Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic alcohol problems among suicide attempters – post-mortem findings of a 14-year follow-up

This study set out to describe the clinical characteristics of a subgroup of suicide attempters with clear post-mortem evidence of long-term alcohol misuse, and to investigate the risk factors predicting chronic alcohol misuse/dependence using survival analysis. Data were collected over 14 years on all unselected deliberate self-poisoning patients (n=1018) treated in the emergency unit of Helsinki University Central Hospital. Of the 222 (22.7%) who had died by the end of the follow-up period, 85 (38.5%) showed clear post-mortem evidence of long-term alcohol misuse. Seventy-four per cent of misusers were men. The risk factors for chronic alcohol misuse/dependence among deceased suicide attempters were: male sex, numerous previous suicide attempts, non-impulsive suicide attempts, certain intention to die and subjective motive of the index attempt other than “wish to die”. The findings emphasize that more attention should be focused on evaluating alcohol use and the risk of alcohol dependence in suicide attempters encountered in the emergency room of general hospitals.
Metas sociales, necesidades psicológicas básicas y motivación intrínseca como predictores de la percepción del esfuerzo en las clases de educación física

The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive power of social goals, basic psychological needs and intrinsic motivation on the perception of effort. A sample of 558 students, 297 girls and 261 boys, aged between 12 and 16 years, participated in the study. The students completed the Spanish versions of the Social Goal Scale-Physical Education (SGS-PE), the Basic Psychological Needs in Exercise Scale (BPNES) adapted to physical education, the intrinsic motivation subscale of the Perceived Locus of Causality Scale (PLOC) and the effort subscale of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI). Multiple linear regression showed that social responsibility goals, perception of competence and autonomy positively predicted effort in physical education classes. These results show the importance for teachers to use strategies that promote responsibility, perception of competence and autonomy of the pupil, in order to achieve improvements in the effort made by pupils in physical education classes.
Formative self-assessment using multiple true-false questions on the Internet: feedback according to confidence about correct knowledge

In undergraduate clinical courses, students are often dispersed over several teaching sites. Traditional curricula do not have mechanisms that allow monitoring of an individual student's educational progress or that of a small group of students at a teaching site relative to that of the whole group. To address these issues, we have developed a web-based formative assessment system that consists of knowledge tests based on multiple true-false questions. During the test, in addition to marking true or false against each question, students indicate their level of confidence (doubt or certainty) about each answer. The feedback consists of whether the answer is correct or incorrect and the confidence with which the student had responded. Feedback to students assesses their own performance in relation to that of their peers. Feedback to tutors provides anonymized information about the level of achievement of students at their teaching site relative to that of students at other sites. This systems has the tools that students can use to direct their learning and tutors can use to tailor their teaching in the light of the instantaneously available comparative feedback.
CLIPS: Customized Levels of IoT Privacy and Security

—Internet of Things (IoT) refers to systems that can be attached to the Internet and thus can be accessed and controlled remotely. Such devices are essential for creating ”smart things” like smart homes, smart grids, etc. IoT has achieved unprecedented success. It offers an interconnected network where devices (in the consumer space) can all communicate with each other. However, many IoT devices only add security features as an afterthought. This has been a contributing factor in many of the recently reported attacks and warnings of potential attacks such as those aimed at gaining control of autonomous cars. Many IoT devices are compact and feature limited computing resources, which often limits their ability to perform complex operations such as encryption or other security and privacy checks. With capabilities of devices in IoT varying greatly, a one-size-ﬁts-all approach to security can prove to be inadequate. We ﬁrmly believe that safety and privacy should both be easy to use, present little inconvenience for users of non-critical systems, yet be as strong as possible to minimize breaches in critical systems. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture that caters to device-speciﬁc security policies in IoT environments with varying levels of functionalities and criticality of services they offer. This would ensure that the best possible security proﬁles for IoT are enforced. We use a smart home environment to illustrate the architecture.
Bilateral Simultaneous Total Knee Arthroplasty: A Patient-Matched Retrospective Observational Study

