Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Economic analysis of oral dexamethasone for symptom relief of sore throat: the UK TOAST study

Objectives To undertake an economic analysis assessing the cost-effectiveness of a single dose of oral dexamethasone compared with placebo for the relief of sore throat. Design A UK-based, multicentre, two arm, individually randomised, double blind trial. Setting and population Adults (≥18 years) with acute sore throat and painful swallowing judged to be infective in origin, recruited and randomised in primary care. Intervention: a single dose of 10 mg oral dexamethasone compared with placebo given at primary care visit. Main outcome Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs), cost per quality-adjusted symptom resolution using the EuroQol-five dimensions-five levels instrument, were estimated as part of a cost–utility analysis performed on an intention-to-treat cohort adopting a health payers perspective. Results Differences in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) over 7 days from baseline and at 24 hours in the dexamethasone compared with the placebo group (2.9% and 2.5% higher, respectively) were observed. After controlling for the baseline HRQoL imbalances, the economic impact of the intervention was not statistically significant: the quality-adjusted life year difference was −0.00005 (95% CI −0.0002 to 0.00011) equivalent to a loss in HRQoL of a half hour in the dexamethasone group. The average cost per patient associated in the dexamethasone and placebo groups in the basecase analysis was £73 and £69, respectively. In the basecase probabilistic analysis, the mean ICER was −£6440 (95% CI −£132 151 to £126 335) and the median ICER was −£304 (IQR-£5816 to £3877); suggesting considerable uncertainty. Conclusions and relevance The economic burden associated with sore throat is substantial and was estimated at £2.35 billion to the healthcare services payer based on reported resource use and 2015 UK unit costs. There is considerable uncertainty regarding the cost-effectiveness of a single dose of oral dexamethasone as a treatment strategy and therefore insufficient evidence to support its use in clinical practice. Trial registration number ISRCTN17435450; Post-results.
Design and implementation of an intrinsically-switched 22–43 GHz tunable bandstop filter

A 22-43 GHz tunable bandstop filter is presented, with relevant background theory, design methodology explained. The filter employs silicon-micromachined evanescent-mode cavity resonators, tuned by low-power electrostatic actuators. Low passband of insertion loss of less than 2 dB is obtained, and high stopband attenuation of over 60 dB is achieved by using quasi-absorptive filter design principles. Further reconfigurability is added by utilizing intrinsically-switched coupling elements, which allow the bandstop filter to achieve an all-pass response when the resonators are tuned to a certain frequency.
Nonspecific Factors in B Cell Responses

In common with many other groups, we have had a longstanding interest in the helper signals required by B cells during the course of an IgM response to sheep red blood cells (SRBC). This particular phenomenon has received a good deal of attention because of its apparent simplicity. Thus, early on it was shown that an apparently T-cell derived non-specific helper factor(s) was sufficient to drive B cell responses to SRBC, whereas other, antigen specific factors or T cells were needed for antibody to be made against protein-bound antigens (Dutton et al. 1971, Schimpl & Wecker 1972, Harwell et al. 1976a, b, Waldmann 1975). Later work defined a T cell product of molecular weight 30-40KD as the principal active stimulator (Watson et al. 1979, Schimpl et al. 1980). This factor was and is commonly called T cell replacing factor (TRF). More recently, experiments examining the synergy between various factors (Farrar et al. 1977, Hoffmann & Watson 1979) and using B cell preparations with lower levels of contaminating T cells (and macrophages (M0) in some cases) have shown that matters were not as simple as was once hoped. To illustrate this, in this paper we describe some of our recent experiments which have shown that several factors are needed for anti-SRBC responses, in cultures containing highly purified B cells.
Morphology of the bovine chondrocyte and of its cytoskeleton in isolation and in situ: are chondrocytes ubiquitously paired through the entire layer of articular cartilage?

OBJECTIVES We compared the morphology and cytoskeleton of chondrocytes seeded in monolayer or in agarose gels with those retained in situ i.e. within their extracellular matrix-the chondrocyte's natural habitat. METHODS Cartilage specimens were harvested from adult bovine femora. Chondrocytes were either enzymatically isolated to seed in both monolayer and agarose gel culture conditions or retained in situ. Full thickness cartilage on bone was sliced both parallel and perpendicular to the articular surface. After immunostaining, the morphology of chondrocytes and of their cytoskeletal organization, i.e. distribution of actin and vimentin, in chondrocytes seeded both in monolayer and 3D agarose and those retained in situ, were assessed using confocal laser scanning microscopy. RESULTS The general cytoskeletal disposition of chondrocytes in situ was similar to that in agarose gel. Actin was seen to form stress fibres only in 2D culture, but not in 3D culture and in situ. In these latter conditions, actin showed a punctate staining pattern. The vimentin meshwork spanned the cytoplasm from the plasma membrane to the nuclear membrane in all culture conditions. However, the organization of the vimentin had a radiate organization in chondrocytes in monolayer and a more circumferential arrangement both in agarose gel and in situ. We further observed: (i) the prevalence of a bichondral configuration of chondrocytes in situ and (ii) the existence of a vimentin link joining some of the sister cells in situ. CONCLUSIONS Bichondral configuration linked with cytoskeletal elements may potentially be significant for the normal function of the chondrocytes, and therefore have implications for approaches to tissue engineering of cartilage.
Genetic variation in the renin-angiotensin system and autonomic nervous system function in young healthy Japanese subjects.

