Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pharmacogenomics and Implications for Nursing Practice.

PURPOSE This article aims to introduce the nurse to pharmacogenomics and its implications for clinical practice with regard to drug therapy. ORGANIZING CONSTRUCTS Pharmacogenomics is discussed with regard to the basic tenets, relationships to common health conditions, education and practice resources, and implications for nursing practice. METHODS Peer-reviewed literature, websites, and expert professional guidelines were reviewed with relation to pharmacogenomics and nursing practice. FINDINGS The genetic-genomic literature has grown significantly since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. This information is now being translated into practice with regard to the patient's genetic profile and the impact on drug therapy, which is pharmacogenomics. CONCLUSIONS The utilization of the patient genetic-genomic profile is beginning to have an impact on patient drug therapy in clinical practice. CLINICAL RELEVANCE Nurses are in the position to make sure, with the increased translation of pharmacogenomics into clinical practice, that adverse drug reactions are avoided and doses are optimized.
Protective Effect of Mycophenolate Mofetil on Endothelial Function in an Aortic Allograft Model

Background. Whether mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) can prevent the vascular endothelial dysfunction related to the administration of calcineurin inhibitor after organ transplantation remains unknown. Methods. Four groups of Lewis rats, grafted with Brown Norway donor aortic abdominal allograft, received since the transplantation cyclosporine A (CsA, 5 mg/kg/day), MMF (40 mg/kg/day), CsA+MMF, or vehicle (control) for 2 weeks. Results. Fifteen days after transplantation, all immunosuppressive regimens were equally effective in preventing graft rejection. When compared with control rats, the endothelium-dependent relaxation to acetylcholine was reduced, and the vasoconstrictor effect of phenylephrine was enhanced in thoracic aorta of CsA-treated rats but not in rats treated with MMF alone or combined with CsA without difference for the endothelium-independent relaxation to sodium nitroprusside. The relaxation to acetylcholine was abolished by the nitric oxide (NO)-synthase inhibitor NG-nitro-l-arginine in all groups. Moreover, the endothelial NO-synthase protein dimer:monomer ratio in the thoracic aorta and the plasma nitrites concentrations, an indicator of NO availability, were decreased in CsA-treated rats but not in rats treated with MMF alone or combined with CsA. Conclusions. This study demonstrates that MMF prevents systemic endothelial dysfunction and the enhanced sensitivity to vasoconstrictors related to CsA administration in a rat allograft aortic model through an increase in NO availability related to the improvement of endothelial NO-synthase functionality.
Survey Forecasts and the Time-Varying Second Moments of Stock and Bond Returns

What are the economic determinants of the level and volatility of the second moments of stock and bond returns? We address this central question via the Campbell-Shiller (Campbell and Shiller, 1988) decomposition, with news constructed using survey forecasts. Risk premium news explains most of the unconditional second moments of returns and 86% of the pre- to post-1997 change in the stock-bond covariance. Also, the second moments of risk premium news explain most of the variance of the second moments of returns. In turn, the second moments of fundamental news explain large portions of the variance of the second moments of risk premium news.
Tool to support computer architecture teaching and learning

Computer architecture is an important subject for informatics and electrical engineering courses. However, students display some difficulties in this subject, mainly due to the lack of educational tools that are intuitive, versatile and graphical. Existing tools are not adequate enough or are very specific. In this paper, an educational MIPS simulator, DrMIPS, is described. This tool simulates the execution of an assembly program on the CPU and displays the datapath graphically. Registers, data memory and assembled code are also displayed and a “performance mode” is also provided. Both unicycle and pipeline implementations are supported and the CPUs and their instruction sets are configurable. The tool is currently available for PCs and Android tablets, and is fairly intuitive and versatile on both platforms.
Reconstitution of Saccharomyces cerevisiae prereplicative complex assembly in vitro

