Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pseudomonas putida Septicemia in a Special Care Nursery Due to Contaminated Flush Solutions Prepared in a Hospital Pharmacy

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas putida bloodstream infections were reported in two preterm neonates from a special care nursery. An unopened container of preservative-free heparin flush, compounded several weeks earlier in the hospital pharmacy and from the same batch that was administered to the patients, grew P. putida with a pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) pattern identical to that of the patients' isolates. Intrinsic contamination was ruled out by the absence of similar reports from other hospitals and by sterility testing of unopened stock solutions. We investigated the in vitro persistence of P. putida in heparinized saline: even under refrigerated conditions, inocula of 102 and 103 CFU/ml exhibited growth at 21 and 35 days, respectively. These findings highlight the need for compliance with current standards of aseptic technique and quality assurance during the preparation of compounded sterile products.
Influence of Patient Characteristics on Assessment of Diabetes Self-Management Support

Background:Factors contributing to patient-reported experiences of diabetes self-management support are not understood well, particularly over time. Objectives:The aim of the study was to identify the contribution of patient characteristics to patient-reported quality of SMS. Methods:Using secondary data from a prospective clinical trial (n = 339) comparing three approaches of providing diabetes self-management support (Group Medical Visits, Automated Telephone Support, and Usual Care) in a diverse, underserved population, the influence of patient characteristics (e.g., age, gender, income, and health status) was examined on Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care ratings. Results:At baseline, older age (p = .014), being female (p = .038), and having lower income (p = .001) were associated with lower ratings. Income and interactions involving income combined explained 12% of the variance in baseline ratings. Compared with White patients, African American and Asian patients tended to have higher baseline ratings (p = .076 and p = .045, respectively). Race or ethnicity influenced perceptions throughout the trial, explaining 5% of the variance at baseline and 2% of the variance in 1-year changes in Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care ratings. As expected, over 1 year, ratings increased more for patients in both intervention groups compared with the control group (p < .001). Discussion:Ratings of healthcare quality are influenced by patient characteristics independent of the nature of the care provided. Understanding more precisely how these differences are associated with differences in clinical processes will be particularly important for efforts aiming to integrate patient-reported measures into assessments of healthcare quality during routine clinical care and clinical trials.
Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians

Written by established and emerging Indigenous intellectuals from a variety of positions, perspectives and places, these essays generate new ways of seeing and understanding Indigenous Australian history, culture, identity and knowledge in both national and global contexts. From museums to Mabo, anthropology to art, feminism to film, land rights to literature, the essays collected here offer provocative insights and compelling arguments around the historical and contemporary issues confronting Indigenous Australians today.
A relational–XML data warehouse for data aggregation with SQL and XQuery

Integrating information from multiple data sources is becoming increasingly important for enterprises that partner with other companies for e-commerce. However, companies have their internal business applications deployed on diverse platforms and no standard solution for integrating information from these sources exists. To support business intelligence query activities, it is useful to build a data warehouse on top of middleware that aggregates the data obtained from various heterogeneous database systems. Online analytical processing (OLAP) can then be used to provide fast access to materialized views from the data warehouse. Since extensible markup language (XML) documents are a common data representation standard on the Internet and relational tables are commonly used for production data, OLAP must handle both relational and XML data. SQL and XQuery can be used to process the materialized relational and XML data cubes created from the aggregated data. This paper shows how to handle the two kinds of data cubes from a relational–XML data warehouse using extract, transformation and loading. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Tuboovarian abscess. Factors associated with operative intervention after failed antibiotic therapy.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether size of tuboovarian abscess (TOA) and other clinical characteristics were associated with the need for surgical intervention. STUDY DESIGN A retrospective chart review of patients hospitalized at an inner city hospital between January 1998 and December 2007 with the diagnosis of TOA. Demographics, medical history, clinical markers of infection, radiology, pathology, and operative reports were examined. Student's t test and Fisher's exact test were utilized to analyze differences between groups. Multiple logistic regression analysis was performed to identify significant predictors of surgery. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was used to assess how well TOA size and other significant variables were associated with the need for operative or procedural intervention. RESULTS A total of 163 patients with TOA were identified; 41 patients were excluded based on specific criteria. Of the remaining 122 women, 65.6% responded to antibiotic therapy, and 34.4% had surgery or ultrasound-guided drainage. Mean TOA size in the medical group was 4.4 cm as compared to 7.3 cm in the surgical group (p < 0.0001). Maximal leukocyte count, older age, and parity were associated with significantly higher risk of surgery. The significant univariate variables remained significant after multivariate analysis. ROC curve analysis revealed an excellent discrimination of the need for surgical treatment as predicted by TOA size, with increased likelihood of surgical or procedural intervention with increasing TOA size. CONCLUSION Radiographic size, leukocyte count, age, and parity are associated with operative or procedural treatment of tuboovarian abscess.
Developing and validating a risk scoring tool for chlamydia infection among sexual health clinic attendees in Australia: a simple algorithm to identify those at high risk of chlamydia infection