CONTEXT The renin-angiotensin system (RAS) interacts with the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in the regulation of blood pressure and cardiovascular function. Several genetic polymorphisms in the RAS have been identified and have been implicated as a cause of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to evaluate the relation between genetic polymorphisms of the RAS (M235T of AGT gene, insertion/deletion of ACE gene, A1166C of AT1R gene, and A1675G of AT2R gene) and ANS function. SUBJECTS One hundred forty-nine young healthy Japanese males were genotyped for each RAS polymorphism. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES ANS function was evaluated by power spectral analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) during supine rest and in a standing position. RESULTS In a supine position, subjects homozygous for the AGT 235T allele had a higher HRV sympathetic index than 235M allele carriers, whereas the orthostatic change in this index was relatively blunted in AGT 235TT carriers. In the analysis of gene-gene interaction, these effects of the AGT 235T homozygotes on HRV sympathetic index were more apparent in the presence of the ACE D allele. Meanwhile, the AT1R 1166C allele was significantly associated with higher HRV low-frequency power and sympathetic index in a standing position. These data suggest that the AGT M235T polymorphism is associated with sympathetic predominance at rest, and AT1R 1166C allele carriers have potentially increased sympathetic response. CONCLUSIONS Cardiac autonomic function can be modulated by genetic variation in the RAS even in young and healthy states.
Estimating Labour Market Discrimination with Selectivity Corrected Wage Equations: Methodological Considerations and an Illustration from Israel

This paper presents a modified and improved methodology for the decomposition of wage differentials between two groups of workers into an endowment component and a discrimination component. The standard decomposition technique does not take into account different probabilities of entering the profession under discussion. To incorporate this type of segregation into the wage differential decompositions, two statistical methodologies are merged: the Oaxaca methodology and the Heckman selectivity bias correction procedure. Using information derived from the entrance equations, the decomposition procedure is then modified, in order to take into account the contribution of segregation to the endowments and the discrimination components. It appears that there is more than one way to do it. The proposed methodology is applied to the analysis of wages of professionals in the Israeli labour market. Comparisons are made between the two genders and between Westerners and Easterners. Our results show that discrimination plays a more important role in explaining gender wage differentials than in explaining ethnic wage gaps and that selectivity corrected decompositions are quite capable of yielding very different conclusions than those based on the standard decompositions.
The Prediction of Small Business Instability--Loan Noncompliance: a Discriminant Analysis Approach.

The purpose of this study was to determine if a small business' tendency towards loan noncompliance could be ascertained from the business' financial information. By developing linear discriminant models a firm's tendency towards loan noncompliance was accurately determined. For the objectives of this study loan noncompliance was defined as the borrower not complying with the terms of the original loan agreement. Examples of loan noncompliance are: (1) alteration of the loan agreement to the disadvantage of the lending institution, (2) late payment, and missing an interest and/or principal payment. Data for this research was obtained from Robert Morris Associates (RMA) member banks. The information received from each bank was their RMA Data Submission Forms. On each form the bank indicated whether the firm was, or was not, in compliance with their original loan agreement at the end of the firm's fiscal year. A total of 347 firms were received resulting in 51 matched pairs. The discriminant models were developed using a stepwise procedure and the Lachenbruch-Mickey leaving-one-out (LM) validation technique. Additional validation was provided by employing a hold-out sample of complying firms. The model that was most effective at determining a firm's tendency towards non-compliance consisted of: (1) earnings before taxes to total liabilities, (2) cash to current liabilities, and (3) current liabilities to cash flow. The accuracy of the model was 76.5 percent employing the LM validation technique and 62.1 percent based on the holdout sample of complying firms. This shows that a small business' tendency towards loan noncompliance can be effectively determined based on financial ratios. The inclusion of industry and economic data did not enhance the financial ratios ability to indicate the tendency towards noncompliance. Improved specification of the model to include nonfinancial information is likely to be difficult. If qualitative information could be obtained (e.g., number of employees, education of owner, integrity of management, etc.) a better model could possibly be developed. The question of coefficient stability and variable relationship stability could be evaluated by employing inter-temporal testing.
Regulation of 2‐acetylaminofluorene‐and 3‐methylcholanthrene‐mediated induction of multidrug resistance and cytochrome P450IA gene family expression in primary hepatocyte cultures and rat liver