Bilateral total knee arthroplasty can be performed either as a staged or simultaneous procedure. We conducted a retrospective comparative study to compare the need for transfusion, the length of procedure, the length of stay, and complications of bilateral simultaneous knee arthroplasty with those of unilateral knee arthroplasty. Sixty-nine patients who underwent bilateral simultaneous knee arthroplasty procedures were compared with a matched control group of 69 patients who underwent unilateral knee arthroplasty. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve was used to determine optimum cut-off values. Both groups of patients had a similar age and gender distribution, preoperative haemoglobin and ASA scores. Cumulative transfusion episodes were lower in the bilateral group than twice that of the unilateral group. In multivariate analysis the preoperative haemoglobin level and bilateral procedures were independent factors predicting the need for transfusion. The average length of procedure and length of hospital stay in the bilateral group was less than twice than that of the unilateral group. Advanced age and bilateral procedures were independent predictors of prolonged length of stay. A haemoglobin level of 12.5 g/dL and age of 70 were most suitable cut-off points to predict need for transfusion and occurrence of medical complications respectively. We conclude that bilateral simultaneous knee arthroplasties are safe and cost effective in appropriately selected patients. We recommend avoiding bilateral simultaneous procedures in patients over the age of 70 years and with significant comorbidities.
Text Tiling: Segmenting Text into Multi-paragraph Subtopic Passages

TextTiling is a technique for subdividing texts into multi-paragraph units that represent passages, or subtopics. The discourse cues for identifying major subtopic shifts are patterns of lexical co-occurrence and distribution. The algorithm is fully implemented and is shown to produce segmentation that corresponds well to human judgments of the subtopic boundaries of 12 texts. Multi-paragraph subtopic segmentation should be useful for many text analysis tasks, including information retrieval and summarization.
Modulation of cerebral GABA by topiramate, lamotrigine, and gabapentin in healthy adults

BackgroundAnticonvulsant drugs have multiple mechanisms of action. Recent in vivo MRS studies suggest that cerebral &ggr;-aminobutyric acid (GABA) increases occur with the administration of certain anticonvulsants in humans. ObjectiveTo investigate the effect of topiramate, gabapentin, and lamotrigine on cerebral GABA concentrations in healthy volunteers and correlate the GABA concentrations with serum drug levels. MethodsSeventeen healthy adults were randomly assigned to receive topiramate, gabapentin, and lamotrigine and underwent GABA measurements using a 4.1-T magnet from a 13.5-mL volume over the occipital region. GABA concentrations and serum levels were measured at 3 and 6 hours following administration of an acute single dose of one of the drugs. Thereafter, drugs were titrated over 4 weeks to target doses, with GABA measurements performed at 2 and 4 weeks. ResultsCerebral GABA concentrations rose 70% in the acute phase compared with baseline for topiramate. GABA rose 48% at 6 hours with gabapentin but not with lamotrigine. With long-term dosing and once target doses were achieved at 4 weeks, significant elevations in GABA were observed compared with baseline for all three drugs (topiramate 46%, gabapentin 25%, lamotrigine 25%). ConclusionThis study demonstrates that single doses of topiramate and gabapentin increase cerebral GABA concentrations acutely (hours) in healthy individuals, but all drugs at clinically utilized doses increase cerebral GABA at 4 weeks. These results suggest that the mechanisms of action of anticonvulsant drugs are more complex and are likely to be multiple in nature.
Evidence-based practice, response to intervention, and the prevention of reading difficulties.

PURPOSE This article provides an evidence-based perspective on what school communities can do to lower the prevalence of reading difficulties among their pupils through preventive interventions. It also delineates the roles that speech-language pathologists (SLPs) might play in these interventions. METHOD This article is organized to first provide a broad overview of current directions in research, practice, and policy in educational interventions, with an emphasis on how the three are increasingly integrated to respond to evidence showing that American school children are underperforming in reading. Next, the concept of response to intervention (RTI) is described. RTI is an educational policy and practice that is grounded in the accumulated literature that focuses on how schools might better organize themselves to deliver multitiered reading interventions to reduce children's risk for reading disability. Last, this article provides three organizational principles that school-based professionals, including SLPs, might follow to deliver RTI interventions. IMPLICATIONS This article provides an important and timely description of key concepts in the prevention of reading difficulties through proactive multitiered interventions. SLPs can draw on the suggestions presented here to inform their local efforts in implementing preventive literacy programs that are consistent with an RTI paradigm.
Mitigating Prefetcher-Caused Pollution Using Informed Caching Policies for Prefetched Blocks

