Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Screening for intimate partner violence in health care settings: a randomized trial.

CONTEXT Whether intimate partner violence (IPV) screening reduces violence or improves health outcomes for women is unknown. OBJECTIVE To determine the effectiveness of IPV screening and communication of positive results to clinicians. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Randomized controlled trial conducted in 11 emergency departments, 12 family practices, and 3 obstetrics/gynecology clinics in Ontario, Canada, among 6743 English-speaking female patients aged 18 to 64 years who presented between July 2005 and December 2006, could be seen individually, and were well enough to participate. INTERVENTION Women in the screened group (n=3271) self-completed the Woman Abuse Screening Tool (WAST); if a woman screened positive, this information was given to her clinician before the health care visit. Subsequent discussions and/or referrals were at the discretion of the treating clinician. The nonscreened group (n=3472) self-completed the WAST and other measures after their visit. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Women disclosing past-year IPV were interviewed at baseline and every 6 months until 18 months regarding IPV reexposure and quality of life (primary outcomes), as well as several health outcomes and potential harms of screening. RESULTS Participant loss to follow-up was high: 43% (148/347) of screened women and 41% (148/360) of nonscreened women. At 18 months (n = 411), observed recurrence of IPV among screened vs nonscreened women was 46% vs 53% (modeled odds ratio, 0.82; 95% confidence interval, 0.32-2.12). Screened vs nonscreened women exhibited about a 0.2-SD greater improvement in quality-of-life scores (modeled score difference at 18 months, 3.74; 95% confidence interval, 0.47-7.00). When multiple imputation was used to account for sample loss, differences between groups were reduced and quality-of-life differences were no longer significant. Screened women reported no harms of screening. CONCLUSIONS Although sample attrition urges cautious interpretation, the results of this trial do not provide sufficient evidence to support IPV screening in health care settings. Evaluation of services for women after identification of IPV remains a priority. TRIAL REGISTRATION clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00182468.
A 48-hour exposure of pancreatic islets to calpain inhibitors impairs mitochondrial fuel metabolism and the exocytosis of insulin.

Genetic variation in the gene for a cytosolic cysteine protease, calpain-10, increases the susceptibility to type 2 diabetes apparently by altering levels of gene expression. In view of the importance of altered beta-cell function in the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes, the present study was undertaken to define the effects on insulin secretion of exposing pancreatic islets to calpain inhibitors for 48 hours. Exposure of mouse islets to calpain inhibitors (ALLN, ALLM, E-64-d, MDL 18270, and PD147631) of different structure and mechanism of action for 48 hours reversibly suppresses glucose-induced insulin secretion by 40% to 80%. Exposure of islets to inhibitors of other proteases, ie, cathepsin B and proteasome, did not affect insulin secretion. The 48-hour incubation with calpain inhibitors also attenuates insulin secretory responses to the mitochondrial fuel alpha-ketoisocaproate (KIC). The same incubation also suppresses glucose metabolism and intracellular calcium ([Ca(2+)](i)) responses to glucose or KIC in islets. In summary, long-term inhibition of islet calpain activity attenuates insulin secretion possibly by limiting the rate of glucose metabolism. A reduction of calpain activity in islet could contribute to the development of beta-cell failure in type 2 diabetes thereby providing a link between genetic susceptibility to diabetes and the pathophysiologic manifestations of the disease.
Beyond “Because It's There”

Abstract Since 2009, participation rates for adventure pursuits such as kayaking and climbing have increased over 25% (Outdoor Industry Foundation, 2011). This study investigated the reported motivations for participation in adventure recreation over a six-year period using the independent variables of gender, experience level, and activity type. The study consisted of 801 participants engaged in four different adventure activities (rock climbing, whitewater kayaking, sea kayaking, and canoeing). Using factor analysis, three factors emerged: Social, Sensation-Seeking, and Self-Image. Of these three factors, subsequent analyses using three-way ANOVAs, revealed significant differences regarding activity type, gender, and experience level. Using discriminant analysis, the Social factor was the most successful in predicting group membership regarding gender, activity type, and level of experience.
Evidence of hormonal basis for improved survival among females with trauma-associated shock: an analysis of the National Trauma Data Bank.

