Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Ketamine on Isoflurane- and Sevoflurane-Induced Cerebral Vasodilation in Rabbits

Although ketamine has been reported to have little effect on the cerebral circulation when used with other anesthetics, its effect on the cerebral vascular response to volatile anesthetics, which increase cerebral blood flow in a concentration-dependent manner, remains obscure. A closed cranial window was prepared in 15 pentobarbital-anesthetized adult rabbits. The cerebral pial arteriolar alteration induced by either isoflurane (n = 8) or sevoflurane (n = 7) at 0 (before volatile anesthetic), 0.33, 0.67, and 1.0 minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) was measured under three consecutive conditions: intravenous infusion with saline, with ketamine, and with ketamine plus l-arginine. Ketamine reduced the vasodilation induced by 0.67 (120 ± 9% versus 113 ± 9%;P < .05) and 1.0 MAC isoflurane (136 ± 11% versus 118 ± 10%;P < .05), but l-arginine did not restore the isoflurane-induced cerebral vasodilation. In rabbits inhaling sevoflurane, the degree of cerebral vasodilator response was smaller than that by isoflurane, and the cerebral vasodilation was comparable whether in the presence or absence of ketamine (with or without l-arginine). In conclusion, ketamine reduces isoflurane-induced cerebral vasodilation, apparently independently of nitric oxide formation, while sevoflurane-induced cerebral vasodilation is not significantly affected by ketamine.
Exposure of pregnant dairy heifer to magnetic fields at 60 Hz and 30 microT.

Thirty-two pregnant Holstein heifers weighing 499 +/- 45 kg, at 3.1 +/- . 7 months of gestation and 21 +/- 2.0 months of age were confined and exposed to 30 microT magnetic fields (MFs) and a 12 h light/12 h dark light cycle. The heifers were divided into two replicates of 16 animals. Each replicate was divided into two groups of eight animals each, one group the non-exposed and the second, the exposed group. The animals were subjected to the different treatments for 4 weeks. After 4 weeks, the animals switched treatment, the exposed group becoming the non-exposed group and vice versa. Then the treatment continued for 4 more weeks. Catheters were inserted into the jugular vein, and blood samples were collected twice a week to estimate the concentration of progesterone (P4), melatonin (MLT), prolactin (PRL), and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). Feed consumption was measured daily. The results indicated that exposure of pregnant heifers to MF similar to those encountered underneath a 735 kV high tension electrical power line for 20 h/day during a period of 4 weeks produces slight effects. This is evidenced by statistically significant higher body weight (1.2%), higher weekly body weight gain (30%), and decreases in the concentration of PRL (15%) and IGF-1 (4%) in blood serum. The absence of abnormal clinical signs and the absolute magnitude of the significant changes detected during MF exposure, make it plausible to preclude any major animal health hazard.
Perceptions of the unregistered healthcare worker's role in pre-registration student nurses' clinical training.

AIM To explore the unregistered healthcare worker's role and influence on student nurses' clinical learning experience. BACKGROUND Across the developed world, the role of the unregistered worker is exceeding its traditional boundaries. Evidence suggests that this includes the day-to-day mentoring of pre-registration student nurses. However, no research to date has explored reasons as to why this is occurring, what types of tasks are taught, and the consequence of this. DESIGN A sequential exploratory mixed method research design was adopted. METHOD Reporting on the final qualitative phase of a mixed method sequential research study, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 59 unregistered healthcare workers across four hospitals in Northern Ireland. Transcriptions were analysed using a content analysis approach; all data were collected in 2010. RESULTS Findings show the diversity of the unregistered healthcare workers' roles and confirm that they play a major part in the education of student nurses with regards to basic, clinical, and non-clinical tasks, with and without the approval of registered staff. However, their involvement did not reflect their levels of expertise as evidenced by certified training. Their participation was justified based on mentor unavailability, their closeness to the student and the patient. While some did raise concerns, they recommended that these workers be formally involved in nurse education. CONCLUSION Mechanisms of workforce planning need to pay particular attention to the expanding role of unregistered healthcare workers as 'role drift' has the potential to alter patterns of work and affect current educational approaches impacting on the acquisition of clinical skills. Further research is recommended in this domain.
Epidemiology of traumatic brain injury in children and adolescents in south‐western Sweden

