Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Switching Intention of Learners on Social Network-based Learning Platforms: A Perspective of the Push–Pull–Mooring Model

Social media or social networking sites have been used to support online learning with good interactive features. If an existing system can retain current users and attract new users, it can provide greater benefits and influence in the field of online learning. However, most previous studies focus on learner participation intention, and rarely note their switching intention. Therefore, this study attempts to analyze and discuss the learner switching intention from the perspective of Push-Pull-Mooring Model. A research framework was proposed for examining the switching intention of learners in social network-based learning platforms. A total of 371 valid samples were used to examine the research framework using the partial least squares approach. The results show that switching intention is significantly affected by the push effects (social interaction and service quality), mooring effects (switching costs and prior switching experience) and pull effects (attractiveness of new services and social effect). To retain and attract users, platform providers can raise switching costs through improving service quality and system capabilities and educators can develop appropriate approaches to enhance social interaction and social effects.
Lateral cephalometry: A simple and economical clinical guide for assessment of nasopharyngeal free airway space in mouth breathers

Nasopharyngeal obstruction by adenoid enlargement is one of the main causes of mouth breathing. Cephalometric radiographs and rhinomanometric tests to evaluate nasal obstruction have been available for several decades. Various lines and areas have been interpreted by number of investigators to implicate the enlarged adenoid in a casual relationship with mouth breathing and the subsequent effect on vertical facial growth. The aim of this paper is to review lateral cephalometric tracing methods combined with newer Auto-cad surface area measurement program so that assessment of the nasopharyngeal free airway space can be done based on it, before more rigorous ear-nose-throat follow up is needed for the patient.
Military and Civilian Media Coverage of Suicide

Military suicide has increased over the past decade and reports of Service Member and Veteran suicides receive media attention. Some methods of reporting suicide appear to cause a “media contagion” effect, potentially increasing suicide. This effect is explored in relation to media reports of both military and civilian suicides. To reduce possible contagion, recommendations for media reporting of suicides were adapted by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). We assessed 240 military and civilian newspaper reports of suicide from 15 different sources for compliance with the SPRC guidelines. Nearly all reviewed articles violated at least one guideline. Results highlighted military news articles regarding Service Members included more pejorative language and discussion of failed psychological treatment. Conversely, civilian articles romanticized the victim and provided more details regarding the suicide. Further exploration of military suicide reporting bias is discussed as a need in future research.
Assessment of the endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography grading system: A prospective study from a tertiary care center.

BACKGROUND/AIMS The American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) grading system was proposed but has not been fully evaluated with prospective clinical studies. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the ERCP difficulty grading system for predicting success and adverse event rates related to the procedure. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 1057 ERCP procedures performed on 752 patients were included in the present study. The complexity grades of the procedures were recorded according to the ASGE grading system. Specific complications of ERCP (pancreatitis, cholangitis, bleeding, and perforation) were also defined and graded. RESULTS The procedure difficulty was determined as 1st degree in 153 patients (14.4%), 2nd degree in 498 patients (47.1%), 3rd degree in 271 (25.6%), and 4th degree in 135 patients (12.7%). The success rate for the entire procedures was 88.4%. The success rate for 1st degree procedures was 99.3%, 97.2% for 2nd degree procedures, 86.7% for 3rd degree procedures, and 46.7% for 4th degree procedures (p<0.005). When the difficulty of the procedures increased from 1 to 4, the adverse event rates increased from 1.3% to 10.4%. CONCLUSION The findings support the evidence that the difficulty degrees of ERCP procedures can help predict the success and complication rates of the procedure. Because of the increased rates of failure and complications in more difficult cases, the procedures should be performed by experienced endoscopists in advanced centers.
Mortality Outcomes With Intensive Blood Pressure Targets in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients: A Pooled Individual Patient Data Analysis From Randomized Trials

