Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Whole-Blood Tissue Factor Procoagulant Activity Is Elevated in Type 1 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE To determine tissue factor procoagulant activity (TF-PCA) in patients with type 1 diabetes and to examine effects of hyperglycemia and hyperglycemia plus hyperinsulinemia on TF-PCA. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We have determined circulating TF-PCA and other coagulation factors under basal (hyperglycemic) conditions, after acute correction of hyperglycemia, in response to 24 h of selective hyperglycemia, and in response to 24 h of hyperglycemia plus hyperinsulinemia in nine type 1 diabetic patients and in seven nondiabetic control subjects. RESULTS As shown previously in patients with type 2 diabetes, basal TF-PCA and plasma coagulation factor VIIa (FVIIa) were higher in patients with type 1 diabetes than in nondiabetic control subjects. However, in contrast with type 2 diabetes, normalizing glucose did not decrease the elevated TF-PCA levels, and raising glucose or glucose plus insulin levels did not increase TF-PCA. CONCLUSIONS Patients with type 1 diabetes have elevated circulating TF-PCA and FVIIa levels and are in a procoagulant state that may predispose them to acute cardiovascular events. The mechanisms regulating TF-PCA in patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes are different and should be further explored.
Impact of impulsive buying behavior on postimpulsive buying satisfaction

I investigated how impulsive buying behavior affects postimpulsive buying satisfaction through the mediator of mixed emotion response and the moderator product type. I collected data using the survey method and used independent samples t tests, two-way analyses of variance, and linear regression to analyze the 243 valid questionnaires. The results showed that impulsive buying behavior has a direct effect on mixed emotion response and affects the consumers’ postimpulsive buying satisfaction through mixed emotion response. Moreover, the product type has regulatory effects. Research limitations and implications for theory and management are discussed.
Association between depression and coronary artery calcification in women with systemic lupus erythematosus.

OBJECTIVES To determine the associations between depression, cardiovascular risk factors and coronary artery calcification (CAC) in women with SLE and controls. METHODS CAC was measured using electron-beam CT (EBCT). Traditional, inflammatory and lupus-related risk factors as well as depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-CES-D) were measured at a single study visit in 161 women with SLE and 161 age- and race frequency-matched female healthy controls. RESULTS Women with SLE reported more depressive symptoms than controls, with 27% of SLE and 15% of controls having CES-D scores suggestive of clinical depression. SLE women were more likely to have CAC, as well as more severe CAC compared with controls. Among the SLE women, depression was associated with greater than 2-fold odds of having any CAC [odds ratio (OR) 2.48; 95% CI 1.05, 5.87; P = 0.04], independent of traditional risk factors (age, hypertension and triglycerides) and inflammatory markers. However, when BMI was included among the covariates, the association between depression and CAC was attenuated, indicating the potential mediating role of BMI. Depression was not a risk factor for CAC in controls. CONCLUSIONS In women with SLE, depression was associated with CAC. This association was mediated by BMI. Depression and adiposity may add to the inflammatory burden of SLE, thus contributing to cardiovascular disease risk.
Are professional attitudes related to gender and medical specialty?

The importance of professional attitudes in medical care has long been recognized; however, medical training has not stressed attitude development until recently. In previous studies among medical students, we found that gender and specialty preference are important factors in attitudes. In this study, patient‐centredness of trainees in general practice and surgery and of final‐year clerks preferring one of these specialties was assessed in one medical school in The Netherlands. The effect of gender, specialty and training level on attitude was investigated.
Digital Games and Beyond: What Happens When Players Compete

Because digital games are fun, engaging, and popular, organizations are attempting to integrate them within organizational activities as serious components, with the anticipation that they can improve employees' motivation and performance. But in order to do so and to obtain the intended outcomes, it is necessary to first obtain an understanding of how different digital game designs impact players' behaviors and emotional responses. Hence, in this study, we address one key element of popular game designs: competition. Using extant research on tournaments and intrinsic motivation, we model competitive games as a skill-based tournament and conduct an experimental study to understand player behaviors and emotional responses under different competition conditions. When players compete with players of similar skill levels, they apply more effort as indicated by more games played and longer duration of play. But when players compete with players of lower skill levels, they report higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of arousal after game-playing. We discuss the implications for organizations seeking to introduce games premised on competition and provide a framework to guide information system researchers to embark on a study of games.
Rethinking the Relationship Between Reading and Behavior in Early Elementary School

