Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical efficacy of metformin combined with clomiphene in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome and their effect on serum sex hormones

Objective: To analyze the effect of metformin combined with clomiphene in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and their effect on serum sex hormone levels. Methods: A total of 69 patients with PCOS treated in The People’s Hospital of Yichun City from August 2016 to July 2017 were enrolled, and randomized into the clomiphene treated group (group A, n=35) and metformin plus clomiphene treated group (group B, n=34). The general clinical data of the patients were observed and recorded. The fasting serum levels of serum follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), estradiol (E2), and pituitary prolactin (PRL) were measured by ELISA. The indicators of glucose metabolism, including fasting insulin (FIN), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), and leptin levels were also measured. At the same time, the pregnancy rate, ovulation rate, abortion rate of early pregnancy and clinical efficacy after treatments were compared between the two groups. Results: The post-treatment levels of FSH and E2 were 6.71±0.86 IU/L and 72.96±6.83 ng/L respectively in group B, and significantly higher compared to those in group A (both P<0.05). The LH and PRL levels in group B after treatment were 7.14±0.58 IU/L and 13.21±1.78 μg/L respectively, and were significantly lower compared to those in group A (both P<0.05). No significant changes were seen in the pre-treatment FIN, FPG, Leptin, and HOMA-IR between group B and group A (all P>0.05). After treatment, all indicators in group B were significantly lower than those in group A (all P<0.05; 12.31±0.86 IU/mL, 4.17±0.58 mmol/L, 3.96±0.47 ng/mL and 2.47±6.83, respectively). After treatment, the pregnancy rate and ovulation rate in group B were 55.9% and 73.5% respectively, higher than those in group A (both P<0.05). The abortion rate of early pregnancy in group B was 2.9% after treatment, which was not significantly different when compared to that in group A (P>0.05). The total number of effectively treated patients in group B was 32, making an effective rate of 94.1%, which was significantly higher than that in group A (P<0.05). Conclusion: Metformin combined with clomiphene have good clinical efficacy in patients with PCOS, improve the patients’ endocrine function of sex hormones, and increase the ovulation rate and pregnancy rate.
Evaluation of serum lipocalin-2 level in patients with plaque psoriasis and its correlation with PASI score

26 ABSTRACT Background: Psoriasis is a chronic papulosquamous disease with variable morphology, distribution, severity, and clinical course, affecting approximately 2% of the population. Lipocalin-2 is expressed in liver, lung, kidney, macrophages and epithelial cells. The lipocalin-2 is known to be related to insulin resistance, obesity and atherosclerotic diseases. Lipocalin-2 expression reflects the different status of inflammation, and may be related with the epidermal hyperplasia. Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between serum lipocalin-2 level and severity of psoriasis vulgaris. Subjects and Methods: A case-control study was carried out on forty patients with plaque psoriasis and forty age and sex matched healthy controls. Full history, general and dermatological examinations was done for all patients and controls. Height, weight, BMI, blood pressure and serum lipocalin-2 were estimated for both patients and controls. Results: The mean serum level of lipocalin-2 was 112.7±12.8 ng/dl in psoriatic patient and 66.7±8.7 ng/dl in control group with a statistically significant elevation in psoriatic patient than control group (P value<0.001). No significant correlation was found between serum level of lipocalin-2 and PASI score, duration of disease and BMI. Conclusion: Serum lipocalin-2 level in patients with psoriasis vulgaris was significantly higher than those in healthy controls, and no correlation between serum level of lipocalin-2 and PASI score was identified.
CHI 3 L 1 is correlated with childhood asthma

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the association between CHI3L1 gene two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (rs12141494 and rs4950928) and susceptibility to pediatric asthma in a Chinese Han population. Methods: The case-control study was carried out on 115 children with asthma and 108 healthy controls. Genotypes of rs12141494 and rs4950928 within CHI3L1 gene were determined with polymerase chain reactionrestriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) approach. Chi-square test was employed to analyze the differences of genotype and allele frequencies of the two polymorphisms between case and control groups. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were applied to explain relative susceptibility of pediatric asthma. Results: The frequencies of genotypes and alleles of rs4950928 in CHI3L1 gene showed a significant difference between asthmatic children and healthy controls (P<0.05). However, no significant differences were found in CHI3L1 SNP rs12141494 between two groups (P>0.05). Conclusion: Our results suggested that rs4950928 in CHI3L1 gene was associated with pediatric asthma risk in a Chinese Han population, while rs12141494 was not.
Auto Dealer Loan Intermediation: Consumer Behavior and Competitive Effects

