Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of prescribing safety alerts for elderly persons in an electronic medical record: an interrupted time series evaluation.

BACKGROUND Considerable effort and attention have focused on medication safety in elderly persons; one approach that has been understudied in the outpatient environment is the use of computerized provider order entry with clinical decision support. The objective of this study was to examine the effects of computerized provider order entry with clinical decision support in reducing the use of potentially contraindicated agents in elderly persons. METHODS With data from a 39-month period of a natural experiment, we evaluated changes in medication dispensing using interrupted time series analysis to estimate changes, controlling for prealert prescribing trends. The setting was a large health maintenance organization in the Pacific Northwest. All adult enrollees of the health plan participated. The intervention was computerized alerts cautioning against using certain medications in elderly persons. The main outcome measure was dispensing per 10,000 members per month. RESULTS Following the implementation of the drug-specific alerts, a large and persistent reduction (5.1 prescriptions per 10,000, P=.004), a 22% relative decrease from the month before alert implementation, in the exposure of elderly patients to nonpreferred medications was observed. We found no evidence of a decrease in use of nonpreferred agents for nonelderly patients. The reduction seen in use of nonpreferred agents for elderly persons was driven primarily by decreases in dispensing for tertiary tricyclic agents. CONCLUSIONS We found that alerts in an outpatient electronic medical record aimed at decreasing prescribing of medication use in elderly persons may be an effective method of reducing prescribing of contraindicated medications. The effect of the alerts on patient outcomes is less certain and deserves further investigation.
Growth phase-dependent transcription of the sigma(54)-dependent Po promoter controlling the Pseudomonas-derived (methyl)phenol dmp operon of pVI150

Transcription from Pseudomonas-derived -24, -12 Po promoter of the pVI150-encoded dmp operon is mediated by the sigma 54-dependent DmpR activator in response to the presence of aromatic pathway substrates in the medium. However, global regulatory mechanisms are superimposed on this regulatory system so that the specific response to aromatic effectors is absent in cultures until the stationary phase is reached. Here we genetically dissect the system to show that the growth phase response is faithfully mimicked by a minimal system composed of the dmpR regulatory gene and the Po promoter regulatory region and can be reproduced in heterologous Escherichia coli. Using this system, we show that the growth phase-dependent DmpR-mediated response to aromatic compounds is limited to fast-growing cultures. Thus, during exponential growth of cultures in minimal media containing different carbon sources, the response to aromatics is immediate, while the response is suppressed in cultures grown on rich media until the exponential-to-stationary phase transition. Elements known to be involved in the DmpR-mediated transcription from Po were analyzed for the ability to influence the growth phase response. Most dramatically, overexpression of DmpR was shown to completely abolish the growth phase response, suggesting that a negatively acting factor may mediate this level of regulation. The possible mechanism of action and integration (of the specific regulation of the dmp operon-encoded catabolic enzymes with the physiological status of the bacteria are discussed.
Affective Haptics: Current Research and Future Directions

Touch plays a prominent role in communicating emotions and intensifying interpersonal communication. Affective haptics is an emerging field, which focuses on the analysis, design, and evaluation of systems that can capture, process, or display emotions through the sense of touch. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the recent achievements in affective haptics and to discuss how the sense of touch can elicit or influence human emotions. We first introduce a definition to the term affective haptics and describe its multidisciplinary nature-as a field that integrates ideas from affective computing, haptic technology, and user experience. Second, we provide a thorough discussion about the effectiveness of using the haptic channel to communicate affective information through direct and mediated means. Third, we present a variety of applications in the area ranging from interhuman social interaction systems to human robot interaction applications. Finally, we discuss some of the key findings discerned from the various surveyed papers, and present some of the challenges and trends in this field. We extract the following conclusions pertaining to affective haptics: 1) haptic stimulation can be successfully used to achieve a higher level of emotional immersion during media consumption or emotional telepresence; 2) existing research has demonstrated that haptics is effective in communicating valence and arousal, and the emotions of happiness, sadness, anger and fear, and less focus have been given to the communication of disgust and surprise; 3) the haptic-based affect detection remains an understudied topic, whereas the haptic-based affect display is a well-established subject; and 4) the interpretation of the haptic stimulation by human beings is highly contextual.
Nucleotide sequence of a 13.9 kb segment of the 90 kb virulence plasmid of Salmonella typhimurium: the presence of fimbriai biosynthetic genes

