Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Timely assessment of disaster and emergency response networks in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, 2012

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to elaborate pros and cons of two coding methods: the rapid network assessment (RNA) and the manual content analysis (MCA). In particular, it focuses on the applicability of a new rapid data extraction and utilization method, which can contribute to the timely coordination of disaster and emergency response operations. Design/methodology/approach Utilizing the data set of textual information on the Superstorm Sandy response in 2012, retrieved from the LexisNexis Academic news archive, the two coding methods, MCA and RNA, are subjected to social network analysis. Findings The analysis results indicate a significant level of similarity between the data collected using these two methods. The findings indicate that the RNA method could be effectively used to extract megabytes of electronic data, characterize the emerging disaster response network and suggest timely policy implications for managers and practitioners during actual emergency response operations and coordination processes. Originality/value Considering the growing needs for the timely assessment of real-time disaster response systems and the emerging doubts regarding the effectiveness of the RNA method, this study contributes to uncovering the potential of the RNA method to extract relevant data from the megabytes of digitally available information. Also this research illustrates the applicability of MCA for assessing real-time disaster response networks by comparing network analysis results from data sets built by both the RNA and the MCA.
Special Section on The Opioid Crisis A Pragmatic Utility Function to Describe the Risk-Benefit Composite of Opioid and Nonopioid Analgesic Medication

It is not straightforward to simultaneously evaluate the beneficial and harmful effects of pain management, since different drugs may possess different analgesia and adverse effect profiles. Utility functions, derived from the pharmacokinetics and pharma-codynamics of individual outcome parameters, have been con- structed to address this problem. Here, we construct “ pragmatic ” utility functions based on measurements of benefit and harm, but without making assumptions about the underlying pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Using data from two previous studies, utility functions were designed by estimating the probability of occurrence of benefit and harm and combining these into one function. Study 1 was a clinical trial on the effect of oral pregabalin on pain relief in chronic pancreatitis patients, with endpoint analgesia and dizziness monitored for 21 days. Study 2 was an experimental study on the effect of intrave- nous fentanyl on antinociception and respiratory depression in healthy volunteers. From study 1, the utility function was negative the first week of treatment, indicative of the greater probability of dizziness than analgesia, but positive thereafter. From study 2, the utility function showed a nadir 30 minutes after dosing, after which the probability function slowly increased toward zero. A pragmatic utility function based on the probability of two binary outcomes, analgesia and adverse effect, was successfully constructed using data from the two previous studies. The results yielded valuable insights into the utility of treatment and may be highly educative for physicians and potentially used in development of potent analgesics without serious side effects. on
Ticagrelor does not impact patient‐reported pain in young adults with sickle cell disease: a multicentre, randomised phase IIb study

Ticagrelor is an antiplatelet agent for adults with coronary artery disease. The inhibition of platelet activation may decrease the frequency of vaso‐occlusion crisis (VOC) in sickle cell disease (SCD). The HESTIA2 study (NCT02482298) randomised 87 adults with SCD (aged 18–30 years) 1:1:1 to twice‐daily ticagrelor 10, 45 mg or placebo for 12 weeks. Numerical decreases from baseline in mean proportion of days with patient‐reported pain (primary endpoint) were seen in all three groups, as well as in pain intensity and analgesic use, with no significant differences between placebo and ticagrelor treatment groups. Plasma ticagrelor concentrations and platelet inhibition increased with dose. Adverse events were distributed evenly across groups and two non‐major bleeding events occurred per group. Ticagrelor was well tolerated with a low bleeding risk, but no effect on diary‐reported pain was detected. Potential effects on frequency of VOCs will need to be evaluated in a larger and longer study.
Chemical Profiles of Incense Smoke Ingredients from Agarwood by Headspace Gas Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Agarwood, the resinous wood in the heartwood of Aquilaria trees, has been used as incense in traditional Chinese medicine for its sedative, aphrodisiac, carminative, and anti-emetic effects. Grading of agarwood is usually based on its physical properties. Therefore, it is important to develop analytic methods for judgment and grading of agarwood. Here, we created a headspace (HS) preheating system that is combined with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (HS GC-MS) to analyze the chemical constituents in the incense smoke produced by agarwood. Incense smoke generated in the HS preheating system was injected directly to GC-MS for analysis. A total of 40 compounds were identified in the incense smoke produced by Kynam agarwood, the best agarwood in the world. About half of the compounds are aromatics and sesquiterpenes. By analyzing chemical constituents in the incense smoke produced by Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian varieties of agarwood, we found that butyl hexadecanoate, butyl octadecanoate, bis(2-ethylhexyl) 1,2-benzenedicarboxylate, and squalene were common in the aforementioned four varieties of agarwoods. 2-(2-Phenylethyl) chromone derivatives were identified only in the incense smoke produced by Kynam agarwood, and were the major ingredient (27.23%) in the same. In conclusion, this is the first study that analyzes chemical profiles of incense smoke produced by agarwood using HS GC-MS. Our data showed that 2-(2-phenylethyl) chromone derivatives could be used to assess quality of agarwoods. Moreover, HS GC/MS may be a useful tool for grading quality of agarwood.
Reaching substantive female representation among decision-makers: A qualitative research study of gender-related experiences from the health sector in Mozambique

