Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implementation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation workshop in first MBBS

Context: Students should be exposed to early clinical scenario so that they start developing competency-based learning right from their MBBS 1st year. Medical Council of India has recognized this need and has suggested early clinical exposure of MBBS 1st year students in their document Vision 2015. Medical education in India needs change for achieving desired competencies. It has been concluded that Indian medical undergraduates have inadequate knowledge in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Aims: To implement CPR workshop in MBBS 1st year, and to study the impact of CPR workshop among MBBS 1st year students. Design: Interventional study. Materials and Methods: CPR workshop was conducted with the help of Faculty of Anesthesia and Physiology among MBBS 1st year students. Teaching learning methods employed were lecture, demonstration, and hand-on practice on mannequin in small groups. The evaluation was done by pre- and post-standardized, validated questionnaire; direct observation procedural skill, and feedback questionnaire. Results: There was a significant improvement in knowledge of students as shown from results of pre- and post-questionnaire. About 84.24% students found the presentation excellent, 71.23% students found the demonstration excellent in terms of visibility and clarity, 63.7% students found the instructions excellent. All students were successful in acquiring skills of CPR as shown by results of directly observed procedural skills. Conclusions: Results of this study suggest that the workshop provided students with sound basic knowledge and adequate practical skills in CPR. CPR workshop should be carried out every year among undergraduate students. CPR workshop should be introduced in MBBS 1st year curriculum.
Talin1 Has Unique Expression versus Talin 2 in the Heart and Modifies the Hypertrophic Response to Pressure Overload*

Background: Talin is an integrin-actin linker essential for integrin activation. Results: Talin1 has distinct developmental and postnatal expression in heart versus Talin2. Cardiac-myocyte specific Talin1 deletion alters physiological and molecular responses of the myocardium to stress. Conclusion: Talin1 has a unique mechanotransductive role in the cardiomyocyte. Significance: Reduction of talin1 in cardiomyocytes may have beneficial effects in the stressed myocardium. Integrins are adhesive, signaling, and mechanotransduction proteins. Talin (Tln) activates integrins and links it to the actin cytoskeleton. Vertebrates contain two talin genes, tln1 and tln2. How Tln1 and Tln2 function in cardiac myocytes (CMs) is unknown. Tln1 and Tln2 expression were evaluated in the normal embryonic and adult mouse heart as well as in control and failing human adult myocardium. Tln1 function was then tested in the basal and mechanically stressed myocardium after cardiomyocyte-specific excision of the Tln1 gene. During embryogenesis, both Tln forms are highly expressed in CMs, but in the mature heart Tln2 becomes the main Tln isoform, localizing to the costameres. Tln1 expression is minimal in the adult CM. With pharmacological and mechanical stress causing hypertrophy, Tln1 is up-regulated in CMs and is specifically detected at costameres, suggesting its importance in the compensatory response to CM stress. In human failing heart, CM Tln1 also increases compared with control samples from normal functioning myocardium. To directly test Tln1 function in CMs, we generated CM-specific Tln1 knock-out mice (Tln1cKO). Tln1cKO mice showed normal basal cardiac structure and function but when subjected to pressure overload showed blunted hypertrophy, less fibrosis, and improved cardiac function versus controls. Acute responses of ERK1/2, p38, Akt, and glycogen synthase kinase 3 after mechanical stress were strongly blunted in Tln1cKO mice. Given these results, we conclude that Tln1 and Tln2 have distinct functions in the myocardium. Our data show that reduction of CM Tln1 expression can lead to improved cardiac remodeling following pressure overload.
Modelling incremental self-repair processing in dialogue

Self-repairs, where speakers repeat themselves, reformul ate or restart what they are saying, are pervasive in human dialogue. These phenomena provide a wind o into real-time human language processing. For explanatory adequacy, a model of dial gue must include mechanisms that account for them. Artificial dialogue agents also need this c apability for more natural interaction with human users. This thesis investigates the structu e of self-repair and its function in the incremental construction of meaning in interaction. A corpus study shows how the range of self-repairs seen in dia logue cannot be accounted for by looking at surface form alone. More particularly it analy ses a string-alignment approach and shows how it is insufficient, provides requirements for a sui table model of incremental context and an ontology of self-repair function. An information-theoretic model is developed which address es these issues along with a system that automatically detects self-repairs and edit terms on transcripts incrementally with minimal latency, achieving state-of-the-art results. Additi onally it is shown to have practical use in the psychiatric domain. The thesis goes on to present a dialogue model to interpret an d ge erate repaired utterances incrementally. When processing repaired rather than fluent tterances, it achieves the same degree of incremental interpretation and incremental repr esentation. Practical implementation methods are presented for an existing dialogue system. Finally, a more pragmatically oriented approach is present ed to model self-repairs in a psycholinguistically plausible way. This is achieved through extending the dialogue model to include a probabilistic semantic framework to perform incremental inference in a reference resolution domain. The thesis concludes that at least as fine-grained a model of c ontext as word-by-word is required for realistic models of self-repair, and context mus t include linguistic action sequences and information update effects. The way dialogue participa nts process self-repairs to make inferences in real time, rather than filter out their disfluency eff ects, has been modelled formally and in practical systems. Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen Mary University of London
Racial Discrimination in English Professional Football: Evidence from an Empirical Analysis of Players' Career Progression