The 90 kb plasmid resident in Salmonella typhimurium confers increased virulence in mice by promoting the spread of infection after invasion of the intestinal epithelium. The nucleotide sequence of a 13.9 kb segment of this plasmid known to encode an outer membrane protein related in sequence to components of fimbrial biosynthesis in enteric bacteria was determined. This cloned segment between the repB and repC replicon regions programmed expression of abundant surface fimbriae in Escherichia coli and S. typhimurium cells. A 7 kb region contained seven open reading frames, the protein products of five of which were related in sequence to regulatory, structural, and assembly proteins of adherence fimbriae/pili, such as the P and K88 piM. These five genes and two adjacent ones which were not markedly related to proteins in the data bases comprise the pef (plasmid‐encoded fimbriae) locus. Transposon TnphoA insertions In four genes in the pef locus (pefA, pefC, orf5 and orf6) resulted in active PhoA fusions and blocked or reduced the surface presentation of fimbriae, indicating that the proteins encoded by these four genes are translocated at least across the cytoptasmic membrane and contribute to formation of the fimbrial structure. The differences in genetic organization and protein sequence relatedness from other fimbrial gene clusters suggest that the pef locus might encode a novel type of fimbria. Between the pef and the repB loci, there were five open reading frames, one of which (orfS) gave rise to active PhoA fusions but was not necessary for fimbriai expression. Two of the other proteins were homologous to transcription regulatory proteins and a third was the rck gene, which encodes an outer membrane protein that confers complement resistance to serum‐sensitive hosts.
Optimal Economic Stabilization Policies Under Decentralized Control and Conflicting Objectives

This paper derives methods for the calculation of optimal stabilization policies under the assumption that monetary and fiscal control are exercised by separate authorities who may have different objectives. Each authority minimizes its own quadratic cost functional subject to the constraint of a linear econometric model. Nash solution strategies are calculated for this discretetime differential game, both in the context of open-loop and closed-loop behavior (in the closed-loop framework each authority can continually revise his policy in response to the evolving strategy of the other authority). The results are applied to a small econometric model, and show how the degree of fiscal or monetary control depends on the particular conflict situation, and how conflicting policies are "suboptimal" in comparison with coordinated policies
On Economics and Finance

THE FIELDS OF ECONOMICS and finance are allied. Indeed finance is sometimes defined as the subfield of economics concerned with intertemporal and portfolio decisions. And yet we are increasingly witnessing the development of two cultures. Researchers in economics examine questions involving financial markets, in ways which seem to researchers in finance to be hopelessly misguided. Much research in finance is regarded by many economists as doctrinaire or trivial. The paper presented by Marsh [1] at these meetings on Euler equation tests of asset pricing models is not atypically partisan. All references to papers written by reearchers located in economics departments are critical. All reference to research by scholars located in finance departments are favorable. Even critical comment by one group of researchers on the work of the other is not terribly common. In many areas, parallel literatures have developed in economics and finance regarding the same questions with virtually no points of contact. There is a public finance and a "regular finance" literature on the role of dividend taxes. There are enormous largely unconnected literatures in both economics and finance about the effects of inflation on interest rates. Parallel literatures on agency theory and the structure of contracts have also emerged in recent years. Industrial organization and financial economists treat the phenomenon of mergers and takeovers in very different ways. The list could be multiplied. Casual observation suggests that most researchers operating in one tradition are almost entirely ignorant of basic concepts in the rival tradition. Researchers in finance who doubt this claim should ask themselves how frequently they have encountered concepts such as the "q < 1" theory of the effects of dividend taxes," "the Mundell-Tobin effect," or self-selection constraints. Economists who doubt this claim might note that several papers are published each year discovering in some particular context the standard finance result that increased variance raises option values. Or they might note how few events studied appear in mainline economics journals. The differences I am discussing may be clarified by considering a field of economics which could but does not exist: ketchup economics. There are two groups of researchers concerned with ketchup economics. Some general economists study the market for ketchup as part of the broader economic system. The other group is comprised of ketchup economists located in Department of Ketchup where they receive much higher salaries than do general economists. Each group has a research program. General economists are concerned with the fundamental determinants of prices and quantities in the ketchup market. They attempt to examine various factors
Unmet Need for ADL Assistance Is Associated With Mortality Among Older Adults With Mild Disability.

