Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Undergraduate medical school education in substance misuse in Britain iii: can medical students drive change?

Background: Two previous studies have demonstrated the parlous state of undergraduate medical education. A third study was undertaken to evaluate any change. Methodology: All deans, heads of psychiatry and addiction specialists working in 28 British medical schools were surveyed by questionnaire. Items included time allocated to formal training, clinical resources, training objectives, professional confidence and competence, postgraduate facilities, plans for change, opinion on the importance of addiction in the curriculum, and scientific credibility. Findings: There was a 100%, 71% and 46% response rate from specialists, heads, and deans respectively. Medical students were receiving, on average, six hours of formal training in substance misuse over their entire course. Although there was disparity in responses between the three groups, there was a clear consensus that the addiction field had scientific credibility. However, this achievement has not been translated into more training, and there is pessimism about any likelihood of change. Discussion: Barriers to training such as too few addiction specialists, stigma, and tensions in academia resulting from the Research Assessment Exercise, are identified. Conclusion: Since the General Medical Council and the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy have explicitly stated the need for undergraduate training, ways in which medical students, as ‘users’ of the undergraduate training package, may be the drivers of change, are suggested.
Communitas and civitas: an idiographic model of consumer collectives

Variously called consumer collectives, subcultures of consumption, brand communities, consumer tribes and brand cults, consumer collectivism is a rising area of interest in scholarly and industry circles. This paper develops an idiographic conceptual model for consumer religiosity, specifically those who worship/consume in groups. Producers enjoy the positive market leverage consumer collectives can provide. Collectives develop, maintain and promulgate rituals, traditions, myths and consumption behaviours. These collectives recruit new users, provide peer support, reinforce the choice to consume the brand and promote the brand to outsiders. Some collectives produce and engage in product/brand-related events, festivals and promotions. Generally self-generating and self-sustaining, the collectives do so with little support from the producers (Belk & Tumbat, 2005; McAlexander, Schouten, & Koenig, 2002; Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001; Shanker, Cova, & Kozinets, 2007). The model's foundation derives from the work of the American philosopher James Carse. Carse explicates the relationship between churches and their congregations, with the intent of parsing religions from belief systems. The communitas/civitas model presented in this paper uses principles derived from his work. A postmodern worldview underpins the civitas/communitas model, accounting for the role of consumption as a means of identity formation and self-actualisation. The marketing-specific service-dominant logic paradigm strengthens the model by pinpointing value creation. The model describes marketing in a Carsean fashion, as an infinite game, and then expands on the interaction of the communitas (the collective) with the civitas (the producer), using principles derived from philosophy and religion. The model delineates the relationships between producers and consumer collectives, and draws parallels between consumer religiosity and spiritual religiosity. These parallels reveal a rich and deep understanding of how to manage and leverage these relationships.
Justice in and to the Environment: Ethical Uncertainties and Political Practices

As the world moves towards increasing rather than reducing inequality, the question of justice forces itself on to the political agenda. But that agenda is also shaped today by people's growing fears for the future of the planetary environment. In this paper we explore the connection between just distributions of environmental values—justice in the environment—and the just relationship between humanity and nature—justice to the environment. We discuss current uncertainties about ‘justice’ as an ethical category. We conclude that justice cannot be dispensed with. But, in the face of postmodernist critique of ‘totalising discourse’, how can universal principles be reasserted? There is a continuing and healthy debate about ‘human rights’ which is focused upon all human beings on the planet. The debate is about the principles which apply to this population, and not to any culturally circumscribed space. It is in this sense ‘universal’. Turning to the relationship between humanity and nature we ask whether an ethic of justice applies to this relationship. Early green utopias which suggest authoritarian solutions are rejected as politically unsustainable, but institutional forms based on an ecological rather than a purely anthropocentric perspective are required to ensure future survival. We conclude that, in the interests of justice, a global nexus of institutional forms is required which is capable of reconciling the universal with the particular and which embodies a recovery of the progressive elements in social and environmental discourse.
Using a Statistical Language Model to Improve the Performance of an HMM-Based Cursive Handwriting Recognition System

In this paper, a system for the reading of totally unconstrained handwritten text is presented. The kernel of the system is a hidden Markov model (HMM) for handwriting recognition. The HMM is enhanced by a statistical language model. Thus linguistic knowledge beyond the lexicon level is incorporated in the recognition process. Another novel feature of the system is that the HMM is applied in such a way that the difficult problem of segmenting a line of text into individual words is avoided. A number of experiments with various language models and large vocabularies have been conducted. The language models used in the system were also analytically compared based on their perplexity.
It, Gender, and Professional Practice: Or, Why an Automated Drug Distribution System Was Sent Back to the Manufacturer

