Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An economic evaluation of the use of TNP on full-thickness wounds.

OBJECTIVE Topical negative pressure (TNP) (vacuum therapy) is frequently used in the management of acute, traumatic, infected and chronic full-thickness wounds. This prospective clinical randomised trial compared the costs of TNP with conventional therapy (moist gauze) in the management of full-thickness wounds that required surgical closure. METHOD The direct medical costs of the total number of resources needed to achieve a healthy, granulating wound bed that was 'ready for surgical therapy' were calculated. RESULTS Fifty-four patients admitted to a department of plastic and reconstructive surgery were recruited into the trial. Cost analysis showed significantly higher mean material expenses for wounds treated with TNP (414euros+/-229euros [SD]) compared with conventional therapy (15euros+/-11euros; p<0.0001 ), but significantly lower mean nursing expenses (33euros+/-31 euros and 83euros+/-58euros forTNP and conventional therapy respectively; p<0.0001). Hospitalisation costs were lower in theTNP group (1788euros+/-1060euros) than in the conventional treatment group (2467euros+/-1336euros; p<0.043) due to an on average shorter duration until they were'ready for surgical therapy'. There was no significant difference in total costs per patient between the two therapies (2235euros+/-1301euros for TNP versus 2565euros+/-1384euros for conventional therapy). CONCLUSION TNP had higher material costs. However, these were compensated by the lower number of time-consuming dressing changes and the shorter duration until they were 'ready for surgical therapy', resulting in the therapy being equally as expensive as conventional moist gauze. DECLARATION OF INTEREST This work was partly supported by the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Esser Foundation, and KCI Medical, Houten,The Netherlands. The authors have no conflicts of interest.
Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology

1 Introduction Chapter 2 Robert Redfield and the Modernist Vision in American Social Science Chapter 3 A Science of Social Change: Constructing the Folk-Urban Continuum Chapter 4 A Broadening of Perspective: Beyond Anthropology as a Natural Science Chapter 5 From Folk Societies to Civilizations Chapter 6 Comparative Civilizations Studies: Explorations in Theory and Methodology Chapter 7 An Anthropological Approach to Civilization Chapter 8 Afterword: The Redfield Legacy
Atomic force and scanning electron microscopy of atmospheric particles

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM–EDS) have been used for both morphological and elemental mass analysis study of atmospheric particles. As part of the geometrical particle analysis, and in addition to the traditional height profile measurement of individual particles, AFM was used to measure the volume relative to the projection area for each particle separately, providing a particle shape model. The element identification was done by the EDS analysis, and the element mass content was calculated based on laboratory calibration with particles of known composition. The SEM–EDS mass measurements from two samples collected at 150 and 500 m above the surface of the Mediterranean Sea were found to be similar to mass calculations derived from the AFM volume measurements. The AFM results show that the volume of most of the aerosols that were identified as soluble marine sulfate and nitrate aerosol particles can be better estimated using cylindrical shapes than spherical or conical geometry. Microsc. Res. Tech. 68:107–114, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Privileging Work Not Sex: Flexibility and Employment in the Sexual Services Industry

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well-paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding worker decisions about sex work. Debates and regulation focus on gendered inequalities related to heterosexuality much more than they recognize gendered inequalities related to labour market conditions. The focus on criminalization, harm, exploitation and stigma obscures the centrality of work flexibility and conditions to women's decision-making. A more direct focus on the broader employment context may produce better recognition of why women do sex work.
Internal development of vegetative buds of Norway spruce trees in relation to accumulated chilling and forcing temperatures.

The timing of budburst of temperate trees is known to be controlled by complicated interactions of temperature and photoperiod. To improve the phenological models of budburst, better knowledge of the internal bud development preceding budburst in relation to environmental cues is needed. We studied the effect of accumulated chilling and forcing temperatures on the internal development of vegetative buds preceding budburst in Norway spruce [Picea abies (L.) Karst. ]. Branches from 17-year-old trees of southern Finnish origin were transferred eight times at 1- to 2-week intervals from October to December 2007 from the field at Punkaharju (61°48'N, 29°20'E) to the greenhouse with forcing conditions (day length 12 h, +20 °C). After seven different durations of forcing, the developmental phase and primordial shoot growth of the buds were analysed at the stereomicroscopic level. Air temperature was recorded hourly throughout the study period. The accumulated chilling unit sum had a significant effect on the temperature sum that was required to attain a certain developmental phase; a higher amount of chilling required a lower amount of forcing. The variation in the rate of development of different buds within each sample branch in relation to the chilling unit and forcing temperature sum was low. Regarding primordial shoot growth, there was also an inverse relation between accumulated chilling and forcing, i.e., a higher accumulated chilling unit sum before forcing required a lower temperature sum to initiate primordial shoot growth and resulted in a stronger effect of accumulated forcing. A second-order regression model with an interaction of chilling and forcing explained the variation of primordial shoot growth with high precision (R(2) = 0.88). However, further studies are required to determine the final parameter values to be used in phenological modelling.
Invasive pneumococcal disease in a cohort of HIV-infected adults: incidence and risk factors, 1990–2003

