Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nurse leaders' perceptions of the ethical recruitment of study subjects in clinical research.

AIM The aim of this study was to describe nurse leaders' perceptions of ethical recruitment in clinical research. BACKGROUND Nurse leaders are expected to get involved in clinical research, but there are few studies that focus on their role, particularly the ethical issues. METHOD Qualitative data were collected from ten nurse leaders using thematic one-to-one interviews and analysed with content analysis. RESULTS Nurse leaders considered clinical research at their workplace in relation to the key issues that enabled ethical recruitment of study subjects in clinical research. These were: early information and collaboration for incorporating clinical research in everyday work, an opportune and peaceful recruitment moment and positive research culture. CONCLUSION Getting involved in clinical research is part of the nurse leader's professional responsibility in current health care. They have an essential role to play in ensuring that recruitment is ethical and that the dignity of study subjects is maintained. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT The duty of nurse leaders is to maintain good contact with other collaborators and to ensure good conditions for implementing clinical research at their site. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the overall situation on their wards. Implementing clinical research requires careful planning, together with educating, supporting and motivating nursing staff.
A Robot that Walks; Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network

Most animals have significant behavioral expertise built in without having to explicitly learn it all from scratch. This expertise is a product of evolution of the organism; it can be viewed as a very long-term form of learning which provides a structured system within which individuals might learn more specialized skills or abilities. This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous one, which control a six-legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented, the robot's performance and behavior repertoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored.
A Low LO Power Mixer Utilizing the Body Effect

We propose a single-stacked CMOS mixer that can operate at low local oscillator (LO) power condition with a new switching mechanism. Gating the body terminal makes it possible for the mixer to operate in a more ideal switching mode by utilizing the body effect. Biasing at near pinch-off region gives rise to beneficial aspect, low power dissipation. This circuit is composed of all PMOS transistors which draw only 0.275 mA from a supply voltage of 1.8 V. This circuit features gain and noise enhancement characteristic, low power consumption, and simple topology. The proposed mixer achieves conversion gain of 18 dB, noise figure of 9.1 dB with 0 dBm LO power, and power consumption as low as 0.5 mW.
Design of a Closed-Loop, Bidirectional Brain Machine Interface System With Energy Efficient Neural Feature Extraction and PID Control

This paper presents a bidirectional brain machine interface (BMI) microsystem designed for closed-loop neuroscience research, especially experiments in freely behaving animals. The system-on-chip (SoC) consists of 16-channel neural recording front-ends, neural feature extraction units, 16-channel programmable neural stimulator back-ends, in-channel programmable closed-loop controllers, global analog-digital converters (ADC), and peripheral circuits. The proposed neural feature extraction units includes 1) an ultra low-power neural energy extraction unit enabling a 64-step natural logarithmic domain frequency tuning, and 2) a current-mode action potential (AP) detection unit with time-amplitude window discriminator. A programmable proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller has been integrated in each channel enabling a various of closed-loop operations. The implemented ADCs include a 10-bit voltage-mode successive approximation register (SAR) ADC for the digitization of the neural feature outputs and/or local field potential (LFP) outputs, and an 8-bit current-mode SAR ADC for the digitization of the action potential outputs. The multi-mode stimulator can be programmed to perform monopolar or bipolar, symmetrical or asymmetrical charge balanced stimulation with a maximum current of 4 mA in an arbitrary channel configuration. The chip has been fabricated in 0.18<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula> m CMOS technology, occupying a silicon area of 3.7 mm<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^2$</tex-math></inline-formula>. The chip dissipates 56 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>W/ch on average. General purpose low-power microcontroller with Bluetooth module are integrated in the system to provide wireless link and SoC configuration. Methods, circuit techniques and system topology proposed in this work can be used in a wide range of relevant neurophysiology research, especially closed-loop BMI experiments.
On Optimal Contracting with Subjective Evaluation

This paper extends the standard principal-agent model to allow for subjective evaluation. The optimal contract results in more compressed pay relative to the case with verifiable performance measures. Moreover, discrimination against an individual implies lower pay and performance, suggesting that the extent of discrimination as measured after controlling for performance may underestimate the level of true discrimination. Finally, the optimal contract entails the use of bonus pay rather than the threat of dismissal, hence neither "efficiency wages" nor the right to dismiss an employee are necessary ingredients for an optimal incentive contract.
Quinine Induced Thrombotic Microangiopathy ( TMA )

