Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparing Treatments for Children With ADHD and Word Reading Difficulties: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Objective: This trial compared attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) treatment alone, intensive reading intervention alone, and their combination for children with ADHD and word reading difficulties and disabilities (RD). Method: Children (n = 216; predominantly African American males) in Grades 2–5 with ADHD and word reading/decoding deficits were randomized to ADHD treatment (medication + parent training), reading treatment (reading instruction), or combined ADHD + reading treatment. Outcomes were parent and teacher ADHD ratings and measures of word reading/decoding. Analyses utilized a mixed models covariate-adjusted gain score approach with posttest regressed onto pretest. Results: Inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity outcomes were significantly better in the ADHD (parent Hedges’s g = .87/.75; teacher g = .67/.50) and combined (parent g = 1.06/.95; teacher g = .36/41) treatment groups than reading treatment alone; the ADHD and Combined groups did not differ significantly (parent g = .19/.20; teacher g = .31/.09). Word reading and decoding outcomes were significantly better in the reading (word reading g = .23; decoding g = .39) and combined (word reading g = .32; decoding g = .39) treatment groups than ADHD treatment alone; reading and combined groups did not differ (word reading g = .09; decoding g = .00). Significant group differences were maintained at the 3- to 5-month follow-up on all outcomes except word reading. Conclusions: Children with ADHD and RD benefit from specific treatment of each disorder. ADHD treatment is associated with more improvement in ADHD symptoms than RD treatment, and reading instruction is associated with better word reading and decoding outcomes than ADHD treatment. The additive value of combining treatments was not significant within disorder, but the combination allows treating both disorders simultaneously.
Attentional Control and Suppressing Negative Thought Intrusions in Pathological Worry

Adaptive behavior relies on the ability to effectively and efficiently ignore irrelevant information, an important component of attentional control. The current research found that fundamental difficulties in ignoring irrelevant material are related to dispositional differences in trait propensity to worry, suggesting a core deficit in attentional control in high worriers. The degree of deficit in attentional control correlated with the degree of difficulty in suppressing negative thought intrusions in a worry assessment task. A cognitive training procedure utilizing a flanker task was used in an attempt to improve attentional control. Although the cognitive training was largely ineffective, improvements in attentional control were associated with improvements in the ability to suppress worry-related thought intrusions. Across two studies, the findings indicate that the inability to control worry-related negative thought intrusions is associated with a general deficiency in attentional control.
Glucocorticoid Receptor Density and Binding Affinity in Healthy Horses and Horses with Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome

Background Dysregulation of the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis occurs in horses with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). Peripheral resistance to glucocorticoids has not been investigated in horses. Objective To determine if glucocorticoid receptor (GR) function in horses can be measured using flow cytometry, and to use this information to evaluate HPA axis dynamics. Animals Eleven healthy adult horses in parts 1 and 2. Ten horses with SIRS and 10 age and sex matched controls in part 3. Methods Flow cytometry was used to evaluate GR density and binding affinity (BA) in 3 healthy horses in part 1. In part 2, exogenous ACTH was administered to eight healthy horses. Their cortisol response and GR properties were measured. In part 3, CBC, serum biochemistry, cortisol and ACTH, and GR properties were compared between controls without SIRS (n = 10) and horses with SIRS (n = 10), and between survivors and nonsurvivors (n = 4 and n = 6 respectively). Results Flow cytometry can be used to measure GR properties in equine PBMCs. No correlation was observed between plasma cortisol concentration and GR density or BA in healthy horses (r = −0.145, P = .428 and r = 0.046, P = .802 respectively). Nonsurvivors with SIRS had significantly decreased GR BA (P = .008). Horses with triglyceride concentration > 28.5 mg/dL had increased odds of nonsurvival (OR=117; 95% CI, 1.94–7,060). GR BA <35.79% was associated with nonsurvival (OR = 30.33; 95% CI, 0.96–960.5). Conclusions and Clinical Importance Tissue resistance to glucocorticoids contributes to HPA axis dysfunction in adult horses with SIRS. These horses might benefit from treatment with exogenous glucocorticoids.
A wet dressing for male genital surgery: A phase II clinical trial

ABSTRACT Purpose: This study was to confirm the safety and efficacy of BC dressing when used in surgical male wound healing at the urogenital area. Methods: Open, non-controlled clinical study of phase II. A total of 141 patients, among those children, adolescents and adults with hypospadias (112), epispadias (04), phymosis (13) and Peyronie's disease (12) that had a BC dressing applied over the operated area after surgery. A written informed consent was obtained from all participants. Study exclusion criteria were patients with other alternative treatment indications due to the severity, extent of the injury or the underlying disease. The outcomes evaluated were efficacy, safe and complete healing. The costs were discussed. Results: In 68% patients, the BC dressing fell off spontaneously. The BC was removed without complications in 13% of patients at the outpatient clinic during the follow-up visit and 17% not reported the time of removal. In 3% of the cases, the dressing fell off early. Complete healing was observed between 8th and 10th days after surgery. The BC dressings have shown a good tolerance by all the patients and there were no reports of serious adverse events. Conclusion: The bacterial cellulose dressings have shown efficacy, safety and that can be considered as a satisfactory alternative for postoperative wound healing in urogenital area and with low cost.
Treatment of Solitary Painful Osseous Metastases with Radiotherapy, Cryoablation or Combined Therapy: Propensity Matching Analysis in 175 Patients