Objective:To investigate the association between the introduction of HAART and invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in HIV-infected patients. Methods:Incidence of IPD was determined from 1990 to 2003 in a cohort of HIV-infected individuals and a nested case–control study assessed risk factors of IPD. Results:There were 72 cases over 19 020 person-years of follow-up (overall IPD rate, 379/100 000 person-years). In the calendar periods 1990–1995, 1995–1998, and 1998–2003, the IPD incidence per 100 000 person-years was 279 [95% confidence interval (CI), 150–519], 377 (95% CI, 227–625) and 410 (95% CI, 308–545), respectively (P = 0.516). CD4 cell count < 200 cells/μl [odds ratio (OR), 3.0; 95% CI, 1.2–7.6), HIV RNA > 50 000 copies/ml (OR, 2.8; 95% CI, 1.2–6.5), hepatitis C (OR, 4.9; 95% CI, 1.7–14.9), serum albumin (OR, 0.1; 95% CI, 0.04–0.5), injection drug use in women (OR, 3.8; 95% CI, 1.6–8.8), and education beyond high school (OR, 0.2; 95% CI, 0.05–0.8) were significantly associated with IPD in multivariate analysis. No treatment factor, including HAART (OR, 0.7; 95% CI, 0.3–1.5) and pneumococcal vaccination (OR, 0.9; 95% CI, 0.5–1.6), was associated with IPD. Conclusions:IPD incidence did not change significantly during the widespread dissemination of HAART in this cohort. IPD risk was associated with several sociodemographic and clinical factors.
Interference between Elementally Trained Stimuli Can Take Place in One Trial

Abstract Recent research has shown that the acquisition of a second cue–outcome association can interfere with responding appropriate to a previously acquired association between another cue and the same outcome, even if the two cues had never received compound training (Matute & Pineno, 1998a). This is similar to other results in the paired-associate literature but it is problematic for associative theories of learning because all of them assume that compound training is necessary for cues to interfere with each other. However, given several assumptions, a recent revision of Wagner's (1981) SOP model proposed by Dickinson and Burke (1996) could account for most of the data available on interference between elementally trained cues. According to the modified SOP model, the target cue that is paired with the outcome during Phase 1 could acquire an inhibitory association with the outcome during the Phase 2 trials in which the interfering cue is trained and the target cue is absent. This inhibitory association could be responsible for the weak responding observed to the target cue during testing because it could interfere with the excitatory association acquired during Phase 1. If this is true, interference should be weaker as the number of Phase 2 interfering trials is reduced. However, the three experiments reported here show that interference can occur even when only one interfering trial is given during Phase 2. The results of these experiments, along with other results in the literature, add support to the idea that interference between elementally trained cues occurs during retrieval and that it is not due to the formation of inhibitory associations between an absent cue and the outcome.
A method to build subliminal channel in streaming media with multiple steganography methods

In this paper, steganography methods on streaming cover data were modeled uniformly, and then a subliminal channel consisting of multiple methods was constructed. A channel coding with feedback was proposed for the reliability of transmission. This coding was not affected by whether the capacity of used methods was fixed or variant. Experiments showed that, with the same capacity utilization as former systems over methods with fixed capacity, the proposed coding made methods with variant capacity no longer sensitive to the packet loss.
Twin SVM for Gesture Classification Using the Surface Electromyogram

Surface electromyogram (sEMG) is a measure of the muscle activity from the skin surface, and is an excellent indicator of the strength of muscle contraction. It is an obvious choice for control of prostheses and identification of body gestures. Using sEMG to identify posture and actions that are a result of overlapping multiple active muscles is rendered difficult by interference between different muscle activities. In the literature, attempts have been made to apply independent component analysis to separate sEMG into components corresponding to the activities of different muscles, but this has not been very successful, because some muscles are larger and more active than the others. We address the problem of how to learn to separate each gesture or activity from all others. Multicategory classification problems are usually solved by solving many one-versus-rest binary classification tasks. These subtasks naturally involve unbalanced datasets. Therefore, we require a learning methodology that can take into account unbalanced datasets, as well as large variations in the distributions of patterns corresponding to different classes. This paper reports the use of twin support vector machine for gesture classification based on sEMG, and shows that this technique is eminently suited to such applications.
Quantity and Impact of Scholarly Journal Publication in Canadian Faculties of Education.

