Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
American Elections And The Rhetoric Of Political Change: Hyperbole, Anger, And Hope In U.S. Politics

Whatever else can be said about Donald Trump and the 2016 election—and many things are being and will continue to be said—he is widely understood as a harbinger of change. He is also widely understood as creating the potential for change in ways that are well outside the norm for U.S. national politics, whether it is because he is bringing populism to national government, threatening the nation with a form of fascism, or merely creating change through a chaotic and disorganized administrative style. Whatever one thinks of his politics, there is widespread agreement that the Trump administration brings something new and different to the American political scene. Trump is also evidence for the uncertainty with which we face major political change. It is generally true, of course, that political observers, academics, and pundits constantly look for signs of political change. Comfortable with the routines of politics, they search for the things that stand out—the new, the different, that which is potentially game changing. Members of the mass media are especially prone to this tendency, as journalists seem to have an increasingly short attention span and perpetually look for
Induction of alpha-smooth muscle actin by transforming growth factor-beta 1 in quiescent human breast gland fibroblasts. Implications for myofibroblast generation in breast neoplasia.

BACKGROUND By using a novel experimental system for the study of reactive fibroblast differentiation at the molecular level, we describe the induction of the alpha-isoform of smooth muscle actin by transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta 1) in human normal breast gland fibroblasts. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN The experimental system allowed fibroblasts to plate and remain quiescent and nonreactive but at the same time stay sensitive to environmental cues for more than 2 weeks after explantation. Most important, the biological activity of growth factors and cytokines could be studied without cells entering the cell cycle, thus serving as a model for stromal reactions with little cell turnover. RESULTS By use of double-labeling immunocytochemistry, isoelectric focusing, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, and fluorography, evidence is presented that the effect of TGF-beta 1 is dose-dependent with a maximal response above 80 pg/ml and a course of 6 days. No other growth factor/cytokine tested (platelet-derived growth factor, interleukin-1, insulin-like growth factor-1, acidic fibroblast growth factor, basic fibroblast growth factor, epidermal growth factor, and interferon-gamma) could induce alpha-smooth muscle actin on their own or potentiate the effect of TGF-beta 1. In an inhibitory assay, only basic fibroblast growth factor was found to prevent the action of TGF-beta 1. The relative contribution of TGF-beta 1-like activity to carcinoma cell induced alpha-smooth muscle actin in fibroblasts was deciphered using TGF-beta neutralizing antibodies and medium conditioned by two different breast carcinoma cell lines. Conditioned medium elicited a fibroblast response indistinguishable from that obtained with exogenously added TGF-beta 1, and indeed neutralization attributed the entire response to the sole effect of secreted TGF-beta 1-like activity. CONCLUSIONS These results provide a strategy for the molecular characterization of epithelial-stromal interaction in breast neoplasia.
Uncovering health literacy: Developing a remotely administered questionnaire for determining health literacy levels in health disparate populations.

INTRODUCTION Low health literacy contributes to health disparities. We sought to develop and evaluate a remotely administered tool to measure health literacy in health disparate populations. The basic research design involved asking the remotely administered questions in conjunction with an existing and valid measure of health literacy, the S-TOFHLA, to a non-representative convenience sample of individuals drawn from lower income communities. The measures of the remotely administered questions were then correlated with the results of the S-TOFHLA to determine if there was a connection between the two measures. We found a statistically significant correlation between a single question in the remotely administered survey and the validated S-TOFHLA measure. This research supports previous work that points to the importance of just a single remotely administered question in terms of correspondence with the S-TOFHLA. OBJECTIVE Develop a questionnaire that can be remotely administered to check for Health Literacy. METHODS Correlation analysis is conducted between various questions and S-TOFHLA scores to determine criterion validity. RESULTS A single question, "How confident are you in filling out medical forms by yourself? " outperforms other measures in correlating with the S-TOFHLA scores. CONCLUSIONS Further assessment of the confidence question both in isolation and in conjunction with other literacy identifiers should be conducted. Also, this question should be tested against other measures of health literacy beyond the S-TOFHLA.
Calcitonin gene-related peptide reverses the hypertension and significantly decreases the fetal mortality in pre-eclampsia rats induced by N(G)-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester.

