Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safety, efficacy, cost, and morbidity of laparoscopic versus open cholecystectomy: a prospective analysis of 228 consecutive patients.

Laparoscopic cholecystectomy has become the procedure of choice in most hospitals for the resolution of surgically treatable gallbladder disease. Few reports address the results of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in comparison to open cholecystectomy during the same time interval within the same institution. One hundred ninety-six laparoscopic cholecystectomies were performed from April 1990 through February 1991. Initial patient selection was restricted to elective procedures for chronic cholecystitis with expanded indications as experience was gained. Of the 196 cases, 11 required conversion to open cholecystectomy, leaving 185 laparoscopic cholecystectomies for comparison. During the same period, 82 open cholecystectomies were performed. Thirty-nine of these were complicated cases and would not have been considered for laparoscopic cholecystectomy early in the study, leaving 43 routine open cholecystectomies for comparative purposes. In the laparoscopic group, 1.1 per cent of the patients had major operative complications as opposed to the open group, which had none. There were no common bile duct injuries in either group. To provide a true cost-benefit analysis, a group of patients was identified that would qualify for elective, same-day admission for either an open or laparoscopic procedure. Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) was performed on 70 patients, and open cholecystectomy (OC) was performed on 26 patients. A comparison of data from these groups showed no significant difference in age or sex. Hospitalization costs averaged $5,390 for the LC group versus $5,392 for the OC group. Postoperative hospital stay averaged 1.3 days for the LC group versus 3.7 days for the OC group (P < 0.0001). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Identification of a Hydrophobin Gene That is Developmentally Regulated in the Ectomycorrhizal Fungus Tricholoma terreum

ABSTRACT The symbiosis between ectomycorrhizal fungi and trees is an essential part of forest ecology and depends entirely on the communication between the two partners for establishing and maintaining the relationship. The identification and characterization of differentially expressed genes is a step to identifying such signals and to understanding the regulation of this process. We determined the role of hydrophobins produced by Tricholoma terreum in mycorrhiza formation and hyphal development. A hydrophobin was purified from culture supernatant, and the corresponding gene was identified. The gene is expressed in aerial mycelium and in mycorrhiza. By using a heterologous antiserum directed against a hydrophobin found in the aerial mycelium of Schizophyllum commune, we detected a hydrophobin in the symbiosis between T. terreum and its native pine host Pinus sylvestris. The hydrophobin was found in aerial mycelium of the hyphal mantle and also in the Hartig net hyphae, which form the interface between both partners. Interestingly, this was not the case in the interaction of T. terreum with a host of low compatibility, the spruce Picea abies. The differential expression with respect to host was verified at the transcriptional level by competitive PCR. The differential protein accumulation pattern with respect to host compatibility seen by immunofluorescence staining can thus be attributed at least in part to transcriptional control of the hyd1 gene.
Recursive neural network paraphrase identification for example-based dialog retrieval

An example-based dialog model often require a lot of data collections to achieve a good performance. However, when it comes on handling an out of vocabulary (OOV) database queries, this approach resulting in weakness and inadequate handling of interactions between words in the sentence. In this work, we try to overcome this problem by utilizing recursive neural network paraphrase identification to improve the robustness of example-based dialog response retrieval. We model our dialog-pair database and user input query with distributed word representations, and employ recursive autoencoders and dynamic pooling to determine whether two sentences with arbitrary length have the same meaning. The distributed representations have the potential to improve handling of OOV cases, and the recursive structure can reduce confusion in example matching.
Protocols for calibrating multibeam sonar

Development of protocols for calibrating multibeam sonar by means of the standard-target method is documented. Particular systems used in the development work included three that provide the water-column signals, namely the SIMRAD SM2000/90and 200-kHz sonars and RESON SeaBat 8101 sonar, with operating frequency of 240 kHz. Two facilities were instrumented specifically for the work: a sea well at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a large, indoor freshwater tank at the University of New Hampshire. Methods for measuring the transfer characteristics of each sonar, with transducers attached, are described and illustrated with measurement results. The principal results, however, are the protocols themselves. These are elaborated for positioning the target, choosing the receiver gain function, quantifying the system stability, mapping the directionality in the plane of the receiving array and in the plane normal to the central axis, measuring the directionality of individual beams, and measuring the nearfield response. General preparations for calibrating multibeam sonars and a method for measuring the receiver response electronically are outlined. Advantages of multibeam sonar calibration and outstanding problems, such as that of validation of the performance of multibeam sonars as configured for use, are mentioned. ©2005 Acoustical Society of America. @DOI: 10.1121/1.1869073 #
USING BEST-WORST SCALING IN HORIZON SCANNING FOR HEPATOCELLULAR CARCINOMA TECHNOLOGIES