Le Current Index of Journals in Education (CIJE) fut utilisd des divers dcrits de chacun des 568 professeurs adjoints dans les facultds anglo-canadiennes de pddagogie. Le Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) servit i dvaluer pour chacun des professeurs-adjoints l'influence respective de tout article de portde intellectuelle, influence ddterminde par le nombre de citations. En fin de compte, les facultds furent classdes selon une moyenne calculde d'apr6s la frdquence et l'influence de leurs articles. Des statistiques furent dressdes pour sept universit6s de langue francaise. Toutefois, elles ne furent jamais publides, car on eut conscience que le CIJE, pour utiliser l'abrdviation anglaise, favorisait les publications d'expression anglaise aux ddpens des articles fran9ais, qui, de ce fait, n'obtenaient que peu d'attention. This study had two purposes. The first was to obtain approximations of the quantity and impact of scholarly journal publication among members of Canada's faculties of education. The second was to tentatively identify some Canadian faculties of education whose members might be particularly productive, and to provide two bases for making comparisons between faculties in terms of scholarly publishing. At present there are few, if any, indexes of the nature and degree of scholarly publishing among members of Canadian faculties of education. Such indexes could provide empirical data for normative questions such as "Is there insufficient, adequate, or overmuch emphasis on scholarly publication among members of education faculties? " Some might argue that promotion procedures or institutional expectations create excessive pressures to "publish or perish" and detract from other professional duties, such as teaching. Others may argue that there is less journal publication among members of education faculties than should be expected from institutions of higher learning. Before normative questions can be answered, answers to simpler questions are needed. What percentage of faculty are in fact publishing in scholarly journals? What is the average number of articles published by faculty members across Canada in the last seven years? What impact upon fellow scholars do members from various faculties make? Answers to these questions in the form of indexes might also provide a beginning for comparisons between faculties and a basis for subsequent analysis of possible reasons for the differences. Some administrators, faculty
National Security Challengesand Sustainable Economic Development: Evidence from Nigeria

Nigeria is one of the relatively secured nations in West African sub-region. In recent times, this endowed nation suddenly metamorphosed into an abode of serial bombing, hostage taking, armed robbery, cold-blooded killings and ethno-religious conflicts traceable to militant groups with conflicting ideological, political and religious agenda. Among these militant groups are Niger-Delta insurgents, Campus cults, Bakassi Boys, Armed robbers, O’odua People’s Congress, Boko Haram et cetera. The resultant loss of lives, rising budgetary spending for security and destruction of valuable government facilities portend devastating consequences for sustainable economic development in the country. This paper examines the link between national security and sustainable economic development in Nigeria. The authors adopt quantitative method, which entails extraction of secondary data from the publications of Central Bank of Nigeria, National Bureau of Statistics and other reliable reports on the subject. The generated data were carefully analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics on the basis of which far-reaching conclusions were drawn. The research findings indicate that Nigeria’s expenditure on national security is rising faster than spending on education, agriculture, health and construction. This unpleasant finding has negative effect on sustainable economic development in Nigeria. The paper proffers tripartite recommendations for governments, the citizens and policy-makers.
Fair Mixing: the Case of Dichotomous Preferences

We consider a setting in which agents vote to choose a fair mixture of public outcomes. The agents have dichotomous preferences: each outcome is liked or disliked by an agent. We discuss three outstanding voting rules. The Conditional Utilitarian rule, a variant of the random dictator, is strategyproof and guarantees to any group of like-minded agents an influence proportional to its size. It is easier to compute and more efficient than the familiar Random Priority rule. Its worst case (resp. average) inefficiency is provably (resp. in numerical experiments) low if the number of agents is low. The efficient Egalitarian rule protects individual agents but not coalitions. It is excludable strategyproof: I do not want to lie if I cannot consume outcomes I claim to dislike. The efficient Nash Max Product rule offers the strongest welfare guarantees to coalitions, who can force any outcome with a probability proportional to their size. But it even fails the excludable form of strategyproofness.
Minimum Concave-Cost Solution of Leontief Substitution Models of Multi-Facility Inventory Systems

The paper shows that a broad class of problems can be formulated as minimizing a concave function over the solution set of a Leontief substitution system. The class includes deterministic single- and multi-facility economic lot size, lot-size smoothing, warehousing, product-assortment, batch-queuing, capacity-expansion, investment consumption, and reservoir-control problems with concave cost functions. Because in such problems an optimum occurs at an extreme point of the solution set, we can utilize the characterization of the extreme points given in a companion paper to obtain most existing qualitative characterizations of optimal policies for inventory models with concave costs in a unified manner. Dynamic programming recursions for searching the extreme points to find an optimal point are given in a number of cases. We only give algorithms whose computational effort increases algebraically (instead of exponentially) with the size of the problem.
Beliefs and self-care practices of adolescents with asthma