Purpose aim of this study was to identify outcomes in pain relief and quality of life in patients with a solitary painful osseous metastasis treated by radiotherapy, cryoablation or the combination using a propensity score matching study design. Materials and Methods 175 patients with painful bone metastases were included in the study. Twenty-five of them underwent a radiation course (20 Gy in five daily fractions) 15 days after the cryoablation. These subjects were retrospectively matched by propensity analysis with a group of subjects treated by radiotherapy (125 subjects) and with a group treated byCryoablation (25 subjects). The pain relief in terms of complete response, rate of subjects requiring analgesics after treatments and the changes in self-rated quality of life were measured. Informed consent was obtained from the subject and the study was approved by the local Ethical Committee. Results An higher proportion of subjects treated by cryoablation (32%) or cryoablation followed by RT (72%;) experienced a complete response compared with patients treated by radiotherapy alone (11.2%). After Bonferroni correction strategy, the addition of radiotherapy to cryoablation significantly improved the rate of complete response compared with cryoablation alone (p = 0.011) and this paralleled with an improved self-rated quality of life. Seventeen subjects (13.6%) of patients in the radiotherapy group, 9 (36%) in the cryoablation group, and 19 (76)% in the cryoablation- radiotherapy group did not require narcotic medications. Conclusions The addition of radiotherapy to cryoablation favorably impacts on perceived pain, with a favorable toxicity profile. However, our data should be interpreted with caution and could serve as a framework around which to design future trials.
Power saving in wireless ad hoc networks without synchronization

Power saving strategies generally attempt to maximize the time that nodes spend in a low power consumption sleep state. Such strategies often require the sender to notify the receiver about pending traffic using some form of traffic announcement. Although asynchronous traffic announcement mechanisms are particularly suitable for the ad hoc environment, they also provide relatively limited power savings. This paper proposes a mechanism that improves the efficiency of asynchronous traffic announcement mechanisms by reducing the proportion of time that nodes need to spend awake, while still maintaining good connectivity properties. The mechanism is based on allowing traffic announcements to be rebroadcast by neighbouring nodes.
Kratos: Discovering Inconsistent Security Policy Enforcement in the Android Framework

The Android framework utilizes a permission-based security model, which is essentially a variation of the ACL-based access control mechanism. This security model provides controlled access to various system resources. Access control systems are known to be vulnerable to anomalies in security policies, such as inconsistency. In this work, we focus on inconsistent security enforcement within the Android framework, motivated by the recent work which discovered such vulnerabilities. They include stealthily taking pictures in the background and recording keystrokes without any permissions, posing security and privacy risks to Android users. Identifying such inconsistencies is generally difficult, especially in complicated and large codebases such as the Android framework. Our work is the first to propose a methodology to systematically uncover the inconsistency in security policy enforcement in Android. We do not assume Android’s security policies are known and focus only on inconsistent enforcement. We propose Kratos, a tool that leverages static analysis to build a precise call graph for identifying paths that allow third-party applications with insufficient privilege to access sensitive resources, violating security policies. Kratos is designed to analyze any Android system, including vendor-customized versions. Using Kratos, we have conservatively discovered at least fourteen inconsistent security enforcement cases that can lead to security check circumvention vulnerabilities across important and popular services such as the SMS service and the Wi-Fi service, incurring impact such as privilege escalation, denial of service, and soft reboot. Our findings also provide useful insights on how to proactively prevent such security enforcement inconsistency within Android.
Initiating sustainable development reporting: evidence from New Zealand

– The purpose of this paper is to document organizations' self descriptions of why they initiated sustainable development (SD) reporting and explore these explanations using an institutional theory framework. , – Constructs organizational narratives from semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with reporting champions who participated in an SD reporting workshop series. The narratives are analysed using institutional theory to explore how regulatory, normative and cognitive institutions combine with organizational dynamics to influence SD reporting activity. , – For these particular organizations, choosing to engage in reporting appears not to be a rational choice. Rather reporting is initiated because it has come to be an accepted part of pursuing a differentiation strategy, it offers some contribution to existing business challenges, and organizations value the rewards it offers. This rationale constitutes a cognitive mechanism within institutional theory. , – The paper provides useful information on initiating sustainable development reporting based on organizations' self descriptions.
Microblogging In Technology Enhanced Learning : A Use-Case Inspection of PPE Summer School 2008