The assembly of the prereplicative complex (pre‐RC) at the origin of replication in eukaryotes is a highly regulated and highly conserved process that plays a critical role in preventing multiple rounds of DNA replication per cell division cycle. This study analyzes the molecular dynamics of the assembly of Saccharomyces cerevisiae pre‐RC in vitro using ARS1 plasmid DNA and yeast whole cell extracts. In addition, pre‐RC assembly was reconstituted in vitro using ARS1 DNA and purified origin‐recognition complex (ORC), Cdc6p and Cdt1p‐Mcm2‐7p. The results reveal sequential recruitment of ORC, Cdc6p, Cdt1p and Mcm2‐7p on to ARS1 DNA. When Mcm2‐7p is maximally loaded, Cdc6p and Cdt1p are released, suggesting that these two proteins are co‐ordinately regulated during pre‐RC assembly. In extracts from sid2‐21 mutant cells that are deficient in CDT1, ORC and Cdc6p bind to ARS1 but Cdt1p and Mcm2‐7p do not. However, Mcm2‐7p does bind in the presence of exogenous Cdt1p or Cdt1p‐Mcm2‐7p complex. Cdt1p‐Mcm2‐7p complex, which was purified from G1‐, early S or G2/M‐arrested cells, exhibits structure‐specific DNA binding, interacting only with bubble‐ or Y‐shape‐DNA, but the biological significance of this observation is not yet known.
Determinants of adherence to methylphenidate and the impact of poor adherence on maternal and family measures.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to examine the association between adherence to immediate-release methylphenidate (IR MPH) and maternal psychological distress, parenting style, parent- child relationship, and perceived family support. METHODS The sample consisted of 307 children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (271 boys and 36 girls), 6-17 years of age, who had been treated with IR MPH for the past 6 months. The measures included the Chinese Health Questionnaire, Parental Bonding Instrument, Family APGAR, and Home Behaviors of the Social Adjustment Inventory for Children and Adolescents. RESULTS Reasons for poor adherence (n = 79; 25.7%) included forgetting medication (72.7%), the medication having no effect (20.0%), and refusing medication (12.7%). Increased age and three-times-daily administration were the major predictors for poor adherence to IR MPH. Poor adherence was associated with increased degree of maternal psychological distress, indifferent parenting, maternal overprotection/control, poor family support, decreased interaction with parents, and increased problems at home. CONCLUSIONS Findings indicate that multiple daily dosing of MPH increases the likelihood of poor adherence, particularly in adolescents, and that poor adherence is associated with impaired maternal/family process. Once-daily administration of MPH is necessary to improve adherence and to decrease the possible exacerbation of tense parent-child relationships caused by poor drug adherence.
Structural Breaks in Stock Returns Driven by Large Shocks

This paper employes a parametric model of structural breaks in the mean of stock returns which allows them to be endogenously driven by large positive or negative stock market return shocks. These shocks can be taken to reflect important market announcements, monetary policy regime shifts and/or changes in business conditions which affect stock market. The model assumes that both the timing and size of breaks are stochastic. The last property of the model distinguishes it from models suggested in the literature to capture structural breaks or regime shifts in the mean of stock returns. Implementation of the model to the US stock market indicates that the model can successfully capture structural breaks in the mean of the aggregate return of this market. Most of these breaks are triggered by negative large return shocks. The latter can be of smaller magnitude that the positive ones. Finally, the paper shows that the model can be employed to successfully forecast future expected stock returns.
Techniques for High-Speed Implementation of Nonlinear Cancellation

The authors present techniques for breaking the bottleneck caused by delays in the feedback loop, which can severely limit the maximum data rate of a detector, operating with nonlinear cancellation (NLC). The authors first show how to simplify the loop to avoid high-speed switching of analog signals by using multiple decision elements, each with a different threshold level. The authors then show how to use lookahead computation to increase the delay permissible in the feedback loop. The authors describe nonlinear cancellation, and outline some of the problems of implementing NLC at high data rates. Techniques for overcoming these problems are developed and are illustrated with the example of a simple one-tap NLC. The authors describe how to generalize the techniques to more complex NLCs and present some more examples. >
Resonant interferometric lithography beyond the diffraction limit