Recent research has focused on how gender and computer technology contribute to the structuring of professional roles. A case study was carried out at a long-term care facility in Winnipeg, Canada, in which a nursing unit-based automated system had been installed to control the distribution of medication to patients. A questionnaire was distributed to all nursing staff, and detailed interviews were carried out with pharmacists and nursing administrators. It was found that gender and technological change did interact to produce an ambivalent impact on professional practice and identities. New clinical pharmacy positions were established; however, the pharmacy was split into clinical and deskilled data entry positions. Nurses hoped the new system would improve medication accuracy, but they resented features that controlled their time and their autonomy. Neither group accepted the new system as a boundary object effectively linking the nursing and pharmacy departments, and it eventually was returned to the manufacturer.
Perceptions of the Holocaust of Palestinian Young Adults, Citizens of Israel

A largely neglected area of study in the field of trauma and its effects is the way a collective trauma of a majority group influences a minority group that lives in the same region. Such an investigation is especially relevant within the context of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict concerning the Holocaust—the defining trauma of Jewish Israelis. This pilot study focused on the thoughts, feelings, and interpretations concerning the Holocaust of 56 young adults, Palestinian citizens in Israel. The semi-structured questionnaires and interviews demonstrate that the young adults express an inherent conflict when dealing with the Holocaust—one that emanates from the tension that exists between universalistic and particularistic interpretations of the Holocaust within the Palestinian narrative. At the universalistic end of the continuum, the Holocaust is acknowledged as a crime against humanity; whereas, at the particularistic end of the continuum, the Holocaust is interpreted through political lenses of the Isr.
The first observed stellar X-ray flare oscillation: Constraints on the flare loop length and the magnetic field

We present the first X-ray observation of an oscillation during a stellar flare. The flare occurred on the active M-type dwarf AT Mic and was observed with XMM-Newton. The soft X-ray light curve (0.2-12 keV) is investigated with wavelet analysis. The flare's extended, flat peak shows clear evidence for a damped oscillation with a period of around 750 s, an exponential damping time of around 2000 s, and an initial, relative peak-to-peak amplitude of around 15%. We suggest that the oscillation is a standing magneto-acoustic wave tied to the flare loop, and find that the most likely interpretation is a longitudinal, slow-mode wave, with a resulting loop length of (2.5 ± 0.2) × 10 10 cm. The local magnetic field strength is found to be 105 ± 50 G. These values are consistent with (oscillation-independent) flare cooling time models and pressure balance scaling laws. Such a flare oscillation provides an excellent opportunity to obtain coronal properties like the size of a flare loop or the local magnetic field strength for the otherwise spatially-unresolved star.
Thoracic Empyema: A 12-Year Study from a UK Tertiary Cardiothoracic Referral Centre

Background Empyema is an increasingly frequent clinical problem worldwide, and has substantial morbidity and mortality. Our objectives were to identify the clinical, surgical and microbiological features, and management outcomes, of empyema. Methods A retrospective observational study over 12 years (1999–2010) was carried out at The Heart Hospital, London, United Kingdom. Patients with empyema were identified by screening the hospital electronic ‘Clinical Data Repository’. Demographics, clinical and microbiological characteristics, underlying risk factors, peri-operative blood tests, treatment and outcomes were identified. Univariable and multivariable statistical analyses were performed. Results Patients (n = 406) were predominantly male (74.1%); median age = 53 years (IQR = 37–69). Most empyema were community-acquired (87.4%) and right-sided (57.4%). Microbiological diagnosis was obtained in 229 (56.4%) patients, and included streptococci (16.3%), staphylococci (15.5%), Gram-negative organisms (8.9%), anaerobes (5.7%), pseudomonads (4.4%) and mycobacteria (9.1%); 8.4% were polymicrobial. Most (68%) cases were managed by open thoracotomy and decortication. Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) reduced hospitalisation from 10 to seven days (P = 0.0005). All-cause complication rate was 25.1%, and 28 day mortality 5.7%. Predictors of early mortality included: older age (P = 0.006), major co-morbidity (P = 0.01), malnutrition (P = 0.001), elevated red cell distribution width (RDW, P<0.001) and serum alkaline phosphatase (P = 0.004), and reduced serum albumin (P = 0.01) and haemoglobin (P = 0.04). Conclusions Empyema remains an important cause of morbidity and hospital admissions. Microbiological diagnosis was only achieved in just over 50% of cases, and tuberculosis is a notable causative organism. Treatment of empyema with VATS may reduce duration of hospital stay. Raised RDW appears to associate with early mortality.
Robust Resource Allocation in Full-Duplex Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we study resource allocation for secondary users (SUs) in underlay full-duplex cognitive networks, where the channel state information of the links between SUs and primary users (PUs) is uncertain. To protect the transmission of the PUs from interference generated by the SUs, we utilize robust optimization theory to characterize the channel uncertainty and formulate a resource allocation problem by jointly optimizing sub-channel assignment, user pairing, and power allocation. By using the dual method, we decompose the original resource allocation problem into a primal problem and a dual problem. We adopt the concave-convex procedure to transform the primal problem into a tractable form through sequential convex approximations while we utilize the sub-gradient method to solve the dual problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.
Communication in Internet message boards

