Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Barriers to Participation in a Patient Satisfaction Survey: Who Are We Missing?

Background A common weakness of patient satisfaction surveys is a suboptimal participation rate. Some patients may be unable to participate, because of language barriers, physical limitations, or mental problems. As the role of these barriers is poorly understood, we aimed to identify patient characteristics that are associated with non-participation in a patient satisfaction survey. Methodology At the University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland, a patient satisfaction survey is regularly conducted among all adult patients hospitalized for >24 hours on a one-month period in the departments of internal medicine, geriatrics, surgery, neurosciences, psychiatry, and gynaecology-obstetrics. In order to assess the factors associated with non-participation to the patient satisfaction survey, a case-control study was conducted among patients selected for the 2005 survey. Cases (non respondents, n = 195) and controls (respondents, n = 205) were randomly selected from the satisfaction survey, and information about potential barriers to participation was abstracted in a blinded fashion from the patients' medical and nursing charts. Principal Findings Non-participation in the satisfaction survey was independently associated with the presence of a language barrier (odds ratio [OR] 4.53, 95% confidence interval [CI95%]: 2.14–9.59), substance abuse (OR 3.75, CI95%: 1.97–7.14), cognitive limitations (OR 3.72, CI95%: 1.64–8.42), a psychiatric diagnosis (OR 1.99, CI95%: 1.23–3.23) and a sight deficiency (OR 2.07, CI95%: 0.98–4.36). The odds ratio for non-participation increased gradually with the number of predictors. Conclusions Five barriers to non-participation in a mail survey were identified. Gathering patient feedback through mailed surveys may lead to an under-representation of some patient subgroups.
Social relationships and depressive symptoms among older adults in southern Brazil.

OBJECTIVES This research tests hypotheses from equity theory and social integration theory regarding the effect of social relationships on depressive symptoms. METHODS The data are based on a representative sample of people aged 60 and older from southern Brazil. The baseline sample consists of 871 subjects interviewed in 1995. Among those baseline subjects, 551 responded in 1999. Cross-sectional and longitudinal multivariate regression models estimate the effect of two dimensions of social relationships (i.e., social exchanges and social integration) on depressive symptoms, controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and health characteristics. RESULTS The results indicate that unbalanced exchange increases depressive symptoms, and social integration decreases depressive symptoms. Specifically, older Brazilians who overbenefit or underbenefit from exchanges with relatives have more depressive symptoms than those with balanced exchanges. In addition, depressive symptoms are lower when an older adult who is receiving support is able to reciprocate. More intensive exchanges with relatives, being married, and satisfaction with family relationships decrease depressive symptoms, whereas living alone increases depressive symptoms. DISCUSSION The results highlight the relevance of social relationships to depressive symptoms among older Brazilians. In addition, the results indicate there is a nonlinear relationship between exchange balance and depressive symptoms in this population. The implications for policy are discussed.
Paclitaxel‐induced neuropathic pain is age dependent and devolves on glial response

Paclitaxel is an antimitotic antitumour drug highly effective against a broad range of cancers considered refractory to conventional chemotherapy. One of the main serious side effects of paclitaxel treatment is the induction of peripheral neuropathic pain that often diminishes the patient's quality of life. In this study, we evaluated the severity of the neuropathy induced by paclitaxel and the inflammatory reaction in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord in young, adult and aged male CD1 mice.
Probabilistic predictive principal component analysis for spatially misaligned and high‐dimensional air pollution data with missing observations

Accurate predictions of pollutant concentrations at new locations are often of interest in air pollution studies on fine particulate matters (PM2.5), in which data are usually not measured at all study locations. PM2.5 is also a mixture of many different chemical components. Principal component analysis (PCA) can be incorporated to obtain lowerdimensional representative scores of such multipollutant data. Spatial prediction can then be used to estimate these scores at new locations. Recently developed predictive PCA modifies the traditional PCA algorithm to obtain scores with spatial structures that can be well predicted at unmeasured locations. However, these approaches require complete data, whereas multipollutant data tend to have complex missing patterns in practice. We propose probabilistic versions of predictive PCA, which allow for flexible model‐based imputation that can account for spatial information and subsequently improve the overall predictive performance.
Ocular comfort of combination glaucoma therapies: brimonidine 0.2%/timolol 0.5% compared with dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5%.