Background Achieving significant female representation in government at decision-making levels has been identified as a key step towards achieving gender equality. In 2015, women held 39.6% of parliamentary seats in Mozambique, which is above the benchmark of 30% that has been suggested as the turning point for minority representation to move from token status to having a sizable impact. We undertook a study to identify gender-related barriers and facilitators to improving women-centered policies in the health sector. Methods We conducted in-depth interviews with 39 individuals (32 women, 7 men) involved at a senior level in policy making or implementation of woman-centric policies within the Mozambique Ministry of Health and affiliated institutions. We used a semi-structured interview guide that included questions on difficulties and facilitating factors encountered in the policy making process, and the perceived role of gender in this process. We used both deductive and inductive analysis approaches, starting with a set of pre-identified themes and expanding this to include themes that emerged during coding. Results Our data suggest two main findings: (1) the women who participated in our study generally do not report feeling discrimination in the workplace and (2) senior health sector perceive women to be more personally attuned to women-centric issues than men. Within our specific sample, we found little to suggest that gender discrimination is a problem professionally for female decision-makers in Mozambique. However, these findings should be contextualized using an intersectional lens with recognition of the important difference between descriptive versus substantive female representation, and whether “percentage of women” is truly the best metric for gaging commitment to gender equality at the policy making level. Conclusions Mozambique’s longstanding significant representation of women may have led to creating an environment that leads to positive experiences for female decision-makers in the government. However, while the current level of female representation should be celebrated, it does not negate the need for continued focus on female representation in decision-making positions.
A stochastic algorithm for accurately predicting path persistence of cells migrating in 3D matrix environments

Cell mobility plays a critical role in immune response, wound healing, and the rate of cancer metastasis and tumor progression. Mobility within a three-dimensional (3D) matrix environment can be characterized by the average velocity of cell migration and the persistence length of the path it follows. Computational models that aim to predict cell migration within such 3D environments need to be able predict both of these properties as a function of the various cellular and extra-cellular factors that influence the migration process. A large number of models have been developed to predict the velocity of cell migration driven by cellular protrusions in 3D environments. However, prediction of the persistence of a cell’s path is a more tedious matter, as it requires simulating cells for a long time while they migrate through the model extra-cellular matrix (ECM). This can be a computationally expensive process, and only recently have there been attempts to quantify cell persistence as a function of key cellular or matrix properties. Here, we propose a new stochastic algorithm that can simulate and analyze 3D cell migration occurring over days with a computation time of minutes, opening new possibilities of testing and predicting long-term cell migration behavior as a function of a large variety of cell and matrix properties. In this model, the matrix elements are generated as needed and stochastically based on the biophysical and biochemical properties of the ECM the cell migrates through. This approach significantly reduces the computational resources required to track and calculate cell matrix interactions. Using this algorithm, we predict the effect of various cellular and matrix properties such as cell polarity, cell mechanoactivity, matrix fiber density, matrix stiffness, fiber alignment, and fiber binding site density on path persistence of cellular migration and the mean squared displacement of cells over long periods of time.
Influencing Factors of the Diabetes Distress among Chinese Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

BACKGROUND Patients with Diabetes Mellitus (DM) are required to have long-term treatment regimen and strict self-management, which thus might lead to the Diabetes Distress (DD). Patients' DD varies in different regions with different levels of medical conditions. For improving the treatment effect of the patients with the Type-2-Diabetes-Mellitus (T2DM), this study explores the influencing factors of the patients' DD in the regions where the medical treatment are at low level. SUBJECTS AND METHODS In this study, 167 adult patients with T2DM were selected from the People's Hospital of Jinhua city, an A-grade hospital of a small-mid-sized city in Eastern China. Based on these samples, the Diabetes Distress Scale with 17 items (DDS17) was adopted to measure the degree of patients' DD, and then regression analyses were carried out to investigate the influencing factors for their DD. RESULTS The T2DM patients with moderate and high levels of DD take up 54.5% of the samples investigated in this study. According to the Spearman correlation analysis, sleep time, physical exercise, diet control, treatment regimen, TG and HbA1c significantly affect the patients' DD. Through the multivariate linear regression analysis, this study shows that (1) sleep time significantly influences the T2DM patients' DD (β=-0.213, P=0.034); (2) sleep time also impacts emotional burden (β=-0.379, P=0.027); (3) physical exercise (β=-0.195, P=0.002), treatment regimen (β=0.158, P=0.026) and diet control (β=0.158, P=0.026) are the three major influencing factors for regimen-related distress. CONCLUSION In the small-mid-sized city where the treatment regimen is not highly advanced, to alleviate the T2DM patients' DD, the medical staff should suggest the patients to improve sleep quality and exercise more, help them positively understand the insulin infusion therapy and take proper diet control.
Post-encoding stress enhances mnemonic discrimination of negative stimuli

