Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Level of Cultural Self-Efficacy Among a Sample of Spanish Nurses in Southeastern Spain

A collaborative study between faculty from the United States and Spain was undertaken to investigate levels of cultural self-efficacy among a sample of Spanish nursing students and nurses. Bandura’s self-efficacy theory provided the conceptual framework for this descriptive study. The Spanish version of the Cultural Self-Efficacy Scale (CSES-S) was translated from the original developed by Bernal and Froman using the back-translation technique recommended by Brislin. The CSES-S was administered to 113 Spanish nurses and students. Alpha coefficient results for the CSES-S ranged from . 90 to . 95. Low to neutral levels of confidence in caring for four ethnic groups were found. Regression analyses showed significant relationships between cultural exposure and cultural self-efficacy for the practicing nurses. Results will assist this collaborative transcultural nursing research effort between the United States and Spain to develop and implement programs and experiences to increase cultural self-efficacy among Spanish nurses and improve care provided to Spain’s diverse population.
Selectively chosen ciphertext security in threshold public-key encryption

Threshold public-key encryption can control decryption abilities of an authorized user group in such a way that each user of the group can produce only a decryption share and at least t of them should collect decryption shares to recover a message. We present a new threshold public-key encryption that is secure against selectively chosen ciphertext attacks. Semantic security against chosen ciphertext adversaries is the de facto level of security for public-key encryption deployed in practice because many encryption systems are broken in a model of chosen ciphertext security. The security of the proposed system is formally proved without random oracles under a new assumption. We also provide proof of the intractability of our assumption in the generic group model. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Measuring cognitive load in test items: static graphics versus animated graphics

The majority of multimedia learning studies focus on the use of graphics in learning process but very few of them examine the role of graphics in testing students' knowledge. This study investigates the use of static graphics versus animated graphics in a computer-based English achievement test from a cognitive load theory perspective. Three hundred and three 7th-grade students were randomly split into two groups and given the test questions either with static graphics or with animated graphics accompanied with text. Students' response time, response accuracy, self-reported ratings on cognitive load and secondary task approach were used to measure their cognitive load. Findings revealed that animating graphics increased the response time and secondary task scores of the students but did not have any significant effect on their test success. Furthermore, no difference was observed in self-reported cognitive loads. The relationship between the four different cognitive load measures was also examined in the study. No direct relation was found between self-reported ratings and secondary task scores. On the other hand, self-ratings and response accuracy were found to be more sensitive to intrinsic cognitive load, whereas response time and secondary task measures were found to be more sensitive to extraneous cognitive load in our testing environment.
Continuous All-Optical Deceleration and Single-Photon Cooling of Molecular Beams

Ultracoldmoleculargasesarepromisingasanavenuetorichmany-bodyphysics,quantumchemistry,quantum information, and precision measurements. This richness, which flows from the complex internal structure of molecules, makes the creation of ultracold molecular gases using traditional methods (laser plus evaporative cooling) a challenge, in particular due to the spontaneous decay of molecules into dark states. We propose a way to circumvent this key bottleneck using an all-optical method for decelerating molecules using stimulated absorptionandemissionwithasingleultrafastlaser.Wefurtherdescribesingle-photoncoolingofthedecelerating molecules that exploits their high dark state pumping rates, turning the principal obstacle to molecular laser cooling into an advantage. Cooling and deceleration may be applied simultaneously and continuously to load molecules into a trap. We discuss implementation details including multilevel numerical simulations of strontium monohydride. These techniques are applicable to a large number of molecular species and atoms with the only requirement being an electric dipole transition that can be accessed with an ultrafast laser.
A1 Adenosine Receptor Upregulation and Activation Attenuates Neuroinflammation and Demyelination in a Model of Multiple Sclerosis

The neuromodulator adenosine regulates immune activation and neuronal survival through specific G-protein-coupled receptors expressed on macrophages and neurons, including the A1 adenosine receptor (A1AR). Here we show that A1AR null (A1AR-/-) mice developed a severe progressive-relapsing form of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE) compared with their wild-type (A1AR+/+) littermates. Worsened demyelination, axonal injury, and enhanced activation of microglia/macrophages were observed in A1AR-/- animals. In addition, spinal cords from A1AR-/- mice demonstrated increased proinflammatory gene expression during EAE, whereas anti-inflammatory genes were suppressed compared with A1AR+/+ animals. Macrophages from A1AR-/- animals exhibited increased expression of the proinflammatory genes, interleukin-1β, and matrix metalloproteinase-12 on immune activation when matched with A1AR+/+ control cells. A1AR-/- macrophage-derived soluble factors caused significant oligodendrocyte cytotoxicity compared with wild-type controls. The A1AR was downregulated in microglia in A1AR+/+ mice during EAE accompanied by neuroinflammation, which recapitulated findings in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. Caffeine treatment augmented A1AR expression on microglia, with ensuing reduction of EAE severity, which was further enhanced by concomitant treatment with the A1AR agonist, adenosine amine congener. Thus, modulation of neuroinflammation by the A1AR represents a novel mechanism that provides new therapeutic opportunities for MS and other demyelinating diseases.
Recent advancements in the field of nanotechnology for the delivery of anti-Alzheimer drug in the brain region

