Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of an ankle strengthening and proprioception exercise protocol on peak torque and joint position sense

Ankle sprains are the most common injury seen in athletics. Because of this, devices such as external ankle supports have been developed to protect the ankle joint and prevent injury. Exercise protocols have also been developed to increase strength and proprioception at the joint, which has been shown to reduce injury risk. The purpose of this study was to examine changes in joint position sense (JPS) and peak plantar flexion and dorsiflexion torque following a six week strength and proprioception exercise protocol, as well as compare these results to those of a control group wearing ankle braces. The study consisted of 20 college aged students who had previously sprained one of their ankles twice. The subjects were divided into two groups, with one group performing exercises three times per week for six weeks while the other group wore ankle braces during physical activity. Testing was performed before the beginning of the protocol, after three weeks, and after completion of the six week protocol. A 3-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed, with an alpha level of p = 0.05. This study found no significant changes in JPS following completion of the exercise group or compared to the brace group for the factors of time, group, and position (p = 0.57). There were significant improvements in peak plantar flexion (p = 0.014) and dorsiflexion (p = 0.033) torque for all subjects, but there was no significant difference between the two groups for either motion (p = 0.33, 0.349). Based on these results, the exercise protocol used in this study should not be used as a substitute for external ankle supports. However, more research should be done to determine if alterations to the exercise protocol can elicit significant results.
Equipped for Life in the Boreal Forest: The Role of the Stress Axis in Mammals

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (stress axis) plays a central role in equipping mammals to succeed in the challenging environment of the boreal forest. Over the last 20 years, we have tackled a broad range of topics to understand how the stress axis functions in four key herbivore species. The central challenge for snowshoe hares is coping with their predators, whereas for the others, it is primarily coping with each other (especially during reproduction) and with their physical environment. Hares are severely stressed by their predators during the population decline. The predator threat causes major changes in the stress axis of hares and reduces their reproduction; in addition, acting through maternal programming, it is the most plausible explanation for the extended period of low numbers following the population decline. Arctic ground squirrel males have an intense breeding season for two to three weeks in early spring, after which many of them die. The functioning of their stress axis changes markedly and is key in meeting their energy demands during this period. In contrast, red-backed vole males, though also short-lived, breed repeatedly only in the summer of their life, and their stress axis shows no change in function. However, their reproductive effort negatively affects their long-term survival. Territorial red squirrels experience marked interannual fluctuations in their major food source (white spruce seed), resulting in major fluctuations in their densities and consequently in the intensity of territorial competition. Changes in the densities of red squirrels also alter maternal stress hormone levels, inducing adaptive plasticity in offspring postnatal growth rates that prepares offspring for the environment they will encounter at independence. To survive winter, red squirrels need to defend their territories year-round, and the basis of this defense appears to be adrenal dehydroepiandrosterone, which has the benefits, but not the costs, of gonadal steroids. Arctic ground squirrels survive winter by hibernating in deeply frozen ground. Unlike all other hibernators, they have evolved a unique adaptation: high levels of adrenal androgens in summer to accumulate protein reserves that they then burn in winter. With a rapidly changing climate, the stress axis will play a key role in permitting northern animals to adapt, but the linkages between the changes in the abiotic and biotic components of the boreal forest and the phenotypic plasticity in the stress response of its inhabitants are not well understood for these or any other herbivore species.
Measuring left right and libertarian- authoritarian values in the British electorate

A B S'I'RA C' I' Butler and Stokes' authoritative analysis of the British electorate concluded that in general voters' political attitudes were poorly formed and, in consequence, unstable and inconsistent. This paper re-examines this question by developing and evaluating multiple-item scales of two core dimensions of mass political beliefs: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values. The scales are shown to have respectable levels of internal consistency, high levels of stability over a one-year period, and to be useful predictors of support for political parties. In these respects they compare favourably with other commonly used indicators of political attitudes, values and ideology (left-right self-placement, postmaterialism and attitudes to nationalization). This superiority applies across different levels of political involvement. Contrary to the conclusions of earlier research into mass political ideology in Britain, therefore, it is contended that in general the electorate has meaningful political beliefs. Moreover, as the scales developed in this research form part of the British and Northern Irish Social Attitudes Series and recent British Election Studies, they provide an important resource for further studies of political culture in the UK.
Seeing the Destination AND the Path: Using Identity‐Based Motivation to Understand and Reduce Racial Disparities in Academic Achievement

