Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors influencing the patient education: A qualitative research

Background: The related literatures revealed that there is a lack of effective patient/family education in the health care centers. Several studies indicate that patients, while getting discharged from hospitals, receive insufficient information about their illness and self-care. The purpose of the study was to explore the factors influencing patient education from the perspectives of nurses in Iran. Materials and Methods: We conducted a qualitative study using a content analysis approach. We used a purposive sampling technique to recruit and interview 18 nurses with at least 2 years of working experience in the cardiac care unit (CCU) and post-CCU ward of two educational hospitals in Tehran related to Tehran University. Data were collected through face-to-face audio-taped interviews and field observations. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed concurrently with data collection. Results: The major theme extracted in this study was the inappropriate organizational culture which includes eight categories listed as follows: Not putting value on education, non-professional activities, physician-oriented atmosphere, conflict and lack of coherence in education, inappropriate communication skills, ignoring patient's right in education, lack of motivation, rewarding system in the organization, and poor supervision and control. Conclusions: The results of this study show that according to the participants’ perspective, organizational culture is in a poor level. So, to improve the performance of nurses, it is necessary to increase their motivation through optimization of organizational culture.
Farmer Transaction Costs of Participating in Federal Conservation Programs: Magnitudes and Determinants

Transaction costs may be a barrier to participation in USDA conservation programs. Data on perceived barriers and transaction costs from the 2012 USDA Agricultural Resources Management Survey of soybean farmers were analyzed. Of farmers who had not applied for programs, almost a third agreed that applying for programs and documenting compliance (perceived transaction costs) were barriers to participation. The measured magnitudes of transaction costs of those who did apply varied by program but do not seem particularly onerous and are lower than in European studies. Regression analysis indicates that complexity of the program and the farming system may increase transaction costs. (JEL Q15, Q52)
Effects of disodium ascorbyl phytostanol phosphates (FM-VP4) on cholesterol accumulation within rat intestinal cells

The objective of this study was to determine whether FM-VP4, a novel compound derived from plant sterols, can effectively reduce cholesterol accumulation within rat intestinal epithelial crypt (IEC-6) cells. IEC-6 cells were cultured in Dulbeccos minimal essential medium (DMEM) containing 5% fetal bovine serum, 100 U/mL penicillin, 100 μg/mL streptomycin, and 0.1 units/mL insulin at 37°C under a humidified 5% CO2 atmosphere and seeded at 6.4×104 cells/well in 48-well plates. Experiments were initiated 14 days postconfluence. IEC-6 cells were exposed to [3H]cholesterol micelles (containing oleic and taurcholic acids), co-incubated with FM-VP4 (0, 10, 50, and 100 μM) in Hepes Buffered Sterile Saline (HBSS). Cells were also preincubated with FM-VP4 prior to [3H]cholesterol micelle incubation to determine whether its effects are elicited intracellularly. The cellular localization of cholesterol was determined using digitonin. To determine the effects of cholesterol on the extent of FM-VP4 accumulation within IEC-6 cells, [3H]FM-VP4 was incubated with IEC-6 cells in the presence of unlabeled cholesterol micelles (0, 10, and 50 μM). The extent of [3H]cholesterol or [3H]FM-VP4 associated with cell monolayers was determined after cell lysis using liquid scintillation counting in a Beckman LS6500 Scintillation Counter. Dose-response and time course studies were performed in which control (no FM-VP4 treatment) and FM-VP4 (10–100 μM) were co-incubated with 50-μM [3H]cholesterol micelles from 1 minute to 24 hours. Incubation with only 50-μM FM-VP4 for less than 24 hours resulted in a 50% to 60% reduction (n=6, P<.05) in [3H]cholesterol associated with the monolayer compared with control (n=6). Preincubation of FM-VP4 did not elicit a significant reduction in cholesterol accumulation compared with control (n=6). Approximately 25% of the total [3H]cholesterol associated with the cells was determined to be cytosolic, while 75% was noncytosolic in the presence and/or absence of FM-VP4. [3H]FM-VP4 was also shown to associate with IEC-6 cells at similar concentrations to cholesterol with the most pronounced inhibition of FM-VP4 accumulation occurring at a cholesterol concentration of 50 μM. However, cholesterol-induced inhibition was detectable only after 1 hour of incubation. FM-VP4 inhibits cholesterol accumulation within IEC-6 cells and is most effective at equimolar concentrations with cholesterol. Our findings further suggest that the action of FM-VP4 is likely at the cell surface and not elicited intracellularly.
Utility of rapid whole-exome sequencing in the diagnosis of Niemann–Pick disease type C presenting with fetal hydrops and acute liver failure