ABSTRACT Introduction: Brain is supposed to be the most complicated part of the body which is very far from the reach of drug moieties. The drug entry in to the brain region depends upon various factors, and among those, the blood-brain-barrier remains the most prominent one. This barrier restricts the entry of almost all the drug and most of the essential biological components like proteins, peptides, etc. and hinders treatment of the CNS disorders. Alzheimer Disease (AD) is one such brain disorder, more specifically a neurodegenerative disorder which primarily affects the older adults. Areas covered: From solubility enhancement to targeted delivery, the nanoparticulate system became the answer for almost all the criticality related to drug delivery. Hence, nanoparticulate drug carrier system has been widely utilizing to remove the hurdles of brain drug delivery. Keeping this in mind, we have underlined the proficiencies of the nanocarrier systems which claim to improve the drug efficacy for the treatment of the AD. Expert opinion: The nanotechnological approaches are highly exploited by the researchers to enhance the drug permeation across the BBB to improve its bioavailability and efficacy by protecting the drug from peripheral degradation. However, still in this area of drug targeting provides vast scope for discoveries towards the enhancement of drug efficacy through surface modifications, site specification, reduced toxicity of the nanocarrier system and so on.
Zero-voltage-switched quasi-resonant buck and flyback converters — Experimental results at 10 MHz1

Experimental results of buck and flyback zero-voltage-switched quasi-resonant converters (ZVS-QRCs) operating above 5 MHz are presented. A design procedure is presented that minimizes voltage stress to the transistor while maintaining zero-voltage-switching for all loads. A novel, quasi-resonant gate drive scheme is proposed and implemented in a buck converter. The drive is simple and provides high switching speed. Power dissipation in the gate drive is substantially reduced due to the quasi-resonant operation. Due to a much reduced switching losses, dv/dt, and di/dt, the ZVS-QRCs are particularly suitable for very-high-frequency distributed power supply applications.
What Determines Wage Inequality Among Young German University Graduates?

Summary This paper investigates the gender wage gap among university graduates in their first job and five to six years into their careers using a representative survey among German university graduates. Results from standard decomposition techniques show that up to 83%of an initial 24% earnings disadvantage for women in the first job can be attributed to differences in endowments that are fixed at the time of labor market entry. Of these, fields of study play a dominant role and explain up to 70%of the earnings differential. Adding employer characteristics raises the explained part of the differential to 96%. The importance of unexplained factors increases after five to six years where 40% of the earnings gap remain unexplained even when controlling for detailed experience and employer characteristics.
Development and validation of high-resolution cardiovascular phenotyping strategies in zebrafish reveals the clinical relevance of ROBO4 to congenital heart defects

ii Preface . iv List of Tables . x List of Figures . xi Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 1.1 Zebrafish as a model organism . 1 1.2 Challenges of studying adult zebrafish . 2 1.3 Adult zebrafish cardiac anatomy and electrophysiology . 3 1.4 Development of tools to study adult zebrafish hearts . 5 1.5 Application of echocardiography and ECG techniques . 7 1.6 Bicuspid aortic valve with and without ascending aortic aneurysm . 8 1.7 Roundabout 4 (ROBO4) . 10 1.8 Figures. 12 Chapter 2: Development of echocardiography for adult zebrafish . 15 2.
Pre-equalization in combination with transmit diversity for OFDMA code-division multiplexing systems in fading channels

The potential of combining channel pre-equalization with transmit diversity for orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access code-division multiplexing (OFDMA-CDM) systems is investigated. The pre-equalization exploits the channel knowledge which is presumed to be available at the transmitter (Tx). The transmission signal is pre-distorted according to the channel state information (CSI) which can be made available, for example, by using time division duplex (TDD) mode. In TDD mode and under the assumption that CSI changes slowly in time, CSI estimated from a received slot can be used for pre-equalization of the next transmission slot. Concerning transmit diversity, we consider space-frequency block coding (SFBC) and transmit selection diversity (TSD). It turns out that TSD significantly outperforms SFBC. Moreover, systems with pre-equalization and TSD exhibit lower complexity than systems with pre-equalization and SFBC, since in the former case CSI is needed only at Tx, while in the latter case CSI is required at both Tx and receiver (Rx). In addition, it is shown that TSD is the optimal transmit diversity technique in the sense of bit error rate (BER) minimization in the case when CSI is available at Tx.
NPC photovoltaic grid-connected inverter using proportional-resonant controller