Previous studies by this laboratory have indicated that expression of the multidrug resistance (mdr) gene can be increased in vivo by exposure to a variety of xenobiotics. Because of the nature of these compounds, it was proposed that mdr gene expression might, at least in part, be regulated by the arylhydrocarbon (Ah) receptor. In the present study, we used a primary hepatocyte culture model to examine the relationship between induction of cytochrome P450IA and mdr expression in vitro. Both 3‐methylcholanthrene (MC) and 2‐acetylamino‐fluorene (AAF) were efficient inducers of mdr expression in this model. Induction of mdr gene expression by both MC and AAF obeyed a log10 concentration/response relationship. In contrast, 2,3,7,8‐tetrachlorodibenzo‐P‐dioxin did not induce mdr expression at concentrations that yielded maximum induction of cytochrome P450IA expression. These data suggest that mdr induction was not mediated via the Ah receptor. Nuclear run‐off analysis indicated that both AAF and MC induced mdr expression by increasing transcription. Primer extension analysis indicated that mdr gene transcription was initiated at one major site 151 bp upstream of the ATG site in both the uninduced and induced state in vivo and in vitro. The sequence of the primer and the site of initiation of gene transcription indicate that the main gene induced was the mdr1b gene.
Are retrospectively reconstructed blood alcohol concentrations accurate? Preliminary results from a field study.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between blood alcohol concentration (BAC) derived from an in vivo breath test and retrospective estimates of BAC (eBAC) for the same drinking event. The relationship was expected to be lower at higher levels of BAC as a result of inaccuracies in the recall of self-report data. METHOD The sample consisted of 44 persons (64% male) who were walking away from a bar district adjacent to a university campus. After giving informed consent, participants provided a breath sample and contact information. The next day a research assistant telephoned the participants and conducted a brief interview, using the equation prescribed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to obtain the self-report data necessary to calculate the eBAC for the previous evening. RESULTS The actual BACs and eBACs were not significantly different, and they were highly correlated (r = 0.84, n = 43). BAC did predict the magnitude of discrepancy between the two, and at BACs over 0.08, the relationship was nonsignificant. CONCLUSIONS Although self-report data can be used to approximate the BAC obtained during a naturally occurring drinking event the relationship is moderated by measured level of intoxication. Retrospective calculations are less accurate when estimating higher BACs.
Improved Text Matching by Enhancing Mutual Information

Text matching is a core issue for question answering (QA), information retrieval (IR) and many other fields. We propose to reformulate the original text, i.e., generating a new text that is semantically equivalent to original text, to improve text matching degree. Intuitively, the generated text improves mutual information between two text sequences. We employ the generative adversarial network as the reformulation model where there is a discriminator to guide the text generating process. In this work, we focus on matching question and answers. The task is to rank answers based on QA matching degree. We first reformulate the original question without changing the asker's intent, then compute a relevance score for each answer. To evaluate the method, we collected questions and answers from Zhihu. In addition, we also conduct substantial experiments on public data such as SemEval and WikiQA to compare our method with existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate that after adding the reformulated question, the ranking performance across different matching models can be improved consistently, indicating that the reformulated question has enhanced mutual information and effectively bridged the semantic gap between QA.
An organization's ethical climate, innovation, and performance

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine how an organization's ethical climate positively relates to its financial performance by considering an organization's innovation, a support for innovation and performance evaluation.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from employees and managers of 41 subsidiaries of a conglomerate in South Korea through survey questionnaires.Findings – The results indicate that an organization's ethical climate is positively related to financial performance, and its positive relationship is mediated by an organization's innovation. The result also shows that a support for innovation has the moderating effect, such that the positive influence of an organization's ethical climate on its innovation increases when a support for innovation is high. However, this study fails to find the moderating effect of performance evaluation.Research limitations/implications – There might be the issue of generalizability, because the sample of this study is on the sample of .
Reliability of frames of reference used for tibial component rotation in total knee arthroplasty