ABSTRACT Considerable research has investigated the link between academic achievement and social behavior. The authors set the context for their work by reviewing some of the research that has been done. To address similarities and limitations in previous research, they included concurrent ratings of behavior from teachers and children's performance on multiple measures of reading in their analyses. The authors provide an empirical analysis of the relationship between behavior and achievement using structural equation modeling that illustrated comparable outcomes to previous research and discuss their findings as a base for directing attention to the importance of teaching behavior as well as academic skills in efforts to prevent learning problems and failure in school.
Acculturative stress in Filipino migrants with functional English: implications for health promotion

The lack of host language proficiency is an important source of acculturative stress among new immigrants and is known to negatively impact on both physical and mental health. However, the acculturative stress and stressors of migrants from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds with functional English language skills in Australia are less well-explored. Using the Filipino migrants as examplar, this paper reviews acculturative stress in three sub-population groups in this community: family migrants, Filipino spouses of Australian men and skilled, professional migrants. Despite English language ability, socioeconomic difficulties upon migration are a common source of acculturative stress. Intergenerational and cultural gaps within the family are conflict points that may cause depression and suicidal ideation. Changes in lifestyle and diet, incongruence of Western health practices with cultural beliefs may unfavourably affect health. Skilled and professional migrants experience stress due to underemployment, non-utilisation or non-recognition of qualifications obtained overseas. The health issues of CALD communities with functional English language skills are often overlooked in comparison with migrants lacking host population language skills. Taking sociocultural issues into consideration is pivotal when designing health promotion initiatives to meet the needs of Australian migrants with functional English language skills.
The realities of researching alongside virtual youth in late modernity creative practices and activity theory

Young people's use and understanding of the Internet is still under-researched. We argue that researching alongside young people in technological settings (a virtual world on the Internet in this paper) is a complicated nexus of conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges. We argue that these are in dialectical, and sometimes incoherent, relationships with the realities of research processes and young people's lived experiences with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The Economic and Social Research Council/Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESRC/EPSRC)-funded Inter-Life Project developed a ‘Virtual Research Community’ in Second Life™ to investigate how young people can work creatively to develop their own agency and subjectivities. We reflect on these challenges as they articulated with the ‘Inter-Life’ Project's aims. They include the need for more empirical evidence of the realities of young people's lives with ICTs, and for re-theorisation of their subjectivities in ICT settings. We interrogate the challenges of participatory research in such settings and the role of creative practices and virtual spaces in finding a voice and being a participatory researcher. In the second part, we illustrate the realities of researching in a virtual world through the lived experience of young people who worked with us. We also explore how activity theory (AT) might assist in the methodological and analytical work of researching young people's creativity in a virtual world.
Successful Remembering Elicits Event-Specific Activity Patterns in Lateral Parietal Cortex

Remembering a past event involves reactivation of content-specific patterns of neural activity in high-level perceptual regions (e.g., ventral temporal cortex, VTC). In contrast, the subjective experience of vivid remembering is typically associated with increased activity in lateral parietal cortex (LPC)—“retrieval success effects” that are thought to generalize across content types. However, the functional significance of LPC activation during memory retrieval remains a subject of active debate. In particular, theories are divided with respect to whether LPC actively represents retrieved content or if LPC activity only scales with content reactivation elsewhere (e.g., VTC). Here, we report a human fMRI study of visual memory recall (faces vs scenes) in which complementary forms of multivoxel pattern analysis were used to test for and compare content reactivation within LPC and VTC. During recall of visual images, we observed robust reactivation of broad category information (face vs scene) in both VTC and LPC. Moreover, recall-related activity patterns in LPC, but not VTC, differentiated between individual events. Importantly, these content effects were particularly evident in areas of LPC (namely, angular gyrus) in which activity scaled with subjective reports of recall vividness. These findings provide striking evidence that LPC not only signals that memories have been successfully recalled, but actively represents what is being remembered.
Out of the `Digger'

Inside prisons, situations of intractable conflict between certain prisoners and correctional authorities arise. The choices available to either party in escaping the sometimes desperate consequences of these battles are usually severely limited. One effect, desire for which is usually disclaimed by the authorities, can be the creation of a yet deeper level of incarceration for the most recalcitrant. Recalling fieldwork experiences in Scotland in the early 1990s, this article describes both this situation and a notable attempt to discover a route out of it. That route lay through the Barlinnie Special Unit, once one of the most internationally celebrated penal innovations of its day. However, the fieldwork immediately preceded, and was marginally and unintentionally implicated in, a decision to close the Special Unit. The article attempts, first and foremost, to recover what was once special about the Special Unit and, second, to discuss the factors and conditions surrounding its elimination. The latter include the uneasy question of the researcher's own involvement and the uses made of aspects of the research by the authorities and the media. While affirming that field research in prisons is unavoidably important, it sounds a note of caution concerning the terms under which it is undertaken.
Aqueous and Surface Chemistries of Photocatalytic Fe-Doped CeO2 Nanoparticles