BACKGROUND Basic science research suggests that sex hormones affect survival after traumatic shock. This study sought to determine the independent effect of gender on mortality among trauma patients in different hormone-related age groups. METHODS Review of severely injured trauma patients with shock included in the National Trauma Databank. Patients were stratified into three groups on the basis of likely hormonal status: prehormonal (age, 0-12 years), hormonal (age,13-64 years), and posthormonal (age, ≥ 65 years). Multiple logistic regression was used to analyze the independent effect of gender on mortality in each group, adjusting for anatomic and physiologic injury severity. RESULTS A total of 48,394 patients met our inclusion criteria (Injury Severity Score ≥ 16 and systolic blood pressure <90 mm Hg). Crude mortality was higher (p < 0.05) for males in all categories: prehormonal = 29% for males (n = 3,553) versus 24% for females (n = 1,831); hormonal = 34% for males (n = 26,778) versus 30% for females (n = 8,677) and posthormonal = 36% for males (n = 4,280) versus 31% for females (n = 3,275). After adjusting for covariates, women in the hormonally active group had a 14% decreased odds of death (0.86 [95% CI, 0.76-0.93]) compared with men. Females did not exhibit this survival advantage in the prehormonal (odds of death = 0.92 [0.74-1.14]) or posthormonal (odds of death = 0.90 [0.76-1.05]) groups. CONCLUSIONS Females aged between 13 and 64 years exhibit significantly lower mortality than males after trauma-associated shock. This outcome difference is lost at the extremes of age (preadolescent children and individuals aged ≥ 65 years) where the effects of sex hormones are absent or diminished. These findings suggest that hormonal differences play a role in the gender-based outcome disparities after traumatic shock.
Nanofluids with Enhanced CHF Prepared from Self-Combustion Synthesized Al2O3 Nanoparticles with PEG 1000 as Fuel

To develop a new coolant for nuclear and non-nuclear applications, nanoparticles of Al2O3 for nanofluids have been successfully synthesized using a self-combustion method from Al(OH)3 precursor extracted from local bauxite. A sol was prepared by dissolving the Al(OH)3 powder in water and adding an amount of PEG 1000 into the solution. The solution was stirred to form a sol and then was heated at 150 °C until forming a gel. The gel was then self-combusted at 450 °C and heated at 600 °C. The combusted and heated material was calcined at 1200 °C for 1 hour to get Al2O3 nanoparticles. The preparation of nanofluids was done by dispersing the Al2O3 nanoparticles into an amount of water as the base fluid. The Al2O3 nanoparticles were crystallized in a theta phase with a crystallite size of 15.7 nm as confirmed by the XRD analyses. According to TEM data, it was known that the particle size of the nanoparticles was 35 nm. The nanofluid with the concentration of 0.025 vol % and pH of 10 possessed zeta potential of -42 mV indicating a stable suspension. This nanofluid had a CHF enhancement of 73% compared to water as the base fluid.
Predictors of inappropriate hospital stay: a clinical case study.

OBJECTIVE To assess the reasons for inappropriate patient stay (IPS) and to identify possible predictors of this inappropriate stay. DESIGN The reasons for IPS were analyzed in a cross-sectional survey at two surgical one gynecologic and one obstetric ward, using a sample of 610 days of hospital stay by means of the Dutch Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol. SETTING The study was conducted at the University Hospital Maastricht, a 715-bed hospital with a regional and teaching function, located in the southern part of The Netherlands. RESULTS Results indicate that > 20% of the hospital stay was inappropriate. The reasons for IPS were statistically significantly related to the patients' age, the availability of home care and medical specialty. In a predictive model, only the specialty proved to be a predictor of IPS. Most of the IPS occurred during the first days of hospital stay and the days before the patient's discharge. CONCLUSION A substantial proportion of hospital stay was found to be inappropriate, due to hospital procedures and the inability to refer patients to other care facilities or care providers. Analysis of the causes of IPS provided useful data for improvement actions. Efficient use of hospital resources should be promoted by reducing the delay in interventions and discharge procedures.
Understanding the therapeutic alliance in stroke rehabilitation

