Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A prospective comparison of laparoscopic and tension-free open herniorrhaphy.

OBJECTIVE To compare results and outcomes following laparoscopic and tension-free open inguinal herniorrhaphy. DESIGN A prospective, nonrandomized trial of a single surgeon's experience. SETTING A large university hospital. PATIENTS The study included 100 patients with 116 hernias. Patients were offered open hernia repair or, if medically suitable for general anesthesia, a laparoscopic hernia repair. Fifty-seven patients underwent open repair and 43 patients underwent laparoscopic repair. INTERVENTION Laparoscopic repair was performed using a transabdominal preperitoneal mesh technique. Open hernia repair was performed using a mesh-plug technique in which the hernia sac was reduced and held in place by a cone of mesh. The floor was covered with a second piece of mesh that encircled the cord and was sutured at the internal ring; it was held in place under the external oblique without sutures. RESULTS Patients undergoing open repair were older than those undergoing laparoscopic repair. The distribution of hernia types was similar. The laparoscopic operation took longer than the open operation (mean [+/- SD], 1.9 +/- 0.4 hours vs 1.6 +/- 0.4 hours; P < .05), was more expensive ($4165 +/- $1154 vs $2985 +/- $1682; P < .05), and required more postoperative admissions (28% vs 3.5%). There were three recurrences in the laparoscopic group and none in the open group. Patients undergoing laparoscopic repair consumed the same amount of narcotic analgesics as did the group undergoing open repair and had discomfort for the same amount of time. Patients undergoing laparoscopic repair returned to work sooner than did patients undergoing open repair (5.6 days vs 10.3 days; P < .05). CONCLUSIONS Laparoscopic hernia repair returns patients to the workplace faster than open hernia repair despite a similar analgesic requirement. The laparoscopic repair costs more and has a higher recurrence rate than open repair. Laparoscopic repair is most suitable for bilateral hernias. Further investigation of this technique is required before its wide-scale application can be recommended.
Effect of the suckling stimulus on daily LH surges induced by chronic oestrogen treatment in ovariectomized lactating rats.

Effects of the suckling stimulus on the daily LH surge induced by chronic oestrogen treatment were examined in ovariectomized lactating rats. Wistar-Imamichi strain rats were kept under 14 h light:10 h darkness (lights on at 05.00 h). Litter size was adjusted to eight on day 1 (day 0 = day of parturition) and ovariectomy performed on day 2. Lactating rats deprived of their litters on day 0 served as nonlactating controls. Silicone elastomer tubing filled with oestradiol was implanted on day 6 or 15. Blood samples were collected through an indwelling cannula at 10.00 and 17.00 h on each day after implantation to detect daily LH surges. Daily LH surges occurred in the late afternoon in both lactating and non-lactating rats implanted with oestradiol on day 6 or 15. The amplitude of daily LH surges in lactating rats implanted on day 6 declined much more rapidly than in non-lactating rats implanted on day 6, but no significant difference was found in the profile of the LH surge between lactating and non-lactating rats implanted on day 15. Pituitary LH contents just before the daily LH surge (12.00-12.30 h) 4 days after implantation in lactating rats implanted with oestradiol on day 6 were significantly less than those in nonlactating rats implanted with oestradiol on day 6 or 15 and in lactating rats implanted on day 15. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Quantifying the Human-Nature Relationship: A User's Guide

Abstract:A growing trend in environmental research is the quantification of the human-nature relationship. This review of human-nature psychometric instruments should be used as a reference for individuals seeking to incorporate these tools into their outdoor and environmental education research. Extensive literature review and autoethnographic techniques were employed to identify and evaluate thirty-four instruments. Instruments were evaluated on structure, ease of use, and concepts represented. Diversity exists amongst the instruments in terms of length, concepts reflected, and structure. The majority of tools reflect environmental attitudes/views (16) or relationship/connection with nature (13). Fewer instruments reflect concern, identity, or environmental behavior. Twenty-eight instruments are deemed easy to use, based on time required to complete and ease of scoring. A timeline outlining the development of the instruments is presented and conclusions and recommendations from original and comparative studies are summarized.
Integrating strategic human capital and strategic human resource management

