Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Forgiving, fast and slow: validity of the implicit association test for predicting differential response latencies in a transgression-recall paradigm

This study examined the role of automaticity in forgiving a real-life offense. As an alternative to self-report, an Implicit Association Test (IAT) of forgiveness was developed. Implicit (IAT-measured) and explicit (self-reported) forgiveness predicted shorter response times of state forgiveness ratings. The forgiveness IAT was highly reliable, moderately stable over time, and demonstrated incremental validity. Results suggest that the newly introduced forgiveness IAT could advance personality research beyond what is known from self-report measures, further corroborating the notion of implicit forgiveness. Implications for personality assessment are discussed.
Evaluation of community eye outreach programs for early glaucoma detection in Nigeria

Purpose To evaluate the relevance of community eye outreach programs in the early detection of glaucoma patients in southwest Nigeria. Methods This was a retrospective, cross-sectional study that was conducted among glaucoma patients referred to the eye clinic of the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Nigeria, between January 2009 and December 2010 from different sources, including community eye outreach programs. The source of referral, stage of glaucoma, and visual field were recorded. Results Six hundred and fifty-three patients were studied during this period. The mean age was 56.3 years ± 16.6 years, with a median age of 60 years. Patients referred from eye outreach programs were more likely to have mild to moderate disease than patients referred from other sources, who were more likely to have severe disease according to both the optic nerve head assessment (P < 0.01, Pearson’s Chi-square = 10.67, odds ratio = 1.7 [confidence interval = 1.23–2.31]) and visual field assessment (24–2) (P < 0.01, Pearson’s Chi-square = 6.07, odds ratio = 1.5 [confidence interval = 1.08–2.03]). Conclusion Community eye outreach programs appear highly useful in the earlier detection of glaucoma in sub-Saharan Africa.
ON THE IDENTIFICATION OF A LOGICAL INCONSISTENCY IN THE GENERAL THEORY OF CRIME

ABSTRACT Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime is widely tested and commented upon and just as widely misapprehended. Criminologists have paid insufficient attention to the implications of the theory's rootedness in classical criminological and rational choice principles and its steadfast rejection of positivism. As a result, much of the beauty of the theory remains unappreciated. A more serious consequence is that criminologists have overlooked what careful attention to the classical and rational choice underpinnings of the theory discloses: the logical inconsistency of two fundamental claims made by Gottfiredson and Hirschi. This paper shows that on pain of logical inconsistency one cannot simultaneously assert, as Gottfredson and Hirschi wish to do, that rational judgment is the ultimate causal determinant of behavior and that variation in parental management practices explains variation in self-control. The proof consists of a demonstration that parental management practices can explain variation in self-control only if rational judgment is not, contrary to what Gottfredson and Hirschi assert, the ultimate causal determinant of behavior. Subsequent to presentation of the proof, implications are discussed, and the logical form of an alternative account of self-control suggested by the manner of resolution of the contradiction is offered.
Long-term effects of local pretreatment with alendronate on healing of replanted rat teeth.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Our previous study showed that topical alendronate, an inhibitor of bone resorption, reduces root resorption and ankylosis for 21 d after replantation of rat teeth. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the long-term inhibitory effects of topical alendronate in the replanted teeth. MATERIAL AND METHODS The rat maxillary first molars were extracted, placed in saline containing 1 mm alendronate (alendronate group) or saline (saline group) for 5 min and then replanted. The maxillae were dissected at 60 and 120 d. Microcomputed tomography horizontal sections at three root levels were analyzed for root and bone resorption, ankylosis and pulp mineralization. RESULTS In the alendronate group at 60 and 120 d, the frequencies of resorption of roots and bone were lower than those in the saline group. The p values show statistical significances of lower frequencies in the alendronate group than in the saline group by chi-square test (see Table 1). Ankylosis and pulp mineralization occurred in the alendronate and saline groups. Bone marrow spaces were narrowed in conjunction with bone tissue expansion around the replanted teeth in the alendronate group. CONCLUSION The inhibitory effects of topical alendronate were retained on root and bone resorption, but not on ankylosis and pulp mineralization, in the replanted teeth for 4 mo. Alendronate might also stimulate bone formation around the rat replanted teeth.
Polymyxin Combinations: Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics for Rationale Use