Optical lithography is the key technology for the production of semiconductor devices, but a fundamental limit to the spatial resolution of this technique arises due to diffraction. More precisely, the Rayleigh criterion states that classical uncorrelated light allows one to create structures with feature sizes down to about half the optical wavelength. Recently, several schemes in the literature demonstrated that the diffraction limit can be circumvented in interferometric lithography. This result is not only interesting from a fundamental point of view, but also relevant for the semiconductor industry that strives for a miniaturization of their devices. However, all of these schemes have in common that they are based on N-photon absorption processes, and therefore require high light field intensities which hampers an experimental realization.
Simple, Yet Fast and Effective Two-Phase Method for Nurse Rostering

SYNOPTIC ABSTRACT The nurse rostering problem is to create a day-to-day shift assignment of each nurse subject to a predefined set of constraints. Based on simple ideas, a two-phase method is suggested. The first phase consists of applying a generic variable-fixing heuristic. As a result, a very small and sparse-reduced problem is obtained. In the second phase, the reduced problem is solved by utilizing a general-purpose MIP solver. The proposed method is tested on NSPLib dataset, and the results obtained show that it is capable of identifying high quality solutions. When compared with recently developed methods, it turns out to be the fastest.
Stability Analysis and Stabilization for Discrete-Time Fuzzy Systems With Time-Varying Delay

This paper is concerned with the problems of stability analysis and stabilization for discrete-time Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy systems with time-varying state delay. By constructing a new fuzzy Lyapunov function and by making use of novel techniques, an improved delay-dependent stability condition is obtained, which is dependent on the lower and upper delay bounds. The merit of the proposed stability condition lies in its reduced conservatism, which is achieved by avoiding the utilization of some bounding inequalities for the cross products between two vectors. Then, a delay-dependent stabilization approach based on a parallel distributed compensation scheme is developed for both state feedback and observer-based output feedback cases. The proposed stability and stabilization conditions are formulated in terms of linear matrix inequalities, which can be solved efficiently by using existing optimization techniques. Two illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the results proposed in this paper.
One day lumbar epidural adhesiolysis and hypertonic saline neurolysis in treatment of chronic low back pain: a randomized, double-blind trial.

BACKGROUND Chronic, refractory low back pain is a common problem. Percutaneous adhesiolysis with hypertonic saline neurolysis was described in the management of chronic refractory low back pain, non-responsive to conservative modalities of management. OBJECTIVE To determine the ability of percutaneous adhesiolysis and hypertonic saline administration to reduce pain and improve functional and psychological status in patients with chronic low back pain. DESIGN Randomized, double-blind, controlled trial. METHODS A total of 75 patients were studied, with 25 patients in each group. Three types of interventions were included, with Group I serving as control with catheterization without adhesiolysis, followed by injection of local anesthetic, normal saline, and steroid. Group II consisted of catheterization and adhesiolysis, followed by injection of local anesthetic, normal saline, and steroid. Group III consisted of adhesiolysis followed by injection of local anesthetic, hypertonic saline, and steroid. Statistical analysis incorporated intent-to-treat analysis. OUTCOME MEASURES Visual Analogue Scale pain scores, Oswestry Disability Index, work status, opioid intake, range of motion measurement, and P-3 (R). Significant pain relief was defined as average relief of 50% or greater. RESULTS Significant improvement was seen in patients in Group II and III, at 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months, compared to baseline measurements, as well as compared to Group I without adhesiolysis. Seventy-two percent of patients in Group III (adhesiolysis and hypertonic neurolysis), 60% of patients in Group II (adhesiolysis only), compared to 0% in Group I (control) showed significant improvement at 12-month follow up. The average number of treatments for one year were 2.76 in Group II and 2.16 in Group III. Duration of significant relief with the first procedure was 2.8 +/- 1.49 months in Group II and 3.8 +/- 3.37 months in Group III. CONCLUSION Percutaneous adhesiolysis, with or without hypertonic saline neurolysis, is an effective treatment for chronic low back pain.
Fucosylation in synovial fluid as a novel clinical marker for differentiating joint diseases--a preliminary study.