Abstract Human capital is an important construct in a variety of fields spanning from micro scholarship in psychology to macro scholarship in economics. Within the various disciplinary perspectives, research focuses on slightly different aspects and levels of human capital within organizations, which may give opportunities for integration. The current paper aims to increase knowledge about human capital within organizations by integrating two streams of research which focus directly on human capital, but have approached human capital in different ways: strategic human capital (SHC), and strategic HRM. We describe both SHC and strategic HRM research streams and propose areas of integration, and directions for future research on human capital in organizations.
Data Security in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been a very popular research topic, offering a treasure trove of systems, networking, hardware, security, and application-related problems. Much of prior research assumes that the WSN is supervised by a constantly present sink and sensors can quickly offload collected data. In this paper, we focus on unattended WSNs (UWSNs) characterized by intermittent sink presence and operation in hostile settings. Potentially lengthy intervals of sink absence offer greatly increased opportunities for attacks resulting in erasure, modification, or disclosure of sensor-collected data. This paper presents an in-depth investigation of security problems unique to UWSNs (including a new adversarial model) and proposes some simple and effective countermeasures for a certain class of attacks.
Intellectual capital’s leverage on corporate market value

The first hypothesis proves that there is a correlation between intellectual capital and market value in Chinese capital market. The correlation is significant over the entire examined period. What this strong correlation further implies is that Chinese listed companypsilas perceived value, to a certain extent, in today knowledge economy, is related to the companypsilas intellectual capital. The second hypothesis has been proven to be correct. There is a correlation between IC Multiplier and intellectual capital. The results prove that the companies in information and technology industry do not have enough structural capital to exploit the value of its employeespsila. This is something we consider alarming since the knowledge intensity is increasing within the companies and in the whole economy of today. However, the IC Multiplier is not low in another three industries, but the structural capital still constrains the employees. We think the main reasons are human capital donpsilat leverage with structural capital effectively that creates the value. Organization capital and relation capitals of most Chinese listed companies are not suitable for the depositing and converting of the employeespsila knowledge, which constrains employeespsila value creation potential. Being short of the internal atmosphere which helps the knowledge to be communicated, converted and shared among the employees and within the company is another reason.
Presurgical Factors Affecting Patient Satisfaction with Pallidal Surgery in Parkinson’s Disease

Objective: To evaluate presurgical factors affecting patient satisfaction with pallidal surgery. Methods: Forty-one parkinsonian patients who underwent unilateral pallidal surgery replied to a questionnaire on general satisfaction with the outcome of surgery graded on a five-point scale. The contribution of age, disease duration, required activity level, Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale Part II activity of daily living (ADL) score and presurgical to postsurgical ADL score change to the level of satisfaction was tested. The required activity level was defined as the physical activity level which the patients required to support their families. Results: Multiple regression analysis revealed that age at surgery (p = 0.02), required activity level (p = 0.005), ADL score in the on phase at surgery (p = 0.001), and ADL score in the off phase at surgery (p = 0.0001) were significant contributors to satisfaction. Conclusions: The patients who were relatively young and required higher activity levels tended to have a higher degree of satisfaction with the outcome, while patients with advanced age tended to be less satisfied, independent of symptomatic improvement after the surgery.
Accounting for implicit and explicit payment vehicles in a discrete choice experiment

ABSTRACT This study estimates the benefits of beach quality improvements, using travel costs as an implicit and entrance fee as an explicit payment vehicle in two otherwise identical labelled discrete choice site selection models. Including entrance fee as an explicit payment vehicle in addition to implicit travel costs is expected to affect beach visitors’ preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) since travel costs only are not expected to measure maximum WTP. Convergent validity of preference parameters and WTP derived from the two identical discrete choice experiments (DCEs) is tested using a split-sample approach and specifying a mixed logit choice model. Both preferences and scale parameters are significantly different between the two samples. As expected, mean WTP values are higher when an explicit entrance fee is included in the DCE. Our results suggest that implicit payment vehicles in choice experiments underestimate welfare changes. Beach visitors’ positive WTP holds promise for the introduction of economic instruments such as entrance fees to support the financial sustainability of improved beach management.
An Analysis of TPACK Integration into English Language Teacher Education Programs: A Comparative Study of Turkey and Denmark.

Technology has always been a part of teaching process and being able to teach with technology requires an understanding of how technology, pedagogy, and content interact to support student learning. Recently, studies on developing TPACK skills of teachers have been emerged; however, studies on TPACK in pre-service education on a specific domain, more specifically English Language Teaching, are limited and none of the existing studies have attempted to compare pre-service teachers' TPACK in different countries or contexts. Therefore, this study compares pre-service English language teachers' TPACK in two countries, Turkey and Denmark, at two Teacher Education Institutions' (TEI) contexts. Through a mixed-method design, results of the study indicated the differences not only in definition of technology, but also in technology applications and teaching processes. Based on these findings, suggestions for teacher education and future research were made.
Identification of novel inhibitors against UDP‐galactopyranose mutase to combat leishmaniasis

