data for the control variables and in order to control for obtrusiveness of the cameras. The data showed that transformational leadership had a significant positive correlation with team effectiveness, while transactional leadership did not. We conducted the interaction pattern analyses based on lag sequential data. These outcomes could not support dominance complementarity or value congruence. The findings showed that teams were more effective when the leaders responded with a transformational behavior to both transactional and transformational behavior by the follower. Responding with a transactional behavior did not lead to higher levels of team effectiveness. Further implications of these outcomes are explained in the discussion section of this paper.
Motivation, Mindset, and Grading Systems

This action research study examines whether students in a standards-based grading environment are more intrinsically motivated than students in traditional grading environment. Additionally, it examines whether students in a standards-based grading environment exhibit more of a fixed or growth mindset compared to students in a traditional grading environment. The participants were 72 sixth grade students in a standardsbased grading classroom environment, and 32 students in a traditional grading-based classroom environment. A survey with statements reflecting students’ intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, fixed mindset, and growth mindset was administered to both groups of students. The survey results suggest that the grading environment, standards-based or traditional, does not account for students’ levels of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, nor does it predict whether a student has a fixed or growth mindset. Document Type Thesis Degree Name Master of Education (MEd) Department Graduate Education First Advisor Pat Kornelis
How to Get Them a Dream Job?: Entity-Aware Features for Personalized Job Search Ranking

This paper proposes an approach to applying standardized entity data to improve job search quality and to make search results more personalized. Specifically, we explore three types of entity-aware features and incorporate them into the job search ranking function. The first is query-job matching features which extract and standardize entities mentioned in queries and documents, then semantically match them based on these entities. The second type, searcher-job expertise homophily, aims to capture the fact that job searchers tend to be interested in the jobs requiring similar expertise as theirs. To measure the similarity, we use standardized skills in job descriptions and searchers' profiles as well as skills that we infer searchers might have but not explicitly list in their profiles. Third, we propose a concept of entity-faceted historical click-through-rates (CTRs) to capture job document quality. Faceting jobs by their standardized companies, titles, locations, etc., and computing historical CTRs at the facet level instead of individual job level alleviate sparseness issue in historical action data. This is particularly important in job search where job lifetime is typically short. Both offline and online experiments confirm the effectiveness of the features. In offline experiment, using the entity-aware features gives improvements of +20%, +12.1% and +8.3% on Precision@1, MRR and NDCG@25, respectively. Online A/B test shows that a new model with these features is +11.3% and +5.3% better than the baseline in terms of click-through-rate and apply rate.
Inference for order reduction in Markov random fields

This paper presents an algorithm for order reduction of factors in High-Order Markov Random Fields (HOMRFs). Standard techniques for transforming arbitrary high-order factors into pairwise ones have been known for a long time. In this work, we take a fresh look at this problem with the following motivation: It is important to keep in mind that order reduction is followed by an inference procedure on the order-reduced MRF. Since there are many possible ways of performing order reduction, a technique that generates “easier” pairwise inference problems is a better reduction. With this motivation in mind, we introduce a new algorithm called Order Reduction Inference (ORI) that searches over a space of order reduction methods to minimize the difficulty of the resultant pairwise inference problem. We set up this search problem as an energy minimization problem. We show that application of ORI for order reduction outperforms known order reduction techniques both in simulated problems and in real-world vision applications.
s-Dynamics Designs for Uncertain Variable Structure Systems with Repetitive Controllers

This paper is concerned with uncertain systems subject to periodic disturbances with a known period, and the discrete-time variable structure repetitive control methodology is applied to address the control problem. The notion of quasisliding mode is reviewed in this paper. Switching-function dynamics obtained with the proposed repetitive strategies are desirable, which govern both reaching phase and sliding phase of the variable structure systems. The attractive layer bounds and quasi-sliding mode bandwidths are given for characterizing the switching-function dynamics. The repetitive control method ensures closed-loop robust stability, and achieves perfect tracking in the presence of periodic perturbations. Partial-period repetitive control is presented for improving transient performance, as more knowledge about the periodicity is available. Numerical simulation is carried out to verify the analytical results.
Head injuries in Leeds: changes in epidemiology and survival over 12 years