OBJECTIVE To investigate fucosylation of synovial fluid glycoproteins in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), juvenile arthritis (JIA), gonarthrosis (GA) and reactive arthritis (ReA), referred to traumatized knee (TK). METHODS Synovial fluid glycoproteins were separated by SDS-PAGE and either silver stained or blotted onto nitrocellulose and probed with the fucose-specific Aleuria aurantia lectin. Five bands were chosen for densitometric analysis. Total fucose content and density of fucosylated epitopes were analyzed. RESULTS Fucose content was elevated in all patient groups and almost all bands, comparing to TK. The density of fucosylated epitopes was increased in the 42-kDa band of RA and JIA cases, and lowered in the 26-kDa band of RA and JIA, but not in GA. In all RA cases FR 42-kDa > FR 26-kDa. The relation was opposite in 8 out of 9 GA cases. CONCLUSION The density of fucosylated epitopes differs significantly in particular glycoproteins of synovial fluid in joint diseases and may be of potential diagnostic value in differentiating diseases of inflammatory and degenerative origin.
CubeX: Leveraging glocality of cube-based networks for RAM-based key-value store

RAM-based storage aggregates the RAM of servers in data center networks (DCN) to provide extremely high storage performance. For quick recovery of storage server failures, Mem-Cube [1] exploits the proximity of the BCube network to limit the recovery traffic to the recovery servers' 1-hop neighborhood. However, previous design is applicable only to BCube, and has suboptimal recovery performance due to congestion and contention. To address these problems, in this paper we propose CubeX, which generalizes the “1-hop” principle of MemCube for all cube-based networks, and improves the throughput and recovery performance of RAM-based key-value (KV) store via cross-layer optimizations. At the core of CubeX is to leverage the glocality (= globality + locality) of cube-based networks: it scatters backup data across a large number of disks globally distributed throughout the cube, and restricts all recovery traffic within the small local range of each server node. Our evaluation shows that CubeX efficiently supports RAM-based KV store for cube-based networks, and CubeX remarkably outperforms MemCube in both throughput and recovery time.
RUM: network Representation learning throUgh Multi-level structural information preservation

We have witnessed the discovery of many techniques for network representation learning in recent years, ranging from encoding the context in random walks to embedding the lower order connections, to finding latent space representations with auto-encoders. However, existing techniques are looking mostly into the local structures in a network, while higher-level properties such as global community structures are often neglected. We propose a novel network representations learning model framework called RUM (network Representation learning throUgh Multi-level structural information preservation). In RUM, we incorporate three essential aspects of a node that capture a network's characteristics in multiple levels: a node's affiliated local triads, its neighborhood relationships, and its global community affiliations. Therefore the framework explicitly and comprehensively preserves the structural information of a network, extending the encoding process both to the local end of the structural information spectrum and to the global end. The framework is also flexible enough to take various community discovery algorithms as its preprocessor. Empirical results show that the representations learned by RUM have demonstrated substantial performance advantages in real-life tasks.
A hybrid approach for solving nonlinear equations of SHEPWM in multilevel inverters

Because of nonlinear nature of corresponding equations in SHEPWM switching strategy, applied to stepped waveform of multilevel inverter's output voltage, using genetic algorithm Toolbox of MATLAB software is a normal solution. Two approaches for solving the equations have been selected in literature. In the first, the equations are solved by constructing nonlinear equally constraints, while in the second, a fitness function, covering all equations, is minimized. In this paper, a hybrid approach is proposed to surmount all disadvantages of mentioned approaches. Simulation results, as well as experimental results are presented to verify the theoretical results.
Fuzzy adaptive control for multi-machine power system based on ant colony algorithm