Stress influences how we remember emotional events and how these events shape future behaviors. However, the impact of stress on memory specificity for emotional events has yet to be examined. To this end, the present study utilized a mnemonic discrimination task that taxes hippocampal pattern separation, the process of distinguishing between overlapping experiences, thereby allowing us to better understand the mechanisms by which stress affects gist versus detail memory of emotional events. Participants encoded scenes composed of negative or neutral objects placed on neutral backgrounds and then underwent a psychosocial stressor or matched control task. Twenty-four hours later during testing, objects were presented separately, with some identical old objects (targets), some new objects (foils), and some similar but not identical objects (lures). Target recognition was enhanced for negative compared to neutral objects in both the stress and control groups. Interestingly, post-encoding stress selectively enhanced mnemonic discrimination of negative versus neutral objects, which was not the case in the control group. Measures of salivary cortisol revealed a quadratic inverted U relationship between negative mnemonic discrimination and cortisol increase. These findings suggest that moderate cortisol release following stress is associated with enhanced memory precision for negative information.
Diagnostic accuracy of Xpert MTB/RIF assay in extrapulmonary tuberculosis

Introduction: The WHO endorsed Xpert Mycobacterium tuberculosis/rifampicin (MTB/RIF) assay, has been evaluated for pulmonary TB in a number of studies but very few have investigated it for extrapulmonary specimens. The present study evaluates the performance of Xpert MTB/RIF assay in the diagnosis of extrapulmonary TB (EPTB). Aim and Objectives: The aim of the study is to determine sensitivity and specificity of Xpert MTB/RIF assay for diagnosis of EPTB and RIF resistance in comparison to culture on Lowenstein–Jensen (LJ) medium and proportion method (PM), respectively. Materials and Methods: A total of 738 specimens from clinically suspected cases of EPTB were subjected to Ziehl–Neelsen staining, Xpert MTB/RIF assay and culture on LJ medium. PM was done on MTB isolates. Results: The sensitivity, specificity of Xpert MTB/RIF assay for diagnosis of EPTB were 84.91% (95% confidence interval [CI] 72.41%–93.25%) and 86.72% (95% CI 83.94%–89.17%) and for RIF resistance detection were 60.00% (95% CI 32.29%–83.66%) and 94.74% (95% CI 73.97%–99.87%), respectively. Among culture-positive cases, the sensitivity of Xpert MTB/RIF assay was 94.12% in smear positive and 80.56% in smear-negative cases. Xpert MTB/RIF showed maximum sensitivity of MTB detection from lymph node specimens (100% [95% CI 54.07%–100.00%]) and other body fluids (100% [95% CI 15.81%–100.00%]). Conclusion: The present study establishes Xpert MTB/RIF assay as a promising tool in the rapid diagnosis of EPTB and detection of RIF resistance.
Proactive Coverage Area Decisions Based on Data Field for Drone Base Station Deployment

Using the drone base station (DBS) to alleviate the network coverage supply-demand mismatch is an attractive issue. Found in DBS-assisted cellular mobile networks, the deployment of DBSs to cope with the dynamic load requirements is an important problem. The authors propose a proactive DBS deployment method to enhance the DBS deployment flexibility based on network traffic. The proposed scheme uses potential value and minimum distance to decide the areas that most need to be covered, which are named as proactive coverage areas (PCAs), whereby the DBSs are assigned to cover those PCAs. Meanwhile, when the number of required DBSs is determined, the energy consumption is related to the coverage radius and the altitude of DBSs. Therefore, the proposed method further investigates the on-demand coverage radius and then obtains the altitude of DBSs. Simulations show that the proposed proactive DBS deployment method provides better coverage performance with a significant complexity reduction.
Images of protest in social media: Struggle over visibility and visual narratives

While political protest is essentially a visual expression of dissent, both social movement research and media studies have thus far been hesitant to focus on visual social media data from protest events. This research explores the visual dimension (photos and videos) of Twitter communication in the Blockupy protests against the opening of the European Central Bank (ECB) headquarters in Frankfurt am Main on 18 March 2015. It does so through a novel combination of quantitative analysis, content analysis of images, and identification of narratives. The article concludes by arguing that the visual in political protest in social media reproduces existing visualities and hierarchies rather than challenges them. This research enhances our conceptual understanding of how activists’ struggles play out in the visual and contributes to developing methods for empirical inquiry into visual social media content.
Wharton’ jelly mesenchymal stromal cell therapy for ischemic brain injury