Abstract The objectives of this study were to outline the incidence, gender distribution, external causes, severity and early outcome of traumatic brain injury (TBI). The subjects were children and adolescents in the southwestern Swedish health care region, aged 0–17 y in 1987–1991 and fulfilling the criteria for TBI. Identification was made from the discharge registers of the hospitals in the region admitting patients with TBI, and outcome data were obtained from medical records. The mean incidence rate was 12/100 000 for TBI. The dominant external cause was traffic (60%), followed by falls (22%). At discharge, 49% of those surviving were healthy, 48% suffered from one functional impairment and 52% suffered from two or more impairments. In conclusion, although the incidence rate of TBI is low in Sweden, the condition causes permanent functional impairment in 6/100 000 cases every year.
Rhythm-Promoting Actions of Exercise in Mice with Deficient Neuropeptide Signaling

Daily exercise promotes physical health as well as improvements in mental and neural functions. Studies in intact wild-type (WT) rodents have revealed that the brain’s suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN), site of the main circadian pacemaker, are also responsive to scheduled wheel running. It is unclear, however, if and how animals with a dysfunctional circadian pacemaker respond to exercise. Here, we tested whether scheduled voluntary exercise (SVE) in a running wheel for 6 hours per day could promote neural and behavioral rhythmicity in animals whose circadian competence is compromised through genetically targeted loss of vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP-/- mice) or its VPAC2 receptor (Vipr2-/- mice). We report that in constant dark (DD), rhythmic VIP-/- and Vipr2-/- mice show weak free-running rhythms with a period of <23 hours and all wild-type mice are strongly rhythmic with approximately 23.5-hour periodicity. VIP-/- and Vipr2-/- mice rapidly (<7 days) synchronize to daily SVE, while WT mice take much longer (>35 days). Following 21 to 50 days of SVE, WT mice show small changes in their rhythms, and most Vipr2-/- mice now sustain robust near 24-hour behavioral rhythms, whereas very few VIP-/- mice do. This study demonstrates that scheduled daily exercise can markedly improve circadian rhythms in behavioral activity and raises the possibility that this noninvasive approach may be useful as an intervention in clinical etiologies in which there are dysfunctions of circadian time keeping.
The influence of smoking on maternal serum PAPP‐A and free beta hCG levels in the first trimester of pregnancy

In an analysis of 3111 singleton pregnancies routinely screened in the first trimester with nuchal translucency, free beta hCG and pregnancy associated plasma protein A (PAPP‐A) smoking has been found to occur in 20.8 per cent of pregnant women. When the individual marker levels were assessed in smokers and non‐smokers, levels of PAPP‐A were reduced in smokers by some 15 per cent. Despite free beta hCG levels being reduced by 10–14 per cent in the second trimester of smoking women, in the first trimester period this is not evident. Simulation studies would suggest that in smokers the detection of trisomy 21 using free beta hCG, PAPP‐A and maternal age will be reduced by some 5 to 6 per cent compared with that of the general population. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Accounts of Suicidality in the Huntington Disease Community

Health professionals, researchers, and philosophers have debated extensively about suicide. Some believe suicides result from mental pathology, whereas others argue that individuals are capable of rational suicide. This debate is particularly poignant within illness communities, where individuals may be suffering from chronic and incurable conditions. This article engages with these issues by presenting the accounts of 20 individuals with Huntington disease (HD), a fatal degenerative condition, and 10 informal caregivers (e.g., spouses). Suicide is a leading cause of death amongst people with HD, with an incidence rate many times higher than the general population. In contrast to the majority of the academic literature on HD suicidality, study participants did not connect suicide with mental pathology. Instead, they perceived suicide as a response to the realities of living with HD, such as prolonged physiological degeneration and the need for long-term intensive health care. These findings are subsequently discussed in relation to the rational-pathological suicide binary.
EFFECTS OF LENGTH OF OWNERSHIP ON FORESTLAND MANAGEMENT AND USES ON THE CUMBERLAND PLATEAU OF TENNESSEE

The Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee has been the focus of a number of debates recently regarding the management of the region’s natural resources. The main reasons include a significant divesture of land holdings by forest industry, a renewed interest in retirementand second-home developments, and increased attention on the unique natural characteristics of the region. Using a 2005 survey data, this paper employed a logit model to identify how new landowners differ in motivations and demographics from those who have owned the land for a longer time period of time. Results suggest that new landowners have stronger motivations such as for privacy purpose, future timber use, as well as long-term financial investment. The significant demographic factors include where landowners spent most of their lives (rural, suburban, or urban), age, marital status, and residence acreage. To examine the effects of length of ownership on forestland management and uses, t-tests were used to show the differences in their past management practices, land uses, and future likelihood of activities. Results indicated that, in general, new landowners were more likely to have conducted management practices in the past five years. New landowners and their family members also used their lands more frequently for activities such as picking non-timber forest products (NTFPS), collecting firewood, and engaging in recreation. The comparison of likelihood of future activities is generally consistent with the past management and land uses. However, there is slightly more uncertainty on future land use change associated with new landowners. This study is useful not only for future natural resource management in Northern Cumberland Plateau but also for predicting future timber supply and other services from the forests of this region.
Improved Single System Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition with VGG Bottleneck Features

On small datasets, discriminatively trained bottleneck features from deep networks commonly outperform more traditional spectral or cepstral features. While these features are typically trained with small, fully-connected networks, recent studies have used more sophisticated networks with great success. We use the recent deep CNN (VGG) network for bottleneck feature extraction—previously used only for low-resource tasks— and apply it to the Switchboard English conversational telephone speech task. Unlike features derived from traditional MLP networks, the VGG features outperform cepstral features even when used with BLSTM acoustic models trained on large amounts of data. We achieve the best BBN single system performance when combining the VGG features with a BLSTM acoustic model. When decoding with an n-gram language model, which are used for deployable systems, we have a realistic production system with a WER of 7.4%. This result is competitive with the current state-of-the-art in the literature. While our focus is on realistic single system performance, we further reduce the WER to 6.1% through system combination and using expensive neural network language model rescoring.
On the Nature of Motivational Orientations: Implications of Assessed Goals and Gender Differences for Motivational Goal Theory

In a historical revision of the achievement goal construct, Elliot (2005) recognized that there is little consensus on whether the term “goal” in “achievement goal orientations” (GO) is best represented as an “aim”, as an overarching orientation encompassing several “aims”, or as a combination of aims and other processes -self-regulation, etc.-. Elliot pointed also that goal theory research provides evidence for different models of GO. As there were no consensus on these issues, we decided to get evidence about the nature and structure of GO, about the role of gender differences in the configuration of such structure, and about relations between GO, expectancies, volitional processes and achievement. A total of 382 university students from different faculties of two public universities of Madrid (Spain) that voluntarily accepted to fill in a questionnaire that assessed different goals, expectancies and self-regulatory processes participated in the study. Scales reliability, confirmatory factor analyses, multiple-group analyses, and correlation and regression analyses were carried out. Results support the trichotomous model of GO, the consideration of GO as a combination of aims and other psychological processes, showed some gender differences and favour the adoption of a multiple goal perspective for explaining students' motivation. En una revisión histórica del constructo “metas de logro”, Elliot (2005) reconocía que no hay consenso sobre si el término “meta” en la expresión “orientación a metas” (OM) debe concebirse como un “objetivo específico”, como un concepto que abarca varias metas, o como una combinación de metas y otros procesos –autorregulación, etc.-. Asimismo señalaba que la investigación sobre la “teoría de metas” apoya diferentes modelos de OM. Al no existir consenso sobre estos temas, decidimos obtener evidencia sobre la naturaleza y estructura de las OM, sobre el papel de las diferencias de género en la configuración de esta estructura, y sobre las relaciones entre OM, expectativas, procesos volitivos y logros académico. Un total de 382 estudiantes universitarios de diferentes facultades de dos universidades públicas de Madrid (España) que aceptaron voluntariamente completar un cuestionario que evaluaba metas, expectativas y procesos autorregulatorios participaron en el estudio. Se realizaron deferentes análisis: fiabilidad, factoriales confirmatorios, multigrupo y de regresión. Los resultados apoyaron el modelo tricotómico de OM, la consideración de las OM como combinación de metas y otros procesos psicológicos, la adopción de la perspectiva de “múltiples metas” para explicar la motivación de los estudiantes, y pusieron de manifiesto algunas diferencias de género.
Optimized disjunctive association rules via sampling