Objective To develop and validate a risk scoring tool to identify those who are at increased risk of chlamydia infection. Methods We used demographic data, sexual behaviour information and chlamydia positivity results from more than 45 000 individuals who attended Sydney Sexual Health Centre between 1998 and 2009. Participants were randomly allocated to either the development or internal validation data set. Using logistic regression, we created a prediction model and weighted scoring system using the development data set and calculated the odds ratio of chlamydia positivity for participants in successively higher quintiles of score. The internal validation data set was used to evaluate the performance characteristics of the model for five quintiles of risk scores including population attributable risk, sensitivity and specificity. Results In the prediction model, inconsistent condom use, increased number of sexual partners in last 3 months, genital or anal symptoms and presenting to the clinic for sexually transmitted infections screening or being a contact of a sexually transmitted infection case were consistently associated with increased risk of chlamydia positivity in all groups. High scores (upper quintiles) were significantly associated with increased risk of chlamydia infection. A cut-point score of 20 or higher distinguished a increased risk group with a sensitivity of 95%, 67% and 79% among heterosexual men, women and men who have sex with men (MSM), respectively. Conclusion The scoring tool may be included as part of a health promotion and/or clinic website to prompt those who are at increased risk of chlamydia infection, which may potentially lead to increased uptake and frequency of testing.
Fundamental limitations for anonymous distributed systems with broadcast communications

We consider deterministic anonymous distributed systems with broadcast communications where each node has some initial value, and the goal is to compute a function of all these values. We show that only a very restricted set of functions can be computed if the nodes do not know (and cannot use) the number of their out-neighbors. Our results remain valid even if nodes know the precise structure of the network but do not know where they lie within the structure. They also remain valid if nodes know their out-degree up to an uncertainty of 1. These results are a variation of those obtained by Boldi and Vigna (1997) for a weaker computation model. As a consequence, computing more complex functions in the context of broadcast communications requires the explicit or implicit knowledge or use of either (a) the out-degree of each node, (b) global node identifiers, (c) randomization, or (d) asynchronous updates with specific properties.
To Cache or Not to Cache: The 3G Case

Recent studies have shown that in the wired broadband world, caching of HTTP objects results in substantial savings in network resources. What about cellular networks? This article examines the characteristics of HTTP traffic generated by millions of wireless users across one of the world's largest 3G cellular networks and explores the potential of forward caching. You can easily use the simple cost model provided here to determine the cost-benefit trade-offs for your own cellular network settings. This is the first large-scale caching analysis for cellular networks.
Long-Term Outcome of Treatment with Topical Corticosteroids for Severe Dry Eye Associated with Sjögren's Syndrome

This retrospective study was performed to analyze the long-term outcome of topical corticosteroid treatment for severe dry eye associated with Sjögren's syndrome (SS). Patients who had severe dry eye associated with SS were topically treated with loteprednol etabonate 0.5% (group A, n=66) or fluorometholone 0.1% (group B, n=67) twice daily and were followed up for 2 years. Visual acuity (VA), intraocular pressure (IOP), Schirmer test, tear film breakup time (BUT), keratoepitheliopathy, and symptom scores were measured at baseline and 6, 12, 18, and 24 months after treatment. VA and IOP were not changed significantly during follow-up in either group. Schirmer test results, keratoepitheliopathy, and symptom scores at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months (p<0.05) and tear film BUT at 12, 18, and 24 months (p<0.05) significantly improved after treatment compared with baseline in both groups. No significant differences between the groups were found in any parameter during follow-up. At 24 months, the number of patients with IOP elevation of more than 2 mmHg compared with baseline was 4 in group A (6.1%) and 9 in group B (13.4%). The mean IOP in these patients was lower in group A than in group B (15.00±0.82 mmHg versus 16.50±1.12 mmHg; p=0.04). Long-term application of low-dose topical corticosteroids is effective for controlling signs and symptoms of chronic, severe dry eye associated with SS. Loteprednol etabonate 0.5% may have a lower risk for IOP elevation than fluorometholone 0.1%.
Hyperspectral Analysis of Leaf Pigments and Nutritional Elements in Tallgrass Prairie Vegetation