Rapid whole-exome sequencing (rWES) is used in critically ill newborn infants to inform about diagnosis, clinical management, and prognosis. Here we report a male newborn infant with hydrops, pancytopenia, and acute liver failure who was listed for liver transplantation. Given the acuity of the presentation, the procedure-related morbidity and mortality, and lack of diagnosis, we used rWES in the proband and both parents with a turnaround time of 10 business days. rWES returned one maternally inherited, likely pathogenic and one paternally inherited, likely pathogenic variant in NPC1, suggestive of a diagnosis of Niemann–Pick disease type C (NPC). Interestingly, a diagnosis of NPC was entertained prior to rWES, but deemed unlikely in light of absent cholesterol storage on liver biopsy and near-normal oxysterol levels in dried blood. The diagnosis of NPC was confirmed on filipin stain in fibroblasts demonstrating defective cholesterol trafficking. NPC is a slowly progressive neurodegenerative disorder that may also affect the liver with overall poor prognosis. It was decided to take the infant off the transplant list and transfer to palliative care, where he died after 4 wk. This case highlights the utility of rWES in an acute clinical setting for several domains of precision medicine including (1) diagnosis, (2) prognosis and outcome, (3) management and therapy, and (4) utilization of resources.
How labor market rigidities shape business taxation

This paper starts by showing that labor market rigidities lower corporate tax rates from OCDE data. We then show that this relationship can be rationalized in a model of tax competition with imperfect competition and trade costs. The rigidity in each national labor market emerges from either an exogenously xed wage or an union monopoly. We also show that, when labor market institutions di¤er between countries, the corporate tax is lower in the country with labor market imperfections but a majority of capital can be located in the other country. Nevertheless, trade liberalization induces a wage and tax convergence and re-location of capital in the unionized country. Keywords: Tax competition, unemployment, capital mobility, labour market imperfections. JEL Classi cation: F12, F16, H25 We wish to thank Simone Moriconi and Kristian Behrens for useful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank participants at RIEF VIIth Doctoral Meetings in Rennes, at the 8th Public Economic Theory meeting, at CORE spatial economic seminar, at GATE seminar, at the 24th meeting of the JMA and at the Public Economic seminar of the ENS-Cachan and CES. yCreuset, University of Saint-Etienne. zINRA, UMR1302, SMART, 4, allee Bobierre, F-35000 Rennes. xCreuset, University of Saint-Etienne. {Corresponding author. Stephane Riou. E-mail: stephane.riou@univ-st-etienne.fr. Address: Creuset, 6 rue basse des rives 42023 Saint-Etienne, cedex 02, France.
TIF4631 and TIF4632: two yeast genes encoding the high-molecular-weight subunits of the cap-binding protein complex (eukaryotic initiation factor 4F) contain an RNA recognition motif-like sequence and carry out an essential function