BACKGROUND Unmet need for assistance with activities of daily living (ADLs) disability is associated with increased risk for future hospitalization. To further explore the association between unmet ADL need and future health outcomes, we examined the association between unmet need for ADL assistance and 1-year mortality. METHODS A prospective study of 6,730 community-living Medicare recipients was conducted among respondents to the 1994, 1999, and/or 2004 National Long Term Care Survey. Only those who reported having one or more ADL disabilities were included. Time to death within 1 year after the community survey was determined from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services vital statistics records. The community interviews provided demographic, health, and ADL information. RESULTS Unadjusted 1-year death rates were 8.7%, 10.6%, 11.4%, 19.2%, and 27.3%, respectively, for respondents with disabilities in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 ADLs. Overall, 21.3% reported unmet need for assistance for one or more ADL disabilities. After controlling for demographic and health characteristics, we found a significant interaction between unmet ADL need and level of ADL disability (p = .018). Post hoc analyses revealed that unmet ADL need was associated with increased risk for mortality only for those with one (hazard ratio = 1.96; 95% CI = 1.29-2.87) or two ADL disabilities (hazard ratio = 1.37; 95% CI = 1.07-1.75), but not for those with three or more ADL disabilities. CONCLUSION Future studies are needed to determine whether these findings are replicable and, if so, whether physiologic or process of care variables explain why ADL is associated with mortality only for those with mild disability.
The impact of sleep loss on hippocampal function

Hippocampal cellular and molecular processes critical for memory consolidation are affected by the amount and quality of sleep attained. Questions remain with regard to how sleep enhances memory, what parameters of sleep after learning are optimal for memory consolidation, and what underlying hippocampal molecular players are targeted by sleep deprivation to impair memory consolidation and plasticity. In this review, we address these topics with a focus on the detrimental effects of post-learning sleep deprivation on memory consolidation. Obtaining adequate sleep is challenging in a society that values “work around the clock. ” Therefore, the development of interventions to combat the negative cognitive effects of sleep deprivation is key. However, there are a limited number of therapeutics that are able to enhance cognition in the face of insufficient sleep. The identification of molecular pathways implicated in the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation on memory could potentially yield new targets for the development of more effective drugs.
Promoting Work-Based Learning for Quality Community-Based Care: An evaluation of the Portland Community College Jobs-to-Careers Project Jobs to Careers Research Project Grant #63057

This report describes evaluation findings from the Portland Community College Jobs to Careers (JTC) project which focused on frontline workers in five assisted living (AL) facilities. Portland State University (PSU) conducted the research. The ALFs varied by size, target population served (e.g., frail elders, those with dementia, those with chronic mental illness), geographical location (i.e., urban, rural, suburban), and profit and nonprofit status. Through the JTC project, frontline workers (referred to in this report as Direct Care Workers – DCWs) participated in work-based learning by completing 27 competency-based care modules. The JTCAL training modules were based on a systematic job analysis of caregiver tasks and the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to perform them. The modules were delivered by assisted living staff who had completed a train-the-trainer program. Composition of training teams varied across settings, but included supervisors (including nurses, managers, administrators), and/or experienced DCWs. Most modules contained entry level and more advanced content. Those completing the first level of content became a “Resident Assistant I (RA I),” while those completing all content achieved a “Resident Assistant II (RA II)” certificate. Completers were eligible for 2 or 3 academic credits respectively through the Gerontology Program at Portland Community College. Wilson and Goldberg (2010) have described the context of assisted living in Oregon and the five participating facilities were described in detail by Craft Morgan and her colleagues (2010) in their final evaluation report. The Jobs to Careers initiative was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson and Hitachi Foundations.
Intergenerational Occupational Choice Comparisons: The Case of Teachers in the UK