PURPOSE Successful management of glaucoma and ocular hypertension requires patient compliance with the therapeutic regimen. Because ocular discomfort affects compliance, we compared the comfort of brimonidine 0.2%/timolol 0.5% and dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5%. METHODS In this single-centre, randomized, double-masked, internally controlled/paired-eye study, 30 subjects without a significant ocular surface disease received brimonidine 0.2%/timolol 0.5% in 1 eye and dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5% in the fellow eye. They evaluated discomfort at 30-40 s and 5 min postinstillation. RESULTS At 30-40 s, brimonidine 0.2%/timolol 0.5% provided significantly lower mean ocular discomfort scores than dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5% (P < 0.0001). This pattern persisted at 5 min but was not statistically significant. Significant differences were seen in the subjects' determination of the more comfortable treatment (P < 0.0001): brimonidine 0.2%/timolol 0.5% was rated as more comfortable than dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5% by 80% of subjects at 30-40 s and by 27% at 5 min. Only 10% of subjects at each time point rated dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5% as more comfortable. The remaining subjects reported no preference at either time point. No adverse events were reported. CONCLUSIONS Brimonidine 0.2%/timolol 0.5% was significantly more comfortable than dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5% upon instillation. Patients with ocular hypertension or glaucoma may be more compliant with brimonidine 0.2%/timolol 0.5% treatment.
A Comparative Study of Measures to Evaluate Medical Students' Performances

Purpose To assess how new National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) performance examinations—computerbased case simulations (CBX) and standardized patient exams (SPX)—compare with each other and with traditional internal and external measures of medical students' performances. Secondary objectives examined attitudes of students toward new and traditional evaluation modalities. Method Fourth-year students (n = 155) at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine (including joint programs at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science and University of California, Riverside) were assigned two days of performance examinations (eight SPXs, ten CBXs, and a self-administered attitudinal survey). The CBX was scored by the NBME and the SPX by a NBME/Macy consortium. Scores were linked to the survey and correlated with archival student data, including traditional performance indicators (licensing board scores, grade-point averages, etc.). Results Of the 155 students, 95% completed the testing. The CBX and the SPX had low to moderate statistically significant correlations with each other and with traditional measures of performance. Traditional measures were intercorrelated at higher levels than with the CBX or SPX. Students' perceptions of the various evaluation methods varied based on the assessment. These findings are consistent with the theoretical construct for development of performance examinations. For example, to assess clinical decision making, students rated the CBX best, while they rated multiple-choice examinations best to assess knowledge. Conclusion Examination results and student perception studies provide converging evidence that performance examinations measure different physician competency domains and support using multipronged assessment approaches.
Identification and detection of simple 3D objects with severely blurred vision.

PURPOSE Detecting and recognizing three-dimensional (3D) objects is an important component of the visual accessibility of public spaces for people with impaired vision. The present study investigated the impact of environmental factors and object properties on the recognition of objects by subjects who viewed physical objects with severely reduced acuity. METHODS The experiment was conducted in an indoor testing space. We examined detection and identification of simple convex objects by normally sighted subjects wearing diffusing goggles that reduced effective acuity to 20/900. We used psychophysical methods to examine the effect on performance of important environmental variables: viewing distance (from 10-24 feet, or 3.05-7.32 m) and illumination (overhead fluorescent and artificial window), and object variables: shape (boxes and cylinders), size (heights from 2-6 feet, or 0.61-1.83 m), and color (gray and white). RESULTS Object identification was significantly affected by distance, color, height, and shape, as well as interactions between illumination, color, and shape. A stepwise regression analysis showed that 64% of the variability in identification could be explained by object contrast values (58%) and object visual angle (6%). CONCLUSIONS When acuity is severely limited, illumination, distance, color, height, and shape influence the identification and detection of simple 3D objects. These effects can be explained in large part by the impact of these variables on object contrast and visual angle. Basic design principles for improving object visibility are discussed.
Organizational citizenship behavior at Catholic institutions of higher education: Effects of organizational commitment, interpersonal- and system-level trust

The purpose of this study was to conduct an exploratory investigation of OCB, trust, and commitment among faculty and staff within Catholic IHEs. Faculty and staff from two Catholic IHEs were the focus of the study. Twenty-five schools were randomly selected from the 50 largest Catholic IHEs by undergraduate enrollment, identified from the 2012 list of Catholic IHEs officially recognized by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU). The successful operation of Catholic IHEs appears to require high levels of trust and commitment. They benefit from higher levels of OCB, as they endeavor to work in common with other IHEs and, concurrently, extend efforts to adhere to the norms and expectations of John Paul II’s 1990 Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Catholic IHEs are tasked with fostering spiritual growth and the Catholic intellectual tradition of dialogue between faith and reason. To address the study objectives, the relationships between the variables of OCB, employee trust, and organizational commitment within two Catholic IHEs were investigated. The research included (a) investigating the traditional conceptualizations of OCB, trust, and commitment with the goal of further defining them as multi-level concepts; (b) designating core concepts of OCB, interpersonaland system-level trust, and commitment; (c) developing a model of OCB, employee trust, and commitment refining from existing theoretical bases; (d) application of core concepts to explore the dimensionality of faculty and staff members’ OCB; (e) exploring the relationship between OCB constructs and levels of trust and organizational commitment; and (f) identification of any moderating effects by comparing these relationships at the different IHEs.
Us and them: how immigrants are constructed in British and Italian newspapers