African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans aspire to do well in school but often fall short of this goal. We use identity-based motivation theory as an organizing framework to understand how macrolevel social stratification factors including minority–ethnic group membership and low socioeconomic position (e.g., parental education, income) and the stigma they carry, matter. Macrolevel social stratification differentially exposes students to contexts in which choice and control are limited and stigma is evoked, shaping identity-based motivation in three ways. Stratification influences which behaviors likely feel congruent with important identities, undermines belief that one's actions and effort matter, and skews chronic interpretation of one's experienced difficulties with schoolwork from interpreting experienced difficulty as implying importance (e.g., “it's for me”) toward implying “impossibility. ” Because minority students have high aspirations, policies should invest in destigmatizing, scalable, universal, identity-based motivation-bolstering institutions and interventions.
Psychological Distress in Anorectic Women, Their Fathers and Mothers

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate self-reported psychological distress in anorectic women, their father and mother. In addition, two other groups of young women and their parents were included. In total, there were three groups consisting of women between 18-30 years with anorexia nervosa (AG), drug-dependency problems (DG), students (SG) without significant problems and the parents of all three groups. The diagnoses of anorexia were made according to DSM-IV. Methods: Several methods were used. The Karolinska Scale of Personality (KSP) (Schalling, Åsberg, Edman, & Oreland, 1987) was the focus of this study. Results: Anorectic women (AG) reported higher levels of psychological distress compared to the students (SG) but less than the drug-dependent women (DG). The fathers of the anorexia nervosa women (AG) did not differ on the different scales from the other fathers. This indicates that anorectic women do not have fathers with elevated psychological distress. A significant effect on the scale of somatic anxiety (KPSA) was the only difference found between the mothers, where AG was in the middle between SG with the highest scores and DG with the lowest scores. Differences in psychological distress within families were also tested showing that anorectic women differed from their mothers and fathers. We found an indication that mothers of anorectic women reported more anxiety than the fathers. Conclusion: In conclusion, this study illustrates the importance of studying mothers and fathers of women with anorexia.
Phylogenetic generalised dissimilarity modelling: a new approach to analysing and predicting spatial turnover in the phylogenetic composition of communities

Compared to species turnover, patterns of phylogenetic turnover provide extra information about the spatial structure of biodiversity, for example providing more informative comparisons between the biota of sites which share no species. To harness this information for broad-scale spatial analysis, we present phylo-GDM, a technique for interpolating the spatial structure of phylogenetic turnover between sampled locations in relation to environment, based on generalised dissimilarity modelling (GDM). Using a database of over 150 000 location records for 114 myobatrachid frog species in Australia, linked to a specieslevel phylogeny inferred from 2467 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA, we calculated species and phylogenetic turnover between pairs of sites. We show how phylogenetic turnover extended the range of informative comparison of compositional turnover to more biologically and environmentally dissimilar sites. We generated GDM models which predict species and phylogenetic turnover across Australia, and tested the fit of models for different ages within the phylogeny to find the phylogenetic tree depth at which the relationship to current day environment is greatest. We also incorporated explanatory variables based on biogeographic patterns, to represent broad-scale turnover resulting from divergent evolutionary histories. We found that while the predictive power of our models was lower for full phylogenetic turnover than for species turnover, models based on the more recent components of the phylogeny (closer to the tips) outperformed species models and full phylogenetic models. Phylo-GDM has considerable potential as a method for incorporating phylogenetic relationships into biodiversity analyses in ways not previously possible. Because phylogenies do not require named taxa, phylo-GDM may also provide a means of including lineages with poorly resolved taxonomy (e.g. from metagenomic sequencing) into biodiversity planning and phylogeographic analysis.
Getting by with a Little Help from My Friends: Mental Rotation Ability after Tacit Peer Encouragement

We examined how Mental Rotation (MR) ability was improved by presenting information that the task was one that could be accomplished. This information purportedly came from either peers or the experimenter. Men and women students completed 10 MR items from the Purdue Visualization of Rotations Test (Bodner & Guay, 1997) and provided self-reports about their confidence in their abilities to perform rotations, background skills and experiences, and effort with the task. The peer-presentation technique improved performance on MR, as both men and women who read that other students had previously managed the tasks performed better than those who merely heard about the tasks, leaving an implied difficulty unaddressed or “in the air. ” When self-reported confidence in MR ability was held constant there were no gender differences in MR performance. The results suggest that appropriate peer models may improve performance on cognitive tasks, perhaps by increasing confidence in ability.
Nonparametric Estimates of Demand in the California Health Insurance Exchange

We develop a new nonparametric approach for discrete choice and use it to analyze the demand for health insurance in the California Affordable Care Act marketplace. The model allows for endogenous prices and instrumental variables, while avoiding parametric functional form assumptions about the unobserved components of utility. We use the approach to estimate bounds on the effects of changing premiums or subsidies on coverage choices, consumer surplus, and government spending on subsidies. We find that a $10 decrease in monthly premium subsidies would cause a decline of between 1.8% and 6.7% in the proportion of subsidized adults with coverage. The reduction in total annual consumer surplus would be between $62 and $74 million, while the savings in yearly subsidy outlays would be between $207 and $602 million. We estimate the demand impacts of linking subsidies to age, finding that shifting subsidies from older to younger buyers would increase average consumer surplus, with potentially large impacts on enrollment. We also estimate the consumer surplus impact of removing the highly‐subsidized plans in the Silver metal tier, where we find that a nonparametric model is consistent with a wide range of possibilities. We find that comparable mixed logit models tend to yield price sensitivity estimates toward the lower end of the nonparametric bounds, while producing consumer surplus impacts that can be both higher and lower than the nonparametric bounds depending on the specification of random coefficients.
PD-L1 immunostaining scoring for non-small cell lung cancer based on immunosurveillance parameters

Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) is the leading cause of cancer death globally, and new immunotherapies developed and under development targeting PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibition require accurate patient selection to assure good clinical outcome. PD-L1 immunohistochemistry is the current biomarker assay used for patient selection, but still imprecise in predicting therapy response. Exploring this issue, we performed computational tissue analysis of PD-L1 immunostaining in procured NSCLC tissues (n = 50) using the Merck KGaA anti-PD-L1 clone MKP1A07310. Staining patterns and PD-L1 cut-off points were interrogated using relevant cancer immune-surveillance biomarkers. Groups with high PD-L1 expression levels (above 25/50% staining cut-off points) were enriched for a biomarker profile in the tumor-nest and microenvironment indicating escape from host-immunity, as represented by increased numbers of cells positive for CD8 and Granzyme B (immune-effectors), FOXP3 (immune-suppressive), and CD68 (P < 0.05). Manual analysis of PD-L1 staining patterns identified tumors with an immune-induced reactive pattern relevant for immunotherapy that would ordinarily be excluded by the arbitrary 25% staining threshold (P < 0.05). Conversely, some cases with completely or predominantly immune-independent constitutive PD-L1 staining patterns that indicate insensitivity to immunotherapy may have been incorrectly selected using this staining cut-off point criterion. Therefore, we propose differentiation of reactive vs constitutive PD-L1 staining patterns to improve the accuracy of this biomarker assay in selecting NSCLC patients for PD-1/PD-L1 immunotherapy.
Multicultural Curriculum Designs in Counselor Education Programs: Enhancing Counselors-in-Training Openness to Diversity

Multicultural competencies are critical elements in both counselor preparation and practice. In accordance with the standards of the Council of Accredited Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP), counselor education programs must implement multicultural competencies as one of core curriculum areas. Although research evidences the positive impact of multicultural training, it remains a challenge to establish which curriculum designs and pedagogical approaches are most effective. This study compares self-reported openness and comfort in interactions with diverse populations of 87 counselors-in-training across two distinct multicultural curriculum designs (i.e., single multicultural course vs. infusion through the curriculum) in a CACREP accredited counselor education program in the Midwest. Implications for counselor education programs and counselors in the field are provided. Author's Notes Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Dorota Celinska at dcelinsk@roosevelt.edu and Roberto Swazo at roberto.swazo@uni.edu
TLR4 May Accelerate Hypoxia Reaction to Promote the Occurrence and Progress of Cervical Lesions by Infected Pathogenic Microorganisms Other than HPV

Objective: To explore what role the inflammatory immune response is playing in the occurrence and development of HPV related cervical disease. Methods: To detect the expression of TLR4, HIF-1α and HPV16 E7 in the specimens of HPV related cervical lesions, for example normal cervix, cervicitis, cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and cervical cancer by RT PCR methods. Results: The expression of TLR4 and HIF-1α ascent from normal cervix to cervicitis, then to CIN tissue, and then to cervical cancer (P 0.05). The expression of HPV16 E7 was higher in cervicitis than that in normal cervix (P 0.05) while there was no significant ascendance from cervicitis to CIN tissue, either from CIN tissue to cervical cancer although it seemed ascending (P > 0.05). Conclusion: TLR4 may promote the occurrence and progress of cervical lesions by accelerating the hypoxia reaction. And the natural immune reaction mediated by TLR4 may be correlated to other pathogenic microorganisms infecting the cervical tissue, rather than HPV.
IMPACT OF APPOINTMENT REMINDERS VIA SHORT MESSAGE SERVICE IN A DISTRICT HOSPITAL