Objectives: To map the pattern of survival and epidemiology of patients admitted to accident and emergency, at a regional neurosciences unit with an isolated head injury, over a 12 year period. Methods: The TARN database of a regional neuroscience referral centre was analysed to identify patients who where admitted after a significant, isolated head injury between January 1990 and December 2001. Demographic data about the patient and nature and cause of the injury were extracted and survival was mapped over the time period. Statistical analysis was performed to identify change in survival. Results: There were 810 eligible patients. The most common cause of injury was road traffic accident (47%) with an average of 42.6% patients transferred from other hospitals. The most common disposal of patients was to an intensive care unit (35%). There was an overall increase in the number of patients but survival did not increase over the time period. Mean survival was 81.8% and overall survival decreased from 95.0% in 1990 to 81.6% in 2001, although this did not represent significant change (p = 0.990). Conclusions: Short term survival after significant head injury has not changed significantly over the 12 year period studied. No subset of patients is having a disproportionate effect on survival but in patients aged over 75, survival increased significantly. Further multicentre work is indicated to map a more accurate clinical picture of head injury survival.
Achieving It Diffusion Within The Fragments - An It Culture Perspective

Many organizations still fail to make a return from the huge investments they make in implementing complex Information Technology (IT). This is usually due to cultural forces that inhibit the level of usage required to facilitate IT Diffusion. An emerging stream of research highlights the IT culture perspective, a perspective vital for understanding individuals’ social practices when they interact with IT. This paper adopted a case study approach to explore how the IT culture perspective may explain how organizational diffusion of an IT may happen despite opposing cultural forces causing a stalemate to the diffusion process. This study identified three IT culture archetypes - embracing, rejecting and confused, depicting a fragmented IT culture during the adaption, acceptance and routinization stages of diffusion of an IT. This study highlights how a salient element of a fragmented IT culture-embracing IT culture archetype could explain how diffusion of an IT happened despite the manifestations of negative IT culture archetypes - ‘confused’ and ‘rejecting’ during the diffusion process.
Breast Cancer Cells Induce Osteolytic Bone Lesions In vivo through a Reduction in Osteoblast Activity in Mice

Bone metastases are severely debilitating and have a significant impact on the quality of life of women with metastatic breast cancer. Treatment options are limited and in order to develop more targeted therapies, improved understanding of the complex mechanisms that lead to bone lesion development are warranted. Interestingly, whilst prostate-derived bone metastases are characterised by mixed or osteoblastic lesions, breast-derived bone metastases are characterised by osteolytic lesions, suggesting unique regulatory patterns. This study aimed to measure the changes in bone formation and bone resorption activity at two time-points (18 and 36 days) during development of the bone lesion following intratibial injection of MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells into the left tibiae of Severely Combined Immuno-Deficient (SCID) mice. The contralateral tibia was used as a control. Tibiae were extracted and processed for undecalcified histomorphometric analysis. We provide evidence that the early bone loss observed following exposure to MDA-MB-231 cells was due to a significant reduction in mineral apposition rate, rather than increased levels of bone resorption. This suggests that osteoblast activity was impaired in the presence of breast cancer cells, contrary to previous reports of osteoclast-dependent bone loss. Furthermore mRNA expression of Dickkopf Homolog 1 (DKK-1) and Noggin were confirmed in the MDA-MB-231 cell line, both of which antagonise osteoblast regulatory pathways. The observed bone loss following injection of cancer cells was due to an overall thinning of the trabecular bone struts rather than perforation of the bone tissue matrix (as measured by trabecular width and trabecular separation, respectively), suggesting an opportunity to reverse the cancer-induced bone changes. These novel insights into the mechanisms through which osteolytic bone lesions develop may be important in the development of new treatment strategies for metastatic breast cancer patients.
Metallo-β-Lactamase-Producing Pseudomonas spp. in Korea: High Prevalence of Isolates with VIM-2 Type and Emergence of Isolates with IMP-1 Type