A quantitative analysis of usage in Computer-Mediated Conversation (CMC). While commentators as ‘early’ as 1984 were predicting that the “organizational, social, and personal effects of computers will be deeply felt”, they could only speculate on the strength of its impact. As this account was being written, at the end of 2001, the effects of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) were fast overtaking our poor ability to measure them. There are many ways to communicate through computers: Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and message boards, which allow users to discuss specific topics with each other. (The term CMC allows for the possibility that some methods of communication, e.g., “chat rooms”, will not meet the definition of ‘mail’. The most popular method of CMC is e-mail. For those who have internet access, CMC is often their preferred choice of indirect (i.e., non face-to-face) communication, thanks to its speed, efficiency, and flexibility. Perhaps for these reasons, e-mail has already overtaken the telephone as the primary means of business communication.
Extraction of Fetal Heart Rate and Fetal Heart Rate Variability from Mother's ECG Signal

This paper describes a new method for extracting the fetal heart rate (fHR) and the fetal heart rate variability (fHRV) signal non-invasively using abdominal maternal electrocardiogram (mECG) recordings. The extraction is based on the fundamental frequency (Fourier’s) theorem. The fundamental frequency of the mother’s electrocardiogram signal (fo-m) is calculated directly from the abdominal signal. The heart rate of the fetus is usually higher than that of the mother; as a result, the fundamental frequency of the fetal’s electrocardiogram signal (fo-f) is higher than that of the mother’s (fo-f > fo-m). Notch filters to suppress mother’s higher harmonics were designed; then a bandpass filter to target fo-f and reject fo-m is implemented. Although the bandpass filter will pass some other frequencies (harmonics), we have shown in this study that those harmonics are actually carried on fo-f, and thus have no impact on the evaluation of the beat-to-beat changes (RR intervals). The oscillations of the time-domain extracted signal represent the RR intervals. We have also shown in this study that zero-to-zero evaluation of the periods is more accurate than the peak-to-peak evaluation. This method is evaluated both on simulated signals and on different abdominal recordings obtained at different gestational ages. Keywords—Aabdominal ECG, fetal heart rate variability, frequency harmonics, and fundamental frequency.
Complex cadherin expression in human prostate cancer cells

Changes in cell‐cell interactions are critical in the process of cancer progression. Likewise, it has been shown that loss of expression of the cell adhesion molecule E‐cadherin is associated with grade, stage, and prognosis in many carcinomas, including prostate cancer. Impaired E‐cadherin‐mediated interactions result in an invasive phenotype; however, the mere loss of cell‐cell contact and communication is not the sole explanation for the observed correlation between loss of E‐cadherin‐mediated adhesion and poor clinical outcome. Using a degenerate cloning strategy for sequences that are highly conserved between the various cadherins, we found several other cadherins (N‐ and P‐cadherin and cadherin‐4, ‐6, and ‐11) to be expressed in human prostate cancer cells. Our data suggest that besides loss of E‐cadherin function, also (upregulation of) expression of other cadherins is involved in the acquisition of an invasive and/or metastatic phenotype. Especially, changes in the expression of N‐cadherin and cadherin‐11 may play an important role in prostate cancer progression. Int. J. Cancer 85:446–450, 2000. ©2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Democratic Transitions

Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, and Limongi (2000) challenge the key hypothesis in modernization theory: political regimes do not transition to democracy as per capita incomes rise, they argue. Rather, democratic transitions occur randomly, but once there, countries with higher levels of GDP per capita remain democratic. We retest the modernization hypothesis using new data, new techniques, and a three-way rather than dichotomous classification of regimes. Contrary to Przeworski et. al. (2000) we find that the modernization hypothesis stands up well. We also find that partial democracies emerge as among the most important and least understood regime types.
Parameters affecting pharyngeal response to genioglossus stimulation in sleep apnoea

Chronic stimulation of the hypoglossus nerve may provide a new treatment modality for obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). In previous studies we observed large differences in response to stimulation of the genioglossus (GG). We hypothesised that both individual patient characteristics and the area of the GG stimulated are responsible for these differences. In the present study, we compared the response to GG electrical stimulation at the anterior area (GGa-ES), which activates the whole GG and the posterior area (GGp-ES), which activates preferentially the longitudinal fibres. Studies were performed in 14 propofol-sedated OSA patients. The parameters evaluated included cephalometry, pressure–flow relationship and pharyngeal shape and compliance assessed by pharyngoscopy. Compared with GGa-ES, GGp-ES resulted in significantly larger decreases in the critical value of end-expiratory pressure (Pcrit) (from 3.8±2.2 to 2.9±3.3 and -2.0±3.9 cmH2O, respectively (p<0.001)). Both tongue size and velopharyngeal shape (anteroposterior to lateral ratio) correlated significantly with the decrease in Pcrit during GGp-ES (R = 0.53 and -0.66, respectively; p<0.05). In the patients with the larger tongue size (n = 7), the decrease in Pcrit reached 8.0±2.2 cmH2O during GGp-ES. We conclude that directing stimulation to longitudinal fibres of the GG improves the flow-mechanical effect. In addition, patients with large tongues and narrow pharynx tend to respond better to GGp-ES.
Adaptive cyber-physical systems with interpreted operating system kernels