Based on multi-machine excitation control models, using fuzzy adaptive theory and considering the multi-machine nonlinear system whose states are not available, observer-based adaptive fuzzy output feed back control schemes are proposed. In this paper, the ant colony algorithm is used to optimize the fuzzy control rules. The simulation result shows that the controller can effectively improve power system stability under big disturbance.
Axonal transport of the cellular prion protein is increased during axon regeneration

The cellular prion protein, PrPc, is a glycosylphosphatidylinositol‐anchored cell surface glycoprotein and a protease‐resistant conformer of the protein may be the infectious agent in transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. PrPc is localized on growing axons in vitro and along fibre bundles that contain elongating axons in developing and adult brain. To determine whether the growth state of axons influenced the expression and axonal transport of PrPc, we examined changes in the protein following post‐traumatic regeneration in the hamster sciatic nerve. Our results show (1) that PrPc in nerve is significantly increased during nerve regeneration; (2) that this increase involves an increase in axonally transported PrPc; and (3) that the PrPc preferentially targeted for the newly formed portions of the regenerating axons consists of higher molecular weight glycoforms. These results raise the possibility that PrPc may play a role in the growth of axons in vivo, perhaps as an adhesion molecule interacting with the extracellular environment through specialized glycosylation.
An Intelligent Agent-Based System in Internet Commerce

This paper proposed an agent-based system that integrates various advanced information technologies. The aim of it is to provide a solution to automating Business– to-Consumer (B2C) trading process in the electronic marketplace. In the system, various technologies have been used, including (1) Intelligent agent, which is used to execute the particular task in the online-trading; (2) Multi-attribute decision method, which calculates the commodity optimality to evaluate the commodities; (3) Ontology, which is used to design the negotiation protocols between the buyer agent and seller agent in the open environment, such as Internet; (4) Web technology, which is used to provide agents integration and application design. The prototype system is implemented using the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE). It shows the potential toward the future electronic market.
Gene expression and association analyses of the phosphodiesterase 4B (PDE4B) gene in major depressive disorder in the Japanese population

The phosphodiesterase 4B (PDE4B) interacts with disrupted‐in‐schizophrenia 1 (DISC1), which is a known genetic risk factor for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder (MDD). PDE4B is also important in the regulation of cAMP signaling, a second messenger implicated in learning, memory, and mood. In this study, we determined mRNA expression levels of the PDE4B gene in the peripheral blood leukocytes of patients with MDD and control subjects (n = 33, each). Next we performed two‐stage case‐controlled association analyses (first set; case = 174, controls = 348; second set; case = 481, controls = 812) in the Japanese population to determine if the PDE4B gene is implicated in MDD. In the leukocytes, a significantly higher expression of the PDE4B mRNA was observed in the drug‐naïve MDD patients compared with control subjects (P < 0.0001) and the expression of the MDD patients significantly decreased after antidepressant treatment (P = 0.030). In the association analysis, we observed significant allelic associations of four SNPs (the most significant, rs472952; P = 0.002) and a significant haplotypic association (permutation P = 0.019) between the PDE4B gene and MDD in the first‐set samples. However, we could not confirm these significant associations in the following independent second‐set of samples. Our results suggest that the PDE4B gene itself does not link to MDD but the elevated mRNA levels of PDE4B might be implicated in the pathophysiology of MDD. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
High-resolution cryo-EM proteasome structures in drug development

High-resolution cryo-EM was used to investigate the structures of inhibitor-bound human and P. falciparum 20S proteasomes, revealing the molecular basis for inhibitor specificity that provides a platform for the development of a potential new class of antimalarials. Here, these studies are reviewed and a detailed description of the methods used for structure determination is provided.