Since their reintroduction into the clinic in the 1980s, the polymyxin antibiotics colistin—administered intravenously as an inactive prodrug, colistin methanesulfonate (CMS)—and polymyxin B have assumed an important role as salvage therapy for otherwise untreatable gram‐negative infections. However, the emerging pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic data on CMS/colistin and polymyxin B indicate that polymyxin monotherapy is unlikely to generate plasma concentrations that are reliably efficacious. Additionally, regrowth and the emergence of resistance with monotherapy are commonly reported even when concentrations exceed those achieved clinically. Given this situation, polymyxin combination therapy, which is increasingly being used clinically, has been suggested as a possible means of increasing antimicrobial activity and reducing the development of resistance. Although considerable in vitro data support this view, investigations of polymyxin combination therapy in patients have only recently commenced. The currently available clinical data for polymyxin combinations are generally limited to retrospective analyses and small, low‐powered, prospective studies using traditional dosage regimens that achieve low plasma concentrations. Considering the potential for rapid development of resistance to polymyxins, well‐designed clinical trials that include higher‐dose polymyxin regimens are urgently required to provide a more definitive answer regarding the role of polymyxin combination therapy compared with monotherapy. In this article, we provide an overview of key in vitro and clinical investigations examining CMS/colistin and polymyxin B combination therapy.
Cysteine Residues in the Transmembrane (TM) 9 to TM11 Region of the Human Equilibrative Nucleoside Transporter Subtype 1 Play an Important Role in Inhibitor Binding and Translocation Function

Inhibitor and substrate interactions with equilibrative nucleoside transporter 1 (ENT1; SLC29A1) are known to be affected by cysteine-modifying reagents. A previous study from our laboratory established Cys222 in transmembrane (TM) 6 as the residue responsible for methyl methanethiosulfonate (a membrane-permeable sulfhydryl modifier)-mediated enhancement of the binding of the ENT1 inhibitor nitrobenzylmercaptopurine riboside (NBMPR) in intact cells. However, the capacity of charged sulfhydryl reagents to inhibit the binding of NBMPR in broken cell preparations (allowing cytoplasmic access) was not affected by mutation of any of the cysteines (Cys87, 193, 213, or 222) in the N-terminal half of the protein. We thus hypothesized that the inhibitory effects of the modifiers were due to the one or more of the six cysteine residues in the C-terminal half of ENT1, particularly one or both of those in the fifth intracellular loop (Cys414 and Cys416). Each of the cysteines were mutated to serine or alanine and expressed in nucleoside transport-deficient PK15 cells and probed with a series of methanethiosulfonate sulfhydryl-modifying reagents. Transporter function was assessed by the site-specific binding of [3H]NBMPR and the cellular uptake of [3H]2-chloroadenosine. These studies established that Cys378 is an extracellular-located residue modified by [2-(trimethylammonium)ethyl] methane-thiosulfonate (MTSET) to inhibit the binding of NBMPR to intact cells. Mutation of Cys414 led to an enhancement of the ability of MTSET to inhibit NBMPR binding, and this enhancement was eliminated by the comutation of Cys378, indicating that disruption of the fifth intracellular loop modifies the conformation of TM10 and its extracellular extension. Mutation of Cys416 led to the loss of the ability of the charged sulfhydryl reagents to inhibit NBMPR binding in isolated membranes and also led to the loss of transport function. This finding further supports an allosteric interaction between the fifth intracellular loop and the extracellular NBMPR binding domain and implicates this region in the translocation function of human ENT1.
An Inverse Initial Boundary Value Problem for the Wave Equation in the Presence of Imperfections of Small Volume