Hypertension is highly prevalent and morbid in the chronic kidney disease population, and blood pressure (BP) targets for this population are unclear. We aimed to compare all-cause mortality outcomes with intensively targeting systolic BP to <130 mm Hg versus a standard of <140 mm Hg. Individual patient data from 4983 chronic kidney disease patients with hypertension were pooled from 4 multicenter randomized control trials—AASK (African American Study of Kidney Disease and Hypertension), ACCORD (Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), MDRD (Modification of Diet in Renal Disease), and the SPRINT (Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial). Patients were assigned their trial-assigned randomized intervention group—standard (n=2474) versus intensive (n=2509) BP targets. Additional analyses included excluding patients with a glomerular filtration rate ≥60 mL/min per 1.73 m2 along with those undergoing intensive glycemic control. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. Average achieved BP was 125.0 mm Hg in the intensive group and 136.9 mm Hg in the standard group. In the primary analysis, the all-cause mortality rate trended towards improved outcomes with intensive treatment but was not statistically significant (hazard ratio: 0.87 [0.69–1.08]; P=0.21). One hundred seventy-three of 2474 patients (1.95% per year) in the standard group and 153 of 2509 patients (1.71% per year) in the intensive group died. After excluding patients with higher glomerular filtration rate values and those undergoing intensive glycemic control, there was a statistically significant decrease in all-cause mortality rate (hazard ratio: 0.79 [0.63–1.00]; P=0.048). An intensive BP target of <130 mm Hg decreases all-cause mortality when compared with a standard target of <140 mm Hg in patients with chronic kidney disease stage 3 or greater who are not undergoing intensive glycemic therapy.
The Anti-Trypanosoma cruzi Activity of Posaconazole in a Murine Model of Acute Chagas' Disease Is Less Dependent on Gamma Interferon than That of Benznidazole

ABSTRACT We have investigated the influences of gamma interferon (IFN-γ) and interleukin-12 (IL-12) on the efficacy of posaconazole (POS) treatment of acute experimental infections with Trypanosoma cruzi; the standard drug, benznidazole (BZ), was used as a positive control. Wild-type (WT) mice infected with T. cruzi and treated with POS or BZ had no parasitemia, 100% survival, and cure rates of 86 to 89%. IFN-γ-knockout (KO) mice infected with T. cruzi and treated with BZ controlled the infection during treatment but relapsed after the drug pressure ceased and had 0% survival, while those receiving POS better controlled the infection after the end of treatment and had 70% survival (P < 0.0001 compared to the results for both untreated and BZ-treated animals). IL-12-KO mice infected and treated with POS or BZ had intermediate results, displaying enhanced parasitemia, decreased survival (77 to 83%), and reduced cure rates (35 to 39%) compared with those of the WT animals. Our results demonstrate that either IFN-γ or IL-12 deficiency reduces the efficacy of POS or BZ in this experimental model but also indicate that the anti-T. cruzi activity of POS is much less dependent on the activity of IFN-γ than that of BZ is.
The study of long‐term HIV dynamics using semi‐parametric non‐linear mixed‐effects models

Modelling HIV dynamics has played an important role in understanding the pathogenesis of HIV infection in the past several years. Non‐linear parametric models, derived from the mechanisms of HIV infection and drug action, have been used to fit short‐term clinical data from AIDS clinical trials. However, it is found that the parametric models may not be adequate to fit long‐term HIV dynamic data. To preserve the meaningful interpretation of the short‐term HIV dynamic models as well as to characterize the long‐term dynamics, we introduce a class of semi‐parametric non‐linear mixed‐effects (NLME) models. The models are non‐linear in population characteristics (fixed effects) and individual variations (random effects), both of which are modelled semi‐parametrically. A basis‐based approach is proposed to fit the models, which transforms a general semi‐parametric NLME model into a set of standard parametric NLME models, indexed by the bases used. The bases that we employ are natural cubic splines for easy implementation. The resulting standard NLME models are low‐dimensional and easy to solve. Statistical inferences that include testing parametric against semi‐parametric mixed‐effects are investigated. Innovative bootstrap procedures are developed for simulating the empirical distributions of the test statistics. Small‐scale simulation and bootstrap studies show that our bootstrap procedures work well. The proposed approach and procedures are applied to long‐term HIV dynamic data from an AIDS clinical study. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Representations at work: a national standard for electronic health records