Understanding the spatial distribution of forage quality is important to address critical research questions in grassland science. Due to its efficiency and accuracy, there has been a widespread interest in mapping the canopy vegetation characteristics using remote sensing methods. In this study, foliar chlorophylls, carotenoids, and nutritional elements across multiple tallgrass prairie functional groups were quantified at the leaf level using hyperspectral analysis in the region of 470–800 nm, which was expected to be a precursor to further remote sensing of canopy vegetation quality. A method of spectral standardization was developed using a form of the normalized difference, which proved feasible to reduce the interference from background effects in the leaf reflectance measurements. Chlorophylls and carotenoids were retrieved through inverting the physical model PROSPECT 5. The foliar nutritional elements were modeled empirically. Partial least squares regression was used to build the linkages between the high-dimensional spectral predictor variables and the foliar biochemical contents. Results showed that the retrieval of leaf biochemistry through hyperspectral analysis can be accurate and robust across different tallgrass prairie functional groups. In addition, correlations were found between the leaf pigments and nutritional elements. Results provided insight into the use of pigment-related vegetation indices as the proxy of plant nutrition quality.
The influence of student gender on the assessment of undergraduate student work

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of perceived student gender on the feedback given to undergraduate student work. Participants (n = 12) were lecturers in higher education and were required to mark two undergraduate student essays. The first student essay that all participants marked was the control essay. Participants were informed that the control essay was written by Samuel Jones (a male student). Participants then marked the target essay. Although participants marked the same essay, half of the participants (n = 6) were informed that the student essay was written by Natasha Brown (a female student), while the remaining participants were informed that it was written by James Smith (a male student). In-text and end-of-text feedback were qualitatively analysed on six dimensions: academic style of writing; criticality; structure, fluency and cohesion; sources used; understanding/knowledge of the subject; and other. Analysis of feedback for both the control and target essay revealed no discernible differences in the number of comments (strengths of the essay, areas for improvement) made and the content and presentation of these comments between the two groups. Pedagogical implications pertaining to the potential impact of anonymous marking on feedback processes are discussed.
Document Embedding with Paragraph Vectors

Paragraph Vectors has been recently proposed as an unsupervised method for learning distributed representations for pieces of texts. In their work, the authors showed that the method can learn an embedding of movie review texts which can be leveraged for sentiment analysis. That proof of concept, while encouraging, was rather narrow. Here we consider tasks other than sentiment analysis, provide a more thorough comparison of Paragraph Vectors to other document modelling algorithms such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and evaluate performance of the method as we vary the dimensionality of the learned representation. We benchmarked the models on two document similarity data sets, one from Wikipedia, one from arXiv. We observe that the Paragraph Vector method performs significantly better than other methods, and propose a simple improvement to enhance embedding quality. Somewhat surprisingly, we also show that much like word embeddings, vector operations on Paragraph Vectors can perform useful semantic results.
cis-Cyclohexane-1,4-dicarboxylic acid

In the title compound, C8H12O4, the two carboxyl groups are on the same side of the cyclohexane ring and the ring adopts a chair conformation. Adjacent molecules related by an inversion centre are linked by pairs of O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming a zigzag chain along [1 ].
A Knowledge , Attitude and Practices Study of the Issues of Climate Change / Variability Impacts and Public Health in Trinidad and Tobago , and St Kitts and

Objective: To determine the level of understanding of the issues of climate change (CC)/variability (CV) and public health by populations of St Kitts and Nevis (SKN) and Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) and to find whether respondents would be willing to incorporate these values into strategies for dengue fever (DF) prevention. Design and Methods: Using a cluster sampling system, representative samples of the communities of SKN (227) and T&T (650) were surveyed for responses to a questionnaire document with questions on the impact of climate variability on health, the physical environment, respondents’ willingness to utilize climate issues to predict and adapt to climate variability for DF prevention. Data were analyzed by Epi Info. Results: Sixty-two per cent SKN and 55% T&T of respondents showed some understanding of the concept of climate change (CC) and distinguished this from climate variability (CV). With regard to causes of CC, 48% SKN and 50% T&T attributed CC to all of: green houses gases, holes in the ozone layer, burning of vegetation and vehicular exhaust gases. However, some 39.3% SKN and 31% (T&T) did not answer this question. In response to ranking issues of life affected by CC/CV in both countries, respondents ranked them: health > water resources > agriculture > biodiversity > coastal degradation. The major health issues identified for SKN and T&T respondents were: food-borne diseases > water-borne diseases > heat stresses; vector-borne diseases were only ranked 4th and 5th for SKN and T&T respondents respectively. There was in both countries a significant proportion of respondents (p < 0.001) who reported wet season-related increase of DF cases as a CC/CV link. Respondents identified use of environmental sanitation (ES) at appropriate times as a method of choice of using CC/CV to prevent DF outbreaks. More than 82% in both countries saw the use of the CC/CV information for DF prevention by prediction and control as strategic but only 50–51% were inclined to become personally involved. Currently, only 50% SKN and 45% T&T respondents claimed current involvement in DF vector surveillance and control in the last two days. Conclusion: Despite the fact that knowledge and attitudes did not always coincide with practices of using ES for DF prevention, in both countries, even with CC/CV tools of prediction being available, it seems that respondents could be persuaded to use such strategies. There is a need for demonstration of the efficacy of CC/CV information and promotion of its usefulness for community involvement in DF and possibly other disease prevention. Un Estudio de Conocimientos, Actitudes y Prácticas (CAP) de los Problemas del Cambio Climático/Variabilidad de los Impactos y Salud Pública en Trinidad y Tobago y St Kitts Nevis SC Rawlins1, A Chen2, JM Rawlins3, DD Chadee4, G Legall3
Consequences of Land Use Changes on Hydrological Functioning