We consider for the wave equation the inverse problem of identifying locations and certain properties of the shapes of small conductivity inhomogeneities in a homogeneous background medium from dynamic boundary measurements on part of the boundary and for a finite interval in time. Using as weights particular background solutions constructed by a geometrical control method, we develop an asymptotic method based on appropriate averaging of the partial dynamic boundary measurements. Our approach is expected to lead to very effective computational identification algorithms.
Fostering professionalism through scaffolding in first year clinical placements

A crucial aspect of the teaching of professionalism relates to the provision of learning experiences that will promote the achievement of this affective learning domain. The development and trial of a learning opportunity to scaffold learning concepts of professionalism is described in this paper. Peer reviewed literature was used to construct a survey, administered to students (n=79). The scenarios for which there was student disagreement, or for which there was disagreement with literature provided a basis for tutorial discussions. Students attended a short clinical placement; subsequent post placement survey completion (n=35) focussed tutorial discussions on compilation of students’ own understandings of professional behaviours. The scenarios developed could be used for other health sciences students; the approach is a model for affective domain learning in all professions.
Variations in serum sphingolipid levels associate with liver fibrosis progression and poor treatment outcome in hepatitis C virus but not hepatitis B virus infection

Ablation of very‐long‐chain ceramides (Cers) with consecutive elevations in sphinganine levels has been shown to cause a severe hepatopathy in a knockout mouse model. We have recently shown that serum sphingolipids (SLs) are deregulated in patients with chronic liver disease. However, their role as possible biomarkers in liver fibrosis remains to date unexplored. We assessed, using liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry, serum concentrations of various SL metabolites in 406 patients with chronic viral hepatitis, 203 infected with genotype 1 hepatitis C virus (HCV) and 203 with hepatitis B virus (HBV), respectively. We observed significant variations of serum SLs, with sphingosine and sphinganine being, both in univariate (P < 0.05) as well as in multivariate analysis, significantly associated to severity of liver fibrosis in HCV‐infected patients (odds ratio [OR]: 1.111; confidence interval [CI]: 1.028‐1.202; P = 0.007 and OR, 0.634; CI, 0.435‐0.925; P = 0.018, respectively). Serum SLs correlated significantly with serum triglyceride and cholesterol levels as well as with insulin resistance, defined by the homeostatic model assessment index, in HCV patients. Sustained viral response rates in HCV patients were independently predicted by serum C24Cer (OR, 0.998; CI, 0.997‐0.999; P = 0.001), its unsaturated derivative C24:1Cer (OR, 1.001; CI, 1.000‐1.002; P = 0.059), and C18:1Cer (OR, 0.973; CI, 0.947‐0.999; P = 0.048), together with ferritin (OR, 1.006; CI, 1.003‐1.010; P < 0.001), alkaline phosphatase (OR, 1.020; CI, 1.001‐1.039; P = 0.032), and interleukin‐28B genotype (OR, 9.483; CI, 3.139‐28.643; P < 0.001). Conclusion: Our study demonstrates a tight interaction between variations in serum SL levels and progression of liver fibrosis as well as responsiveness to antiviral therapy. Particularly, sphingosine, sphinganine, and C24Cer appear as promising novel biomarkers in chronic HCV infection and should be further evaluated within the noninvasive prediction of liver fibrosis. (Hepatology 2015;61:812–822)
Voice onset time in bilingual German-Spanish children