Many modern high-performance processors prefetch blocks into the on-chip cache. Prefetched blocks can potentially pollute the cache by evicting more useful blocks. In this work, we observe that both accurate and inaccurate prefetches lead to cache pollution, and propose a comprehensive mechanism to mitigate prefetcher-caused cache pollution. First, we observe that over 95% of useful prefetches in a wide variety of applications are not reused after the first demand hit (in secondary caches). Based on this observation, our first mechanism simply demotes a prefetched block to the lowest priority on a demand hit. Second, to address pollution caused by inaccurate prefetches, we propose a self-tuning prefetch accuracy predictor to predict if a prefetch is accurate or inaccurate. Only predicted-accurate prefetches are inserted into the cache with a high priority. Evaluations show that our final mechanism, which combines these two ideas, significantly improves performance compared to both the baseline LRU policy and two state-of-the-art approaches to mitigating prefetcher-caused cache pollution (up to 49%, and 6% on average for 157 two-core multiprogrammed workloads). The performance improvement is consistent across a wide variety of system configurations.
International Journal of Health Geographics Open Access Research a Modified Version of Moran's I

Background: Investigation of global clustering patterns across regions is very important in spatial data analysis. Moran's I is a widely used spatial statistic for detecting global spatial patterns such as an east-west trend or an unusually large cluster. Here, we intend to improve Moran's I for evaluating global clustering patterns by including the weight function in the variance, introducing a population density (PD) weight function in the statistics, and conducting Monte Carlo simulation for testing. We compare our modified Moran's I with Oden's I* pop for simulated data with homogeneous populations. The proposed method is applied to a census tract data set. Methods: We present a modified version of Moran's I which includes information about the strength of the neighboring association when estimating the variance for the statistic. We provide a power analysis on Moran's I, a modified version of Moran's I, and I* pop in a simulation study. Data were simulated under two common spatial correlation scenarios of local and global clustering. Results: For simulated data with a large cluster pattern, the modified Moran's I has the highest power (43.4%) compared to Moran's I (39.9%) and I* pop (12.4%) when the adjacent weight function is used with 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, or 30% of the total population as the geographic range for the cluster. For two global clustering patterns, the modified Moran's I (power > 25.3%) performed better than both Moran's I (> 24.6%) and I* pop (> 7.9%) with the adjacent weight function. With the population density weight function, all methods performed equally well. In the real data example, all statistics indicate the existence of a global clustering pattern in a leukemia data set. The modified Moran's I has the lowest p-value (.0014) followed by Moran's I (.0156) and I* pop (.011). Conclusions: Our power analysis and simulation study show that the modified Moran's I achieved higher power than Moran's I and I* pop for evaluating global and local clustering patterns on geographic data with homogeneous populations. The inclusion of the PD weight function which in turn redefines the neighbors seems to have a large impact on the power of detecting global clustering patterns. Our methods to improve the original version of Moran's I for homogeneous populations can also be extended to some alternative versions of Moran's I methods developed for heterogeneous populations. Background Global indices of spatial autocorrelation have been used to evaluate the degree to which …
Force tracking with feed-forward motion estimation for beating heart surgery

The manipulation of fast-moving, delicate tissues in beating heart procedures presents a considerable challenge to the surgeon. A robotic force tracking system can assist the surgeon by applying precise contact forces to the beating heart during surgical manipulation. Standard force control approaches cannot safely attain the required bandwidth for this application due to vibratory modes within the robot structure. These vibrations are a limitation even for single degree-of-freedom systems that drive long surgical instruments. These bandwidth limitations can be overcome by the incorporation of feed-forward motion terms in the control law. For intracardiac procedures, the required motion estimates can be derived from 3-D ultrasound imaging. Dynamic analysis shows that a force controller with feed-forward motion terms can provide safe and accurate force tracking for contact with structures within the beating heart. In vivo validation confirms that this approach confers a 50% reduction in force fluctuations when compared with a standard force controller and a 75% reduction in fluctuations when compared with manual attempts to maintain the same force.
Expression and Functionality of Anti-Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Anticancer Drug Uptake Transporters in Immune Cells