We recently established that the chronic inhibition of nitric oxide production with N(G)-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME) increases blood pressure and fetal mortality in pregnant rats. Using this animal model, we have investigated whether calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) can reverse the pre-eclampsia-like conditions produced by L-NAME. CGRP and L-NAME were chronically infused s.c. into pregnant rats separately or together starting on day 17 of gestation; a control group was given saline infusions. Systolic blood pressure was measured on gestational days 17, 18, 19 and 22 and post-partum days 1 and 2. The weight and mortality of the pups were recorded immediately after spontaneous delivery. Animals treated with L-NAME exhibited significant elevations of blood pressure on days 18, 19 and 22 of gestation and during post-partum, increased pup mortality (18.4 versus 0.0%) and decreased pup weights (5.14 +/- 0.07 versus 6.20 +/- 0.06 g). The co-administration of L-NAME and CGRP prevented the gestational (not the post-partum) L-NAME hypertension and decreased pup mortality to 6.4% but did not reverse the decreased fetal weight (5.31 +/- 0.06 g). Our data indicate the CGRP (i) participates in regulation of the vascular adaptations that occur during normal pregnancy, (ii) has beneficial effects on the hypertension and increased mortality of experimental preeclampsia, and (iii) may exert differential effects on the systemic (i.e. maternal) and fetal components of utero-placental circulation. These findings may have important clinical implications.
Evaluation of four proposed bleeding criteria for the onset of late menopausal transition.

CONTEXT The current criterion for onset of late menopausal transition is amenorrhea of 90 d or more. The Stages of Reproductive Aging Workshop proposed alternative criteria based on a shorter period of amenorrhea. Empirical data comparing proposed criteria are not available. OBJECTIVE This paper evaluates the several bleeding criteria that served as the basis of these recommendations. The goal was to provide empirically based guidance regarding which bleeding criterion may be optimal for widespread application in clinical and research settings. DESIGN/SETTING The study used prospective menstrual calendar data from four community and population-based cohort studies: TREMIN, Melbourne Women's Midlife Health Project, Seattle Midlife Women's Health Study, and Study of Women's Health Across the Nation. PARTICIPANTS The study included 735 TREMIN, 279 Seattle Midlife Women's Health Study, 216 Melbourne Women's Midlife Health Project, and 2270 Study of Women's Health Across the Nation women aged 35-57 yr at baseline who contributed 10 menstrual cycles or more. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) The main measures were the frequency of and median age at occurrence and time from occurrence to final menstrual period (FMP) for four criteria: skipped segment, 10-segment running range, 60- and 90-d amenorrhea. RESULTS A skipped segment, 10-segment running range greater than 42 d and 60-d amenorrhea identify a similar time in women's reproductive lives. The latter two identify the exact same date in two thirds of women. All three criteria occur in a greater proportion of women than the 90-d criterion and are equally predictive of the FMP, although they occur 1-2 yr earlier. CONCLUSIONS These findings support the recommendation of the Stages of Reproductive Aging Workshop that 60 d of amenorrhea be used to define onset of the late menopausal transition.
Meniscal repair in vivo using human chondrocyte‐seeded PLGA mesh scaffold pretreated with platelet‐rich plasma