This study examines the acquisition of the voicing contrast in German-Spanish bilingual children, on the basis of the acoustic measurement of Voice Onset Time (VOT). VOT in four bilingual children (aged 2;0–3;0) was measured and compared to VOT in three monolingual German children (aged 1;9–2;6), and to previous literature findings in Spanish. All measurements were based on word-initial stops extracted from naturalistic speech recordings. Results revealed that the bilingual children displayed three different patterns of VOT development: 1. Delay in the phonetic realization of voicing: two bilingual children did not acquire long lag stops in German during the testing period; 2. Transfer of voicing features: one child produced German voiced stops with lead voicing and Spanish voiceless stops with long lag voicing; and 3. No cross-language influence in the phonetic realization of voicing. The relevance of the findings for cross-linguistic interaction in bilingual phonetic/phonological development is discussed.
A Unified Framework for Creating Domain Dependent Polarity Lexicons from User Generated Reviews

The exponential increase in the explosion of Web-based user generated reviews has resulted in the emergence of Opinion Mining (OM) applications for analyzing the users’ opinions toward products, services, and policies. The polarity lexicons often play a pivotal role in the OM, indicating the positivity and negativity of a term along with the numeric score. However, the commonly available domain independent lexicons are not an optimal choice for all of the domains within the OM applications. The aforementioned is due to the fact that the polarity of a term changes from one domain to other and such lexicons do not contain the correct polarity of a term for every domain. In this work, we focus on the problem of adapting a domain dependent polarity lexicon from set of labeled user reviews and domain independent lexicon to propose a unified learning framework based on the information theory concepts that can assign the terms with correct polarity (+ive, -ive) scores. The benchmarking on three datasets (car, hotel, and drug reviews) shows that our approach improves the performance of the polarity classification by achieving higher accuracy. Moreover, using the derived domain dependent lexicon changed the polarity of terms, and the experimental results show that our approach is more effective than the base line methods.
Multidrug Resistance of Acinetobacter Baumannii in Ladoke Akintola University Teaching Hospital, Osogbo, Nigeria

Acinetobacter baumannii is a ubiquitous pathogen that has emerged as a major cause of healthcare-associated infections at Ladoke Akintola University Teaching Hospital. Isolates were assayed according to standard protocol. The isolates were subjected to molecular techniques to detect blaOXA, blaTEM, blaCTX-M, and blaSHV genes in strains of the A. baumannii isolates. The prevalence of A. baumannii was 8.5% and was most prevalent among patients in the age group 51–60 (36%); the male patients (63.6%) were more infected than their female counterparts. Patients (72.7%) in the intensive care unit (ICU) were most infected with this organism. The isolates showed 100% resistance to both amikacin and ciprofloxacin and 90.9% to both ceftriaxone and ceftazidime, while resistance to the other antibiotics used in this study were: piperacillin (81.8%), imipenem (72.7%), gentamycin (72.2%), and meropenem (63.6%). None of the isolates was, however, resistant to colistin. PCR results showed that blaOXA, blaTEM, and blaCTX-M genes were positive in some isolates, while blaSHV was not detected in any of the isolates. This study has revealed that the strains of A. baumannii isolated are multiple drug resistant. Regular monitoring, judicious prescription, and early detection of resistance to these antibiotics are, therefore, necessary to check further dissemination of the organism.
Stress ulcer prophylaxis in critically ill patients: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Critically ill patients especially who require mechanical ventilation or have coagulopathy are at increased risk for stress-related gastrointestinal hemorrhage. There are conflicting data on the efficacy and complication rates of various prophylactic regimens. METHODOLOGY Our single-center randomized, placebo-controlled study included 287 patients with high risk for stress-related upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage (>48 h mechanical ventilation, coagulopathy). We compared 3 prophylactic regimens (proton pump inhibitor--omeprazole 40 mg i.v. once daily, n=72; H2 antagonists--famotidine 40 mg twice a day, n=71; and sucralfate 1 g every 6 hours, n=69) with placebo (n=75) in patients with trauma or after major surgery. RESULTS Of 287 assessable patients, clinically significant stress-related upper gastrointestinal bleeding was observed in 1%, 3%, 4%, and 1% of patients assigned to receive omeprazole, famotidine, sucralfate, and placebo, respectively (p>0.28). Bleeding developed significantly more often in patients with coagulopathy compared with the others (10% vs. 2%; p=0.006). The gastric pH (p>0.001) and gastric colonization (p<0.05) was significantly higher in the patients who received pH increasing substances when compared with the other 2 groups. Nosocomial pneumonia occurred in 11% of patients receiving omeprazole, in 10% of famotidine patients, in 9% of sucralfate patients and in 7% of controls (p>0.34). No statistically significant differences were found for days on ventilator, length of ICU stay, or mortality among all the 4 groups. CONCLUSIONS We could not show that omeprazole, famotidine, or sucralfate prophylaxis can affect already very low incidence of clinically important stress-related bleeding in high-risk surgical intensive care unit patients. Furthermore, our data suggested that especially gastric pH increasing medication could increase the risk for nosocomial pneumonia. Routine prophylaxis for stress-related bleeding even in high-risk patients seems not to be justified.
Assessment of driver's seating discomfort using interface pressure distribution