In this chapter we focus on issues of identity as they relate to the construction of the ‘other’, or more precisely of foreign immigrants, in the press partitions of the British and Italian corpora. As Hastings and Manning argue: ‘[i]t has long been an anthropological truism that the construction of (ethnolinguistic) identity cannot be studied except at its boundaries, beginning with alterity or otherness’ (2004: 293). This is also in line with Hardt-Mautner’s statement that ‘[n]ational identity emerges very much as a relational concept, the construction of “self” being heavily dependent on the construction of “other”’ (1995: 179). By studying who is other we learn how we think of ourselves. The two sections of the chapter both start with a brief historical overview of the way the press has dealt with immigration in the past in the relevant country before going on to make analyses of the most salient expressions referring to immigration in the IntUne Italian and UK press corpora. These analyses are based on building up collocational profiles by looking at the words which co-occur most frequently with these expressions, their collocates, first of all in the limited context of a concordance line, classically of 80 characters and, where necessary, in a larger context, frequently reading the whole article. We then examine how the ‘us’ of the title is constructed by identifying the significant collocates of the word our for English and nostr* for Italian. There is also a brief analysis of the metaphors and topoi related to immigration which appear in both waves of the UK and Italian press partitions of the IntUne Corpus. The chapter ends with a comparison of the construction of the immigrant in these two partitions.
Narrowing the Expectation Gap in Auditing: The Role of the Auditing Profession

The study sought to ascertain the role of the auditing profession in narrowing the audit expectation gap. Selfadministered questionnaires were used in the study. The data generated from the responses of the subjects were analyzed using descriptive and statistical analysis through the computer (SPSS 16.0). The result shows that the public is ignorant of the duties of the auditor and this lack of knowledge is responsible for unreasonable expectations of the public from auditors. Based on the findings and conclusion, it was recommended that the public need more education on the duties and responsibilities of the auditor, the standard auditor’s report should be expanded to include disclaimer clauses clearly showing that it is not a certificate or guarantee of the financial soundness of the auditee, it should be clearly stated in the audit report that the auditor is not the Compliance Officer of the audited company and that the auditors report should add that the opinion expressed by the auditor should not be construed to mean a guarantee of accuracy of the financial statements.
Low-frequency oscillations in narrow vibrated granular systems

We present simulations and a theoretical treatment of vertically vibrated granular media. The systems considered are confined in narrow quasi-two-dimensional and quasi-one-dimensional (column) geometries, where the vertical extension of the container is much larger than both horizontal lengths. The additional geometric constraint present in the column setup frustrates the convection state that is normally observed in wider geometries. This makes it possible to study collective oscillations of the grains with a characteristic frequency that is much lower than the frequency of energy injection. The frequency and amplitude of these oscillations are studied as a function of the energy input parameters and the size of the container. We observe that, in the quasi-two-dimensional setup, low-frequency oscillations are present even in the convective regime. This suggests that they may play a significant role in the transition from a density inverted state to convection. Two models are also presented; the first one, based on Cauchy's equations, is able to predict with high accuracy the frequency of the particles' collective motion. This first principles model requires a single input parameter, i.e. the centre of mass of the system. The model shows that a sufficient condition for the existence of the low-frequency mode is an inverted density profile with distinct low and high density regions, a condition that may apply to other systems too. The second, simpler model just assumes an harmonic oscillator like behaviour and, using thermodynamic arguments, is also able to reproduce the observed frequencies with high accuracy.
Neuronal network generating locomotor behavior in lamprey: circuitry, transmitters, membrane properties, and simulation.

All patterns of behavior are produced by interacting nerve cells. Although progress has been rapid on the level of the single nerve cell and its different types of ion channels, little or no knowledge is available on how the neural networks underlying different aspects of the vertebrate behavioral repertoire may function on a cellular level. The reason for this condition is that a detailed knowledge about the circuitry is required, for instance how different, relevant nerve cells interact, their properties, the types of synaptic interaction between interneurons, and so forth. Such detailed knowledge has been beyond reach with current techniques for these com­ plex mammalian nervous systems, which have been studied in some detail, like those of rat and cat. Nevertheless, much valuable information has been gathered about these nervous systems concerning which parts of the
Preoperative serum vascular endothelial growth factor levels: significance in ovarian cancer.