The 5' ends of eukaryotic mRNAs are blocked by a cap structure, m7GpppX (where X is any nucleotide). The interaction of the cap structure with a cap-binding protein complex is required for efficient ribosome binding to the mRNA. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the cap-binding protein complex is a heterodimer composed of two subunits with molecular masses of 24 (eIF-4E, CDC33) and 150 (p150) kDa. p150 is presumed to be the yeast homolog of the p220 component of mammalian eIF-4F. In this report, we describe the isolation of yeast gene TIF4631, which encodes p150, and a closely related gene, TIF4632. TIF4631 and TIF4632 are 53% identical overall and 80% identical over a 320-amino-acid stretch in their carboxy-terminal halves. Both proteins contain sequences resembling the RNA recognition motif and auxiliary domains that are characteristic of a large family of RNA-binding proteins. tif4631-disrupted strains exhibited a slow-growth, cold-sensitive phenotype, while disruption of TIF4632 failed to show any phenotype under the conditions assayed. Double gene disruption engendered lethality, suggesting that the two genes are functionally homologous and demonstrating that at least one of them is essential for viability. These data are consistent with a critical role for the high-molecular-weight subunit of putative yeast eIF-4F in translation. Sequence comparison of TIF4631, TIF4632, and the human eIF-4F p220 subunit revealed significant stretches of homology. We have thus cloned two yeast homologs of mammalian p220.
XM02, the first granulocyte colony-stimulating factor biosimilar, is safe and effective in reducing the duration of severe neutropenia and incidence of febrile neutropenia in patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma receiving chemotherapy

Recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factors (G-CSFs) such as filgrastim or lenograstim are being used to treat chemotherapy-induced neutropenia. The aim of the present study was to investigate a new G-CSF, XM02, in comparison to filgrastim in terms of safety and efficacy in the prevention of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia in non-Hodgkin-lymphoma (NHL). A total of 92 patients receiving chemotherapy were randomised in cycle 1 to treatment with daily injections (subcutaneous 5 µg/kg/day) of XM02 (n = 63) or filgrastim (n = 29) for at least 5 days and a maximum of 14 days. In subsequent cycles, all patients received XM02. The mean duration of severe neutropenia (DSN) was 0.5 and 0.9 days in cycle 1 for XM02 and filgrastim, respectively (p = 0.1055). In cycle 1, the incidence of febrile neutropenia (FN) was 11.1% for XM02 and 20.7% for filgrastim (p = 0.1232). The adverse event profile was similar between XM02 and filgrastim. XM02 demonstrated equivalent efficacy and similar safety profile as the reference medication filgrastim. Treatment with XM02 is as beneficial as filgrastim in ameliorating severe neutropenia and FN in patients with NHL receiving chemotherapy. XM02 is safe and well tolerated in the doses applied in this study.
Using Corticosteroids to Reshape the Gut Microbiome: Implications for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

Background:Commensal gut microbiota play an important role in regulating metabolic and inflammatory conditions. Reshaping intestinal microbiota through pharmacologic means may be a viable treatment option. We sought to delineate the functional characteristics of glucocorticoid-mediated alterations on gut microbiota and their subsequent repercussions on host mucin regulation and colonic inflammation. Methods:Adult male C57Bl/6 mice, germ-free, Muc2-heterozygote (±), or Muc2-knockout (−/−) were injected with dexamethasone, a synthetic glucocorticoid, for 4 weeks. Fecal samples were collected for gut microbiota analysis through 16S rRNA terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism and amplicon sequencing. Intestinal mucosa was collected for mucin gene expression studies. Germ-free mice were conventionalized with gut microbes from treated and nontreated groups to determine their functional capacities in recipient hosts. Results:Exposure to dexamethasone in wild-type mice led to substantial shifts in gut microbiota over a 4-week period. Furthermore, a significant downregulation of colonic Muc2 gene expression was observed after treatment. Muc2-knockout mice harbored a proinflammatory environment of gut microbes, characterized by the increase or decrease in prevalence of specific microbiota populations such as Clostridiales and Lactobacillaceae, respectively. This colitogenic phenotype was transmissible to IL10-knockout mice, a genetically susceptible model of colonic inflammatory disorders. Microbiota from donors pretreated with dexamethasone, however, ameliorated symptoms of inflammation. Conclusions:Commensal gut bacteria may be a key mediator of the anti-inflammatory effects observed in the large intestine after glucocorticoid exposure. These findings underscore the notion that intestinal microbes comprise a “microbial organ” essential for host physiology that can be targeted by therapeutic approaches to restore intestinal homeostasis.
Operational Efficiency and Firm Life Cycle in the Korean Manufacturing Sector