The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that platelet‐rich plasma (PRP) pretreatment on a poly‐lactic‐co‐glycolic acid (PLGA) mesh scaffold enhances the healing capacity of the meniscus with human chondrocyte‐seeded scaffolds in vivo, even when the seeded number of cells was reduced from 10 million to one million. A flexible PLGA mesh scaffold was pretreated with PRP using a centrifugal technique. One million human articular chondrocytes were seeded onto the scaffold by dynamic oscillation. After 7 days, scaffolds were placed between human meniscal discs and were implanted subcutaneously in nude mice for 6 weeks (n = 16/group). Fluorescence microscopy demonstrated uniform attachment of the chondrocytes throughout the scaffolds 24 h following seeding. Cell attachment analysis revealed a significantly increased number of chondrocytes on PRP‐pretreated than non‐treated scaffolds (p < 0.05). Field emission scanning electron microscopy revealed chondrocytes attached to the PRP‐pretreated scaffolds interconnecting their cellular processes with the fibrin network at 24 h and day 7 of culture. Of the 16 constructs containing PRP‐pretreated scaffolds implanted in mice, six menisci healed completely, nine healed incompletely and one did not heal. Histological results from the 16 control constructs containing non‐treated scaffolds revealed that none had healed completely, four healed incompletely and 12 did not heal. The histological outcome between the groups was significantly different (p < 0.05). These findings suggest that human articular chondrocytes on PRP‐pretreated PLGA mesh scaffolds demonstrate increased cell attachment and enhance the healing capacity of meniscus with a reduced number of seeding cells in a meniscal repair mouse model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Depression diagnoses and antidepressant use in primary care practices: a study from the Practice Partner Research Network (PPRNet).

BACKGROUND We examined the pharmacologic management and follow-up of adults with newly diagnosed depression, and the use of antidepressants among patients not diagnosed with depression in primary care practice. A total of 389 physicians in 39 practices in the Practice Partner Research Network (PPRNet), a national network of primary care physicians provided data for the study. METHODS We performed a retrospective cohort study for the year 1996 using demographic, contact, diagnosis, and prescription data available in the December 1997 PPRNet database. We identified patients with new diagnoses of depression from the problem lists in the electronic medical record. Psychopharmacologic agents prescribed within 5 days of the diagnosis, follow-up contacts within 6 months of the diagnosis, and diagnoses of patients prescribed antidepressants without a new diagnosis of depression were also identified. We performed descriptive analyses for all practices and for individual practices. RESULTS During 1996, there were 149,327 active adult patients in the 39 participating practices. Of the 131,141 patients without a history of depression or antidepressant prescription, 2103 (1.6%) had a new diagnosis of depression in 1996. Incidence among the 39 practices ranged from 0.4% to 4.0%. Forty-nine percent of the newly diagnosed patients received an antidepressant prescription within 5 days of diagnosis; 81% of the prescriptions were for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Ninety percent of the patients prescribed antidepressants had at least one contact in the 6 months after diagnosis (mean = 5.3 contacts). One third of the patients who had not begun antidepressants within 5 days of their diagnoses started taking one by the end of 1996. Among the 149,327 active patients, 6.3% received a prescription for an antidepressant in 1996. More than 40% of these patients had never been diagnosed with depression. CONCLUSIONS Our study highlights the high prevalence and wide interpractice variations of diagnosing depression and prescribing antidepressants in primary care. Follow-up of patients newly diagnosed with depression was common and consistent with published guidelines. Opportunities for increased detection and treatment of depression exist in approximately half of the study practices.
Burden of musculoskeletal disorders in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, 1990–2013: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013