Abstract Purpose The quality of the therapeutic alliance between a client and their clinician is thought to play an important role in healthcare but there is limited research about this concept in stroke rehabilitation. This study explored the core components of a therapeutic alliance and the factors perceived to impact on its development in a stroke rehabilitation unit. Methods Interpretive description methodology was used to gather and synthesise participants’ experiences of their therapeutic relationships. Ten individual client interviews and one clinician focus group were conducted. Data was were analysed using conventional content analysis. Results A therapeutic alliance appeared to consist of three overlapping core components: a personal connection, a professional collaboration, and family collaboration. Clients valued these components to different degrees and priorities could change over time. Alliance breakdowns were perceived to stem from a clinician’s incorrect assumptions about their client’s relationship preferences or lack of responsiveness to their needs. Recovery of the alliance seemed to depend on the strength of the pre-existing relationship and steps taken to repair it. Conclusions Establishing and maintaining a therapeutic alliance appears to be an individualised and complex process. A clinician’s ability to use their personal attributes therapeutically, and professional skills flexibly, appeared integral to relationship quality. IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION Developing therapeutic relationships requires a person-centred and sometimes family/whānau-centred approach. The judicious use of self-disclosure may achieve emotional proximity and yet maintain professional boundaries. Maintaining relationship health requires a proactive approach to detect and manage relationship disruptions.
Low Hardware Complexity Pipelined Rank Filter

The major benefit of a disclosed low-hardware-complexity pipelined rank filter is reduction in hardware complexity and increase in processing speed, due to identical pipelined stages and the absence of mask bits. Field-programmable-gate-array realization of this filter significantly reduces the number of used logic elements and registers, in comparison with the best prior art methods, and, at the same time, increases the maximum operating frequency. One rank-sample result is available at the output on each clock cycle, thus enabling real-time nonlinear image processing.
A High-Efficiency DC–DC Converter Using 2 nH Integrated Inductors

Historically, buck converters have relied on high-Q inductors on the order of 1 to 100 muH to achieve a high efficiency. Unfortunately, on-chip inductors are physically large and have poor series resistances, which result in low-efficiency converters. To mitigate this problem, on-chip magnetic coupling is exploited in the proposed stacked interleaved topology to enable the use of small (2 nH) on-chip inductors in a high-efficiency buck converter. The dramatic decrease in the inductance value is made possible by the unique bridge timing of the stacked design that causes magnetic coupling to boost the converter's efficiency by reducing the current ripple in each inductor. The magnetic coupling is realized by stacking the two inductors on top of one another, which not only lowers the required inductance, but also reduces the chip area consumed by the two inductors. The measured conversion efficiency for the prototype circuit, implemented in a 130-nm CMOS technology, shows more than a 15% efficiency improvement over a linear converter for low output voltages rising to a peak efficiency of 77.9 % for a 0.9 V output. These efficiencies are comparable to converters implemented with higher Q inductors, validating that the proposed techniques enable high-efficiency converters to be realized with small on-chip inductors.
Characteristics of developmental dyslexia in a regular writing system