Purpose Two Korean nationwide studies showed that metallo-β-lactamases (MBLs)-producing-Pseudomonas spp. are not rare. The aim of this study was to assess the trends of MBL-producing isolates among imipenem-resistant isolates of Pseudomonas spp. Materials and Methods Imipenem-resistant clinical isolates were collected from 23 hospitals and one commercial laboratory participating in the KONSAR program in 2005. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to detect MBL genes. Results Alleles of MBL genes were detected in 10.8% of 415 Pseudomonas aeruginosa and 66.7% of 12 P. putida isolates from 18 of 24 hospitals/laboratory. Among the 14 IMP-1-like and 39 VIM-2-like MBLs, emergence of IMP-6 was detected for the first time. Conclusion Prevalence of MBL-producing P. aeruginosa has not significantly increased, but IMP-6 emerged in P. aeruginosa.
Prognostic Value of the Six-Minute Walk Test in Heart Failure Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery: A Literature Review

Background. The prognostic value of cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) is known, but the predictive value of 6MWT in patients with heart failure (HF) and patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) is not established yet. Objective. We conducted a systematic review exploring the prognostic value of 6MWT in HF patients undergoing cardiac surgery. The aim was to find out whether the change in the distance walked during follow-up visits was associated with prognosis. Data Source. We searched “PubMed” from January 1990 to December 2012 for any review articles or experimental studies investigating the prognostic value of 6MWT in HF patients and patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Results. 53 studies were included in the review, and they explored the role of 6MWT in cardiology, cardiac surgery, and rehabilitation. The results did not show the relation between the six-minute walk distance and adverse events after CABG. The predictive power of the distance walked for death in HF patients undergoing cardiac surgery was not found. It is not yet proved if the change in the six-minute walk distance is associated with prognosis. The predictive power of the six-minute walk distance for death in HF patients undergoing cardiac surgery remains unclear.
An Assessment of Antibacterial Activity of Four Endodontic Sealers on Enterococcus faecalis by a Direct Contact Test: An In Vitro Study

Aim. To evaluate the antibacterial activity of four endodontic sealers on Enterococcus faecalis by a direct contact test. Material and Methods. Enterococcus faecalis was used as a test organism. Direct contact test which is based on measuring the effect of close contact between test bacteria and tested material on the kinetics of bacterial growth was performed to overcome the disadvantages of agar diffusion test. The sealers tested were zinc oxide eugenol-based sealer, glass-ionomer-based sealer, polydimethyl-siloxane-based sealer, and urethane dimethacrylate resin-based sealer. Data was collected by recording the optical density with the help of a spectrophotometer. Results. The sealers exhibited different inhibitory effects. The results obtained were subjected to statistical analysis by Kruskal Wallis analysis of variance and Dunn's multiple comparison test. Group comparison showed very highly significant difference between the groups. Conclusion. Zinc oxide eugenol-based sealer was the most effective and urethane dimethacrylate resin-based sealer was the least effective against Enterococcus faecalis, whereas glass-ionomer-based and polydimethyl-siloxane-based sealers were effective only for a short period. Inhibition of the bacterial growth is related to the direct contact of the microorganism with the sealer.
Relationships between submicrometer particulate air pollution and air mass history in Beijing, China, 2004-2006