This paper studies the intermediation of auto loans through auto dealers using new and comprehensive administrative data. The arrangements between auto dealers and lenders incentivize dealers to increase loan prices. We leverage details of the corresponding contracts to demonstrate that many consumers are less responsive to finance charges than to vehicle charges. Taking this behavior into account, we estimate an equilibrium model of dealer price setting and lender competition. We explore counterfactuals where dealers have no discretion to price loans and final rates are set by lenders instead. We find large gains in consumer surplus from such a policy.
DETECTION OF TAST SALT TOLERANCE GENE IN THREE SELECTED WHEAT GENOTYPES FOR SALINITY STRESS UNDER SALINITY CONDITIONS

The aim of this study is detection of salt tolerant gene (TaST) selected wheat genotypes for salt tolerance (1H, 2H , 3H) through plant breeding program as compared with local cultivars (sensitive) under salinity condition. Quantitative reverse transcription-PCR (q-RT-PCR) was used to detect TaST salt tolerant gene in these selected genotypes. Also chlorophyll and organic compounds contents were estimated in the upper leaves of the selected genotypes and local cultivars. Results of the PCR showed that the gene band of TaST appeared only in the selected genotypes with length 175bp at both salinity conditions, while this band absent in the local cultivars, (sensitive) (Iraq and latefyi), also at both salinity conditions. All the selected genotypes had the same band size (175bp). Chlorophyll content in the upper leaves of selected genotypes increased at salinity treatment, while it decreased in the leaves of local cultivars at this treatment as compared with non-saline conditions. The results also, showed that the selected genotypes had the highest organic compounds in their leaves, especially under salinity condition. It can be concluding that the selected genotypes (1H, 2H, and 3H) were more salt tolerance than local cultivars (Iraq, latefyi).
Seakeeping Sensitivity Studies Using the Decomposition CFD Model Based on the Ghost Fluid Method

This work presents various seakeeping sensitivity studies performed with a novel CFD model based on solution and domain decomposition and the implicit treatment of free surface jump conditions via the Ghost Fluid Method (GFM). Solution decomposition via Spectral Wave Explicit Navier–Stokes Equations (SWENSE) allows us to efficiently simulate incident wave propagation, while domain decomposition via implicit relaxation zones prevents undesirable wave reflection off far field boundaries. The GFM discretises the pressure jump conditions, yielding interface–corrected interpolation schemes, which implicitly couple the two fluids at the free surface. In order to capture the interface, implicitly redistanced Level Set (LS) method derived from the Phase Field (PF) equation is used, rendering additional explicit redistancing unnecessary. The combined model is implemented in foam-extend-3.2, a community driven fork of the open source software OpenFOAM. Validation of the model is performed by simulating 5 head wave cases and 5 oblique wave cases for the KRISO Container Ship (KCS), comparing the results with available experimental data published in Larsson et al. (2015a). In order to verify the developed numerical framework, numerous sensitivity studies are performed: • Time step resolution and hydro–mechanical (fluid–flow/6 DOF) coupling uncertainty assessment for one test case; • Grid uncertainty assessment for all test cases (3 grids for each case); • Periodic uncertainty assessment for all test cases (at least 30 periods simulated for majority of cases). The results of sensitivity studies are used to deduce guidelines for this type of CFD simulations. Performance in terms of CPU time and strong parallel scalability are assessed, showing that the presented model is highly efficient for seakeeping simulations.
Cluster Sustainability in the New Zealand Timber Industry

Four cluster groups in New Zealand’s timber industry are examined to determine the attributes of a sustainable cluster. Two of the four groups have sustained the support of enterprise owners and two have failed to sustain support. Using structured and semi structured questions, business managers in organisations associated with each cluster group were interviewed. The attributes of the more successful clusters are identified related to: (i) the mix of enterprise types; (ii) managers’ expectations from cluster participation; (iii) the business relationships between cluster participants. These characteristics lead to the development of two models of enterprise activity conducive to cluster formation. Each model has different implications for the potential impact of a cluster on enterprise growth. These findings raise a number of challenges for the advocacy of business clusters as a tool for enhancing business competitiveness. ____________________
Researching Organizational Culture Using the Grounded Theory Method

Researching organizational culture using the grounded theory method is intuitively logical, given the ease of conceptualising organizational culture as a basic social process. In spite of its intuitive appeal, there are numerous challenges along the research voyage that could facilitate or jeopardise the unsuspecting researcher’s investigation. The aim of this paper is to alert prospective researchers, to some of the critical considerations that arise when designing and conducting research of this nature. The paper first tackles issues that are related to the conceptualisation of organizational culture as the phenomenon of interest, before turning to the research design implications. Research considerations that are related to the conceptualisation of organizational culture and the formulation of the research, include (1) the school of thought that the researcher embraces and the implications of its research traditions; (2) the assumptions made about the nature of organizational culture (such as its degree of uniformity or variation, its definition and construction, and its stability and development over time) and the implications for its investigation; (3) the contextual characteristics of the study (such as the size of the organization being investigated) and their implications for the manifestation of organizational culture; and (4) the researcher’s values and interests and their implications for accessing credible data. Other than the implications of conceptualisation of organizational culture on the formulation of the research problem, further research design considerations discussed include (1) aligning the researcher’s ontological and epistemological assumptions with the assumptions made about organizational culture; (2) identifying sources of data and techniques for its collection, that are appropriate to the conceptualisation of culture and its temporal characteristics in particular; and (3) reconciling the level of data collection with its level of analysis in order to aggregate and reconcile various individual perspectives of a collective social construct.
The Treatment of Owner Occupied Housing and Other Durables in a Consumer Price Index