A novel test for racial discrimination in English professional football is presented, based on an assessment of the effect of race on footballers' labour market transition probabilities. Career progression is observed over five-year intervals within the period 1986-2001. Transition probabilities are estimated using a three-equation model with initial divisional status, retention and divisional transition as dependent variables. Retention depends on age, divisional status, first-team appearances, playing position and birthplace. Divisional transition depends on age, first-team appearances and playing position. Black players tend to be employed by teams of higher divisional status and have higher retention probabilities, suggesting a form of hiring discrimination affecting the process of becoming a professional.
Post‐merger corporate performance: an Indian perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the post‐merger operating performance of acquiring companies involved in merger activities during the period 1999‐2002 in India. It attempts to identify synergies, if any, resulting from mergers.Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the operating performance approach, which compares the pre‐merger and post‐merger performance of companies using accounting data to examine merger related gains to the acquiring firms.Findings – It is found that the post‐merger profitability, assets turnover and solvency of the acquiring companies, on average, show no improvement when compared with pre‐merger values. So it seems that, contrary to common beliefs and expectations, mergers usually do not lead to improve the acquirer's financial performance.Research limitations/implications – Further studies may develop some alternate measures of merger‐related gains as financial measures have limitations to capture the full impact of merger on corporate performance. Moreov.
Functioning in the Real World: Using Storytelling to Improve Validity in the Assessment of Executive Functions

ABSTRACT Real-world contexts differ in the clarity of expectations for desired responses, as do assessment procedures, ranging along a continuum from maximal conditions that provide well-defined expectations to typical conditions that provide ill-defined expectations. Executive functions guide effective social interactions, but relations between them have not been studied with measures that are matched in the clarity of response expectations. In predicting teacher-rated social competence (SC) from kindergarteners' performance on tasks of executive functions (EFs), we found better model–data fit indexes when both measures were similar in the clarity of response expectations for the child. The maximal EF measure, the Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment, presents well-defined response expectations, and the typical EF measure, 5 scales from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), presents ill-defined response expectations (i.e., Abstraction, Perceptual Integration, Cognitive-Experiential Integration, and Associative Thinking). To assess SC under maximal and typical conditions, we used 2 teacher-rated questionnaires, with items, respectively, that emphasize well-defined and ill-defined expectations: the Behavior Rating Inventory: Behavioral Regulation Index and the Social Skills Improvement System: Social Competence Scale. Findings suggest that matching clarity of expectations improves generalization across measures and highlight the usefulness of the TAT to measure EF.
Market Dynamics and Momentum Profits

Abstract Recent evidence indicates that momentum profits are sensitive to market conditions. We find that the profits are higher when the markets continue in the same state than when they transition to a different state. These findings support Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Subrahmanyam (1998), who suggest that investor overconfidence is higher when the markets continue in the same state (UP or DOWN) than when they reverse, predicting higher momentum profits in the former. In contrast, our evidence following DOWN markets is not consistent with the other competing models for the market-state conditional momentum profits.
Phase II Study of Psychotherapeutic Intervention in Advanced Cancer

The effect of psychosocial counseling on tumor progression was studied in 96 cancer patients, who were no longer amenable to regular medical treatment. Patients were offered 12 sessions of individual experiential‐existential counseling, each session lasting 1.5 to 2 hours. In addition patients participated fortnightly in group counseling meetings. In five out of 35 evaluable patients, tumor growth became stationary during or immediately following therapy. In four patients this stationary period last 3–9 months, and in one patient 2 years. Natural Killer cell activity, self‐reported loneliness, depression, purpose in life and locus of control showed no change from pre‐ to post intervention. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Internal labour markets in Australia: evidence from the survey of education and training experience