The Chinese capital Beijing is one of the global megacities where the effects of rapid economic growth have led to complex air pollution problems that are not well understood. In this study, ambient particle number size distributions in Beijing between 2004 and 2006 are analysed as a function of regional meteorological transport. An essential result is that the particle size distribution in Beijing depends to large extent on the history of the synoptic scale air masses. A first approach based on manual back trajectory classification yielded differences in particulate matter mass concentration by a factor of two between four different air mass categories, including three main wind directions plus the case of stagnant air masses. A back trajectory cluster analysis refined these results, yielding a total of six trajectory clusters. Besides the large scale wind direction, the transportation speed of an air mass was found to play an essential role on the PM concentrations in Beijing. Slow-moving air masses were shown to be associated with an effective accumulation of surface-based anthropogenic emissions due to both, an increased residence time over densely populated land, and their higher degree of vertical stability. For the six back trajectory clusters, differences in PM 1 mass concentrations by a factor of 3.5, in the mean air mass speed by a factor of 6, and in atmospheric visibility by a factor of 4 were found. The main conclusion is that the air quality in Beijing is not only degraded by anthropogenic aerosol sources from within the megacity, but also by sources across the entire Northwest China plain depending on the meteorological situation.
Evaluating three treatments for borderline personality disorder: a multiwave study.

OBJECTIVE The authors examined three yearlong outpatient treatments for borderline personality disorder: dialectical behavior therapy, transference-focused psychotherapy, and a dynamic supportive treatment. METHOD Ninety patients who were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder were randomly assigned to transference-focused psychotherapy, dialectical behavior therapy, or supportive treatment and received medication when indicated. Prior to treatment and at 4-month intervals during a 1-year period, blind raters assessed the domains of suicidal behavior, aggression, impulsivity, anxiety, depression, and social adjustment in a multiwave study design. RESULTS Individual growth curve analysis revealed that patients in all three treatment groups showed significant positive change in depression, anxiety, global functioning, and social adjustment across 1 year of treatment. Both transference-focused psychotherapy and dialectical behavior therapy were significantly associated with improvement in suicidality. Only transference-focused psychotherapy and supportive treatment were associated with improvement in anger. Transference-focused psychotherapy and supportive treatment were each associated with improvement in facets of impulsivity. Only transference-focused psychotherapy was significantly predictive of change in irritability and verbal and direct assault. CONCLUSIONS Patients with borderline personality disorder respond to structured treatments in an outpatient setting with change in multiple domains of outcome. A structured dynamic treatment, transference-focused psychotherapy was associated with change in multiple constructs across six domains; dialectical behavior therapy and supportive treatment were associated with fewer changes. Future research is needed to examine the specific mechanisms of change in these treatments beyond common structures.
Whole-Brain Atrophy Rate in Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease, Multiple System Atrophy, and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy

In multiple system atrophy (MSA) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), the absence of surrogate endpoints makes clinical trials long and expensive. We aim to determine annualized whole-brain atrophy rates (a-WBAR) in idiopathic Parkinson's disease (IPD), MSA, and PSP. Ten healthy controls, 20 IPD, 12 PSP, and 8 MSA patients were studied using a volumetric MRI technique (SIENA). In controls, the a-WBAR was 0.37% ± 0.28 (CI 95% 0.17–0.57), while in IPD a-WBAR was 0.54% ± 0.38 (CI 95% 0.32–0.68). The IPD patients did not differ from the controls. In PSP, the a-WBAR was 1.26% ± 0.51 (CI 95%: 0.95–1.58). In MSA, a-WBAR was 1.65% ± 1.12 (CI 95%: 0.71–2.59). MSA did not differ from PSP. The a-WBAR in PSP and MSA were significantly higher than in the IPD group (p = 0.004 and p < 0.001, resp.). In PSP, the use of a-WBAR required one-half of the patients needed for clinical scales to detect a 50% reduction in their progression. In MSA, one-quarter of the patients would be needed to detect the same effect. a-WBAR is a reasonable candidate to consider as a surrogate endpoint in short clinical trials using smaller sample sizes. The confidence intervals for a-WBAR may add a potential retrospective application for a-WBAR to improve the diagnostic accuracy of MSA and PSP versus IPD.