Representations are at work in IT technology. As plans of and for work, they enable cooperation, coordination, accountability and control, which have to be balanced off against each other. The article describes a standard developed for electronic health records (EHR) and the results of a test of a prototype built on that standard at a department of internal medicine in 2004. It is argued that the prototype did not support clinical work, which is attributed to the model of work embedded in the standard, called Basic Structure for EHR (BEHR). The article concludes by calling for critical conceptualizations of the relations between representation, work and knowledge production.
Pengembangan LKPD Berbasis Inquiry Berbantuan Simulasi Phet untuk Meningkatkan Penguasaan Konsep Gelombang Cahaya di Kelas XI MIPA SMAN 2 Kota Bengkulu

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menghasilkan LKPD berbasis inquiry berbantuan simulasi PhET dan meningkatkan kemampuan penguasaan konsep peserta didik. Desain penelitian ini mengikuti desain ADDIE yang dibatasi pada tahap Development. Subjek penelitian pengembangan ini adalah siswa-siswi kelas XI MIPA D SMA N 2 Kota Bengkulu tahun pelajaran 2018/2019. Hasil validasi ahli menunjukan bahwa LKPD berbasis Inquiry berbantuan simulasi PhET telah memenuhi standar kelayakan isi, kebahasaan, dan kemenarikan tampilan. Hal tersebut didukung dengan hasil uji respon siswa terhadap LKPD dengan persentase 84.8% termasuk pada kategori sangat baik. Hasil analisis data test peserta didik setelah penggunaan LKPD menunjukan bahwa terjadi peningkatan penguasaan konsep materi gelombang cahaya dengan skor N-gain 0.76 diakhir pertemuan dengan kategori tinggi dan keefektifan peningkatan penguasaan konsep dengan klasifikasi Tinggi. Sehingga, dapat disimpulkan LKPD yang dihasilkan telah valid dengan tanggapan peserta didik yang baik dan efektif meningkatkan penguasaan konsep peserta didik.Kata kunci: LKPD, Inquiry, Simulasi PhET, Penguasaan konsep
The Impact of E-Banking on Bank Profitability : Evidence from Jordan

This study is aimed to test the effect of e-banking services provided by banks on the internet on the profitability of these banks during the period 2000-2009. The study sample consists of all domestics banks in Jordan separated into 3 groups: Non-internet service providers, Recent adopters of the service, and Early adopters of the service. Ratios are used to test the effect on profitability; these ratios are Return on Assets, Return on Equity Margin of Interest as profitability measures. Other ratios are used as independent variables which are: Market share, Overhead RATIO, Deposits/Assets, and Loan/Assets. Regression analysis is used to test the effect of e-banking services on the profit. The regression analysis showed that there is no significant effect of e-banking services on the profitability of recent adopter's banks in terms of ROA, and ROE. It gives an indicator of high expenses and cost associated with applying these services. Unlike Margin, It is significantly affected by the e-banking services. For early adopters, the result were much better than those for the early adopters, but still not significant with the profitability of these bank. Finally, Internet banking is new and changing rapidly, and therefore results of empirical studies on Internet banking may vary considerably with different sample and methods of analysis
The Effects of Syllable and Sentential Position on the Timing of Lingual Gestures in /l/ and /r/

This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on gesture timing in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in the relative timing of the anterior and posterior lingual gestures for /l/ and /r/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Results showed that the component lingual gestures for /l/ and /r/ are coordinated differently in onsets and codas, across the three varieties studied; the anterior lingual gesture tends to precede the posterior gesture in syllable-onset liquids, while this gesture order is reversed for syllable-coda liquids. For /l/, but not /r/, being in utterance-initial and final position results in a significantly increased temporal distance between the two lingual gestures. For coda /r/, prerhotic vowels were found to have a significant impact on the relative timing of lingual gestures.
The Assessment of Clinically Significant Differences in Treating Spinal Deformity Using the SRS Questionnaire: What Is the Threshold of Change That Is Meaningful to Patients?