Objectives We used findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 to report the burden of musculoskeletal disorders in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR). Methods The burden of musculoskeletal disorders was calculated for the EMR's 22 countries between 1990 and 2013. A systematic analysis was performed on mortality and morbidity data to estimate prevalence, death, years of live lost, years lived with disability and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Results For musculoskeletal disorders, the crude DALYs rate per 100 000 increased from 1297.1 (95% uncertainty interval (UI) 924.3–1703.4) in 1990 to 1606.0 (95% UI 1141.2–2130.4) in 2013. During 1990–2013, the total DALYs of musculoskeletal disorders increased by 105.2% in the EMR compared with a 58.0% increase in the rest of the world. The burden of musculoskeletal disorders as a proportion of total DALYs increased from 2.4% (95% UI 1.7–3.0) in 1990 to 4.7% (95% UI 3.6–5.8) in 2013. The range of point prevalence (per 1000) among the EMR countries was 28.2–136.0 for low back pain, 27.3–49.7 for neck pain, 9.7–37.3 for osteoarthritis (OA), 0.6–2.2 for rheumatoid arthritis and 0.1–0.8 for gout. Low back pain and neck pain had the highest burden in EMR countries. Conclusions This study shows a high burden of musculoskeletal disorders, with a faster increase in EMR compared with the rest of the world. The reasons for this faster increase need to be explored. Our findings call for incorporating prevention and control programmes that should include improving health data, addressing risk factors, providing evidence-based care and community programmes to increase awareness.
Linking soft and hard total quality management practices: evidence from Jordan

The purpose of this study is to describe the relationship between the two aspects of total quality management (TQM), soft TQM practices and hard TQM practices in manufacturing organisations. A research project was carried out in Jordanian manufacturing organisations using questionnaire survey. The relationships between the practices were examined through Pearson correlation and simple linear regression analyses. The results showed that the relationship between soft and hard TQM practices is significant. Customer focus has a significant relationship with statistical process control (SPC), while education and training have two significant relationships (SPC and continuous improvement). Top management leadership has three significant relationships (SPC, continuous improvement and product design). Finally, supplier relationship has significant relationships with all hard practices except process management practice. Hence, managers of manufacturing companies should realise the important role of hard practices in implementing soft TQM practices successfully.
Conditional-Associative Learning in Eating Disorders: A Comparison With OCD

The acquisition of conditional associations using neutral and individually threatening verbal stimuli was assessed in 16 females with anorexia nervosa (AN), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), bulimia nervosa and normal controls, respectively. Groups did not differ in terms of age, sex, intelligence, depression, verbal memory and verbal fluency measures. Patients and controls were widely comparable on tests assessing neuropsychological functioning. In the conditional-associative learning (CAL)-task only anorectic and OCD-patients displayed an impaired performance with neutral material but not with individually threatening material. Such a deficit was not evident in bulimics or in normal controls. These findings support the assumptions from functional neuroimaging investigations in AN and OCD and provide evidence that obsessive and compulsive behavior could have its origin within common neurobiological dysfunctions. The CAL possibly serves as a functional correlate of a neurophysiological dysfunction in obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders.
Vitamin C: update on physiology and pharmacology

Although ascorbic acid is an important water‐soluble antioxidant and enzyme cofactor in plants and animals, humans and some other species do not synthesize ascorbate due to the lack of the enzyme catalyzing the final step of the biosynthetic pathway, and for them it has become a vitamin. This review focuses on the role of ascorbate in various hydroxylation reactions and in the redox homeostasis of subcellular compartments including mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum. Recently discovered functions of ascorbate in nucleic acid and histone dealkylation and proteoglycan deglycanation are also summarized. These new findings might delineate a role for ascorbate in the modulation of both pro‐ and anti‐carcinogenic mechanisms. Recent advances and perspectives in therapeutic applications are also reviewed. On the basis of new and earlier observations, the advantages of the lost ability to synthesize ascorbate are pondered. The increasing knowledge of the functions of ascorbate and of its molecular sites of action can mechanistically substantiate a place for ascorbate in the treatment of various diseases.
The benefit of SPECT when added to planar scintigraphy in patients with bone metastases in the spine.

