Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronotropic and Inotropic Effects of Ropivacaine, Bupivacaine, and Lidocaine in the Spontaneously Beating and Electrically Paced Isolated, Perfused Rabbit Heart

Background and Objectives. The purpose of this study was to compare the inotropic and chronotropic effects of ropivacaine, bupivacaine, and lidocaine in an isolated, spontaneously beating rabbit heart preparation. The ability to electrically pace the heart in the presence of local anesthetic also was examined. Methods. Hearts were perfused with Krebs-Hense-leit solution, then exposed to ropivacaine or bupivacaine at 1, 6, or 13 μg/ml or lidocaine at 6, 20, or 40 μg/ml ( n = 6, each concentration). Left ventricular pressure, left ventricular dP/dt (rate of change derivation from analog waveform of the left ventricular pressure wave), pulmonary artery flow, oxygen consumption, and electrocardiogram were monitored through-out the studies. Drug exposure was for 30 minutes or until a 75% decrease in left ventricular pressure occurred. Results. All preparations were exposed to 1 μg/ml bupivacaine or ropivacaine and 6 μg/ml lidocaine for the full 30 minutes. At the intermediate concentrations, only one of six bupivacaine preparations (6 μg/ml) survived the full 30-minute exposure period, compared to six of six preparations for both ropivacaine (6 μg/ml) and lidocaine (20 μg/ml; p < 0.05). Similar results were found with exposure to the highest concentrations of these local anesthetics. No electrocardiogram changes were observed with any of the three lidocaine concentrations or with the lowest ropivacaine and bupivacaine concentration. At the intermediate concentration, atrioventricular conduction changes were seen with bupivacaine in five of six preparations, compared to one of six ropivacaine preparations ( p < 0.05). With the high concentration, ventricular tachycardia occurred in four of six bupivacaine preparations, compared to zero of six with ropivacaine ( p < 0.05). In general, left ventricular systolic pressure, dP/dt, heart rate, and oxygen consumption were reduced during exposure to all concentrations of the three local anesthetics. The most profound effects (>75% reduction) were seen with 13 μg/ml bupivacaine. All local anesthetics caused an increase in the voltage required to pace the hearts via the atria. With 6 μg/ml bupivacaine and 13 μg/ml ropivacaine, 50% of the preparations could not be paced via the atria; and with 13 μg/ml bupivacaine, none of the preparations could be paced via the atria. The depressant effects of 6 μg/ml bupivacaine approximated those seen with 13 μg/ml ropivacaine. The reductions in oxygen consumption and pulmonary artery flow were not significantly different between treatment groups. Conclusion. The results of this study indicate that bupivacaine is more cardiodepressant and arrhythmogenic than either ropivacaine or lidocaine.
Arbitrage, Idiosyncratic Risk and the Rationality of Discounts on Closed-End Funds

We examine the roles of rational and behavioural factors in explaining long-run premiums/discounts on closed-end funds, using evidence on equity funds from the US and UK. Although the processes by which fund prices converge towards long-run premiums or discounts are similar in the two countries, there is a remarkable difference in what influences the cross-section of premiums: in the US two behavioural factors (idiosyncratic risks and dividend payouts) have a positive influence, whereas in the UK two rational factors (management fees and liquidity) have a negative influence. While these cross-sectional factors are highly significant, they cannot explain why premiums are not positive in the US (-3% average) and so highly negative in the UK (-12% average). The main contribution of our paper is to show that a fund trades at a discount because there is an arbitrage cap on its premium resulting from new issues. This censors the distribution of the premium and causes its mean to be negative. The more idiosyncratic is a fund’s risk, the more difficult it is to make a copycat issue and the smaller is the cap’s downward influence on the premium. Because of the cap, the existence of a discount is a rational phenomenon for all types of closed-end fund, albeit modified for equity funds by behavioural factors in the US and by rational factors in the UK.
Localized and efficient curli nucleation requires the chaperone-like amyloid assembly protein CsgF