Abstract The present study assessed reading difficulties and cognitive impairments of German-speaking dyslexic children at grade levels 2, 3, and 4. It was found that German dyslexic children suffered from a pervasive speed deficit for all types of reading tasks, including text, high frequency words, and pseudowords, but at the same time showed generally rather high reading accuracy. For pseudowords, reading refusals or word responses were absent, and the majority of errors was close to the target pronunciation. Reading speed seemed to be most impaired for pseudowords and function words that did not allow the children to take a short-cut from phonemically mediated word processing. The discussion offers a developmental framework for the interpretation of these reading difficulties. For the cognitive tasks, dyslexic children did not differ from age-matched control children on the pseudoword repetition task or the digit span task, indicating that auditory perception and memory were not impaired. On phonological awareness tasks (rhyme oddity detection, vowel substitution, and pseudoword spelling), dyslexic children scored lower than age-matched control children, but not lower than younger reading-level control children. The performance of the dyslexic children on the phonemic segmentation tasks (pseudoword spelling and vowel substitution) was high in absolute terms. In contrast, marked differences between dyslexic and age-matched controls were found on rapid naming tasks: dyslexic grade 4 children showed lower numeral-naming speed than reading-level grade 2 children. Numeral-naming speed turned out to be the most important predictor of reading speed differences. These findings are discussed in relation to the phonological impairment explanation of dyslexia and to recent alternative explanations that posit an underlying impairment in automatizing skills which demand the fast execution of low-level cognitive processes.
CNN-based image analysis for malaria diagnosis

Malaria is a major global health threat. The standard way of diagnosing malaria is by visually examining blood smears for parasite-infected red blood cells under the microscope by qualified technicians. This method is inefficient and the diagnosis depends on the experience and the knowledge of the person doing the examination. Automatic image recognition technologies based on machine learning have been applied to malaria blood smears for diagnosis before. However, the practical performance has not been sufficient so far. This study proposes a new and robust machine learning model based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically classify single cells in thin blood smears on standard microscope slides as either infected or uninfected. In a ten-fold cross-validation based on 27,578 single cell images, the average accuracy of our new 16-layer CNN model is 97.37%. A transfer learning model only achieves 91.99% on the same images. The CNN model shows superiority over the transfer learning model in all performance indicators such as sensitivity (96.99% vs 89.00%), specificity (97.75% vs 94.98%), precision (97.73% vs 95.12%), F1 score (97.36% vs 90.24%), and Matthews correlation coefficient (94.75% vs 85.25%).
Mothers Experiencing Homelessness: Social Exclusion, Resistance, and Health

ii CO-AUTHORSHIP STATEMENT . iv ACKNOWLEDGMENT.v TABLE OF CONTENTS . vii LIST OF APPENDICES . x CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTION . 1 Statement of Research Purpose . 2 Summary of Research Approach . 2 Positionality/Self Relexivity . 3 Background . 8 Homelessness in Canada: The Historical and Current Political Context . 8 Relevance . 17 Dissertation Overview . 18 References . 19 CHAPTER TWO – SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND HEALTH: DEVELOPMENT OF NURSING KNOWLEDGE.26 Introduction . 26 Conceptualization of Social Exclusion: Historical and Political Context . 27 Prevailing Perspectives and Conflicting Ideologies . 30 Research Exploring Social Exclusion and Health in Canada . 34 Toward Improvements in Social Exclusion Research in Canada . 36 Conceptualization of Social Exclusion for Nursing Knowledge . 38 Nursing Research Implications and Future Directions . 40 Concluding Comments.41 References . 42 CHAPTER THREE – LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH DESIGN . 47 Current Literature.47 Homelessness and Adverse Health Consequences . 47 Violence and Trauma: The Gendered Experience of Homelessness . 49 Unique Challenges for Mothers Experiencing Homelessness . 52 Strengths and Acts of Resistance . 55 Social Exclusion and Health . 59 Summary of the Literature . 59 Statement of Research Purpose . 60 Research Design: Methodologies and Methods . 61 Theoretical Perspective . 61 Methodologies.65 Table of
Enhancement of PCB degradation by Burkholderia xenovorans LB400 in biphasic systems by manipulating culture conditions