Increasing evidence have supported that Wharton's jelly mesenchymal stem cell (WJ-MSCs) have immunomodulatory and protective effects against several diseases including kidney, liver pathologies, and heart injury. Few in vitro studies have reported that WJ-MSCs reduced inflammation in hippocampal slices after oxygen–glucose deprivation. We recently reported the neuroprotective effects of human WJ-MSCs (hWJ-MSCs) in rats exposed to a transient right middle cerebral artery occlusion. hWJ-MSCs transplantation significantly reduced brain infarction and microglia activation in the penumbra leading with a significant reduction of neurological deficits. Interestingly, the grafted hWJ-MSCs in the ischemic core were mostly incorporated into IBA1 (+) cells, suggesting that hWJ-MSCs were immunorejected by the host. The immune rejection of hWJ-MSCs was reduced in after cyclosporine A treatment. Moreover, the glia cell line-derived neurotrophic factor expression was significantly increased in the host brain after hWJ-MSCs transplantation. In conclusion, these results suggest that the protective effect of hWJ-MSCs may be due to the secretion of trophic factors rather than to the survival of grafted cells. This paper is a review article. Referred literature in this paper has been listed in the references section. The data sets supporting the conclusions of this article are available online by searching various databases, including PubMed. Some original points in this article come from the laboratory practice in our research center and the authors' experiences.
A Study on Engineering Students’ Concept Images: What is a Function?

Bu calismanin amaci, lisans ogrencilerinin fonksiyon kavramina yonelik kavram imajlarini belirleyip bu kavrama iliskin algilarini tespit etmektir. Bunu yapabilmek icin, 2013-2014 egitim-ogretim yilinin guz doneminde bir universitenin 1. sinifinda ogrenim goren 77 ogrenciye acik uclu sorulardan olusan bir yazili anket uygulanmistir. Bu makale cercevesinde konu ile dogrudan iliskili olan 1 soruya ogrencilerin verdikleri cevaplarin analizine yer verilmistir. Ogrenci cevaplari icerik analiziyle cozumlenmistir. Ogrencilerin verdikleri cevaplar dogrultusunda fonksiyon kavramina yonelik zihinlerinde olusturduklari imajlar 10 farkli kategori altinda toplanmistir. Arastirmanin bulgularina gore, ogrencilerin fonksiyon kavramina yonelik bazi yanlis algilamalarinin oldugu tespit edilmistir. Ayrica ogrencilerin fonksiyon kavrami icin makine, islem mekanizmasi, kurallar butunu, baginti, eslestirme, oranti vs. gibi farkli benzetmeler kullandiklari ve bu kavrama yonelik gunluk hayattan cesitli ornekler verebildikleri gorulmustur.
Evaluation of Three Peptide Immobilization Techniques on a QCM Surface Related to Acetaldehyde Responses in the Gas Phase

The quartz-crystal microbalance is a sensitive and universal tool for measuring concentrations of various gases in the air. Biochemical functionalization of the QCM electrode allows a label-free detection of specific molecular interactions with high sensitivity and specificity. In addition, it enables a real-time determination of its kinetic rates and affinity constants. This makes QCM a versatile bioanalytical screening tool for various applications, with surface modifications ranging from the detection of single molecular monolayers to whole cells. Various types of biomaterials, including peptides mapping the binding sites of olfactory receptors, can be deposited as a sensitive element on the surface of the electrodes. One of key ways to ensure the sensitivity and accuracy of the sensor is provided by application of an optimal and repeatable method of immobilization. Therefore, effective sensors operation requires development of an optimal method of deposition. This paper reviews popular techniques (drop-casting, spin-coating, dip-coating) for coating peptides on piezoelectric crystals surface. Peptide (LEKKKKDC-NH2) derived from an aldehyde binding site in the HarmOBP7 protein was synthesized and used as a sensing material for the biosensor. The degree of deposition of the sensitive layer was monitoring by variations in the sensors frequency. The highest mass threshold for QCM measurements for peptides was approximately 16.43 µg·mm−2 for spin coating method. Developed sensor exhibited repeatable response to acetaldehyde. Moreover, responses to toluene was observed to evaluate sensors specificity. Calibration curves of the three sensors showed good determination coefficients (R2 > 0.99) for drop casting and dip coating and 0.97 for the spin-coating method. Sensors sensitivity vs. acetaldehyde were significantly higher for the dip-coating and drop-casting methods and lower for spin-coating one.