Elucidation of the early events in amyloidogenesis is key to understanding the pathology of, and developing therapies for, amyloid diseases. Critical informants about these early events are amyloid assembly proteins that facilitate the transition from monomer to amyloid fiber. Curli are a functional amyloid whose in vivo polymerization requires a dedicated nucleator protein, CsgB, and an assembly protein, CsgF. Here we demonstrate that without CsgF, curli subunits are released from the cell into the media and are inefficiently polymerized, resulting in fewer and mislocalized curli fibers. CsgF is secreted to the cell surface, where it mediates the cell-association and protease-resistance of the CsgB nucleator, suggesting that CsgF is required for specific localization and/or chaperoning of CsgB for full nucleator activity. CsgF is thus critical to achieve localized and efficient nucleation of fiber subunits into functional, cell-associated amyloid.
Does Distance between Target and Acquirer Matter for Bank Mergers?

Geographical deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to a wave of US bank mergers. A still unresolved issue is the role that distance between target and acquirer plays in the performance and efficiency of mergers. In theory, a nearby bank acquisition reduces monitoring costs while a distant acquisition achieves greater risk diversification. By analyzing the efficiency and performance of more than one thousand bank mergers between 1988 and 2002, we find that distance improved bank performance for mergers within a given BHC. In contrast, distance led to a decline in profitability and an increase in risk for mergers of banks from different BHCs. We argue that the BHC structure enables a firm to establish effective monitoring capabilities before consolidating, which allows the BHC to manage far-flung enterprises effectively.
One-step cloning system for isolation of bacterial lexA-like genes

A system to isolate lexA-like genes of bacteria directly was developed. It is based upon the fact that the presence of a lexA(Def) mutation is lethal to SulA+ cells of Escherichia coli. This system is composed of a SulA- LexA(Def) HsdR- strain and a lexA-conditional killer vector (plasmid pUA165) carrying the wild-type sulA gene of E. coli and a polylinker in which foreign DNA may be inserted. By using this method, the lexA-like genes of Salmonella typhimurium, Erwinia carotovora, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and P. putida were cloned. We also found that the LexA repressor of S. typhimurium presented the highest affinity for the SOS boxes of E. coli in vivo, whereas the LexA protein of P. aeruginosa had the lowest. Likewise, all of these LexA repressors were cleaved by the activated RecA protein of E. coli after DNA damage. Furthermore, under high-stringency conditions, the lexA gene of E. coli hybridized with the lexA genes of S. typhimurium and E. carotovora but not with those of P. aeruginosa and P. putida.
Verification of Image Feature Correspondences

This thesis is focused on correspondence verification which is one of the less researched stages of wide baseline stereo matching. A correspondence can be informally described as a pair of points of interest, one in the first image, the other in second image. During the process of wide baseline stereo matching, these correspondences can be identified as either correct or incorrect. Correct classification of correspondences has the potential to make the matching process much more effective. This thesis is focused on the performance of the Sequential Correspondence Verification algorithm introduced in [1] in combination with view synthesis [10] on scenes with significant viewpoint changes. The experiments conducted in this thesis show that the SCV is not suitable for scenes with extreme viewpoint changes. Moreover, it was discovered that the SCV is much more sensitive to precision of the input correspondences than it had been previously thought. Minor contribution of this work is the discovery that correspondences created with up-to-date software version are less accurate than the correspondences used in [1] which were generated by an older version of the same software.
Strategic firm type and export performance

This study adopts the Miles and Snow typology as a framework for analyzing export performance of manufacturing firms. The study investigates the role of distinctive competence and various strategic responses of firms belonging to each strategic type on their foreign market performance. The results of this study show that a firm’s strengths and strategic responses are related and that the impact of strategic responses on export performance differs according to the firm’s strategic type. Based on these results, the strengths that defenders, prospectors and analyzers should build and maintain as well as the strategic responses that each should pursue are identified.
Predictive Value of Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate for the Prognosis of Elderly Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction

Copyright © 2017 by The Korean Geriatric Society This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Predictive Value of Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate for the Prognosis of Elderly Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction
On the relevance of prolonged convulsive status epilepticus in animals to the etiology and neurobiology of human temporal lobe epilepsy

Convulsive status epilepticus (SE) in animals has been an invaluable experimental method for elucidating the role of excitatory synaptic activity in seizure-associated neuronal death (Meldrum et al., 1973; Olney et al., 1974; Nadler et al., 1978; Schwarcz et al., 1978; Ben-Ari et al., 1980; Schwob et al., 1980). Pioneering studies by Meldrum and colleagues established that prolonged convulsive seizures produced brain damage even when systemic physiological factors were normalized (Meldrum et al., 1973). Subsequent studies using the glutamate receptor agonist kainic acid (Olney et al., 1974) led to the hypothesis that excessive glutamatergic presynaptic discharge per se was the cause of “excitotoxic” postsynaptic neuronal death (Schwob et al., 1980). Studies using a variety of chemoconvulsants or electrical stimulation finally provided conclusive evidence that prolonged presynaptic excitation, regardless of how it is initiated, can be neurotoxic to postsynaptic target cells (Nadler et al., 1978; Ben-Ari et al., 1980; Olney, 1981; Sloviter and Damiano, 1981; McIntyre et al., 1982). Early anecdotal observations that spontaneous seizures developed in rats that survived convulsive SE led to suggestions that these rats might be useful models of human temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE; Pisa et al., 1980; Nadler, 1981; Tremblay and Ben-Ari, 1984). Although SE-induced brain damage in animals is obviously an excellent model of SE-induced brain damage in humans, recent data indicate that convulsive SE fails to reproduce the main features of human TLE (Harvey and Sloviter, 2005). Characteristic features of human refractory TLE include extensive hippocampal atrophy and limited extrahippocampal damage (Margerison and Corsellis, 1966), as well as seizure onset from the hippocampus and closely related structures (Spencer and Spencer, 1994). However, most animals ex-
The Impact of Governance Uncertainty on Technology Diversification

In this paper, we address the link between governance uncertainty, which is defined as traditions and institutions by which a country? s authority is exercised and innovation output of affected companies. Governance uncertainty may interfere with organizational ownership, operations, and transfers. Our research focuses on the context of primary sector firms, notably, firms active in the upstream oil industry, which must source natural oil and gas from particular geographical areas because these resources are fixed in certain locations. For these companies, governance uncertainty is a reality with regard to numerous issues (for example, environmental legislation, share of oil rents, corruption), which may constitute a serious threat to their core business of exploitation of finite natural resources, especially when it affects access to resource deposits. Our analysis shows that companies react to this problem by
Making the Numbers? ‘Short Termism’ & the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster

Recent work suggests that an excessive focus on “managing the numbers”—delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer-term performance—makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive advantage. “Short termism” has been blamed for everything from the decline of the U.S. automobile industry to the low penetration of techniques such as total quality management and continuous improvement. Yet a significant body of research suggests that firms that sacrifice long-term investment to manage earnings are often rewarded for doing so. This paper presents a model to help reconcile the tension between these apparently contradictory perspectives. We show that if the source of long-term advantage is modeled as a stock of capability that accumulates over time, the intensity of the firm’s effort to manage short-term earnings at the expense of long-term investment can have very different consequences depending on whether the firm’s capability is close to a critical “tipping thre.
Animal models of neuroinflammation secondary to acute insults originated outside the brain