Two‐phase partitioning bioreactors (TPPBs) can be used to biodegrade environmental contaminants after their extraction from soil. TPPBs are typically stirred tank bioreactors containing an aqueous phase hosting the degrading microorganism and an immiscible, non‐toxic and non‐bioavailable organic phase functioning as a reservoir for hydrophobic compounds. Biodegradation of these compounds in the aqueous phase results in thermodynamic disequilibrium and partitioning of additional compounds from the organic phase into the aqueous phase. This self‐regulated process can allow the delivery of large amounts of hydrophobic substances to degrading microorganisms. This paper explores the reactor conditions under which the polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) degrader Burkholderia xenovorans LB400 can degrade significant amounts of the PCB mixture Aroclor® 1242. Aroclor® degradation was found to stall after approximately 40 h if no carbon source other than PCBs was available in the reactor. Sodium pyruvate was found to be a suitable carbon source to maintain microbial activity against PCBs and to function as a substrate for additional cell growth. Both biphenyl (while required during the inoculum preparation) and glucose had a negative effect during the Aroclor® degradation phase. Initial Aroclor® 1242 degradation rates in the presence of pyruvate were high (6.2 mg L−1 h−1) and 85% of an equivalent concentration of 100 mg Aroclor® 1242 per L aqueous phase could be degraded in 48 h, which suggest that solvent extraction of PCBs from soil followed by their biodegradation in TPPBs might be a feasible remediation option. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2008;99: 521–528. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Family Care of Adults With Intellectual Disabilities: Analysis of Finnish Policies and Practices

Previous research on family care has been criticized for taking the dependence of care recipients for granted. Furthermore, it has been argued that exploring the ways in which this dependence is socially created can benefit care recipients and carers alike. The author explores the ways in which current policies maintain the high prevalence of family care among adults with intellectual disabilities in Finland. A companion study analyzing the Finnish service system for people with intellectual disabilities explored its effects on the practice of family care through interviews of parents of adult children with disabilities. While the provision of community-based housing services has increased in the course of the deinstitutionalization process, it has not been provided adequate funding due to the political pressure to curb the cost of social welfare. Parents respond to these policies using two main strategies: family care and normalization. These strategies draw on different conceptions of parental responsibilities and persons with intellectual disabilities. Government cost containment policies maintain the practice of family care of adults with intellectual disabilities in direct and indirect ways. They restrict access to community-based housing services and by compromising quality, feed the view that the needs of adult children with intellectual disabilities are best met by their parents at home. These policies have implications for they raise concerns among persons with intellectual disabilities and their parents since they both restrict the possibilities of adult children to move away from home and compel parents to adopt long-term care responsibilities, often at great personal cost.
Clinical and pathological evidence for a frontal variant of Alzheimer disease.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the clinical and pathological features of a subgroup of patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) who exhibited early and disproportionately severe impairments on tests of frontal lobe functioning. We hypothesized that these patients would exhibit a greater degree of either neurofibrillary tangle (NFT) or senile plaque pathology in the frontal lobes than would patients with typical AD. DESIGN AND OUTCOME MEASURES We examined the neuropsychological profiles and senile plaque and NFT accumulation in the frontal, entorhinal, temporal, and parietal cortices in 3 patients with AD who exhibited disproportionate frontal impairments during early stages of dementia (frontal AD) and 3 matched patients with typical AD (typical AD). RESULTS Compared with the typical AD group, the frontal AD group performed significantly worse on 2 tests of frontal lobe functioning and on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised Block Design test. No significant group differences were found on other tests. Analysis of brain tissue samples demonstrated that, despite comparable entorhinal, temporal, and parietal NFT loads, the frontal AD group showed a significantly higher NFT load in the frontal cortex than the typical AD group. Senile plaque pathology in the frontal and entorhinal cortices did not differentiate the 2 groups. CONCLUSIONS We identified a subgroup of patients with pathologically confirmed AD who presented in the early stages of dementia with disproportionate impairments on tests of frontal lobe functioning and had a greater-than-expected degree of NFT pathology in the frontal lobes, suggesting the existence of a frontal variant of AD that has distinctive clinical and pathological features.