PURPOSE To assess the clinical relevance of serum vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) levels in distinguishing patients with ovarian cancer from those with benign adnexal masses. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Preoperative serum VEGF levels were assessed in 101 women with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer, 16 with low malignant potential (LMP) ovarian tumors, and 34 women with benign ovarian tumors. VEGF levels were determined using an ELISA (R&D Systems, Minneapolis, MN). RESULTS Ovarian cancer patients had a mean preoperative VEGF level of 549 pg/ml (median 379 pg/ml), which was significantly higher than those with benign adnexal masses (mean 228 pg/ml, median 155 pg/ml; P < 0.001) and LMP tumors (mean 200 pg/ml, median 129 pg/ml; P < 0.001). There were no significant differences in VEGF levels between individuals with benign masses and LMP tumors. The ability of VEGF to differentiate malignancy from benign masses at a cutoff VEGF level of 246 pg/ml gave a sensitivity of 74%, a specificity of 71%, a positive predictive value of 88%, and a negative predictive value of 48%. VEGF levels were also significantly higher in patients with stage I ovarian cancer compared with those with benign disease or LMP tumors. Among patients with ovarian cancer, there were no significant differences in VEGF levels based on age, stage, grade, or level of cytoreduction. The presence of ascites was associated with a significantly higher VEGF level (mean 667 pg/ml, median 445 pg/ml versus mean 317 pg/ml, median 293 pg/ml; P < 0.001). Various preoperative VEGF levels were assessed as a predictor of survival, and a VEGF level >380 pg/ml was associated with a hazard ratio of 2.13 (P = 0.009) by univariate analysis. In multivariate analysis of age, stage, cytoreduction, preoperative CA-125, grade, ascites, and VEGF levels above 380 pg/ml, only VEGF levels >380 pg/ml (hazard ratio 2.33; P = 0.02) and advanced stage (hazard ratio 9.03; P = 0.004) were significant. CONCLUSIONS Preoperative VEGF levels may be useful in differentiating benign adnexal masses from malignancy. Preoperative VEGF levels >380 pg/ml are an independent risk factor for death because of disease.
Rosai-Dorfman disease: a report of eight cases in a tertiary care center and a review of the literature

Rosai-Dorfman disease (RDD) is a nonmalignant histiocytic disorder of unknown origin that is extremely rare. By immunohistochemistry, the RDD cells are characteristically S-100 positive and CD1a negative. Emperipolesis is a common histopathological finding, although not specific for RDD. Lymph node and cutaneous manifestations are most frequent, but diverse organs can be affected. The clinical course is unpredictable regardless of treatment. Here, we present a series of 8 cases presenting lymph node and/or cutaneous lesions. Lymph node involvement was seen in diverse regions, including mediastinal and retroperitoneal. The treatment response to steroids was diversified, and the chemotherapy response was disappointing. Associated autoimmune diseases (Sjögren syndrome and antiphospholipid syndrome) were observed in 2 patients. Regardless of therapy modality, these patients exhibited a favorable prognosis in a follow-up duration that ranged from 15 to 80 months.
An Efficient Implementation of Edmonds' Algorithm for Maximum Matching on Graphs

A matching on a graph is a set of edges, no two of which share a vertex. A maximum matching contains the greatest number of edges possible. This paper presents an efficient implementation of Edmonds' algorithm for finding a maximum matching. The computation time is proportional to <italic>V</italic><supscrpt>3</supscrpt>, where <italic>V</italic> is the number of vertices; previous implementations of Edmonds' algorithm have computation time proportional to <italic>V</italic><supscrpt>4</supscrpt>. The implementation is based on a system of labels that encodes the structure of alternating paths.
A Situation‐Specific Theory of Asian Immigrant Women's Menopausal Symptom Experience in the United States

In this article, a situation-specific theory that explains the menopausal symptom experiences of Asian immigrant women in the United States is presented. Using an integrative approach, the theory was developed on the basis of the transitions theory, a review of the relevant literature, and a study on Asian immigrant women's menopausal symptom experience in the United States. The proposed theory includes transition conditions, patterns of response, and nursing therapeutics as major concepts and explains the relationships among these major concepts. This theory should be further validated and developed in intervention studies and nursing practice with this specific population.
Learning Causal Structure from Undersampled Time Series

Even if one can experiment on relevant factors, learning the causal structure of a dynamical system can be quite dicult if the relevant measurement processes occur at a much slower sampling rate than the \true" underlying dynamics. This problem is exacerbated if the degree of mismatch is unknown. This paper gives a formal characterization of this learning problem, and then provides two sets of results. First, we prove a set of theorems characterizing how causal structures change under undersampling. Second, we develop an algorithm for inferring aspects of the causal structure at the \true" timescale from the causal structure learned from the undersampled data. Research on causal learning in dynamical contexts has largely ignored the challenges of undersampling, but this paper provides a framework and foundation for learning causal structure from this type of complex time series data.