The term “neuroinflammation” has been widely used to describe a series of acute or chronic conditions that cause inflammation in the central nervous system (CNS). Neurological damage can be a consequence of direct local injury or, secondary, of systemic or even distant inflammatory processes. In this respect, animal models have been developed to better understand the pathophysiology and, possibly, to evaluate more effective methods of treatment for these disorders. Animal models that promote alterations in blood–brain barrier permeability—the activation of microglia or astrocytes, modifications in neuropeptide expression, oxidative stress, increased apoptosis, release of inflammatory mediators, leukocyte infiltration, and brain edema—are likely to involve neuroinflammation and therefore can serve as useful models for human inflammatory CNS injury. This review describes the major animal models of neuroinflammation triggered by systemic or distant inflammatory processes. We will focus on animal models of acute neurologic damage; experimental models that lead to chronic neuroinflammation will not be addressed here.
Effect of Regional Ischemia on the Left Ventricular End‐ Systolic Pressure‐Volume Relationship of Isolated Canine Hearts

We studied the effects of regional ischemia on the left ventricular isovolumic end- systolic pressure-volume relationship (ESPVR) in six excised, blood-perfused canine ventricles. We created different extents of regional ischemia by ligating various branches of the coronary arteries while keeping the coronary arterial pressure constant (80 mm Hg). The extent of regional ischemia (Rm) relative to the total mass of the left ventricular myocardium was determined by regional myocardial blood flow measured by the radioactive microsphere technique. With regional ischemia, the ESPVR shifted rightward without significant change in slope in the physiologic end-systolic pressure range. In the subphysiological end-systolic pressure range, however, its slope became lower than control. In order to quantify the degree of the rightward shift, we measured the extrapolated volume axis intercept (Vo) by fitting a straight line to the ESPVR in the physiological range under control and ischemic conditions. The shift in Vo (ΔVO) associated with ischemia was linearly correlated with Rm (ΔVO = 50.7Rm - 0.6, n = 28, r = 0.944, P < 0.001). We conclude that the major effect of acute regional ischemia on the ESPVR in the physiological pressure range is a parallel rightward shift. This forms a striking contrast to the effect of global ischemia (under which only the slope is affected without a substantial change in Vo).
Systems thinking for strengthening health systems in LMICs: need for a paradigm shift.

Health systems are complex. Failing to take this complexity into account will continue to hinder efforts to achieve better and more equitable health outcomes. Understanding and working with complexity requires a paradigm shift from linear reductionist approaches to dynamic and holistic approaches that appreciate the multifaceted and interconnected relationships among health system components as well as the views interests and power of its different actors and stakeholders. Systems thinking helps to re-orient our perspectives by expanding our understanding of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems and identifying how this learning may be applied to system problems and the creation of potential solutions. Long used in other disciplines systems thinking holds great yet largely untapped potential for health systems particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Systems thinking is primarily a way of thinking in approaching problems and in designing solutions. It is an approach to problem solving that appreciates the very nature of complex systems as dynamic constantly changing governed by history and by feedback where the role and influence of stakeholders and context is critical and where new policies and actions (of different stakeholders) often generate counterintuitive and unpredictable effects sometimes long after policies have been implemented. (Excerpts)
Preliminary Feasibility Analysis For An Integrated Biomaterials And Ethanol Biorefinery Using Wheat Straw Feedstock

Biobased products and fuels appear to have a very bright future. A consortium led by NDSU is currently engaged in a project that would use cellulose nanofibers derived from wheat straw to make a product that could substitute for fiberglass and plastics in many applications, including automotive parts. The work described here analyzes the economic value of producing cellulose nanowhiskers (CNW) as a co-product in an ethanol biorefinery. An ASPEN Plus-based process model was developed to evaluate ethanol production from wheat straw. The base case model generated 54.418 million gallons per year (MGPY) of denatured ethanol, using approximately 900,000 tons per year of wheat straw feedstock. The capital cost was estimated at $185 million. Total operating costs, excluding by-product credits, were $92.4 million per year. Revenue from sales was estimated at $98.0 million per year from ethanol and $7.5 million per year from electricity. The earnings before interest and income tax (EBIT) are $13.1 million per year providing a return on investment (ROI) of 7.06 percent. The production cost of ethanol including by-product credit was determined at $1.56 per gallon. When production of CNW was added to the base case model, the manufacturing cost of producing CNW from wheat straw was estimated to be $. 57 per pound. Economic analysis indicated that production of CNW would be an enhancement to the economic performance of a wheat straw to ethanol mill.
Draft Genome Sequence of Xanthomonas arboricola pv. juglandis J303, Isolated from Infected Walnut Trees in Southern Chile