Quinine is the most common cause of Drug induced thrombotic microangiopathy (DITMA), being the offending drug in 33% of cases. We present a case of DITMA after only a single dose of quinine with no previous history of quinine exposure treated successfully with plasma exchange (PEX), oral corticosteroid followed by mycophenolatemofetil (MMF). The diagnosis was made by the close temporal relationship of exposure of quinine to the onset of TMA and exclusion of other causes of TMA including aHUS, TTP, SLE. DITMA from quinine can be triggered either by a single ingestion occurring many months or up to 10 years in some case reports. Our case presented with a prolonged PT has previously been reported and makes the distinction from DIC more challenging. The patient was managed with regular hemodialysis and PEX. Although the role of PEX is uncertain in Quinine induced DITMA-in this case PEX was associated with improving hematological parameters, rising platelet counts, resolution of hemolysis on the blood film and a gradual improvement in renal function. This case highlights the need for a careful drug history in patients who present with TMA and provides evidence for the potential value of PEX in this condition. Although quinine antibody levels are not widely available, the use of immunosuppression with MMF to control the disease, through suppression and removal of quinine-dependent antibody production is supported. The evolution of Specialist Centers for TMA may help to concentrate experience in managing such acute case presentations and allow future research.
Augmented evolutionary intelligence: combining human and evolutionary design for water distribution network optimisation

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been employed for the optimisation of both theoretical and real-world problems for decades. These methods although capable of producing near-optimal solutions, often fail to meet real-world application requirements due to considerations which are hard to define in an objective function. One solution is to employ an Interactive Evolutionary Algorithm (IEA), involving an expert human practitioner in the optimisation process to help guide the algorithm to a solution more suited to real-world implementation. This approach requires the practitioner to make thousands of decisions during an optimisation, potentially leading to user fatigue and diminishing the algorithm's search ability. This work proposes a method for capturing engineering expertise through machine learning techniques and integrating the resultant heuristic into an EA through its mutation operator. The human-derived heuristic based mutation is assessed on a range of water distribution network design problems from the literature and shown to often outperform traditional EA approaches. These developments open up the potential for more effective interaction between human expert and evolutionary techniques and with potential application to a much larger and diverse set of problems beyond the field of water systems engineering.
The solar type protostar IRAS16293-2422: new constraints on the physical structure

Context. The low mass protostar IRAS16293-2422 is a prototype Class 0 source in studies of the chemical structure during the initial phases of life of solar type stars. Aims. To derive the chemical structure accurately, a precise determination of the source physical structure is required. The goal of this study is to derive the structure of IRAS16293-2422. Methods. We reanalyzed all available continuum data (single dish and interferometric, from millimeter to MIR) to derive accurate density and dust temperature profiles. Using ISO observations of water, we also reconstructed the gas temperature profile. Results. Our analysis shows that the envelope surrounding IRAS16293-2422 is described well by the Shu “inside-out” collapsing envelope model or a single power-law density profile with index equal to 1.8. In contrast to some previous studies, our analysis does not show evidence of a large (≥800 AU in diameter) cavity. Conclusions. Although IRAS16293-2422 is a multiple system composed of two or three objects, our reconstruction will be useful in deriving the chemical structure of the large cold envelope surrounding these objects and the warm component, treated here as a single source, from single-dish observations of molecular emission.
On the Risk-Return Tradeoff in the Stock Exchange of Thailand: New Evidence

This paper provides new evidence on the positive risk-return tradeoff in the Thai stock market using monthly data. An AR(p)-GARCH-in-mean model is applied to the data from January 1981 to December 2009. Since stock prices and dividend series are not cointegrated, the excess returns are separately calculated as capital gain and dividend excess returns. By incorporating the dummy variables that capture the impact of the 1987 global stock market crash and the Asian 1997 financial crisis in the conditional variance equations, the results show that the persistence of excess return volatility is reduced. It is also found that there exists a positive risk-return tradeoff in the stock market in both capital gain and dividend excess returns. The size of the risk-return tradeoff is higher and more highly significant when the market dividend yield is used to obtain the excess return. Therefore, dividend is more important than capital gain. In addition, the impact of volatility on excess returns is not asymmetric implying that the AR(p)-GARCH-in-mean model is sufficient to detect the positive risk-return tradeoff.
Detect Overlapping Communities via Ranking Node Popularities

Detection of overlapping communities has drawn much attention lately as they are essential properties of real complex networks. Despite its influence and popularity, the well studied and widely adopted stochastic model has not been made effective for finding overlapping communities. Here we extend the stochastic model method to detection of overlapping communities with the virtue of autonomous determination of the number of communities. Our approach hinges upon the idea of ranking node popularities within communities and using a Bayesian method to shrink communities to optimize an objective function based on the stochastic generative model. We evaluated the novel approach, showing its superior performance over five state-of-the-art methods, on large real networks and synthetic networks with ground-truths of overlapping communities.
N400 to Semantically Anomalous Pictures and Words