Objectives: There is a growing need for efficient procedures for identification of emerging technologies by horizon scanning systems. We demonstrate the value of best-worst scaling (BWS) in exploring clinicians’ views on emerging technologies that will impact outcomes in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in the next 5 to 10 years. Methods: Clinicians in Asia, Europe, and the United States were surveyed and their views about eleven emerging technologies relevant to HCC were explored using BWS (case 1). This involved systematically presenting respondents with subsets of five technologies and asking them to identify those that will have the most and least impact on HCC within 5 to 10 years. Statistical analysis was based on sequential best-worst and analyzed using conditional logistic regression. Results: A total of 120 clinicians uniformly distributed across ten countries completed the survey (37 percent response rate). Respondents were predominately hepatologist (41 percent) who focused on HCC (65 percent) and had national influence in this field (39 percent). Respondents viewed molecular targeted therapy (p < .001) and early detection of HCC (p < .001) as having most potential, while improved surgical techniques (p < .001) and biopsy free HCC diagnostics (p < .001) were viewed upon negatively. Conclusions: We demonstrate that BWS could be an important research tool to facilitate horizon scanning and HTA more broadly. Our research demonstrates the value of including clinicians’ preferences as a source of data in horizon scanning, but such methods could be used to incorporate the opinions of a broad array of stakeholders, including those in advocacy and public policy.
Community-Based Development in the Context of Within Group Heterogeneity

Community-Based Development (CBD) is being currently proposed as the main avenue to fighting poverty and circumventing the shortcomings of state -directed aid resources. Largely as a response to critiques of top-down development, most bilateral donors and big international organizations have indeed started to include participatory elements in the design of their large-scale development assistance programmes The most important advantage usually associated with these programmes consists of the informational gains arising from the proximity of local decision -making bodies to the target populations. By contrast, one serious potential difficulty lies in the vulnerability of such programmes to capture by local elites. The paper examines these two aspects critically in the light of economic theory and principles and reviews whatever empirical evidence is available. On the one hand, it appears that informational advantages of the CBD approach are not always as decisive as they might seem. On the other hand, the elite capture problem is not a priori more serious in a decentralized than in a centralized approach . Political economy models lead to indeterminate conclusions and to have to be content with identifying factors that are more or less conducive to effectiveness of decentralized development. The paper then proceeds by discussing the possibility of mitigating the elite capture problem through various reputation mechanisms, both multilateral and bilateral. Problems raised by multilateral mechanisms are brought to light with a special focus on aid disbursed by foreign donors to local communities or groups. Attention is therefore turned to a bilateral, local leader-disciplining mechanism that relies on a sequential disbursement procedure supported by a fraud detection technology. One of the conclusions reached on the basis of such analysis is that too quick and massive a rush on CBD may prove self -defeating in the sense that the share of aid resources actually reaching the poor will be low if donor agencies are impatient to achieve results. Furthermore, stiff competition among foreign donor agencies engaged in CBD is likely to yield the same perverse result. This is so not only because competition tends to make reallocation of aid funds more costly in the event of a detected project failure (in the sense of elite capture), but also because of the presence of careless agencies which, for various reasons, do not implement the sort of sequential disbursement mechanism envisaged.
Modeling High-Grade Serous Carcinoma: How Converging Insights into Pathogenesis and Genetics are Driving Better Experimental Platforms

Recent developments in the study of epithelial ovarian cancer have called into question the traditional views regarding the site of tumor initiation. Histopathologic studies and genomic analyses suggest that extra-ovarian sites, like the fallopian tube, may harbor the coveted cell of origin and could therefore contribute significantly to the development of high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HG-SOC). Our ability to validate these emerging genomic and pathologic observations and characterize the early transformation events of HG-SOC hinges on the development of novel model systems. Currently, there are only a handful of new model systems that are addressing these concerns. This review will chronicle the convergent evolution of these ovarian cancer model systems in the context of the changing pathologic and genomic understanding of HG-SOC.
A New Approach to the Experimental Study of Shyness: Person by Context Influences on Computer-mediated Social Communication