ABSTRACT Here, we report the draft genome sequence of Xanthomonas arboricola pv. juglandis J303, isolated from infected walnut trees in southern Chile. The size of the genome is 5,066,424 bp with a G+C content of 65.4%. X. arboricola pv. juglandis J303 has several genes related to virulence, antibiotic resistance, and copper resistance.
Exploring Potential Drivers of Employee Engagement, Enablement, and Empowerment: A Quest Toward Developing a Framework for Building Sustainable Employee Excellence for Manufacturing Environment in Indonesia

Survival and sustainability in today’s business dynamics are very much driven by how high-performing the business culture is in an organization. This organizational culture is very much driven by the actions of every person in the organization. These actions, along with the results of the actions, are basically what employee excellence is all about. This paper is a result of a study aimed at developing a framework for sustainable employee excellence through the constructs of engagement, enablement, and empowerment. The study commenced with literature review to identify potential drivers of each of these constructs, which were then used in conceptual theory building to come up with the proposed framework. To further explore and confirm these drivers, the study then proceeded with considerable number of evidence-based interviews with several layers of employees in several manufacturing organizations in Indonesia, both national and multinational companies. Upon developing the proposed framework, this paper also provided propositions and explored directions for future research. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n2s1p577
The effect of HLA disparity on clinical outcome after HLA‐haploidentical blood and marrow transplantation

Huo M‐R, Xu L‐P, Li D, Liu D‐H, Liu K‐Y, Chen H, Han W, Chen Y‐H, Wang Y, Wang J‐Z, Zhang X‐H, Zhao X‐Y, Huang X‐J. The effect of HLA disparity on clinical outcome after HLA‐haploidentical blood and marrow transplantation. Clin Transplant 2011 DOI: 10.1111/j.1399‐0012.2011. 01499.x. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons A/S.
Spillover of social responsibility associations in a brand portfolio

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the spillover effect of social responsibility (SR) activity at the product brand level on the full brand portfolio. Extant research has established that SR activity can be beneficial to companies by influencing consumers’ SR associations with the company and its product brands. However, most studies only look at the outcomes of SR implemented at the corporate level (i.e. corporate social responsibility [CSR]). This paper provides a new and expanded perspective by exploring how SR at the product brand level reverberates throughout the full brand portfolio. Drawing on associative network theory, the authors propose a conceptual model that predicts when and how SR associations with a product brand spillover to corporate brand and other product brands and the consequences of this spillover. Design/methodology/approach – Two experiments were conducted to test the conceptual model. The authors used utilitarian products (frozen yogurt, ice cream, and soft drink) in the first .
Testing Market Efficiency of Indian Stock Market

As long as financial markets are concerned, people tried to forecast the future movement of it. The purpose of forecast is to expect great fortunes. In reality it is an important question that "is it possible to forecast market with the historical data? " If it is possible than excess returns can be made by picking up lottery stock. This situation is called "Inefficient Market". On the other hand if market is efficient, it is west of time to predict stock market. The main intention of this paper is to study the efficiency level in Indian Stock market and the random walk nature of the stock market by using RUN test for the period from 1st January 2001 to 31st December 2010. In this paper, 6 major indices (BSE 30, BSE 100,200,500, BSE SMALL CAP and BSE MIDCAP) are studied.