In recent years there has been important debate on the changing nature of the employment relationship, with some scholars claiming a significant weakening of the bond between employers and employees. An associated implication is that internal labour markets (ILMs) are becoming less prevalent in the economy. This paper uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Survey of Education and Training Experience 1993-2005 to explore whether the bonds between employers and employees are weakening, and hence whether ILMs are being dismantled. Measures of job tenure, training expenditure and earnings are examined. Results indicate little or modest change in the first two measures. In addition the paper finds no evidence of a change in the average return to job tenure in earnings functions. On balance, the paper does not find a weakening in the relationship between employers and employees in Australia. This in turn suggests that ILMs are not of declining importance in the Australian labour market.
Antecedents to Market Orientation in the Worker Cooperative Organization: The Mondragon Group

type="main" xml:lang="fr"> Etant donne l'importance socio-economique des entreprises cooperatives et vu qu'elles sont une option reelle et competitive dans un environnement complexe, il est necessaire d'etudier attentivement leur modele organisationnel. Il est significatif que certaines des cooperatives de travailleurs les plus consolidees se sont centrees sur une orientation commerciale. L'objectif central de cet article est des lors d'examiner l'influence d'un ensemble d'antecedents internes a l'orientation de marche des cooperatives. Les auteurs verifient des lors les benefices possibles de l'orientation commerciale sur la performance de l'entreprise. Les entreprises de travailleurs qui ont construit le Groupe Mondragon – pionnier mondial de la pratique economique democratique – sont l'objet de cette analyse.
Purification and characterization of a cyclooxygenase‐2 and angiogenesis suppressing factor produced by human fibroblasts

Cyclooxygenase‐2 (COX‐2) is an inducible enzyme that plays an important role in several pathophysiological processes, including inflammation, angiogenesis, and tumorigenesis. We have recently observed that COX‐2 induction is restrained in proliferating fibroblasts. The mechanism by which this occurs is unclear. Here, we report the detection and isolation from the conditioned medium of proliferating fibroblasts a factor that suppressed COX‐2 expression. This factor, which was named cytoguardin, suppressed COX‐2 protein levels induced by phorbol 12myristate 13‐acetate, interleukin‐1β, tumor necrosis factor α, and lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in fibroblasts and LPS‐induced COX‐2 protein levels and promoter activities in human endothelial cells and murine RAW 264.7 cells in a comparable concentration‐dependent manner. It inhibited COX‐2 expression induced by angiogenic factors and endothelial tube formation induced by angiogenic factors and colon cancer cell medium. These findings provide evidence for the control of COX‐2 transcription by an endogenous cellular factor.
The Impact of Red Tape on Governmental Performance: An Empirical Analysis

This study investigates the impact of red tape on governmental performance in the context of English local government. Both the red tape and performance constructs are multidimensional, so relationships between the concepts and their several dimensions are examined in detail. The results show that different types of red tape have varying impacts on governmental performance but that these effects are somewhat weaker than public management theory and conventional wisdom suggest. Moreover, some types of red tape affect some dimensions of performance in surprising ways. For example, internal red tape has limited effects on efficiency but inflicts considerable damage on equity. The results also show that red tape is a subject-dependent concept-known in the literature as stakeholder red tape. We contend that this alternative conceptualization of red tape opens new vistas for understanding the concept and should be explored further. The implications for public management research and practice are discussed.
The inhibition of cat lateral superior olive unit excitatory responses to binaural tone bursts. I. The transient chopper response.

1. The temporal properties of lateral superior olivary (LSO) unit discharges to binaural tone bursts were studied to determine the general time course and statistical properties of these discharges and to provide a basis for extending a point process model of LSO unit monaural discharges to describe their binaural discharges. Single-unit activity was recorded extracellularly from the LSO of the anesthetized cat. The initial transient and the gross temporal features of LSO unit discharges to binaural simultaneous tone bursts are examined in this paper. 2. The poststimulus time (PST) histograms generated by LSO unit discharges to monaural and binaural tone bursts illustrated that the ipsilaterally elicited tone-burst discharges were most strongly inhibited during the initial segment of the binaural response and that the degree of inhibition decreased (i.e., discharge rate increased) as the poststimulus onset time increased. Hence, the contralateral inhibitory effect "adapts" in a manner similar to the ipsilaterally elicited discharges. 3. When the interaural level difference was decreased, the degree of discharge inhibition increased: the period of maximal inhibition spread to shorter and longer poststimulus onset times as the contralateral latency decreased and as the contralateral response magnitude increased. The latency of the inhibitory effect could decrease sufficiently to result in the suppression of the first spike of the ipsilateral discharge. Also, when the binaural stimulus was of sufficient intensity, an increase in spike output, the OFF discharge, was often observed during the last 1-10 ms of the response. 4. It was concluded that the initial and general time course of the binaural response could serve as cues of binaural stimulus level, interaural level differences, and interaural time-of-arrival differences of high-frequency stimuli. The binaural response could be discriminated from a monaural response of similar discharge rate as the former either occurred with shorter latency or, when the first spike was suppressed, with much longer and/or more variable latency than the latter. The gross temporal differences between the monaural and binaural responses could be accounted for in terms of differences in certain gross temporal features (e.g., latency and adaptation) of the ipsilateral and contralateral responses. 5. The effect of stimulating the contralateral ear was not limited to the inhibition of discharges. The timing of a discharge to an ipsilateral stimulus could be perturbed (lengthened) by a contralateral stimulus at levels below that which suppressed the discharge. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Recent Progress in Understanding Congenital Cranial Dysinnervation Disorders