In a series of five studies, I used the Internet and computed-mediated technologies as tools to revisit the longstanding issue within the fields of personality and experimental social psychology: "person by context" interaction on social communicative behaviour. The effects of the personality trait of shyness were examined in visually anonymous and non-anonymous conditions to see if the interaction of the person and context influenced social communication. Participants were paired in dyads and instructed to converse using a text-based online Instant Messenger program. Dyads were randomly assigned to converse with webcams or without webcams. For some types of behaviour (e.g., self-disclosure), shyness and level of visual anonymity interacted (Studies 1 and 2). Shy individuals disclosed more personal information in a visually anonymous context than a visually non-anonymous context. For non-shy individuals, self-disclosure was not influenced by the context. For other types of behaviour (e.g., affective language), the effect of shyness was consistent across context. To determine the specificity of the shyness-anonymity interaction, other person­ anonymity interactions were examined (e.g., self-esteem, loneliness, sex of the participants) (Studies 3 and 4). Finally, the influence of the shyness-anonymity interaction on social communicative behaviour was examined in a cooperative performance-related task (Study 5). These series of studies suggest that anonymity is a particularly salient contextual cue for shy individuals. Furthermore, the moderating effects of anonymity on shyness
On 5G radio access architecture and technology [Industry Perspectives]

In early 2012, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) under the United Nations initiated a program to develop an International Mobile Telecommunication (IMT) system for 2020 and beyond (IMT-2020), thereby officially kicking off the global race toward a yet to be defined fifth generation (5G) mobile network. Fast forward three years, the vision of this next-generation system is beginning to take shape. A recent ITU-Radiocommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-R) Draft Recommendation [1] on IMT-2020 identifies three key usage scenarios in 5G as enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine-type communications, and ultra-reliable and low-latency communications. The same report also issues guidance on the requirements for these scenarios in terms of performance index such as spectrum efficiency, latency, connection density, and area traffic capacity, as shown in Fig. 1. In order to meet these requirements and bring this visionary system to reality, we believe that the future 5G network will be one that is built on a small cell backbone. As spectrum suitable for mobile communication becomes more and more scarce, densification is the only way to meet the area traffic capacity demand. Even for millimeter-wave band, where spectrum is abundant, the channel's propagation characteristics will likely limit its range for mobile access to that of a small cell, at least in the early phase of 5G before device technology matures. The small cell also brings the radio access point closer to the end device, thereby shortening the last and most challenging segment of an end-to-end communication link, consequently reducing latency and increasing reliability. Many of the massive number of machine-type communications can also benefit from the extended battery life resulting from shorter uplink distance. To facilitate the deployment of a future mobile network that has the small cell as its primary traffic bearing workhorse,the current radio access architecture needs to undergo some major revamping, and new technologies need to be introduced.
Characteristics Relevant to Performance as an Army Leader: Knowledges, Skills, Abilities, Other Characteristics and Generics Skills

Abstract : This paper reviews the results obtained in attempting to construct a taxonomic system capable of describing individual attributes that influence leadership effectiveness. To identify the knowledges, skills, abilities and other characteristics (KSAOs) as well as the generic skills involved, a literature review was conducted examining studies concerned with relevant problem-solving processes. A general taxonomy of KSAOs capable of influencing leadership effectiveness was constructed which was applicable to both officers and noncommissioned officers.
Th17 immune response to adipose tissue‐derived mesenchymal stromal cells

Adipose tissue‐derived mesenchymal stromal cells (ASCs) hold the promise of achieving successful immunotherapeutic results due to their ability to regulate different T‐cell fate. ASCs also show significant adaptability to environmental stresses by modulating their immunologic profile. Cell‐based therapy for inflammatory diseases requires a detailed understanding of the molecular relation between ASCs and Th17 lymphocytes taking into account the influence of inflammation and cell ratio on such interaction. Accordingly, a dose‐dependent increase in Th17 generation was only observed in high MSC:T‐cell ratio with no significant impact of inflammatory priming. IL‐23 receptor (IL‐23R) expression by T cells was not modulated by ASCs when compared to levels in activated T cells, while ROR‐γt expression was significantly increased reaching a maximum in high (1:5) unprimed ASC:T‐cell ratio. Finally, multiplex immunoassay showed substantial changes in the secretory profile of 15 cytokines involved in the Th17 immune response (IL‐1β, IL‐4, IL‐6, IL‐10, IL‐17A, IL‐17F, IL‐22, IL‐21, IL‐23, IL‐25, IL‐31, IL‐33, IFN‐γ, sCD40, and TNF‐α), which was modulated by both cell ratio and inflammatory priming. These findings suggest that Th17 lymphocyte pathway is significantly modulated by ASCs that may lead to immunological changes. Therefore, future ASC‐based immunotherapy should take into account the complex and detailed molecular interactions that depend on several factors including inflammatory priming and cell ratio.
The three-point correlation function of luminous red galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We present measurements of the redshift-space three-point correlation function of 50 967 luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from Data Release 3 (DR3) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We have studied the shape dependence of the reduced three-point correlation function (Qz(s, q, θ )) on three different scales, s = 4, 7 and 10 h −1 Mpc, and over the range of 1 < q < 3 and 0 ◦ <θ <180 ◦ . On small scales (s = 4 h −1 Mpc), Qz is nearly constant, with little change as a function of q and θ. However, there is evidence for a shallow U-shaped behaviour (with θ ) which is expected from theoretical modelling of Qz(s, q, θ ). On larger scales (s = 7 and 10 h −1 Mpc), the U-shaped anisotropy in Qz (with θ) is more clearly detected. We compare this shape dependence in Qz(s, q, θ) with that seen in mock galaxy catalogues which were generated by populating the dark matter haloes in large N-body simulations with mock galaxies using various halo occupation distributions (HOD). We find that the combination of the observed number density of LRGs, the (redshift-space) two-point correlation function and Qz(s, q, θ ) provides a strong constraint on the allowed HOD parameters (Mmin, M1, α) and breaks key degeneracies between these parameters. For example, our observed Qz(s, q, θ) disfavours mock catalogues that overpopulate massive dark matter haloes with many LRG satellites. We also estimate the linear bias of LRGs to be b = 1.87 ± 0.07 in excellent agreement with other measurements.
Doubly Differential Final-State Momentum Distributions of the Ionization Products in Collision of Bare Ions with Hydrogen.