Land use and land cover changes are well known to have a strong influence on the water cycle and its evolutions. Vegetation cover is the main component of the land surface that explains the behaviour of rainwater transforming into runoff, infiltration or evapotranspiration. Land use changes such as afforestation or deforestation, increase in cropping or grazing areas, likely modify this water balance and land surface behaviour. However, urbanisation and sometimes some geopolitical events, could significantly influence the water cycle.
Global analysis of physical and functional RNA targets of hnRNP L reveals distinct sequence and epigenetic features of repressed and enhanced exons

HnRNP L is a ubiquitous splicing-regulatory protein that is critical for the development and function of mammalian T cells. Previous work has identified a few targets of hnRNP L-dependent alternative splicing in T cells and has described transcriptome-wide association of hnRNP L with RNA. However, a comprehensive analysis of the impact of hnRNP L on mRNA expression remains lacking. Here we use next-generation sequencing to identify transcriptome changes upon depletion of hnRNP L in a model T-cell line. We demonstrate that hnRNP L primarily regulates cassette-type alternative splicing, with minimal impact of hnRNP L depletion on transcript abundance, intron retention, or other modes of alternative splicing. Strikingly, we find that binding of hnRNP L within or flanking an exon largely correlates with exon repression by hnRNP L. In contrast, exons that are enhanced by hnRNP L generally lack proximal hnRNP L binding. Notably, these hnRNP L-enhanced exons share sequence and context features that correlate with poor nucleosome positioning, suggesting that hnRNP may enhance inclusion of a subset of exons via a cotranscriptional or epigenetic mechanism. Our data demonstrate that hnRNP L controls inclusion of a broad spectrum of alternative cassette exons in T cells and suggest both direct RNA regulation as well as indirect mechanisms sensitive to the epigenetic landscape.
Intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in parenting styles

In the present research 286 mothers and 274 fathers were surveyed regarding perceptions of their own parenting styles, and recollections of the parenting styles used by their parents. Perceived intergenerational continuities were established for authoritarian and permissive parenting and, while same gender continuities were stronger than cross-gender continuities, significant independent cross-gender similarities were found between both fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons. Perceptions of intergenerational similarities were stronger between fathers and sons than mothers and daughters, emphasising fathers' important parenting role with their sons. Intergenerational discontinuities were found for authoritative parenting, with results suggesting that the meaning and interpretation of authoritative parenting may vary between parents and children. Current parents also perceived themselves to be less authoritarian and more authoritative and permissive than their own parents, indicating that intergenerational transmission of parenting characteristics may be moderated by a socio-cultural shift from more authoritarian to more democratic child rearing practices.
The Use of Propensity Score Methods in Psychotherapy Research

Background: Randomized controlled trials are considered the best scientific proof of effectiveness. There is increasing concern, though, about their feasibility in psychotherapy research. We discuss a quasi-experimental study design for situations in which a randomized controlled trial is not feasible. Here, as an alternative strategy, the propensity score (PS) method is used to correct for selection bias. Methods: We used data from a Dutch research project, SCEPTRE (Study on Cost-Effectiveness of Personality Disorder Treatment). The sample consisted of 749 psychotherapy patients with personality pathology. We tested whether the PS method was useful and applicable. We examined differences between 2 treatment groups (short vs. long treatment duration) in pretreatment characteristics before and after PS correction. This revealed the impact of the PS on outcome differences. Results: The PS offered statistical control over observed pretreatment differences between patients in a non-randomized study. Conclusions: When a randomized controlled trial is not possible, this quasi-experimental design using the PS could be a feasible alternative. Its advantages and limitations are discussed. Implemented carefully, this method is promising for future effectiveness research.