The paper systematically surveys alternative approaches to the treatment of durable goods in a consumer price index. The main approaches are the acquisitions, rental equivalence, user cost and payments approaches. A major component of the user cost approach to valuing the services of a durable is the depreciation component. The paper presents a general model of depreciation and then it is specialized to the three most common models of depreciation that are in use. A complication is many durables (like housing) are custom produced and thus the usual methods for determining the form of depreciation are not applicable. The special problems caused by these uniquely produced consumer durables are considered as well as some of the special problems involved in implementing the user cost and rental equivalence methods for valuing the services provided by Owner Occupied Housing.
Comparison of sine-wave frequency estimation methods in respect of speed and accuracy for a few observed cycles distorted by noise and harmonics

The paper deals with frequency estimation methods of sine-wave signals for a few signal cycles and consists of two parts. The first part contains a short overview where analytical error formulae for a signal distorted by noise and harmonics are presented. These formulae are compared with other accurate equations presented previously by the authors which are even more accurate below one cycle in the measurement window. The second part contains a comparison of eight estimation methods (ESPRIT, TLS, Prony LS, a newly developed IpDFT method and four other 3-point IpDFT methods) in respect of calculation time and accuracy for an ideal sine-wave signal, signal distorted by AWGN noise and a signal distorted by harmonics. The number of signal cycles is limited from 0.1 to 3 or 5. The results enable to select the most accurate/ fastest estimation method in various measurement conditions. Parametric methods are more accurate but also much slower than IpDFT methods (up to 3000 times for the number of samples equal to 5000). The presented method is more accurate than other IpDFT methods and much faster than parametric methods, which makes it possible to use it as an alternative, especially in real-time applications.
A Study on Prophylactic Efficacies of Daptomycin and Vancomycin in a Rat Model of MRSA Infection Secondary to Spinal Implantation

A Study on Prophylactic Efficacies of Daptomycin and Vancomycin in a Rat Model of MRSA Infection Secondary to Spinal Implantation Öner ÖZER, Fusun D. ÖZER, Emrah AKÇAY, Ibrahim Burak ATCI, Umit KOCAMAN, Mehmet Ali OZİNEL, Ender VARDAR, Nail OZDEMİR Alsancak State Hospıtal, Infectious Diseases, Izmir, Türkiye Bozyaka Training and Research Hospital, Neurosurgery, Izmir, Türkiye Tepecik Training and Research Hospital, Neurosurgery, Izmir, Türkiye Ege Unıversity, Microbiology and Clinic Microbiology, Izmir, Türkiye Bozyaka Training and Research Hospital, Pathology, Izmir, Türkiye
DIRECT NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THE GROWTH OF COHERENT FLOW STRUCTURES IN A TRIGGERED TURBULENT SPOT

Hairpin-like coherent flow structures have been identified as the dominant vortical structures in transitional and turbulent boundary layers and free shear layers. To fully characterize the processes occurring within such flows, it is important to study the growth mechanism of the hairpin vortices, particularly at their early stages of development, and the development of the resultant wave packets containing multiples of these flow structures. The formation of an artificiallytriggered turbulent spot in isolation provides a suitable test case to study the mechanism through which a hairpin vortex forms in a shear layer and how the formation of one such flow structure may produce a local flow environment that promotes the creation of similar flow structures in sequence. The present study involves direct numerical simulations wherein an isolated turbulent spot is produced through a perturbation in the form of a pulsed jet ejected transversely through a square orifice in the test surface. The simulated spots compare favorably with spots measured experimentally under similar freestream conditions. Two levels of freestream acceleration—one that is nominally zero and another that is above the typical threshold required for relaminarization—are applied to the flow to assess the sensitivity of the hairpin-like vortical structures to freestream acceleration. Hairpin-like vortices near the spot trailing edge are observed to grow primarily through an instability of shear layers created between highand low-velocity streaks near the spanwise edges of the spot.
Bedside Ultrasound for the Diagnosis of Pneumonia