Introduction: Around the world’s hospitals the non-attendance rate is a worrying fact. Particularly in Portugal, there is one district hospital, S. Sebastião Hospital, object of this study that has adopted the method of sending SMS to patients to remind them of appointments, in order to try to reduce the non-attendance rate. Aim: To measure the changes in non-attendance rate according to the sending or not of an appointment reminder via SMS. Methods: The population enclosed all patients of S. Sebastião Hospital with mobile phone number registered at the system and the sample enclosed the patients with appointments on the days chosen for the study (N=3899). The study is experimental and transversal. It was done during 6 working days by sending a SMS randomly and alternately to the participants two working days before the appointment and then the hospital gave us the data collected. The independent variables studied were: state of SMS sending, gender, age groups, day of the week, time of the day, previous contact with the system, mobile network, type of episode, specialty. The dependent variable was the non-attendance. It was analysed the influence of each variable in the non-attendance rate, doing a chi-square test. It was also done logistics regressions for the variable attendance including in each regression the variable in study, the variable state of SMS sending and the interaction between the two variables. Results with p<0,05 were considered statistically significative. Results: The variables in which p<0,05 are: type of episode, day of the week, specialty and age groups. The difference between non-attendance rates in reminded and nonreminded group 3,5%, corresponding to a rate ratio of 26,7% and p<0,05. In the study of influence of the different variables on the impact of the SMS sending, it was obtained a p>0,05. Discussion: The variables related to the non-attendance rate are: type of episode, day of the week, specialty and age groups. The sending of SMS has a great influence on the forgetfulness, decreasing the non-attendance rate. It wasn’t found any relation between the variables studied and the impact of the SMS.
Chapter 2 Seizures in Ischemic Stroke

Stroke is the most common cause of new-onset seizures in older adults. Cerebrovascular disease accounts for 11 % of adult epilepsy, and, in older adults, stroke is the underlying cause in over a third of all cases [1]. Seizures secondary to ischemic stroke are generally categorized into early seizures (occurring up to 2–4 weeks after a stroke) and late seizures (occurring after 4 weeks). Risk factors for developing poststroke seizures generally include cortical involvement, anterior hemisphere location, early seizures, and possibly cardioembolic etiology [2]. Early seizures may be associated with increased mortality, while late or recurrent seizures may hinder long-term neurologic outcome [3]. There is a paucity of evidence for the prophylactic use of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) in ischemic stroke without seizures. The decision to start patients on a long-term AED after their first poststroke seizure is debatable; consideration of the probability of seizure recurrence and the negative influence of some AEDs on neurological recovery must be taken into account.
Clinical significance of ESBL-producing Escherichia coli isolated from urinary tract infections in sylhet Bangladesh

The prevalence of extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBL) producing E. coli in the town of Sylhet was assessed over 12 months period. One hundred patients who had symptomatic urinary tract infections were selected for this study and urine samples were collected from the private laboratories of the community. These isolates were further confirmed as ESBL-producing E. coli by phenotypic methods were identified and selected. Patients having urinary tract infection showed 72% were female and the rest 28% were male. The investigations were carried out on female population only. The patient’s age ranged from 4 years to 60 years. The highest age incidence of UTI patient was 21-30 years (28%) followed by 31-40 years (20%). Patients in the age range 41-50 years showed15% and patients above 50 years 19%. The antibiotic susceptibility test for non-ESBL showed 100% sensitivity to imipenem and meropenem. There was multidrug resistance to amoxicillin-clavulanic acid 30% ceftazidime 40%, ceftriaxone 35%, and ciprofloxacin 60%. The ESBL group were also 100% sensitive to carbapenems and the rest of resistance by percentage were amoxicillin-clavulanic acid -80%, ceftazidime-55%, ceftriaxone-80 %, ciprofloxacin 80%. The ESBL and non ESBL producing strains were separated for plasmid profile analysis. The plasmid profile showed 60% of isolates exhibit high molecular weight plasmids (>140MDa) in ESBL groups and similar results were seen in Non ESBL groups (64%). These findings suggests that both ESBL and non ESBL producing isolates harbour large size plasmids, despite the fact that ESBL–producing strains cause wide range of multi-drug resistance in the community.
Osmotic Stress Effect over Carbohydrate Production in a Native Starin of Scenedesmus sp.

The production of biofuels is currently presented as a possible answer in the search for sustainable alternatives for the total or partial substitution of fossil fuels. One of the most successful biofuels that have been developed is bioethanol. However, bioethanol production has been limited since it relies on the use of sugar cane or cereals. These materials are important sources of food and their demand as both a biofuel and a foodstuff has led to the price increase and may lead to possible shortages. Our group has focused on searching for native microalgae as sources of carbohydrates and bioethanol, with the goal of finding a sustainable source of bioethanol. Currently, twelve different strains which reach growth rates between 0.7 - 1.8 g/L and present carbohydrate production under osmotic shock conditions have been isolated. In this work, we demonstrate the results obtained with the Chlorella sp. [1] strain and the results obtained with the Scenedesmus sp. strain. The Scenedesmus sp. strain showed an increase in the production from 22 to 650 mg/sugar/g of biomass (dry weight), after 24 hours of osmotic shock with 0.1 M NaCl. The osmolytes which were produced after osmotic shock were identified as sucrose and trehalose, both of which are fermentable. These results demonstrate that this strain, through the photosynthetic pathway and osmotic shock, is a potential source of fermentable sugars.