The problem of finding optimized support association rules for a single numerical attribute, where the optimized region is a union of k disjoint intervals from the range of the attribute, is investigated. The first polynomial time algorithm for the problem of finding such a region maximizing support and meeting a minimum cumulative confidence threshold is given. Because the algorithm is not practical, an ostensibly easier, more constrained version of the problem is considered. Experiments demonstrate that the best extant algorithm for the constrained version has significant performance degradation on both a synthetic model of patterned data and on real world data sets. Running the algorithm on a small random sample is proposed as a means of obtaining near optimal results with high probability. Theoretical bounds on sufficient sample size to achieve a given performance level are proved, and rapid convergence on synthetic and real-world data is validated experimentally.
Comparison of epicardial and pericardial fat thickness assessed by echocardiography in African American and non-Hispanic White men: a pilot study.

OBJECTIVES Compared to non-Hispanic Whites, African American men have less intra-abdominal visceral adipose tissue (VAT) relative to total fat mass despite having a higher risk of obesity-related diseases. This study explores whether this racial pattern of VAT distribution extends to the intrathoracic VAT. METHODS We used two-dimensional transthoracic echocardiography to measure pericardial and maximum and minimum epicardial fat thickness anterior to the right ventricle in 50 African American and 106 non-Hispanic White men, aged 40-75 years, consecutively referred for echocardiography for standard clinical indications. Age, coronary risk factors, height, and weight were recorded, and body mass index (BMI) was calculated. The two groups were compared with respect to pericardial and maximum, minimum, and average epicardial fat thicknesses. RESULTS Among non-Hispanic Whites, pericardial and minimum epicardial fat measured at the mid-rightventricular wall were higher by 37% and 69%, respectively, than among African Americans (5.2+/-3.1 mm vs 3.8+/-3.1 mm, P<.011; 2.2+/-1.6 mm vs 1.3+/-1.2 mm, P<.001). Maximum epicardial fat along the distal right ventricular wall was 19% greater in non-Hispanic Whites, but this difference was not statistically significant (4.3+/-2.6 mm vs 3.6+/-2.0 mm, P=.133). The average epicardial fat measured at two sites was 26% greater in non-Hispanic Whites (2.9+/-2.0 mm vs 2.3+/-1.3 mm, P=.019). CONCLUSIONS Among men referred for echocardiography, non-Hispanic Whites have more epicardial and pericardial fat than do African Americans. Echocardiography may be a useful research tool for investigating VAT distribution and its relationship to cardiovascular risk.
Hand Hygiene Compliance in a Hematology Unit