The N400 component of the human event-related brain potential appears to be related to violations of semantic expectancy during language comprehension. The present experiment investigated whether the N400 is related specifically to activity in a language system or is an index of a conceptual system that is accessed by both pictures and words. Sentences were visually presented one word at a time with the last word being replaced in one condition by a line drawing representing the same concept (eg, the word socks was replaced by a picture of socks). The N400 recorded in the Pictures Condition was found to be identical to the N400 generated by words in terms of amplitude, scalp distribution, and latency. These results suggest that the N400 is an index of activity in a conceptual memory that is accessed by both pictures and words.
How End-Of-Life Home Care Services Are Used from Admission to Death: A Population-Based Cohort Study

Aim: Our goal was to describe the trajectories of end-of-life nursing and personal support worker (PSW) use from home care admission until death. Methods: We studied a historical prospective cohort of end-of-life home care patients in Ontario, Canada, linking administrative databases. We calculated the odds of using any nursing or PSW hours and the incidence rate ratio of services used for each week approaching death, controlling for confounders. Results: Among all patients (n=11,867), the odds of using any nursing and PSW hours increased by 4 percent and 10 percent, respectively, each week closer to death. Among patients using services, the ratio of nursing and PSW hours increased 20 percent and 11 percent, respectively, in the last 4 weeks of life compared to use at 24 weeks before death. Conclusion: Use of nursing and PSW hours increases slightly each week before death and sharply in the last month of life. Understanding the trajectory of home care services use can help decision makers design better end-of-life care.
Does a nondipping pattern influence left ventricular and left atrial mechanics in hypertensive patients?

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine left ventricular and left atrial function in untreated hypertensive patients with different blood pressure (BP) patterns by using two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE) and three-dimensional echocardiography (3DE) speckle tracking analyses. Methods: This cross-sectional study included 147 recently diagnosed hypertensive patients (86 dippers and 61 nondippers). All patients underwent a 24-h ambulatory BP monitoring and complete 2DE and 3DE examination including speckle tracking analysis. Results: The analysis of our results showed that 3DE left ventricular global longitudinal strain was significantly lower in the nondippers (−17.8 ± 2.6 vs. −16.2 ± 2.4%, P < 0.001). Similar results were obtained for 3DE left ventricular global circumferential strain (−17.4 ± 2.7 vs. −16.3 ± 2.6%, P = 0.015), as well for 3DE left ventricular global radial strain (45.8 ± 8.5 vs. 42.1 ± 8.2%, P = 0.009), and left ventricular global area strain (−29.1 ± 4.7 vs. −27.4 ± 4.3%, P = 0.027). The left ventricular twist was increased in the nondippers (12.7 ± 2.9 vs. 14.1 ± 3.4°, P = 0.008), whereas the untwisting rate was significantly decreased in this group (−43.7 ± 5.7 vs. −36.9 ± 5.1 °/s, P < 0.001). The left atrial longitudinal strain, as well as left atrial systolic and early diastolic strain rates, was decreased in nondippers. Independent predictors of 3DE left ventricular longitudinal, circumferential, radial, and area strain were a 24-h mean BP, (E/e′)m, and 3DE left ventricular ejection fraction. An additional independent predictor of the left atrial longitudinal strain was 3DE left ventricular mass index. Conclusion: The 3DE speckle tracking examination demonstrated that the left ventricular and left atrial mechanics were more impaired in the nondippers than in the dippers untreated hypertensive patients.
The Prevalence of Sexual Assault Against People Who Identify as Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual in the United States: A Systematic Review

This article systematically reviews 75 studies that examine the prevalence of sexual assault victimization among gay or bisexual (GB) men, and lesbian or bisexual (LB) women, in the United States. All studies were published between 1989 and 2009 and report the results of quantitative research. The authors reviewed the reported prevalence of lifetime sexual assault victimization (LSA), and where available, childhood sexual assault (CSA), adult sexual assault (ASA), intimate partner sexual assault (IPSA), and hate crime-related sexual assault (HC). The studies were grouped into those that used a probability or census sampling technique (n = 25) and those that used a non-probability or ‘‘community-based’’ sampling technique (n = 50). A total of 139,635 gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) respondents participated in the underlying studies reviewed. Prevalence estimates of LSA ranged from 15.6-85.0% for LB women and 11.8—54.0% for GB men. Considering the median estimates derived from the collective set of studies reviewed, LB women were more likely to report CSA, ASA, LSA, and IPSA than GB men, whereas GB men were more likely to report HC than LB women. Across all studies, the highest estimates reported were for LSA of LB women (85.0%), CSA of LB women (76.0%), and CSA of GB men (59.2%). With some exceptions, studies using non-probability samples reported higher sexual assault prevalence rates than did population-based or census sample studies. The challenges of assessing sexual assault victimization with GLB populations are discussed, as well as the implications for practice, policy, and future research.
Inhibition of DNA synthesis by hydroxyurea: structure-activity relationships.