Microblogging is the latest variant of blogging which allows users to post very short messages. Due to its ease interface, the possibility of directly addressing other users, and several surrounding services microblogging becomes more and more used in scientific conferences as main back-channel. This paper discusses microblogging with Twitter as main information back-channel in an exemplary use case Summer School.
Application of Traditional and Novel Cloud Property Retrieval Techniques on Landsat TM Data over SGP

With the recognition in recent years of the influence of three-dimensional (3-D) radiative transfer on cloud optical property retrievals, interest in the measurements of the Thematic Mapper (TM) radiometer aboard the Landsat satellite has been renewed. This instrument provides a unique high-resolution data set where the effects of 3-D cloud structure are expected to be prominent. The purpose of this paper is to examine the real world application of the Nonlocal Independent Pixel Approximation (NIPA) of Marshak et al. (1998), and to suggest a new Independent Pixel Approximation (IPA) using normalized reflectivity differences. Our satellite data set consists of a full Landsat scene over the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) site.
Primary Human Lung Alveolus‐on‐a‐chip Model of Intravascular Thrombosis for Assessment of Therapeutics

Pulmonary thrombosis is a significant cause of patient mortality; however, there are no effective in vitro models of thrombi formation in human lung microvessels that could also assess therapeutics and toxicology of antithrombotic drugs. Here, we show that a microfluidic lung alveolus‐on‐a‐chip lined by human primary alveolar epithelium interfaced with endothelium and cultured under flowing whole blood can be used to perform quantitative analysis of organ‐level contributions to inflammation‐induced thrombosis. This microfluidic chip recapitulates in vivo responses, including platelet‐endothelial dynamics and revealed that lipopolysaccharide (LPS) endotoxin indirectly stimulates intravascular thrombosis by activating the alveolar epithelium, rather than acting directly on endothelium. This model is also used to analyze inhibition of endothelial activation and thrombosis due to a protease activated receptor‐1 (PAR‐1) antagonist, demonstrating its ability to dissect complex responses and identify antithrombotic therapeutics. Thus, this methodology offers a new approach to study human pathophysiology of pulmonary thrombosis and advance drug development.
Mining the Human Phenome Using Allelic Scores That Index Biological Intermediates

It is common practice in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to focus on the relationship between disease risk and genetic variants one marker at a time. When relevant genes are identified it is often possible to implicate biological intermediates and pathways likely to be involved in disease aetiology. However, single genetic variants typically explain small amounts of disease risk. Our idea is to construct allelic scores that explain greater proportions of the variance in biological intermediates, and subsequently use these scores to data mine GWAS. To investigate the approach's properties, we indexed three biological intermediates where the results of large GWAS meta-analyses were available: body mass index, C-reactive protein and low density lipoprotein levels. We generated allelic scores in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, and in publicly available data from the first Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. We compared the explanatory ability of allelic scores in terms of their capacity to proxy for the intermediate of interest, and the extent to which they associated with disease. We found that allelic scores derived from known variants and allelic scores derived from hundreds of thousands of genetic markers explained significant portions of the variance in biological intermediates of interest, and many of these scores showed expected correlations with disease. Genome-wide allelic scores however tended to lack specificity suggesting that they should be used with caution and perhaps only to proxy biological intermediates for which there are no known individual variants. Power calculations confirm the feasibility of extending our strategy to the analysis of tens of thousands of molecular phenotypes in large genome-wide meta-analyses. We conclude that our method represents a simple way in which potentially tens of thousands of molecular phenotypes could be screened for causal relationships with disease without having to expensively measure these variables in individual disease collections.
The Effect of Additional Pleural Procedures onto Recurrence Rates on the Spontaneous Pneumothorax Surgery