Multi-megawatt photovoltaic (PV) power plants are widespread in electrical power systems because of the drastic decrease in the PV panel prices. The multi-string structure is considered for high power PV systems due to the increase in the overall energy conversion efficiency and the modularity when compared to the centralized topology. High power conversion can be achieved easily using parallel connection of several grid-tied two-level voltage-source inverters (2L-VSIs). However, this configuration complicates the control designs. Thus, this issue can be overcome by replacing these 2L-VSIs with a single high power three-level neutral point clamped inverter (3L-NPC). Moreover, the 3L-NPC inherits several attractive merits such as improved power quality with reduced total harmonic distortion (THD), increased overall efficiency as well as lower costs. In addition to that, the voltage oriented control using proportional-resonant (VOC-PR) in conjunction with the adaptive space vector modulation (ASVM) technique is proposed for the large-scaled PV system with grid-tied NPC inverter. The feasibility of the proposed control for the high power system is validated through the simulation results under various environmental conditions. Besides that, the dynamic mance of the system under the proposed VOC-PR is greatly enhanced in comparison with the conventional method using PI controller.
Enhancing the Scalability of Blue Whale Cluster File System in Video-editing Environment

Scalability, which indicates the capacity of system to support the maximal number of clients, is very important to cluster file system. But in practical applications, the bandwidth that storage devices provide doesn’t linearly grow with the increasing number of clients which leads to bad QoS and restricts the scalability of cluster file system. This paper analyses the bottleneck of scalability of Blue Whale Cluster File System (BWFS) in video-editing application, and present a solution that clients employ the spare disk resource to cache data from remote server. By careful chosen of cache strategy and replacement algorithm, clients can access remote data from local disk, which significantly reduce random access to server and efficiently reduce the workload of storage servers. Therefore, the scalability of the whole system is significantly enhanced. We also implement a prototype to validate the solution and the result shows that it can enhance the scalability of the Blue Whale System by 80% at most.
Zein as a Pharmaceutical Excipient in Oral Solid Dosage Forms: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

Zein is the main storage protein of corn and it has several industrial applications. Mainly in the last 10–15 years, zein has emerged as a potential pharmaceutical excipient with unique features. Zein is a natural, biocompatible and biodegradable material produced from renewable sources. It is insoluble, yet due to its amphiphilic nature, it has self-assembling properties, which have been exploited for the formation of micromicroparticle and nanoparticle and films. Moreover, zein can hydrate so it has been used in swellable matrices for controlled drug release. Other pharmaceutical applications of zein in oral drug delivery include its incorporation in solid dispersions of poorly soluble drugs and in colonic drug delivery systems. This review describes the features of zein significant for its use as a pharmaceutical excipient for oral drug delivery, and it summaries the literature relevant to macroscopic zein-based oral dosage forms, i.e. tablets, capsules, beads and powders. Particular attention is paid to the most novel formulations and applications of zein. Moreover, gaps of knowledge as well as possible venues for future investigations on zein are highlighted.
Journal of Complementary and Integrative Medicine Impact of Mind Body Therapies on Vascular Endothelial Dysfunction and Implications for Cardiovacular Disease Management

Mind body therapies appear to reduce morbidity and mortality in patients with cardiovascular diseases, but there is limited understanding of the mechanisms that mediate this effect. Vascular endothelial dysfunction is a central feature of atherogenesis that is adversely impacted by mental stress. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of mind body therapies on peripheral endothelial function in patients with and without established cardiovascular disease. The search included Medline, Cochrane Library, Scopus and Embase to identify studies up to November 2009. Eligible studies were randomized controlled trials that compared the effects of mind body therapies and placebo on endothelial function. Two reviewers extracted data on study characteristics, methods, and outcomes. Disagreement was resolved by consensus. Three eligible trials enrolled a total of 258 patients. Sixty one (24 percent) were women and 53 percent had established cardiovascular disease. The trials had good methodological quality. Meta-analysis using random-effects model showed a non significant improvement of endothelial function by mind body therapies (standardized mean difference 0.15; 95% CI, -0.36 to 0.67, P=0.56). The analysis was underpowered due to small sample size. Circumstantial evidence indicates that mind body therapies may have a therapeutic benefit on endothelial dysfunction, however, the aggregate data from the three small randomized trials to date do not support this hypothesis. This biologically plausible effect requires additional investigation in adequately powered studies.
Improve Uncertainty Estimation for Unknown Classes in Bayesian Neural Networks with Semi-Supervised /One Set Classification