Summary The following compounds inhibited incorporation of thymidine-3H into the DNA of HeLa cells without significantly impairing cellular incorporation of uridine-3H into RNA or leucine-3H into protein; they are listed in order of potency. Dihydroxyurea > N-methylhydroxyurea > N-acetylhydroxyurea = hydroxyurea = N-hydroxyguanidine = N-hydroxyurethane = N-ethylhydroxyurea > 3-phenyl-1-hydroxyurea = formamidoxime > N-methylacetohydroxamic acid = N-methylhydroxylamine > acetohydroxamic acid. Hydroxylamine, N-hydroxyglycine amide and 3-phenyl-1-hydroxy-2-thiourea inhibited incorporation of all three labeled precursors. Methoxyamine, methoxyurea, and N-methylmethoxyurea had no effect upon thymidine uptake. Addition of three deoxyribonucleosides, deoxyadenosine (0.1 mm), deoxyguanosine (0.1 mm), and deoxycytidine (1.0 µm), to the culture medium provided partial protection against the inhibitory effects of hydroxyurea, hydroxyurethane, acetohydroxamic acid, hydroxyguanidine, formamidoxime, and N-methylhydroxylamine. The data suggest that all of these agents inhibit a reaction in the biosynthesis of deoxyribonucleotides from ribonucleotides. The relationship between chemical structure and inhibitory activity is discussed and some possible inhibitory mechanisms examined.
Mid-estrus uterine blood flow in endometritic and non-endometritic dairy cows using transrectal Doppler ultrasonography

ABSTRACT The objective of the present study was to derive the comparative quantification of various blood flow parameters in endometritic and non-endometritic dairy cows at mid-estrus. Uterine perfusion was investigated by performing the transrectal Doppler ultrasonography of both the middle uterine arteries in Jersey cows diagnosed with clear uterine discharge and clinical endometritis at mid-estrus. Pulsatility and Resistance indices (PI and RI), Time average mean velocity (TAMEAN), Time average maximum velocity (TAMAX), diameter of the artery and volume of blood flow were measured to study the waveforms. Significantly lower (p < 0.05) PI and RI were found in cows diagnosed with clinical endometritis in comparison to non-endometritic cows. There was significantly higher (p < 0.01) volume and velocity of blood flow (TAMEAN, TAMAX, Blood flow volume (BFV)-TAMEAN and BFV-TAMAX) in both the middle uterine arteries during endometritis as compared to non-endometritic cows. Also, significantly higher (p < 0.05) blood flow velocity and volume (TAMEAN, BFV-TAMEAN and BFV-TAMAX) were recorded in middle uterine artery ipsilateral to dominant follicle as compared to contralateral one in non-endometritic cows. The PI value was positively correlated with RI in endometritic (r = 0.88; p < 0.01) and non-endometritic cows (r = 0.81; p < 0.01) but negatively correlated with other parameters in all the cows irrespective of inflammatory state of uterus.
The ratio of congenital heart disease and innocent murmur in children in Van city, the Eastern Turkey.

OBJECTIVE We tried to determine the prevalence of and expose the significance of clinical evaluation of innocent and pathological murmurs due to underlying disorders and to determine the indication of echocardiographic examination in innocent murmurs' evaluation and the frequency of congenital heart diseases (CHD) in childhood. METHODS This study was performed on 6035 children between 6-15 ages (3306 boys and 2729 girls) who attended six different elementary schools reflecting various economic groups in Van city in the Eastern of Turkey, which is a developing country. RESULTS We detected murmurs of different intensities in 243 patients (4%). The results showed that 209 children's (3.5%) murmurs were accepted as innocent. The regurgitation was detected in single or two valves in 27% (56 cases) of cases with innocent murmurs. Additionally no valve insufficiency or regurgitation was determined in children who had innocent murmurs except these 56 cases. Of patients who had murmurs, 27 children (0.4%) had congenital heart disease and 7 (0.1%) had rheumatic heart disease. In patients who had CHD, mitral valve prolapsus and tricuspid valve prolapsus were found in 48% and 37% of the cases, respectively. CONCLUSION Congenital heart disease was found in similar frequency with the literature. Innocent murmurs were found lower than in the literature, but higher than in other studies done in our country. Our study showed that, especially valve prolapsus, other CHD and less frequently rheumatic carditis can be seen in children who look like otherwise healthy. We emphasize that all children especially attending primary education, should be examined by a cardiologist even they have no complaints.