Transmission of pathogens from the hands of health care workers (HCWs) is the main cause of nosocomial infections, and hand hygiene is the single most important procedure to prevent it. At present, little is known about the adherence of HCWs to hand hygiene procedures in hematology units, where the patients are at high risk for acquiring hospital infections. In a prospective observational study, two observers monitored the hand hygiene compliance of HCWs in a hematology unit during 30-min observation periods distributed randomly during the daytime over 2 months. The prevalence of compliance with hand hygiene was 26% on 638 observed occasions. The noncompliance was higher among nurses [odds ratio (OR) 3.52, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.85–6.70] and other HCWs (OR 1.72, 95% CI 0.98–3.02) compared to physicians. The compliance rate differed from 4 to 60% depending on the activity. The lowest compliance rate (4%) was observed before patient care and the highest (60%) was after insertion of invasive devices. When we classified the occasions for hand hygiene into ‘before’ and ‘after’ activities, the compliance rates were 9 and 36%, respectively (OR 5.6, 95% CI 3.4–9.0). In conclusion, noncompliance with hand hygiene was high in this hematology unit, especially among nurses and before activities. Variations with the type of HCW and activity suggest that targeted educational programs and feedback control may be useful.
Lotteries vs. All‐Pay Auctions in Fair and Biased Contests

The form of contests for a single fixed prize can be determined by a designer who maximizes the contestants' efforts. This paper establishes that, under common knowledge of the two asymmetric contestants' prize valuations, a fair Tullock-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to an all-pay-auction; it yields larger expected efforts (revenues) for the contest designer. If the contest can be unfair (structural discrimination is allowed), then the designer's payoff under the optimal lottery is equal to his expected payoff under the optimal all-pay auction.
Modeling Parenting Programs as an Interim Service for Families Waiting for Children's Mental Health Treatment

Using a discrete choice conjoint experiment, we explored the design of parenting programs as an interim strategy for families waiting for children's mental health treatment. Latent class analysis yielded 4 segments with different design preferences. Simulations predicted the Fast-Paced Personal Contact segment, 22.1% of the sample, would prefer weekly therapist-led parenting groups. The Moderate-Paced Personal Contact segment (24.7%) preferred twice-monthly therapist-led parenting groups with twice-monthly lessons. The Moderate-Paced E–Contact segment (36.3%), preferred weekly to twice-monthly contacts, e-mail networking, and a program combining therapist-led sessions with the support of a computerized telephone e-coach. The Slow-Paced E–Contact segment (16.9%) preferred an approach combining monthly therapist-led sessions, e-coaching, and e-mail networking with other parents. Simulations predicted 45.3% of parents would utilize an option combining 5 therapist coaching calls with 5 e-coaching calls, a model that could reduce costs and extend the availability of interim services. Although 41.0% preferred weekly pacing, 58% were predicted to choose an interim parenting service conducted at a twice-monthly to monthly pace. The results of this study suggest that developing interim services reflecting parental preferences requires a choice of formats that includes parenting groups, telephone-coached distance programs, and e-coaching options conducted at a flexible pace.
Content delivery network slicing: QoE and cost awareness

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) emerged to manage the great amount of content, as well as the transmissions over long distances. In recent years, this concept proves to be a promising solution for emergent enterprises. In this paper, we present a Content Delivery Network as a Service (CDNaaS) platform which can create virtual machines (VMs) through a network of data centers and provide a customized slice of CDN to users. CDNaaS manages a great number of videos by means of caches, transcoders, and streamers hosted in different VMs. However, an optimal placement of VMs with adequate flavors for the different images is required to obtain an efficient slice of CDN. In this work, we argue the need to find a convenient slice for the CDN owner while respecting his performance requirements and minimizing as much as possible the incurred cost. We first formulate the VMs placement problem as two Linear Integer problem solutions, aiming at minimizing the cost and maximizing the quality of experience of streaming. Then, extensive simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed models.
SPILLOVERS IN SPACE : DOES GEOGRAPHY MATTER ?

Using US firm level panel data we simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three potential sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technological, and product market (“horizontal”). To do so, we construct new measures of geographic proximity based on the distribution of a firm’s inventor locations as well as its headquarters. We find that geographic location is important for productivity, perhaps dominating other spillover mechanisms, and that both intra– and inter–regional (counties) spillovers matter. The geographic location of a firm’s researchers is more important than its headquarters. These benefits may be the reason why local policy–makers compete so hard for the location of local R&D labs and high tech workers.