In this paper recoil-ion production cross sections are presented differential in recoil-ion longitudinal momentum and electron emission angle in ionization of atomic and molecular hydrogen by bare ion projectiles. A new formulation for constructing these double differential distributions from the measured electron double differential cross sections is used. A novel feature is the separation of two different branches of the recoil-ion longitudinal momentum distribution corresponding to soft and hard collision mechanisms of ionization. The single differential distributions have also been derived. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society. }
Awareness and Acceptability of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) in Kenya

ABSTRACT Kenyan gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) are significantly affected by HIV. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an effective biomedical approach to HIV prevention. We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 459 HIV-negative Kenyan GBMSM to assess individual and interpersonal correlates of PrEP awareness/acceptability using univariate and hierarchical logistic regression modeling. We found that 64.3% of participants had heard of PrEP and 44.9% were willing to use PrEP. In hierarchical logistic regression models for PrEP awareness, condom use with regular partners, higher condom use self-efficacy, higher perceived ability to use PrEP, history of STI, and membership in LGBT organization were significantly associated with being aware of PrEP (χ2 = 69.6, p < .001). In hierarchical logistic regression models for PrEP acceptability, higher self-esteem, higher condom use self-efficacy, depression/anxiety, higher perceived ability to use PrEP, willingness to engage in PrEP follow-up visits, coercion at sexual debut, and family exclusion were significantly associated with being acceptable to PrEP (χ2 = 231.8, p < .001). Individual and interpersonal factors were significantly associated with PrEP awareness and acceptability. Our findings underscore the need to promote awareness and understanding of PrEP as an effective HIV prevention tool in combination with other safer-sex methods that are appropriate given an individual’s personal circumstances.
The redshift evolution of X-ray and Sunyaev–Zel’dovich scaling relations in the fable simulations

We study the redshift evolution of the X-ray and Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ) scaling relations for galaxy groups and clusters in the fable suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. Using an expanded sample of 27 high-resolution zoom-in simulations, together with a uniformly sampled cosmological volume to sample low-mass systems, we find very good agreement with the majority of observational constraints up to z ∼ 1. We predict significant deviations of all examined scaling relations from the simple self-similar expectations. While the slopes are approximately independent of redshift, the normalizations evolve positively with respect to self-similarity, even for commonly used mass proxies such as the YX parameter. These deviations are due to a combination of factors, including more effective active galactic nuclei feedback in lower mass haloes, larger binding energy of gas at a given halo mass at higher redshifts, and larger non-thermal pressure support from kinetic motions at higher redshifts. Our results have important implications for cluster cosmology from upcoming SZ surveys such as SPT-3G, ACTpol, and CMB-S4, as relatively small changes in the observable–mass scaling relations (within theoretical uncertainties) have a large impact on the predicted number of high-redshift clusters and hence on our ability to constrain cosmology using cluster abundances. In addition, we find that the intrinsic scatter of the relations, which agrees well with most observational constraints, increases at lower redshifts and for lower mass systems. This calls for a more complex parametrization than adopted in current observational studies to be able to accurately account for selection biases.