PURPOSE This study compared the efficiency of SPECT with planar bone scans in differentiating malignant from benign lesions and in detecting metastases to the spine. METHODS Planar scintigraphy and SPECT were performed in 37 patients with low back pain without known malignancy and in 38 patients with confirmed malignancy. The type, location, and intensity of tracer accumulation were compared on the planar and SPECT scans. The malignant or benign nature of lesions was proved by radiologic methods, histologic findings, 6 month follow-up, or all of these. RESULTS More metastases were detected by SPECT (SPECT, 58 of 64; planar, 42 of 64; P < 0.01). In three of seven patients with known malignancy who had a normal result of planar scan, only SPECT detected metastases. Fifty-nine metastases were radiologically mainly osteolytic, one was osteoblastic and four were mixed. Most lesions showed increased radioactivity (40 of 42 on planar scans vs. 45 of 58 on SPECT) and 2 of 42 (5%) vs. 12 of 58 (21%) were cold with marginally increased uptake. One of 58 metastases was a cold lesion seen on SPECT only. Lesions were more often malignant than benign when seen on SPECT in a pedicle (n = 5; malignant = 3, benign = 2), in the body and pedicle (n = 22; malignant = 14, benign = 8), within the vertebral body (n = 5; malignant = 4, benign = 1) and in the whole vertebra (n = 6; malignant = 4, benign = 2). The lesion to background ratio was higher on SPECT than on planar scans (SPECT, 2.26; planar scans, 1.86; P < 0.05 in malignant lesions). CONCLUSIONS SPECT of the spine improved the diagnostic accuracy of bone scans when added to a planar scan in patients with known malignancy and clinical suspicion of spinal metastases when the planar scan was borderline abnormal. It helps in differentiating between benign and malignant lesions of the spine.
Learning to Read Irregular Text with Attention Mechanisms

We present a robust end-to-end neural-based model to attentively recognize text in natural images. Particularly, we focus on accurately identifying irregular (perspectively distorted or curved) text, which has not been well addressed in the previous literature. Previous research on text reading often works with regular (horizontal and frontal) text and does not adequately generalize to processing text with perspective distortion or curving effects. Our work proposes to overcome this difficulty by introducing two learning components: (1) an auxiliary dense character detection task that helps to learn text specific visual patterns, (2) an alignment loss that provides guidance to the training of an attention model. We show with experiments that these two components are crucial for achieving fast convergence and high classification accuracy for irregular text recognition. Our model outperforms previous work on two irregular-text datasets: SVT-Perspective and CUTE80, and is also highly-competitive on several regular-text datasets containing primarily horizontal and frontal text.
An economic evaluation of operative compared with nonoperative management of displaced intra-articular calcaneal fractures.

BACKGROUND The choice of therapy for a displaced intra-articular calcaneal fracture has long been a source of uncertainty in orthopaedic surgery, both in terms of the impact of the therapy on clinical outcomes and on health-care and non-health-care costs. We performed an economic evaluation, based on the results of a randomized clinical trial, to evaluate the economic implications of operative compared with nonoperative management of this fracture. METHODS An economic evaluation was performed, with use of a four-year time horizon, to determine the effect on costs and health benefits of operative compared with nonoperative management for a group of patients with displaced intra-articular fractures of the calcaneus. The complication rate, arthrodesis rate, survival data, and health-outcome data were estimated prospectively from a recent randomized clinical trial. Direct health-care costs and indirect costs (the cost of time lost from work) were estimated retrospectively from the center treating the majority of the patients. RESULTS Operative management resulted in a lower rate of subtalar arthrodesis and a shorter time off from work compared with nonoperative treatment. When indirect costs, such as the time lost from work, were included in the analysis, operative management was less costly (an average savings of Can$19,000 per patient) and more effective, thus making it the preferred strategy. The result was most sensitive to the estimates of the costs of time lost from work. When these costs were excluded, operative treatment remained more effective, but with an increased average cost of Can$2800 per patient. CONCLUSIONS Calcaneal fractures have been recognized as having relatively poor clinical outcomes and a major socioeconomic impact with regard to time lost from work and recreation. Our analysis suggests that operative management of displaced intra-articular fractures is economically attractive. However, further exploration of the impact and valuation of time lost from work and patient outcomes is required.