Almost all drugs used in anti-human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 and anticancer therapies require membrane proteins to get into the cell to develop their proper activity. Nevertheless, little is known regarding the expression and activity of specific carriers involved in the uptake of these drugs in immune cells. Here, we assessed the mRNA levels, protein expression profile, and activity of the gene families SLC28 (coding for concentrative nucleoside transporters, hCNT1–3), SLC29 (equilibrative nucleoside transporters, hENT1–2), and SLC22 (organic cation transporters, hOCT1–3 and hOCTN1–2). Both hENTs and hCNT2 were abundant in primary lymphocytes, with a preferential activity of hENT1. A significant up-regulation in hENTs expression (100-fold) and activity (30-fold) was seen under stimulation of primary T lymphocytes. In contrast, monocytes, monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs), and immature monocyte-derived dendritic cells predominantly expressed hCNT3, a functional transporter in MDMs. Finally, in immune cells, hOCTs showed a more heterogeneous expression profile and a lower activity than human nucleoside transporters (hNTs), although up-regulation of hOCTs also occurred upon lymphocyte activation. Overall, the expression and activity of most of the studied transporters emphasize their relevance in relation to anti-HIV and anticancer therapies. The identification of the transporter involved in each specific drug uptake in immune cells could help to optimize pharmacological therapeutic responses.
Statistical Manifolds with almost Quaternionic Structures and Quaternionic Kähler-like Statistical Submersions

In this paper we investigate statistical manifolds with almost quaternionic structures. We define the concept of quaternionic Kahler-like statistical manifold and derive the main properties of quaternionic Kahler-like statistical submersions, extending in a new setting some previous results obtained by K. Takano concerning statistical manifolds endowed with almost complex and almost contact structures. Finally, we give a nontrivial example and propose some open problems in the field for further research.
An in vitro system for testing leucocyte and leukaemic cell line adhesion to synthetic fibres

Leucocyte adhesion is an important phenomenon in antimicrobial defence, inflammation and immunological mechanisms and has been shown to be dependent upon specialized adhesion molecules. To prevent side‐effects related to blood transfusion (e.g. anti‐human leucocyte antigen immunization and transmission of infectious agents) leucocyte reduction of blood products is now systematically performed in various countries. The most common system used for leucoreduction is blood filtration. For further understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the interaction between leucocytes and the fibres present in filters we used a flow chamber to study the adhesion of leucocytes and leukaemic cell lines to different types of fibre. Adhesion was quantified using video‐microscopy and computer image analysis. Our results demonstrate that adhesion to filter fibres was dependent on the expression of β2‐integrins CD11–‐CD18 and was inhibited by anti‐CD18. The amount of fibres present, their spatial arrangement and the physicochemical characteristics of the fibres were important factors in leucocyte adhesion. Leucocyte adhesion was the highest to polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyimide fibres. Lymphocytes or lymphocytic cell lines were poorly adherent to PET fibres. The retaining capacity of leucocyte filters can be improved by taking into account the different parameters for the design of new filters
Family Functioning and Parental Divorce as Predictors of Attachment Styles and Sexual Attitudes in College Students.

Research has demonstrated that parental divorce and family functioning are associated with children‟s socieomotional and psychological adjustment well into their adult years. Research has also demonstrated that sexual attitudes are becoming more liberal (cf., Harding & Jencks, 2003; Leiblum, Wiegel, & Brickle, 2003). The purpose of this research was to examine family functioning and parental divorce status in relation to attachment styles and sexual attitudes among college students (n = 387). The participants completed the Brief Sexual Attitudes Scale (BSAS), The Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised Scale (ECR-R), and Family Relationship Index (FRI). As hypothesized, family functioning was a better indicator than divorce status in explaining anxious and avoidant attachment scores. The hypothesis that family functioning would be a better predictor than divorce status in explaining permissive sexual attitudes was not supported. Furthermore, the hypothesis that higher scores on anxious and avoidant attachment scores would be predictive of more permissive sexual attitudes was supported with regard to avoidant attachment styles. Specifically, SPSS data analyses using multiple regressions found that college students who reported greater cohesiveness within their families (regardless of parental divorce status) reported lower anxious and lower avoidant attachment scores. Neither divorce status nor family functioning was predictive of permissive sexual attitudes. However, participants who reported greater avoidant attachment scores also reported endorsing more permissive sexual attitudes scores. Finally, males were more likely than females to endorse permissive sexual attitudes. Limitations and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
ICT implementation and school leadership: Case studies of ICT integration in teaching and learning

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government launched a five‐year ICT strategy in schools in late 1998. This paper reports the findings of the analysis on models of change in 18 schools striving to integrate the use of ICT in teaching and learning across the school curriculum. The study shows that the strategy adopted by a school in instituting such change and the resulting variation of pedagogical practices using ICT is strongly dependent on the school leaders’ vision and understanding of the role and impact of ICT in the curriculum, their goals and objectives for ICT integration, as well as the history, culture and background of the school and its general vision and mission.