Although deep neural network (DNN) has achieved many state-of-the-art results, estimating the uncertainty presented in the DNN model and the data is a challenging task. Problems related to uncertainty such as classifying unknown classes (class which does not appear in the training data) data as known class with high confidence, is critically concerned in the safety domain area (e.g, autonomous driving, medical diagnosis). In this paper, we show that applying current Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) techniques alone does not effectively capture the uncertainty. To tackle this problem, we introduce a simple way to improve the BNN by using one class classification (in this paper, we use the term "set classification" instead). We empirically show the result of our method on an experiment which involves three datasets: MNIST, notMNIST and FMNIST.
The Important Leadership Competencies Of Higher Echelon To Middle-Level Managers In Thailand

This research investigation lays a foundation for extending research in the area of the Leadership Competencies. This study provides a different perspective in viewing Leadership Competencies, inasmuch as it shows the important leadership competencies, examine the relationships between these important leadership competencies and the demographical characteristics of participants and explore ways to develop an efficacious approach to develop the important leadership competencies. This research paper was based on the 1998 leadership competency model developed by Eyde et al. (1999) and latest version of The Leadership Competency Model by U.S. Office of Personal Management (OPM) . Thus, it can be said that this study provides excellent guidance to human resource managers, teachers, other educators, researchers and business management in the search for tools useful to the task of building a prosperous firm and organization in the current global business environment.
A New 2D Interaction-based Method for the Behavioral Analysis of Instrumental Activities of Daily Living

In neuropsychology, many computerized solutions have been proposed in order to assess patients’ functioning in activities of daily living, via realistic interactive simulation. In this context, most developed systems are based on simple devices, real time 2D interaction, and monoscopic 3D computer graphics environment. Behavioral analysis has drawn the interest of many domains, such as neuropsychology, ergonomics, web design, or virtual reality. However, advances on this topic remains fragmented in their respective areas. Thus, in computerized solutions applied to neuropsychology, the behavioral analysis does not take into account the data from interaction. The potential interest of computerized solutions is hence underexploited. In this paper, we propose a transdisciplinary solution, based on a finer analysis of 2D interaction data, such as stop duration. This method could reveal interesting aspects of users’ behaviors.
Optimal Beamforming and Power Allocation for Cognitive Femto Base Stations Based on Soft Decision

In this paper, an optimal beamforming and power allocation for the sensing-based spectrum sharing (SBSS) that employs a soft decision on the state of the primary user is proposed. Different from the existing soft-decision-based SBSS that employs a single antenna and adjusts only transmit power, in the proposed scheme, the secondary transmitter employs multiple transmit antennas and controls the beamforming direction and the transmit power. We design the optimal beamforming and power allocation under the constraints of total transmit power and interference power, where both average and instantaneous power constraints are considered. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique can significantly improve the average throughput of the secondary user compared with the existing methods. The proposed beamforming for the soft-decision-based SBSS is a promising scheme, particularly for cognitive femto base stations (BSs) to boost up the spectral efficiency while managing the interference to the macro BSs.
Is there a rational method to purify proteins? From expert systems to proteomics

The purification of recombinant proteins for therapeutic or analytical applications requires the use of several chromatographic steps in order to achieve a high level of purity. A range of techniques is available such as anion and cation exchange chromatography, which can be carried out at different pHs, and hence used at different steps, hydrophobic interaction chromatography, gel filtration and affinity chromatography. Evidently when confronted with a complex mixture of partially unknown proteins or a clarified cell extract there are many different routes one can take in order to choose the minimum and most efficient number of purification steps to achieve a desired level of purity (e.g. 98, 99.5 or 99.9%). In this review we will show how an initial ‘proteomic’ characterization of the complex initial mixture of target protein and protein contaminants can be used to select the most efficient chromatographic separation steps in order to achieve a maximum level of purity with a minimum number of steps. The chosen methodology was implemented in a computer based expert system. The first algorithm developed was used to select the most efficient purification method to separate a protein from its contaminants based on the physicochemical properties of the protein product and the protein contaminants. The second algorithm developed was used to predict the number and concentration of contaminants after each separation as well as protein product purity. The successful application of the expert system approach, based on an initial proteomic characterization, to the practical cases of protein mixtures and clarified fermentation supernatant is presented and discussed. The purification strategy proposed was experimentally tested and validated with a mixture of four proteins and the experimental validation was also carried out with an ‘unknown’ supernatant of Bacillus subtilis producing a recombinant β‐1,3‐glucanase. The system was robust to errors <10% which is the range that can be found in the experimental determination of the properties in the database of product and contaminants. On the other hand, the system was sensitive both to larger variations (>20%) in the properties of the contaminant database and the protein product and to variations in one protein property (e.g. hydrophobicity). Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.