Background Spontaneous pneumothoraxes constituted 1/1000 hospital admissions. They are particularly one of life threatening health issues in combination with bilateral pneumothorax, tension pneumothorax, repertory failure or COPD. Objectives The cases of spontaneous pneumothorax represent a significant portion of the patients profile within the chest surgery clinics. The risk of recurrent pneumothorax in post thoracoscopy is between 2% and 14%, thus the subject of cure treatment and approach is still controversial. The cases were retrospectively treated due to spontaneous pneumothorax and their reasons, treatment approaches and results were comparatively examined with the literature. Patients and Methods The years between 2007 and 2010, according to our hospital clinic, outpatients and accident & emergency admission records, 79 patients were admitted with a diagnosis of spontaneous pneumothorax; and the patients’ age, gender, symptoms, types of pneumothorax, surgical intervention and recurrence, average length of stay, mortality and complications were retrospectively evaluated. Results Seventy of all the patients (88.6%) were male and 9 of those (13.7%) were female. The mean age was calculated as 45.50 ± 21.07 (0-85). The patients were comprised of 41 (51.9%) with primary spontaneous pneumothorax and 38 (48.1%) with secondary spontaneous pneumothorax. 55 of the patients (69.6%) with the first attack, and 24 patients (30.4%) with post tube thoracotomy’s 2nd or 3rd pneumothorax attack were admitted. Those who were accepted with post tube thoracostomy’s 2nd or 3rd attack made up 2/3 of the secondary spontaneous pneumothorax patients. 57 of the patients (68.4%) were treated with the tube thoracostomy. The tube thoracostomy related complication was 6.3%, hemorrhage due to parenchymal damage and massive air leak were observed. An open surgical method to 22 of those patients and apical resection and apical pleurectomy + tetracycline pleurodesis to 16 of whom and bullae ligation and mechanical abrasion to 6 patients were applied. The recurrence of pneumothorax in post-surgery was not observed for 1-3 year period Complication was not detected . Mortality, one patient (1.3%) died in post tube thoracotomy, which was a stage 4 lung cancer patient. Conclusions Most cases for pneumothorax were consisted of the patients with the primary spontaneous pneumothorax; the patients with recurrent pneumothorax were comprised of secondary spontaneous pneumothorax patients and those of majority secondary spontaneous pneumothorax patients were observed with bullous emphysema profile. By looking at the pertinent literature, there are publications showing VATS with the recurrence rate ranging from 2% to 14% and post thoracotomy recurrence rate from 0% to 7%. We think that applying pleurectomy, mechanical abrasion and chemical pleurodesis additional to bullae ligation or apical resection in pneumothorax surgery will significantly reduce the recurrence rate.
Tolerance to Sound Intensity of Binaural Coincidence Detection in the Nucleus Laminaris of the Owl

Neurons of the owl’s nucleus laminaris serve as coincidence detectors for measurement of interaural time difference. The discharge rate of nucleus laminaris neurons for both monaural and binaural stimulation increased with sound intensity until they reached an asymptote. Intense sounds affected neither the ratio between binaural and monaural responses nor the interaural time difference for which nucleus laminaris neurons were selective. Theoretical analysis showed that high afferent discharge rates cause coincidence detectors with only excitatory input to lose their selectivity for interaural time difference when coincidence of impulses from the same side becomes as likely as that of impulses from the two sides. We hypothesize that inhibitory input whose strength increases with sound intensity protects nucleus laminaris neurons from losing their sensitivity to interaural time difference with intense sounds.
Weak coordination among petiole, leaf, vein, and gas‐exchange traits across Australian angiosperm species and its possible implications

Abstract Close coordination between leaf gas exchange and maximal hydraulic supply has been reported across diverse plant life forms. However, it has also been suggested that this relationship may become weak or break down completely within the angiosperms. We examined coordination between hydraulic, leaf vein, and gas‐exchange traits across a diverse group of 35 evergreen Australian angiosperms, spanning a large range in leaf structure and habitat. Leaf‐specific conductance was calculated from petiole vessel anatomy and was also measured directly using the rehydration technique. Leaf vein density (thought to be a determinant of gas exchange rate), maximal stomatal conductance, and net CO 2 assimilation rate were also measured for most species (n = 19–35). Vein density was not correlated with leaf‐specific conductance (either calculated or measured), stomatal conductance, nor maximal net CO 2 assimilation, with r 2 values ranging from 0.00 to 0.11, P values from 0.909 to 0.102, and n values from 19 to 35 in all cases. Leaf‐specific conductance calculated from petiole anatomy was weakly correlated with maximal stomatal conductance (r 2 = 0.16; P = 0.022; n = 32), whereas the direct measurement of leaf‐specific conductance was weakly correlated with net maximal CO 2 assimilation (r 2 = 0.21; P = 0.005; n = 35). Calculated leaf‐specific conductance, xylem ultrastructure, and leaf vein density do not appear to be reliable proxy traits for assessing differences in rates of gas exchange or growth across diverse sets of evergreen angiosperms.
Intrinsic Motivation : A Preliminary Meta-Analysis Is Intrinsic Motivation as Important in Utilitarian Systems as It Is in Hedonic Systems ? A Preliminary Meta-Analysis

This research examines whether the hedonic 1 or utilitarian nature of a system serves as a boundary condition for understanding an individual’s interaction with information technology (IT). To do so, we reviewed the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) literature to identify studies incorporating intrinsic motivators (i.e. indicators of hedonic responses to IT). We then employed meta-analytic techniques to examine whether the nature of the system moderates intrinsic motivators’ influence across studies. Results from the meta-analysis of 24 studies indicate intrinsic motivators are as germane to understanding use of utilitarian systems as they are to hedonic systems. The implications of these results are discussed.