This paper examines how U.K. graduate occupational choices have changed since 1970, with reference to the choice of becoming a teacher using two cohorts of data. Remuneration, morale, status, and image of the teaching profession have been altered dramatically. The sensitivity of the teacher choice to relative wage changes is examined and compared for men and women separately. The paper presents a counterfactual prediction of the decisions that each cohort would have made had they experienced the market conditions of the other and estimates a decomposition of the changes in the average probabilities due to remunerative and other factors. Copyright 1994 by Royal Economic Society.
Efficient Worker Selection Through History-Based Learning in Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a promising approach for obtaining services and data in a short time and at a reasonable budget. However, the quality of the output provided by the crowd is not guaranteed, and must be controlled. This quality control usually relies on worker screening or contribution reviewing at the cost of additional time and budget overheads. In this paper, we propose to reduce these overheads by leveraging the system history. We describe an offline learning algorithm that groups tasks from history into homogeneous clusters and learns for each cluster the worker features that optimize the contribution quality. These features are then used by the online targeting algorithm to select reliable workers for each incoming task. The proposed method is compared to the state of the art selection methods using real world datasets. Results show that we achieve comparable, and in some cases better, output quality for a smaller budget and shorter time.
Awareness and Completion of Advance Directives in Older Korean‐American Adults

There has been growing concern about racial and ethnic disparities in completion rates of advance directives (ADs) in community‐dwelling older populations. Although differences in AD completion rates between non‐Hispanic whites and African Americans have been reported, not much is known about the awareness and completion of ADs in other groups of ethnic minorities. Using a sample of community‐dwelling Korean‐American older adults (n = 675) as a target, factors associated with their awareness and completion of ADs were explored. Guided by Andersen's behavioral health model, predisposing (age, sex, marital status, education), need (chronic conditions, functional disability), and enabling (health insurance, acculturation) variables were included in the separate logistic regression models of AD awareness and AD completion. In both models, acculturation was found to be a significant predictor; those who were more acculturated were more likely to be aware of ADs and to have completed ADs. This study contributes to the knowledge about the role of acculturation in explaining AD awareness and completion in Korean‐American older adults and provides recommendations for possible AD educational interventions for this older adult minority population.
A Comparison of the Immediate Effects of Eccentric Training vs Static Stretch on Hamstring Flexibility in High School and College Athletes.

BACKGROUND A pre-event static stretching program is often used to prepare an athlete for competition. Recent studies have suggested that static stretching may not be an effective method for stretching the muscle prior to competition. OBJECTIVE The intent of this study was to compare the immediate effect of static stretching, eccentric training, and no stretching/training on hamstring flexibility in high school and college athletes. METHODS Seventy-five athletes, with a mean age of 17.22 (+/- 1.30) were randomly assigned to one of three groups - thirty- second static stretch one time, an eccentric training protocol through a full range of motion, and a control group. All athletes had limited hamstring flexibility, defined as a 20° loss of knee extension measured with the femur held at 90° of hip flexion. RESULTS A significant difference was indicated by follow up analysis between the control group (gain = -1.08°) and both the static stretch (gain = 5.05°) and the eccentric training group (gain = 9.48°). In addition, the gains in the eccentric training group were significantly greater than the static stretch group. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION The findings of this study reveal that one session of eccentrically training through a full range of motion improved hamstring flexibility better than the gains made by a static stretch group or a control group.
Hedonic pricing models for metropolitan bus services

Conventional studies on the pricing of bus services use the cost structure to explain bus fares. In this paper, a hedonic pricing model for bus services in Hong Kong is estimated. The contributions of cost and market factors are uncovered. It is found that the cost factors dominate the determination of bus fares. In contrast to our expectation, bus fares do not react to competition faced by bus companies. Moreover, except the three cross-harbour tunnels, the bus fare has no direct relationship with the tolls of other tunnels. Our model serves well as a reference tool for bus companies to set market-acceptable bus fares.
Towards a Dialogue System with Long-term, Episodic Memory

Intelligent personal assistants lack long-term memory. We propose graph databases as a extensible solution to this problem by representing relevant knowledge as entities, properties, and relations between them. We demonstrate through two experiments that our approach lends itself to a system that can improve natu-ral language understanding by updating its knowledge dynamically in a generalizable and interpretable fashion.
Comparative analysis of measures of biological artefacts identification in the electroencefalography signal in the context of biological noise

The paper presents comparison between measures of artefacts identification in the electroencefalography (EEG) signal. The dedicated measures were applied in the task of biological artefact identification. The examined person was asked to perform the following activities: eyes blinking, jaw moving, eyeball moving, counting, eyes opened, eyes closed, hands squeezing. The case study described in the paper presents results of comparison of various artefacts measures such as variance, correlation coefficient etc. The conducted research has shown that no method can be called universal and the most suitable method should be selected for every type of biological artefacts.