Leishmania, a protozoan parasite that causes leishmaniasis, affects 1‐2 million people every year worldwide. Leishmaniasis is a vector born disease and characterized by a diverse group of clinical syndromes. Current treatment is limited because of drug resistance, high cost, poor safety, and low efficacy. The urgent need for potent agents against Leishmania has led to significant advances in the development of novel antileishmanial drugs. β‐galactofuranose (β‐Galf) is an important component of Leishmanial cell surface matrix and plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of parasite. UDP‐galactopyranose mutase (UGM) converts UDP‐galactopyranose (UDP‐Galp) to UDP‐galactofuranose (UDP‐Galf) which acts as the precursor for β‐Galf synthesis. Due to its absence in human, this enzyme is selected as the potential target in search of new antileishmanial drugs. Three dimensional protein structure model of Leishmania major UGM (LmUGM) has been homology modeled using Trypanosoma cruzi UGM (TcUGM) as a template. The stereochemistry was validated further. We selected already reported active compounds from PubChem database to target the LmUGM. Three compounds (6064500, 44570814, and 6158954) among the top hit occupied the UDP binding site of UGM suggested to work as a possible inhibitor for it. In vitro antileishmanial activity assay was performed with the top ranked inhibitor, 6064500. The 6064500 molecule has inhibited the growth of Leishmania donovani promastigotes significantly. Further, at similar concentrations it has exhibited significantly lesser toxicity than standard drug miltefosine hydrate in mammalian cells.
Packed Feelings and Ordered Sentiments: Sentiment Parsing with Quasi−compositional Polarity Sequencing and Compression

Recent solutions proposed for sentenceand phrase-level sentiment analysis have reflected a variety of analytical and computational paradigms that include anything from naive keyword spotting via machine learning to full-blown logical treatments, either in pure or hybrid forms. As all appear to succeed and fail in different aspects, it is far from evident which paradigm is the optimal one for the task. In this paper, we describe a quasi-compositional sentiment learning and parsing framework that is well-suited for exhaustive, uniform, and principled sentiment classification across words, phrases, and sentences. Using a hybrid approach, we model one fundamental logically defensible compositional sentiment process directly and use supervised learning to account for more complex forms of compositionality learnt from mere flat phraseand sentencelevel sentiment annotations. The proposed framework operates on quasi-compositional sentiment polarity sequences which succinctly capture the sentiment in syntactic constituents across different structural levels without any conventional n-gram features. The results obtained with the initial implementation are highly encouraging and highlight a few surprising observations pertaining to role of syntactic information and sense-level sentiment ambiguity.
Intra-Provincial Financial Disparity, Economic Disparity, and Regional Development in China: Evidence from Prefecture-Level City Data

ABSTRACT The uneven spatial distribution of economic and financial activities in China has long been a concern of both researchers and policy makers. While most previous research focuses on China’s regional disparities measured using provincial data, this article investigates intra-provincial disparities which reflect the dispersion among cities within a given province. Using data on 282 prefecture-level cities in 25 provinces from 2003 to 2012, the relationship between economic disparity and financial disparity is investigated, after which the effects of the intra-provincial disparities on provincial economic growth are examined. It is found that intra-provincial financial disparity and economic disparity are positively correlated. The results also show that intra-provincial economic disparity has no effect on provincial economic growth. The intra-provincial financial disparity, however, has a negative effect on the local economic growth rate. Therefore, developing financial inclusion and narrowing financial disparity are important measures to maintain sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
Comparison of Marketing Vitality of Family and Non Family Companies doing Business in the Czech Republic

Family businesses were founded in the Czech Republic mostly after 1989, and they are now undergoing the first generational change. Throughout their existence, they have become major employers in the regions, bringing about innovation, progress and social responsibility. If they are to develop further, if they are to be competitive against non-family companies that are managed by professional management, the successors must also use modern marketing and management tools. The issue of family business becomes a big challenge for the Czech academic environment. This is a very topical issue, but not yet studied, bringing new scientific knowledge in the field of realities of marketing management of family businesses in the Czech Republic. The survey period of marketing vitality was between 2016, 2017. Literature review has been prepared by desk-research. Its elaboration was based mainly on foreign monographic sources, scientific articles in the Web of Science, Proquest, Scopus and others. The scientific method was primary quantitative research – a questionnaire survey – which aimed to compare the marketing vitality of family and non-family businesses, and to compare the use of defined marketing tools in family and non-family businesses. Survey data on 264 enterprises were analyzed using descriptive static, graphically processed, evaluated through correlation analysis. The results of this paper confirmed the hypothesis that family businesses as well as non-family small-sized businesses have their success based on so-called “value marketing” (and in the opinion of the authors intuitively) on building long-term customer loyalty by constantly increasing the value offered.
Motivation and Information Design

I model a benevolent planner who motivates a time-inconsistent agent by only committing to provide feedback. The optimal feedback mechanism always takes the simple form of recommending an action. I also provide conditions for when the optimal feedback mechanism takes the simple form of a cutoff. I show that providing incentives through feedback always makes the time-inconsistent agent unambiguously better off, a property that does not necessarily hold when monetary instruments are used.
A Circularly Polarized Broadside Radiating “Herringbone” Array Design With the Leaky-Wave Approach