Respiratory distress is a common presentation in both the pediatric and adult emergency department (ED). Community acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a common cause for this distress, and carries the potential for high morbidity and mortality if inadequately treated. In a fast-moving and potentially resource-limited ED, however, it can sometimes be di! cult to decide which patients require further imaging to di"erentiate CAP from the myriad of other potential etiologies for respiratory distress such as bronchiolitis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure, and pulmonary embolism. Although both the British Thoracic Society (BTS) and Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) state that bacterial CAP is a clinical diagnosis based on persistent fever, retractions, and tachypnea, they agree that radiographic imaging should be obtained in any patient requiring hospital admission or with significant clinical uncertainty. Unfortunately, even if the ED provider decides to pursue chest X-ray (CXR) imaging, he or she may still miss the diagnosis, as CXR has been shown in several studies to have a notable false negative rate (FNR) and high inter-observer variability in the diagnosis of CAP. The limitations and inherent radiation exposure of CXR, in combination with the increasing availability of and familiarity with bedside lung ultrasound (LUS) imaging, have prompted many ED physicians to begin looking to LUS as a potential alternative in the evaluation of patients with suspected CAP.
Decoding cancer heterogeneity: studying patient-specific signaling signatures towards personalized cancer therapy

The past years have witnessed a rapid increase in the amount of large-scale tumor datasets. The challenge has now become to find a way to obtain useful information from these masses of data that will allow to determine which combination of FDA-approved drugs is best suited to treat the specific tumor. Various statistical analyses are being developed to extract significant signals from cancer datasets. However, tumors are still being assigned to pre-defined categories (breast luminal A, triple negative, etc.), conceptually contradicting the vast heterogeneity that is known to exist among tumors, and likely overlooking unique tumors that must be addressed and treated individually. We present herein an approach based on information theory that, rather than searches for what makes a tumor similar to other tumors, addresses tumors individually and unbiasedly, and impartially decodes the critical patient-specific molecular network reorganization in every tumor. Methods: Using a large dataset obtained from ~3500 tumors of 11 types we decipher the altered protein network structure in each tumor, namely the patient-specific signaling signature. Each signature can harbor several altered protein subnetworks. We suggest that simultaneous targeting of central proteins from every altered subnetwork is essential to efficiently disturb the altered signaling in each tumor. We experimentally validate our ability to dissect sample-specific signaling signatures and to rationally design personalized drug combinations. Results: We unraveled a surprisingly simple order that underlies the extreme apparent complexity of tumor tissues, demonstrating that only 17 altered protein subnetworks characterize ~3500 tumors of 11 types. Each tumor was described by a specific subset of 1-4 subnetworks out of 17, i.e. a tumor-specific altered signaling signature. We show that the majority of tumor-specific signaling signatures are extremely rare, and are shared by only 5 tumors or less, supporting a personalized, comprehensive study of tumors in order to design the optimal combination therapy for every patient. We validate the results by confirming that the processes identified in the 11 original cancer types characterize patients harboring a different cancer type as well. We show experimentally, using different cancer cell lines, that the individualized combination therapies predicted by us achieved higher rates of killing than the clinically prescribed treatments. Conclusions: We present a new strategy to deal with the inter-tumor heterogeneity and to break down the high complexity of cancer systems into simple, easy to crack, patient-specific signaling signatures that guide the rational design of personalized drug therapies.
IMPORTANCE OF SELF-EFFICACY OF WORKING IN TEAM ENVIRONMENT IN DETERMINING INDIVIDUAL SATISFACTION AND PERFORMANCE : DOES IT DEPEND ON THE TEAM PERFORMANCE ?

Utilization of teams is increasingly becoming prevalent in high-tech entrepreneurial organizations. As the team approach is becoming popular, more and more employees are getting involved in teams. According to management literature, individual satisfaction is an important variable for long term organizational performance. Therefore, individual satisfaction of working in a team becomes an important consideration for the entrepreneurial organizations. This study provides an explanation of relationships between employees' self-efficacy of working in a team, their satisfaction with teams and individual performance. It suggests that the above relationships depend on overall team performance.
School Manager System based on a Personal Information Architecture

The current technological revolution has provided multiple benefits to human activities. For their part, organizations have had the need to make changes to their business requirements, which have led them to migrate to systems and services in more complex models. Educational institutions have experienced the impact of technological progress, because, regarding school management, information handling requires to be performed through automated processes that also protect data from any human or cyber-attack. The purpose of the paper herein is to show the development and integration of a system dedicated to manage personal information within a school environment, through the implementation of an information management architecture, whose main purpose is to create certified documents that can be shared with other information systems in the same trust environment. Research is descriptive in nature as it pretends to detect abnormalities in the characteristics of PIMS, describe their associations, and prove or reject the hypothesis in order to be compared to subsequent studies.