ABSTRACT Background: The measurement of health-related quality of life is important in spinal deformity surgery. The Scoliosis Research Society questionnaire has allowed disease-specific research in this area, and determining the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) is as important as it is elusive. We seek to further refine our estimations of clinically perceived improvements by the patient. Methods: We used an anchor-based approach for each domain of the SRS questionnaire to compare changes at 1 year after treatment. We set the MCID as the upper 95% boundary of the “no change” group bordering the “improvement” arm, where the patients may start to perceive their own change toward the better. We compared this with the mean change. Results: The threshold value for the MCID was 0.54 for the pain domain, 0.31 for function, 0.62 for self-image, and 0.5 for mental health. The mean changes in our group's pain and self-image exceeded their MCID. Conclusions: Compared with our previous work, we further attempted to refine our assessment of the MCID in spinal deformity. Pain continues to show clinically significant improvement, and self-image also demonstrated mean improvement over its estimated MCID. Level of Evidence: 2 Clinical Relevance: This result in self-image is an important addition to the MCID literature, given its lack of consistency in previous work.
Measurements of islet function and glucose metabolism with the dipeptidyl peptidase 4 inhibitor vildagliptin in patients with type 2 diabetes.

OBJECTIVE Pharmacological inhibition with the dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP-4) inhibitor vildagliptin prolongs the action of endogenously secreted incretin hormones leading to improved glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). We undertook a double-blinded, randomized-order, crossover study to examine the vildagliptin mechanisms of action on islet function and glucose utilization. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Participants with T2DM (n = 16) who had a baseline hemoglobin A(1c) of 7.1 +/- 0.2% completed a crossover study with 6 wk of treatment with vildagliptin and 6 wk with placebo. At the completion of each arm, participants had a study of postprandial metabolism and a two-step glucose clamp performed at 20 and 80 mU/min x m(2) insulin infusions. RESULTS Vildagliptin increased postprandial glucagon-like peptide-1 and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide by 3- and 2-fold, respectively, reduced fasting plasma glucose and postprandial plasma glucose by 1.3 +/- 0.3 mmol/liter and 1.6 +/- 0.3 mmol/liter (both P <0.01), and improved glucose responsiveness of insulin secretion by 50% (P < 0.01). Vildagliptin lowered postprandial glucagon by 16% (P <0.01). Examined by glucose clamp, insulin sensitivity and glucose clearance improved after vildagliptin (P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS Vildagliptin improves islet function in T2DM and improves glucose metabolism in peripheral tissues.
Reconciling high server utilization and sub-millisecond quality-of-service

The simplest strategy to guarantee good quality of service (QoS) for a latency-sensitive workload with sub-millisecond latency in a shared cluster environment is to never run other workloads concurrently with it on the same server. Unfortunately, this inevitably leads to low server utilization, reducing both the capability and cost effectiveness of the cluster. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of maintaining high QoS for low-latency workloads when sharing servers with other workloads. We show that workload co-location leads to QoS violations due to increases in queuing delay, scheduling delay, and thread load imbalance. We present techniques that address these vulnerabilities, ranging from provisioning the latency-critical service in an interference aware manner, to replacing the Linux CFS scheduler with a scheduler that provides good latency guarantees and fairness for co-located workloads. Ultimately, we demonstrate that some latency-critical workloads can be aggressively co-located with other workloads, achieve good QoS, and that such co-location can improve a datacenter's effective throughput per TCO-$ by up to 52%.
Using a Diagnostic Corpus of C Programs to Evaluate Buffer Overflow Detection by Static Analysis Tools