Pressure distribution at the driver-seat interface has been regarded as an objective measure having a clear association with subjective ratings, yet existing evidence regarding its efficacy is unclear. This study examined associations between driver's seating discomfort and kinds of pressure distribution variables considering driver's behaviours showing discomfort - changing seating postures and moving frequently. This requires quantitative and dynamic analyses of body pressure distribution. To investigate the relationship of pressure data with driver's postural changes, eight subjects performed a simulated driving task for 100 min in a driving simulator. The driving postures and body-seat interface pressure were measured continuously, and the subjective ratings were surveyed at the prescribed interval. In this study, two kinds of body pressure distribution variables were proposed as components of a discomfort assessment framework, and the relationship between these pressure variables with subjective ratings were analyzed. The close correlations between the pressure ratio variables and subjective ratings supported the possibility of using pressure data as a tool for the assessment of driver discomfort. It was also found that the change of load center position represented the change of driver's postures and might be a good indicator for discomfort prediction.
Late referrals to home palliative care service affecting death at home in advanced cancer patients in Japan: a nationwide survey.

BACKGROUND To identify factors influencing place of death among home palliative care patients with advanced cancer, focusing on the timing of referrals from hospital to home care settings. METHODS A cross-sectional nationwide questionnaire survey was conducted on home palliative care patients at 1000 randomly selected home care agencies in Japan. A total of 568 responses were analyzed (effective response rate, 69%). RESULTS Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that (i) predischarge health care supports in hospital (e.g. early referral 8 days or more before discharge; clear explanation by hospital staffs to patients and families regarding discharge to live and die at home) and (ii) postdischarge health care supports after transferring home care (e.g. signing a 24-h support insurance contract of network between primary physician and nurse as a home palliative care team; primary nurse consultation with primary physician >3 times during the first week after discharge) have an effect on place of death among home palliative care patients. CONCLUSION An early and carefully coordinated referral support system for smooth discharge by hospital staffs as well as intensive and highly qualified support just after discharge by the home care team would help to increase the number of patients who could die at home.
Lactic Acidosis: From Sour Milk to Septic Shock

Lactic acidosis is frequently encountered in the intensive care unit. It occurs when there is an imbalance between production and clearance of lactate. Although lactic acidosis is often associated with a high anion gap and is generally defined as a lactate level >5 mmol/L and a serum pH <7.35, the presence of hypoalbuminemia may mask the anion gap and concomitant alkalosis may raise the pH. The causes of lactic acidosis are traditionally divided into impaired tissue oxygenation (Type A) and disorders in which tissue oxygenation is maintained (Type B). Lactate level is often used as a prognostic indicator and may be predictive of a favorable outcome if it normalizes within 48 hours. The routine measurement of serum lactate, however, should not determine therapeutic interventions. Unfortunately, treatment options remain limited and should be aimed at discontinuation of any offending drugs, treatment of the underlying pathology, and maintenance of organ perfusion. The mainstay of therapy of lactic acidosis remains prevention.