A series-fed “herringbone” microstrip traveling wave circularly polarized antenna array is designed to achieve broadside radiation. It is shown that such an antenna can be modeled as a periodic leaky-wave (LW) structure, providing insight into radiation characteristics of interest, such as the directivity and beam angle of the structure, particularly at broadside. Full-wave simulations as well as a prototype of the design verified the approach. The extracted leaky-wave number properly predicts the behavior seen in radiation measurements, and no degradation in antenna gain is seen at or near broadside.
The Involvement in Sexual Coercive Behaviors of Spanish College Men

This study aimed to know the prevalence of sexual coercion toward women perpetrated by acquaintance Spanish college men, and some personal factors associated with the involvement in these behaviors to replicate the confluence model. An anonymous questionnaire was completed by 196 university students that included an adaptation of the Sexual Experiences Survey, and other scales to assess different attitudes, motives, and experiences associated with sexual aggression. About 15% of men admitted some involvement in sexual behaviors when the woman did not want it. The control and dominance needs, the personal disposition to impersonal sex, and empathy competency showed the strongest association with the involvement in coercive sexual behaviors. Empathy moderated the effects of control and domination needs and the impersonal sex in predicting sexual coercion. Overall, our data supports the confluence model.
The Role of Environmental Design in Cancer Prevention, Diagnosis, Treatment, and Survivorship: A Systematic Literature Review

The purpose of this literature review is to provide a better understanding of the impact that environmental design can have on the process of cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship. Cancer is considered a chronic disease in the United States, and more than 1.6 million new cases are diagnosed annually. New strategies of cancer care propose patient-centered services to achieve the best outcome, and researchers have found that environmental design can be an important part of improving this care. Searches were conducted in the PubMed and Google Scholar databases as well as in specific healthcare design journals such as Health Environments Research & Design, Environmental Psychology, and Environment and Behavior. The criteria for articles included in the review were (a) English-language articles related to facility design, which addressed (b) the topics of built environment in relation to cancer diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship, and were (c) published in peer-reviewed journals between 2000 and 2017. Finally, 10 articles were selected, and the contents were analyzed. The selected articles demonstrate that environmental design is one of the critical factors for success throughout the whole continuum of cancer care from diagnosis to end-of-treatment. Some of the specific conclusions from the review are that “neighborhood-oriented” design strategies can be beneficial (by providing accessibility to all facilities along the patient’s path), that access to nature for patients, staff, and visitors alike is associated with better outcomes, and that provisions for natural lighting and noise reduction are associated with cancer patients’ well-being.
Measurement of Output, Value Added, GDP in Canada and the United States

This report provides, in a summary fashion, similarities and differences in the production accounts of Canada and the United States. The discussion is limited to those issues which affect the level of output, value added and GDP, both at the total economy level and by industry or sector, all at current prices. We have noted 27 issues, distributed under four broad headings: A). An examination of the production boundary recommended by the 1993 SNA and the effect of lack of its full implementation on the level of production in the two countries. B). A review of present practices in the two countries in compiling production account for institutional sectors vis-a-vis the recommendations of the 1993 SNA and their effect on both inter-country and international comparisons. C). A review of the conventions used for valuation of output and value added in the two countries vis-a-vis the recommendations of the 1993 SNA and their impact on their inter-industry comparisons as well as .
Influence of comorbidity and severity on the clinical outcome of bacteremic pneumococcal pneumonia treated with beta-lactam monotherapy.

The influence of the severity of pneumonia and comorbidity factors, as predictors of clinical outcome, was assessed in patients with microbiologically documented pneumococcal bacteremic pneumonia treated with penicillin or third generation cephalosporin monotherapy in a 5-year retrospective study. Among 288 patients admitted to three Spanish hospitals with bacteremic pneumococcal pneumonia, 65 (23%) were included. Twenty-four were treated with penicillins and 41 with a third-generation cephalosporin. Twenty-seven patients (42%) had severe pneumonia and 41 (63%) had a comorbidity index >1. Twenty-one patients (32%) were infected with penicillin-resistant strains. Four cases (2 with penicillin-resistant strains; 3 treated with cephalosporins) were clinical failures. Four cases (3 with penicillin-resistant strains; 2 treated with cephalosporins) died, i.e. 6% mortality rate. The only factor that influenced empirical treatment election was HIV-positive condition. Clinical outcome was not influenced by treatment election, penicillin susceptibility of the infecting pneumococci, patient basal conditions or severity of pneumonia, but the latter was associated with mortality and length of hospitalization.