This study evaluated seven different frames of reference used for tibial component rotation in total knee arthroplasty (TKA) to determine which ones showed good reliability between bone specimens. An optoelectronic system based around a computer-assisted surgical navigation system was used to measure and locate 34 individual anatomical landmarks on 40 tibias. Each particular frame of reference was reconstructed from a group of data points taken from the surface of each bone. The transverse axis was used as the baseline to which the other axes were compared, and the differences in angular rotation between the other six reference frames and the transverse axis were calculated. There was high variability in the tibial rotational alignment associated with all frames of reference. Of the references widely used in current TKA procedures, the tibial tuberosity axis and the anterior condylar axis had lower standard deviations (6.1° and 7.3°, respectively) than the transmalleolar axis and the posterior condylar axis (9.3° for both). In conclusion, we found high variability in the frames of reference used for tibial rotation alignment. However, the anterior condylar axis and transverse axis may warrant further tests with the use of navigation. Combining different frames of reference such as the tibial tuberosity axis, anterior condylar axis and transverse axis may reduce the range of errors found in all of these measurements.
Do Dividend Clienteles Explain Price Reactions to Dividend Changes?

Previous studies find that stock price reactions to dividend announcements are positively related to dividend yield, consistent with the dividend-clientele hypothesis. In this paper, we argue that this yield-related clientele effect can be attributed to estimation biases in using preannouncement dividends as a proxy for market's anticipated dividends. Based on our samples constructed to mitigate the dividend estimation biases, we find that dividend yield has no additional power beyond the standardized dividend change in explaining the announcement-period excess returns. Our results are consistent with the information/signaling hypothesis, but inconsistent with the dividend-clientele hypothesis. In addition, we find that firm size remains negatively related to the price reactions to dividend changes.
Unregulated greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions from current technology heavy-duty vehicles

ABSTRACT The study presents the measurement of carbonyl, BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene), ammonia, elemental/organic carbon (EC/OC), and greenhouse gas emissions from modern heavy-duty diesel and natural gas vehicles. Vehicles from different vocations that included goods movement, refuse trucks, and transit buses were tested on driving cycles representative of their duty cycle. The natural gas vehicle technologies included the stoichiometric engine platform equipped with a three-way catalyst and a diesel-like dual-fuel high-pressure direct-injection technology equipped with a diesel particulate filter (DPF) and a selective catalytic reduction (SCR). The diesel vehicles were equipped with a DPF and SCR. Results of the study show that the BTEX emissions were below detection limits for both diesel and natural gas vehicles, while carbonyl emissions were observed during cold start and low-temperature operations of the natural gas vehicles. Ammonia emissions of about 1 g/mile were observed from the stoichiometric natural gas vehicles equipped with TWC over all the driving cycles. The tailpipe GWP of the stoichiometric natural gas goods movement application was 7% lower than DPF and SCR equipped diesel. In the case of a refuse truck application the stoichiometric natural gas engine exhibited 22% lower GWP than a diesel vehicle. Tailpipe methane emissions contribute to less than 6% of the total GHG emissions. Implications: Modern heavy-duty diesel and natural gas engines are equipped with multiple after-treatment systems and complex control strategies aimed at meeting both the performance standards for the end user and meeting stringent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions regulation. Compared to older technology diesel and natural gas engines, modern engines and after-treatment technology have reduced unregulated emissions to levels close to detection limits. However, brief periods of inefficiencies related to low exhaust thermal energy have been shown to increase both carbonyl and nitrous oxide emissions.
The Changing University: Meeting a Need and Needing to Change

This paper returns to the logic of industrialisation thesis of the 1960s and asks whether higher education can respond to the new infrastructures of global society. Its thesis is that capitalism has generated new global infrastructures (the control of capital empowered by information technology) and that these driving forces have generated changes in knowledge, higher education, research and learning. Higher education is a typical superstructural institution, functional to the infrastructure – but it is finding problems in responding rapidly to the greater demands of the knowledge-based society of advanced capitalism. It has to change but perhaps it is unable to change sufficiently rapidly, and so the infrastructure is beginning to generate its own educational institutions. More significantly, it would have to be non-functional to the infrastructure if it were to meet some of the human needs.
Broadband Circularly Polarized Printed Antenna With Branched Microstrip Feed

A novel broadband circularly polarized antenna is presented in this letter. It consists of a triangular monopole and a slot etched on the ground plane. By employing a branched microstrip feedline to excite the monopole and the slot in parallel, the broadband circular polarization performance of the proposed antenna is realized with overall size of 38 × 54 mm 2. The measured 3-dB axial-ratio bandwidth is 46.8% ( 2.13 ~ 3.43 GHz), and the impedance bandwidth for S 11\leqslant -10 dB is 73.0% ( 1.99 ~ 4.28 GHz). Good agreement between the simulated and measured results is also achieved, validating our design concept. The surface current analysis and a parametric study of the design are also carried out to explain the mechanism of circular polarization .