The purpose of this qualitative pilot study was to identify beliefs and self-care practices of adolescents with asthma in a private high school, where the incidence of asthma is nearly 20%. Analysis of the data from 10 individual audiotaped interviews, using a semistructured questionnaire, yielded major themes of knowledge acquisition, self-efficacy, and social support that are associated with behaviors that control asthma with better outcomes. Specifically, the greatest knowledge acquisition and symptom recognition were associated with exposure to multiple educators, especially school-based programs. High self-efficacy was facilitated through positive experiencesteens recognized that they had fewer asthma events and severity once they were in better physical condition, on preventive medicines, and/or used trigger avoidance success. Social support for teens was very helpful and included parents, family, friends, coaches and teachers, and healthcare providers. Implications for practice include the need for adolescent asthma-awareness training, as higher awareness of asthma conditions and triggers may provide peer support for teens with asthma in school.
Probabilistic assessment of the process-noise covariance matrix of discrete Kalman filter state estimation of active distribution networks

The accuracy of state estimators using the Kalman Filter (KF) is largely influenced by the measurement and the process noise covariance matrices. The former can be directly inferred from the available measurement devices whilst the latter needs to be assessed, as a function of the process model, in order to maximize the KF performances. In this paper we present different approaches that allow assessing the optimal values of the elements composing the process noise covariance matrix within the context of the State Estimation (SE) of Active Distribution Networks (ADNs). In particular, the paper considers a linear SE process based on the availability of synchrophasors measurements. The assessment of the process noise covariance matrix, related to a process model represented by the ARIMA [0,1,0] one, is based either on the knowledge of the probabilistic behavior of nodal network injections/absorptions or on the a-posteriori knowledge of the estimated states and their accuracies. Numerical simulations demonstrating the improvements of the KF-SE accuracy achieved by using the calculated matrix Q are included in the paper. A comparison with the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) method is also given for validation purposes.
Characterization and Evolution of Tetrameric Photosystem I from the Thermophilic Cyanobacterium Chroococcidiopsis sp TS-821[C][W][OPEN]

This study characterizes a tetrameric/dimeric form of photosystem I (PSI) from the thermophilic cyanobacterium Chroococcidiopsis TS-821 and suggests that this PSI structure may be an intermediate during evolution to a monomeric form in plants. Photosystem I (PSI) is a reaction center associated with oxygenic photosynthesis. Unlike the monomeric reaction centers in green and purple bacteria, PSI forms trimeric complexes in most cyanobacteria with a 3-fold rotational symmetry that is primarily stabilized via adjacent PsaL subunits; however, in plants/algae, PSI is monomeric. In this study, we discovered a tetrameric form of PSI in the thermophilic cyanobacterium Chroococcidiopsis sp TS-821 (TS-821). In TS-821, PSI forms tetrameric and dimeric species. We investigated these species by Blue Native PAGE, Suc density gradient centrifugation, 77K fluorescence, circular dichroism, and single-particle analysis. Transmission electron microscopy analysis of native membranes confirms the presence of the tetrameric PSI structure prior to detergent solubilization. To investigate why TS-821 forms tetramers instead of trimers, we cloned and analyzed its psaL gene. Interestingly, this gene product contains a short insert between the second and third predicted transmembrane helices. Phylogenetic analysis based on PsaL protein sequences shows that TS-821 is closely related to heterocyst-forming cyanobacteria, some of which also have a tetrameric form of PSI. These results are discussed in light of chloroplast evolution, and we propose that PSI evolved stepwise from a trimeric form to tetrameric oligomer en route to becoming monomeric in plants/algae.
People’s Churches in Germany in the Midst of Social Changes: Die Sinus-Milieus und andere soziologische Erklärungsversuche als Ansätze für eine neue pastorale Praxis

Kirche und Gesellschaft bildeten in der Vormoderne mehr oder weniger eine Einheit, wahrend in der Fruhmoderne ein Prozess der Verdrangung der Kirche aus dem offentlichen Raum begann. In der entwickelten Moderne bildete sich eine differenzierte Gesellschaft aus, in der gesellschaftliche Subsysteme nebeneinander existieren. Kirche und Religion verloren ihre fruhere Deutungsmacht und auch der Kirche nahe stehende traditionale soziale Milieus schwanden. Der Individualisierungsprozess schlug sich auch im Ruckgang der Kirchenzugehorigkeit nieder. In der postmodernen Gesellschaft nahm die Pluralisierung von Lebensstilen weiter zu. Der Begriff Erlebnisgesellschaft trifft den Kern einer postmodernen Gesellschaft, in der Asthetik und Lebensstile eine immer grosere Rolle spielen. In den herkommlichen Schichtkonzepten werden so komplexe gesellschaftliche Verhaltnisse nicht ausreichend berucksichtigt. Modelle wie das der Sinus-Milieus orientieren sich neben den soziookonomischen Lebensbedingungen auch an Wertorientier.