In the new era of cyber-physical systems, software must adapt itself to ever-changing environmental conditions and situations. This is currently not reflected in the design of embedded operating systems, since they are primarily optimized for fixed usage scenarios with tight resource constraints. We discuss the idea of interpreted operating system kernels, which can form a new foundation for highly reconfigurable embedded systems. The paper elaborates reasonable use cases, shows comparable approaches from the past and sketches an implementation strategy that is based on a bare-metal Python interpreter.
Being Concerned With Well-Being and With Learning

The cognitive system is designed for knowledge and skill acquisition, but, as several researchers have pointed out, learning is also facilitated or hampered by emotions, moods, and feelings. Emotions are stored in memory along with declarative and procedural knowledge, and this information may be used as a gross discriminator to identify quickly problematic and nonproblematic situations. As such, emotions can be seen as action readiness changes that are linked to current concerns. They remind the person of past problematic or nonproblematic situations. When negative emotions create a pessimistic perceptual attitude, they may draw the learner's attention to task-irrelevant aspects that activate intrusive thoughts and create a concern for well-being rather than for learning. An optimistic perceptual attitude may lead to short-term learning intentions and to activity in the mastery mode.
EPS-SJ Exopolisaccharide Produced by the Strain Lactobacillus paracasei subsp. paracasei BGSJ2-8 Is Involved in Adhesion to Epithelial Intestinal Cells and Decrease on E. coli Association to Caco-2 Cells

The aim of this study was to determine the role of an exopolysaccharide produced by natural dairy isolate Lactobacillus paracasei subsp. paracasei BGSJ2-8, in the adhesion to intestinal epithelial cells and a decrease in Escherichia coli’s association with Caco-2 cells. Annotation of the BGSJ2-8 genome showed the presence of a gene cluster, epsSJ, which encodes the biosynthesis of the strain-specific exopolysaccharide EPS-SJ, detected as two fractions (P1 and P2) by size exclusion chromatography (SEC) coupled with multi-angle laser light scattering (MALLS) detection. SEC-MALLS analysis revealed that an EPS-SJ- mutant (EPS7, obtained by insertion mutagenesis of the glps_2198 gene encoding primary glycosyltransferase) does not produce the P2 fraction of EPS-SJ. Transmission electron microscopy showed that EPS7 mutant has a thinner cell wall compared to the EPS-SJ+ strain BGSJ2-83 (a plasmid free-derivative of BGSJ2-8). Interestingly, strain BGSJ2-83 showed higher adhesion to Caco-2 epithelial intestinal cell line than the EPS7 mutant. Accordingly, BGSJ2-83 effectively reduced E. coli ATCC25922’s association with Caco-2 cells, while EPS7 did not show statistically significant differences. In addition, the effect of EPS-SJ on the proliferation of lymphocytes in gastrointestinal associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) was tested and the results showed that the reduction of GALT lymphocyte proliferation was higher by BGSJ2-83 than by the mutant. To the best of our knowledge this is the first report indicating that the presence of EPS (EPS-SJ) on the surface of lactobacilli can improve communication between bacteria and intestinal epithelium, implying its possible role in gut colonization.
Language Acquisition and Gender for Limited-LanguageProficient Mexican Americans in a Maintenance Bilingual Program

The major purpose of this dual-focused study was to determine the long-term effect of a maintenance bilingual education (MBE) program (K-2) on the acquisition of English (L2) and/or Spanish (L1)forfour groups of native Spanish-speaking boys and girls with varying degrees of Spanish oral proficiency who were all limited English proficient (LEP). The first part of the study examined the acquisition of English oral language proficiency forfluent Spanish-speaking boys (n = 65) and girls (n = 46), as well asfor limited-Spanish-proficient boys (n = 102) and girls (n = 85). The second part further examined the limited-Spanish-proficient subjects by gender for their acquisition of English and Spanish. These two groups were the most-limited language proficient (boys n = 45, girls n = 32) and the very-limited language proficient (boys n = 60, girls n = 53) students. The most significant overall findings emerging from this study related to the additive effects that the MBE program fostered for boys' and girls' oral English and/or Spanish.