We examine how operational efficiency is different across life cycle stages. We apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the efficiency scores for Korean manufacturing firms. The means of the technical, pure technical and scale efficiency scores are 0.847, 0.879, and 0.964, respectively, implying that Korean manufacturing firms have a significant level of inefficiency and still room for improvement. The statistical tests of mean efficiency difference show that the operational efficiency is increasing through the life cycle as a whole. The scale efficiency of the decline stage is lower than those of the growth and maturity stages, which may be due to the unutilized production capacity.
Declining, transition and slow rural territories in southern Italy Characterizing the intra-rural divides

ABSTRACT As metropolitan areas around the world keep expanding, behind them, rural areas continue to be affected by greater rates of depopulation. This is not a new phenomenon: rural to urban migration has been reported in the developed world at least from the period between the two world wars. However, recent rural depopulation trends have dramatically intensified in both the developed and the developing countries worldwide. In planning literature, greater emphasis is placed on the “urban–rural” divide, that is, people leaving the countryside to look for better opportunities in urban areas. However, a growing body of literature points to the fact that not all rural areas are declining at the same rate. Indeed, some rural towns have managed to retain population and even to grow. Therefore, at least in developed countries, an “intra-rural” divide notion is emerging. To exemplify this notion, we have studied rural towns in Southern Italy.
Structural basis for the recognition of ldb1 by the N‐terminal LIM domains of LMO2 and LMO4

LMO2 and LMO4 are members of a small family of nuclear transcriptional regulators that are important for both normal development and disease processes. LMO2 is essential for hemopoiesis and angiogenesis, and inappropriate overexpression of this protein leads to T‐cell leukemias. LMO4 is developmentally regulated in the mammary gland and has been implicated in breast oncogenesis. Both proteins comprise two tandemly repeated LIM domains. LMO2 and LMO4 interact with the ubiquitous nuclear adaptor protein ldb1/NLI/CLIM2, which associates with the LIM domains of LMO and LIM homeodomain proteins via its LIM interaction domain (ldb1‐LID). We report the solution structures of two LMO:ldb1 complexes (b: 1M3V and 1J2O) and show that ldb1‐LID binds to the N‐terminal LIM domain (LIM1) of LMO2 and LMO4 in an extended conformation, contributing a third strand to a β‐hairpin in LIM1 domains. These findings constitute the first molecular definition of LIM‐mediated protein–protein interactions and suggest a mechanism by which ldb1 can bind a variety of LIM domains that share low sequence homology.
Tree-Structured Curriculum Learning Based on Semantic Similarity of Text

Inspired by the notion of a curriculum that allows human learners to acquire knowledge from easy to difficult materials, curriculum learning (CL) has been applied to many areas including Natural Language Processing (NLP). Most previous CL methods in NLP learn texts according to their lengths. We posit, however, that learning semantically similar texts is more effective than simply relying on superficial easiness such as text lengths. As such, we propose a new CL method that considers semantic dissimilarity as the complexity measure and a tree-structured curriculum as the organization method. The proposed CL method shows better performance than previous CL methods on a sentiment analysis task in an experiment.
The Clinical and Economic Burden of Newly Diagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease in a Medicare Advantage Population