of 291 small C-program test cases was developed to evaluate static and dynamic analysis tools designed to detect buffer overflows. The corpus was designed and labeled using a new, comprehensive buffer overflow taxonomy. It provides a benchmark to measure detection, false alarm, and confusion rates of tools, and also suggests areas for tool enhancement. Experiments with five tools demonstrate that some modern static analysis tools can accurately detect overflows in simple test cases but that others have serious limitations. For example, PolySpace demonstrated a superior detection rate, missing only one detection. Its performance could be enhanced if extremely long run times were reduced, and false alarms were eliminated for some C library functions. ARCHER performed well with no false alarms whatsoever. It could be enhanced by improving inter- procedural analysis and handling of C library functions. Splint detected significantly fewer overflows and exhibited the highest false alarm rate. Improvements in loop handling and reductions in false alarm rate would make it a much more useful tool. UNO had no false alarms, but missed overflows in roughly half of all test cases. It would need improvement in many areas to become a useful tool. BOON provided the worst performance. It did not detect overflows well in string functions, even though this was a design goal.
Circadian Rhythm of Vascular Function in Midlife Adults.

Objective- Adverse cardiovascular events occur more frequently in the morning than at other times of the day. Vascular endothelial function (VEF)-a robust cardiovascular risk marker-is impaired during this morning period. We recently discovered that this morning impairment in VEF is not caused by either overnight sleep or the inactivity that accompanies sleep. We determined whether the endogenous circadian system is responsible for this morning impairment in VEF. We also assessed whether the circadian system affects mechanistic biomarkers, that is, oxidative stress (malondialdehyde adducts), endothelin-1, blood pressure, and heart rate. Approach and Results- Twenty-one (11 women) middle-aged healthy participants completed a 5-day laboratory protocol in dim light where all behaviors, including sleep and activity, and all physiological measurements were evenly distributed across the 24-hour period. After baseline testing, participants underwent 10 recurring 5-hour 20-minute behavioral cycles of 2-hour 40-minute sleep opportunities and 2 hours and 40 minutes of standardized waking episodes. VEF, blood pressure, and heart rate were measured, and venous blood was sampled immediately after awakening during each wake episode. Independent of behaviors, VEF was significantly attenuated during the subjective night and across the morning ( P=0.04). Malondialdehyde adducts and endothelin-1 exhibited circadian rhythms with increases across the morning vulnerable period and peaks around noon ( P≤0.01). Both systolic ( P=0.005) and diastolic blood pressure ( P=0.04) were rhythmic with peaks in the late afternoon. Conclusions- The endogenous circadian system impairs VEF and increases malondialdehyde adducts and endothelin-1 in the morning vulnerable hours and may increase the risk of morning adverse cardiovascular events in susceptible individuals. Clinical Trial Registration- URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov . Unique identifier: NCT02202811.
Short-term Mortality Prediction for Elderly Patients Using Medicare Claims Data

Risk prediction is central to both clinical medicine and public health. While many machine learning models have been developed to predict mortality, they are rarely applied in the clinical literature, where classification tasks typically rely on logistic regression. One reason for this is that existing machine learning models often seek to optimize predictions by incorporating features that are not present in the databases readily available to providers and policy makers, limiting generalizability and implementation. Here we tested a number of machine learning classifiers for prediction of six-month mortality in a population of elderly Medicare beneficiaries, using an administrative claims database of the kind available to the majority of health care payers and providers. We show that machine learning classifiers substantially outperform current widely-used methods of risk prediction-but only when used with an improved feature set incorporating insights from clinical medicine, developed for this study. Our work has applications to supporting patient and provider decision making at the end of life, as well as population health-oriented efforts to identify patients at high risk of poor outcomes.