Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Different domains of health functioning as predictors of sickness absence--a prospective cohort study.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to examine different domains of health functioning as predictors of sickness absence. METHODS The Short Form 36 (SF-36) is one of the best known instruments measuring various domains of physical and mental health functioning. A questionnaire including the SF-36 was mailed to 40-60-year-old employees of the City of Helsinki in 2000-2002. For the subsequent three years, sickness absence episodes >2 weeks were derived from the employer's register. The predictive ability of the eight subscales and two component summaries of the SF-36 were compared using regression methods and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. RESULTS All eight SF-36 subscales and the two component summaries predicted the occurrence of sickness absence over the follow-up period. Among women, bodily pain was the strongest predictor, with 1 standard deviation increase in bodily pain increasing the occurrence of sickness absence by 77% [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 68-86%]. Role limitations due to emotional problems were the weakest predictor of sickness absence (29%, 95% CI 23-36%). Among men, the results were similar to those of women. In both genders, the area under the ROC curve was largest for bodily pain, general health, and physical functioning and lowest for mental health and role limitation due to emotional problems. CONCLUSIONS The subscales measuring physical domains of functioning were more strongly associated with sickness absence than the mental subscales. In particular, ability to perform daily activities, pain, and general health were important predictors of sickness absence >2 weeks.
Myoblast fusion is regulated by a prostanoid of the one series independently of a rise in cyclic AMP

The role of prostanoids in the regulation of chick myoblast differentiation has been investigated. At 3 X 10(-6) M, indomethacin and chloroquine specifically inhibit cell fusion. They do not affect cell proliferation, alignment, or the expression of two muscle-specific proteins, namely, the acetylcholine receptor and the muscle-specific form of creatine phosphokinase. The results demonstrate that it is indomethacin's activity as an inhibitor of prostaglandin synthesis at the cyclooxygenase step that causes the block of cell fusion, whereas chloroquine probably acts at the earlier step of phospholipase A. Prostaglandin E1 (PGE1), but not prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), rapidly reverses the inhibition of fusion imposed by indomethacin or chloroquine. The dose response of the myoblasts to PGE1 is a bell- shaped curve with a 100% reversal of fusion at approximately 10(-9) M. Eicosatrienoate and linoleate reverse the inhibition of fusion with similar kinetics, whereas arachidonate is completely ineffective. The ability of PGE1 and eicosatrienoate but not PGE2 and arachidonate to restore fusion to control levels implies that fusion is specifically regulated by a prostanoid of the one series. The reversal of the fusion- block by linoleate further suggests that this fatty acid provides the necessary source of eicosatrienoate in the myoblast plasma membrane. At 10(-8) M and above, PGE1 and PGE2 stimulate adenylate cyclase and depress control fusion as does 10(-5) M isoproterenol. The beta- adrenergic blocker propranolol abolishes both isoproterenol's inhibition of myoblast fusion and its activation of adenylate cyclase. The similar depressions imposed on cell fusion by 10(-8)-10(-6) M prostanoid and 10(-5) M isoproterenol suggest that in both cases the depressive effects are mediated by cyclic AMP. It is concluded that a prostanoid of the one series regulates fusion by a cyclic AMP- independent mechanisms.
Afterlife Beliefs and Ego Integrity as Two Mediators of the Relationship Between Intrinsic Religiosity and Personal Death Anxiety Among Older Adult British Christians

The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of afterlife beliefs and ego integrity as two mediators of the negative relationship between intrinsic religiosity and personal death anxiety in later life. One hundred forty-three older adult British Christians responded to both initial and follow-up postal surveys containing questions on their religious and death attitudes. Structural equation modeling analysis showed that intrinsic religiosity predicted lower personal death anxiety via fostering more benign afterlife beliefs and ego integrity. This study demonstrated that intrinsic religiosity had a negative indirect effect on personal death anxiety through the joint agency of more benign afterlife beliefs and greater ego integrity. It also provided empirical evidence in support of the role of intrinsic religiosity in promoting psychosocial well-being in later life.
Graphene-Reinforced Biodegradable Resin Composites for Stereolithographic 3D Printing of Bone Structure Scaffolds

A biodegradable UV-cured resin has been fabricated via stereolithography apparatus (SLA). The formulation consists of a commercial polyurethane resin as an oligomer, trimethylolpropane trimethacrylate (TEGDMA) as a reactive diluent and phenylbis (2, 4, 6-trimethylbenzoyl)-phosphine oxide (Irgacure 819) as a photoinitiator. The tensile strength of the three-dimensional (3D) printed specimens is 68 MPa, 62% higher than that of the reference specimens (produced by direct casting). The flexural strength and modulus can reach 115 MPa and 5.8 GPa, respectively. A solvent-free method is applied to fabricate graphene-reinforced nanocomposite. Porous bone structures (a jawbone with a square architecture and a sternum with a round architecture) and gyroid scaffold of graphene-reinforced nanocomposite for bone tissue engineering have been 3D printed via SLA. The UV-crosslinkable graphene-reinforced biodegradable nanocomposite using SLA 3D printing technology can potentially remove important cost barriers for personalized biological tissue engineering as compared to the traditional mould-based multistep methods.
Multiple interval mapping for quantitative trait loci.