Background/Rationale: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) represents a serious public health issue affecting approximately 5.4 million individuals in the United States and is projected to affect up to 16 million by 2050. This study examined health care resource utilization (HCRU), costs, and comorbidity burden immediately preceding new diagnosis of AD and 2 years after diagnosis. Methods: This study utilized a claims-based, retrospective cohort design. Medicare Advantage members newly diagnosed with AD (n = 3374) were compared to matched non-AD controls (n = 6748). All patients with AD were required to have 12 months of continuous enrollment prior to AD diagnosis (International Classification of Diseases, Clinical Modification [ICD-9] 331.0), during which time no diagnosis of AD, a related dementia, or an AD medication was observed. Non-AD controls demonstrated no diagnosis of AD, a related dementia, or a prescription claim for an AD medication treatment during their health plan enrollment. Medical and pharmacy claims data were used to measure HCRU, costs, and comorbidity burden over a period of 36 months (12 months pre-diagnosis and 24 months post-diagnosis). Results: The HCRU and costs were greater for AD members during the year prior to diagnosis and during postdiagnosis years 1 and 2 compared to controls. The AD members also displayed greater comorbidity than their non-AD counterparts during postdiagnosis years 1 and 2, as measured by 2 different comorbidity indices. Conclusions: Members newly diagnosed with AD demonstrated greater HCRU, health care costs, and comorbidity burden compared to matched non-AD controls.
Theoretical Study of the Electronic Structure of the KRb Molecule.

Upon request of experimentalists now engaged in high-resolution spectroscopic investigations of the molecule KRb, we have determined the potential energy of electronic states (2S+1)Lambda((+)) correlating up to the limit K(5p) + Rb(5s) and of electronic states Omega((+/-)) correlating up to the limit K(4s) + Rb(4d(2)D(3/2)) in a large range of internuclear distance R. For the five states so far observed, the agreement between calculated and experimental molecular constants is good with DeltaR(e) < 0.08 Å, Deltaomega(e) < 6 cm(-1), and DeltaT(e) < 140 cm(-1). Extensive numerical data for energies versus R have been listed in a data base available at http://www.idealibrary. com. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.
The effectiveness of mandatory motor vehicle safety inspections : do they save lives?

Choosing an optimal level of government involvement in the economy is a contentious issue. In both national and provincial politics, the Canadian political pendulum, between regulation and deregulation, has shifted back and forth for decades. In some cases, provinces have embarked on completely different policy choices on the basis of ideology. One example of this is motor vehicle inspections. For over 30 years Maritime Provinces (PEI, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick) have had mandatory motor vehicle inspections on cars, light trucks, SUVs and vans. Why? Research in this paper will demonstrate that the effect of these inspections on fatality, injury, or property damage (collisions) has been minimal. However, results are sensitive to model selection and specification. Furthermore, in conversations conducted between December 2002 and February 2003, ministry officials provided little direct, independent evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of inspection programs. A sensitivity analysis is undertaken to demonstrate the accuracy of model results.
Fixed-time consensus of multi-agent systems over undirected networks

This paper investigates the distributed fixed-time consensus problem of networked agents under the connected interaction topology, featuring an upper bound of the convergence time and being independent of initial conditions. To achieve fixed-time consensus, a new class of distributed nonlinear consensus protocols are constructed for first-order dynamic agents with or without external disturbances. Theoretical studies indicate that under the proposed protocols, all states of the agents will converge to a common value in fixed time. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical results is illustrated by simulation results.
Shared last-level cache management for GPGPUs with hybrid main memory

Memory intensive workloads become increasingly popular on general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), and impose great challenges on the GPGPU memory subsystem design. On the other hand, with the recent development of non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, hybrid memory combining both DRAM and NVM achieves high performance, low power and high density simultaneously, which provides a promising main memory design for GPGPUs. In this work, we explore the shared last-level cache management for GPGPUs with consideration of the underlying hybrid main memory. In order to improve the overall memory subsystem performance, we exploit the characteristics of both the asymmetric read/write latency of the hybrid main memory architecture, as well as the memory coalescing feature of GPGPU. In particular, to reduce the average cost of L2 cache misses, we prioritize cache blocks from DRAM or NVM based on observation that operations to NVM part of main memory have large impact on the system performance. Furthermore, the cache management scheme also integrates the GPU memory coalescing and cache bypassing techniques to improve the overall cache hit ratio. Experimental results show that in the context of a hybrid main memory system, our proposed L2 cache management policy improves performance against the traditional LRU policy and a state-of-the-art GPU cache strategy EABP [20] by up to 27.76% and 14%, respectively.