The present work describes the effects of water on Fe-doped nanoparticulate CeO2, produced by flame spray pyrolysis, which is a critical environmental issue because CeO2 is not stable in typical atmospheric conditions. It is hygroscopic and absorbs ~29 wt % water in the bulk when exposed to water vapor but, more importantly, it forms a hydrated and passivating surface layer when immersed in liquid water. In the latter case, CeO2 initially undergoes direct and/or reductive dissolution, followed by the establishment of a passivating layer calculated to consist of ~69 mol % solid CeO2·2H2O and ~30 mol % gelled Ce(OH)4. Under static flow conditions, a saturated boundary layer also forms but, under turbulent flow conditions, this is removed. While the passivating hydrated surface layer, which is coherent probably owing to the continuous Ce(OH)4 gel, would be expected to eliminate the photoactivity, this does not occur. This apparent anomaly is explained by the calculation of (a) the thermodynamic stability diagrams for Ce and Fe; (b) the speciation diagrams for the Ce4+-H2O, Ce3+-H2O, Fe3+-H2O, and Fe2+-H2O systems; and (c) the Pourbaix diagrams for the Ce-H2O and Fe-H2O systems. Furthermore, consideration of the probable effects of the localized chemical and redox equilibria owing to the establishment of a very low pH (<0) at the liquid-solid interface also is important to the interpretation of the phenomena. These factors highlight the critical importance of the establishment of the passivating surface layer and its role in photocatalysis. A model for the mechanism of photocatalysis by the CeO2 component of the hydrated phase CeO2·2H2O is proposed, explaining the observation of the retention of photocatalysis following the apparent alteration of the surface of CeO2 upon hydration. The model involves the generation of charge carriers at the outer surface of the hydrated surface layer, followed by the formation of radicals, which decompose organic species that have diffused through the boundary layer, if present.
Improved Production of Tryptophan in Genetically Engineered Escherichia coli with TktA and PpsA Overexpression

Intracellular precursor supply is a critical factor for amino acid productivity. In the present study, ppsA and tktA genes were overexpressed in genetically engineered Escherichia coli to enhance the availability of two precursor substrates, phosphoenolpyruvate and erythrose-4-phosphate. The engineered strain, TRTH0709 carrying pSV709, produced 35.9 g/L tryptophan from glucose after 40 h in fed-batch cultivation. The two genes were inserted, independently or together, into a low-copy-number expression vector (pSTV28) and transferred to TRTH0709. Fed-batch fermentations at high cell densities of the recombination strains revealed that overexpression of the ppsA gene alone does not significantly increase tryptophan yield. On the other hand, overexpression of the tktA gene, alone or with the ppsA gene, could further improve tryptophan yield to a final tryptophan titer of 37.9 and 40.2 g/L, respectively. These results represent a 5.6% and 11.9% enhancement over the titer achieved by TRTH0709. No evident genetic modifications leading to growth impairment were observed.
Statistics of feature extraction by topographic independent component analysis from natural images

Our contribution highlights the statistical properties and biological interpretation of the basis vectors (filters) that result from applying topographic independent component analysis (ICA) to feature extraction from patches of natural images. The consistency of the feature sets obtained from various collections of natural image data sets applying topographical ICA (TICA) supports the opinion that the statistical properties of the environmental stimuli enforce a process according to some optimization criterion, which provides a good computational model for the response properties of sensory neurons. However, the basis vector set differs statistically meaningful from one image collection to the other, making the ICA decomposition of natural images unsuitable for a novel approach to image compression. Key-Words: Independent component analysis, Topography, Natural images, higher-order statistics
Integration impacts on Diaspora–homeland relations

In the current academic literature there is a shortage that this explorative article is trying to discuss and fill in: first, there are relatively few focused publications on Diasporas' relations with their homelands, and second, there are relatively few publications on the various impacts of the integration of Diasporas into their hostlands’ societies and politics on their relations with their homelands. These are the two main interconnected issues discussed in this article. More specifically, the first part of this article discusses the complex issue of Diasporans' cultural, social, and political integration into hostlands and its impacts on Diasporas–homelands relations. The next empirical part of the article will briefly discuss a number of cases to illustrate the main points suggested here. The key analytical issues and the order in which they should be discussed in further studies of Diasporas' integration into their hostlands and their impact on their homelands will be suggested in the concluding part of this article.
E-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online