Background: In 2002, the new term congenital cranial dysinnervation disorder (CCDD) was proposed as a substitute for the traditional concept of congenital fibrosis of the extraocular muscles (CFEOM) based on mounting genetic, neuropathologic, and imaging evidence, suggesting that many, if not all, of these disorders result from a primary neurologic maldevelopment rather than from a muscle abnormality. This report provides an update 8 years after that original report. Evidence Acquisition: Review of pertinent articles published from January 2003 until June 2010 describing CCDD variants identified under PubMed MeSH terms congenital fibrosis of the extraocular muscles, congenital cranial dysinnervation disorders, individual phenotypes included under the term CCDD, and congenital ocular motility disorders. Results: At present, a total of 7 disease genes and 10 phenotypes fall under the CCDD umbrella. A number of additional loci and phenotypes still await gene elucidation, with the anticipation that more syndromes and genes will be identified in the future. Identification of genes and their function, along with advances in neuroimaging, have expanded our understanding of the mechanisms underlying several anomalous eye movement patterns. Conclusions: Current evidence still supports the concept that the CCDDs are primarily due to neurogenic disturbances of brainstem or cranial nerve development. Several CCDDs are now known to have nonophthalmologic associations involving neurologic, neuroanatomic, cerebrovascular, cardiovascular, and skeletal abnormalities.
Incomplete information in rent-seeking contests

We consider a variant of the Tullock lottery contest. Each player’s constant marginal cost of effort is drawn from a potentially different continuous distribution. In order to study the impact of incomplete information, we compare three informational settings to each other; players are either completely informed, privately informed about their own costs, or ignorant of all cost realizations. For the first and the third setting, we determine the unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. Under private information, we prove existence of a pure-strategy Bayesian Nash equilibrium and identify a sufficient condition for uniqueness. Assuming that unit cost distributions all have the same mean, we show that under ignorance of all cost realizations ex ante expected aggregate effort is lower than under both private and complete information. Ex ante expected rent dissipation, however, is higher than in the latter settings if we focus on the standard lottery contest and assume costs are all drawn from the same distribution. Between complete and private information, there is neither a general ranking in terms of effort nor in terms of rent dissipation.
Level of depression among adolescents of religious minorities and their dominant counterparts in Pakistan

Objective: This study investigated the level of depression among religious minority adolescents (Christians and Hindus) in comparison with their dominant counterparts (Muslims) in Pakistan. For this purpose, based on literature available, we hypothesised that adolescents of religious minorities would have a higher level of depression than their dominant counterparts. Design: Between-group design was used as it was considered most appropriate for this study where a religious minority adolescent group was compared with its dominant counterpart. Method: A total of 320 adolescents participated in this study of whom 160 belonged to the minority religious groups (i.e. 76 Christians and 84 Hindus) and 160 to the dominant religious group, i.e. Muslims. To assess the level of depression in the participants, Reynolds Adolescents Depression Scale (2nd ed., Reynolds 2002) was used. Results: One-Way Analysis of Variance was used to analyse the data in statistical terms to reveal any significant difference or differences between these two groups. Conclusions: The findings of the study suggest that religious minority adolescents (Christians and Hindus) in Pakistan are inclined to have higher levels of depression than their dominant counterparts (Muslim adolescents).
Collaborative self-study supporting new technology: The Mahara e-portfolio project

E-portfolios have long been used to support learning and development and to showcase achievement. This paper discusses a new and innovative use of e-portfolios which relates to the ways in which they can support collaborative research. The collaborative self-study which accompanied the implementation of an e-portfolio within a teacher education programme is described and then followed by discussion of three of its features. These were the value of the collaboration for supporting the deep understanding of a new technology, ethical issues for such a research study and the use of the e-portfolio environment as a data collection instrument.