Much has changed in the field of online learning and teaching, since the first edition of Gilly Salmon’s (2000) highly influential book was published over 10 years ago. This book advocated a now widely adopted ‘five-stage’ pedagogical model. Coming from a social constructivist perspective, the model describes steps through which learners, with the assistance of their ‘e-moderator’, are acclimatised to their online environment (access and motivation); become acquainted with their peers (socialisation); find and share information with them (information exchange); negotiate meaning and co-construct knowledge (knowledge construction) and finally assimilate new knowledge and understanding through self-reflection (development). Research underpinning the model drew on student contributions posted on asynchronous text-based discussion boards at the Open University. This latest edition aims to revise and re-evaluate both the model and the role of the e-moderator in the context of more media-rich contemporary web 2.0 technologies. The book is divided into two parts: ‘Concepts and Cases’ and ‘Resources for Practitioners’. The first three chapters of part one cover the theory and practice of the five-stage model, drawing on more recent literature and empirical data. The model is examined through case studies set in a variety of online contexts including discussion boards (voice as well as text driven), wikis and 3D virtual worlds. As the title of the book implies, an essential component of the model is the presence of the ‘e-moderator’ who guides, motivates and scaffolds student learning through each stage. To this end, chapters 4–6 discuss the e-moderator role in depth and consider the skills required for successful e-moderation such as weaving (creating connections between individual student contributions to promote further discussion), summarising (drawing together the main points of a discussion thread) and giving feedback (individual and group). The importance of e-moderation to the learning process is emphasised here, as is the need for proper training and development of e-moderators. Chapter 7 looks at the experiences of online learners in relation to current concerns such as inclusivity and internationalisation. The final chapter of part one takes the reader on an interesting journey into the (perhaps not so distant) future of online learning and e-moderating, imagining several possible scenarios referred to as ‘planets’. ‘Planet Caffelattia’ seems to be the author’s preferred scenario with its emphasis on community learning and peer-to-peer sharing, where technology acts as ‘mediating devices, promoting creativity and collaboration’ (p. 187). Part two of the book serves as a useful quick reference guide for those involved in the design and implementation of e-tivities (online learning activities), and the training and development of e-moderators. Each of the 24 sections here offers a Innovations in Education and Teaching International Vol. 49, No. 2, May 2012, 233–234
A Comparison of Bias-Corrected Covariance Estimators for Generalized Estimating Equations

Although asymptotically the sandwich covariance estimator is consistent and robust with respect to the selection of the working correlation matrix, when the sample size is small, its bias may not be negligible. This article compares the small sample corrections for the sandwich covariance estimator as well as the inferential procedures proposed by Mancl and DeRouen (2001), Kauermann and Carroll (2001), Fay and Graubard (2001), and Fan et al. (2012). Simulation studies show that when using a maximum likelihood method to estimate the covariance parameters and using the between-within method for the denominator degrees of freedom when making inference, the Kauermann and Carroll method is preferred in the investigated balanced logistic regression and the Mancl and DeRouen and Fan et al. methods are preferred in the investigated proportional odds model. A collagen-induced arthritis study is employed to demonstrate the application of the methods.
Increasing Ball Velocity in the Overhead Athlete: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Abstract Myers, NL, Sciascia, AD, Westgate, PM, Kibler, WB, and Uhl, TL. Increasing ball velocity in the overhead athlete: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. J Strength Cond Res 29(10): 2964–2979, 2015—Overhead athletes routinely search for ways to improve sport performance, and one component of performance is ball velocity. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effect of different strengthening interventions on ball and serve velocity. A comprehensive literature search with pre-set inclusion and exclusion criteria from 1970 to 2014 was conducted. Eligible studies were randomized control trials including the mean and SDs of both pretest and posttest ball velocities in both the experimental and the control groups. The outcome of interest was ball/serve velocity in baseball, tennis, or softball athletes. Level 2 evidence or higher was investigated to determine the effect different training interventions had on velocity. Pretest and posttest data were extracted to calculate Hedges's g effect sizes with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Methodological qualities of the final 13 articles within the analysis were assessed using the Physiotherapy Evidence Database scale. The majority of the articles included in this analysis had an effect on velocity with the strongest effect sizes found in periodized training (Hedges's g = 3.445; 95% CI = 1.976–4.914). Six studies had CI that crossed zero, indicating that those specific interventions should be interpreted with caution. Consistent and high-quality evidence exists that specific resistance training interventions have an effect on velocity. These findings suggest that interventions consisting of isokinetic training, multimodal training, and periodization training are clinically beneficial at increasing velocity in the overhead athlete over different windows of time.