A new statistical method for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL), called multiple interval mapping (MIM), is presented. It uses multiple marker intervals simultaneously to fit multiple putative QTL directly in the model for mapping QTL. The MIM model is based on Cockerham's model for interpreting genetic parameters and the method of maximum likelihood for estimating genetic parameters. With the MIM approach, the precision and power of QTL mapping could be improved. Also, epistasis between QTL, genotypic values of individuals, and heritabilities of quantitative traits can be readily estimated and analyzed. Using the MIM model, a stepwise selection procedure with likelihood ratio test statistic as a criterion is proposed to identify QTL. This MIM method was applied to a mapping data set of radiata pine on three traits: brown cone number, tree diameter, and branch quality scores. Based on the MIM result, seven, six, and five QTL were detected for the three traits, respectively. The detected QTL individually contributed from approximately 1 to 27% of the total genetic variation. Significant epistasis between four pairs of QTL in two traits was detected, and the four pairs of QTL contributed approximately 10.38 and 14.14% of the total genetic variation. The asymptotic variances of QTL positions and effects were also provided to construct the confidence intervals. The estimated heritabilities were 0.5606, 0.5226, and 0. 3630 for the three traits, respectively. With the estimated QTL effects and positions, the best strategy of marker-assisted selection for trait improvement for a specific purpose and requirement can be explored. The MIM FORTRAN program is available on the worldwide web (http://www.stat.sinica.edu.tw/chkao/).
Predicting Time Spent with Physician

The goal of this project is to predict how much time a physician should be spending with a patient, given the patient’s injury, referral status, and other reported, nonidentifiable medical information. This may be used as an additional factor for measuring and predicting physician efficiency alongside existing methodology. We implement linear regression and a variety of classification techniques on a national dataset of Emergency Room (ER) patients and outpatients. We use cross validation to select the optimum set of features. In addition, we implement the k-Means algorithm to generate new features for our supervised learning algorithms. Our final models provide good predictions of time spent with physician with a mean error of around 7 minutes.
Chemosensitivity and radiosensitivity of small cell lung cancer cell lines studied by a newly developed 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) hybrid assay.

The 3-(4,5-Dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) hybrid assay was developed by technically combining the human tumor clonogenic assay and the MTT assay to make the most of both assays. This assay was able to estimate the in vitro growth of cultured cell lines and of tumor cells in pleural effusion, suggesting the possibility of its use for assessment of chemosensitivity and radiosensitivity of fresh tumor samples. Multiple cell lines [including morphological and/or phenotypical in vitro converters and cisplatin (CDDP)-resistant lines] were established from three patients with small cell lung cancer at different stages of the disease. Chemosensitivity of these cell lines to four commonly used chemotherapeutic drugs was tested by the MTT hybrid assay. SK1 and SK3 lines were established from Patient S. K. before and after chemotherapy and radiotherapy, respectively. SK3/CDDP, a CDDP-resistant line derived from the SK3 line, was 30-fold more resistant to CDDP [50% inhibiting dose (IC50), 21.5 micrograms/ml] than the SK1 line. In Patient M. O. , MOA2/CDDP, a CDDP-resistant line derived from MOA2 (an in vitro converter from the MO line), was 41-fold more resistant to CDDP (IC50, 37 micrograms/ml) than the parent MO line. From Patient T. M. , TM1 and TM2 lines were established before and after chemotherapy, respectively. The latter showed 6-fold more resistance to CDDP than the former. Chemosensitivity of these lines to three other drugs, 4-hydroperoxycyclophosphamide, Adriamycin, and etoposide, suggested cross-resistance between CDDP and 4-hydroperoxycyclophosphamide. Radiosensitivity study was also carried out with the MTT hybrid assay. The MOA2 line was more resistant [Do, 3.0 Gy; extrapolation number (n), 4.0] than the parental MO line (Do, 1.6 Gy; n, 2.1). There was no clear difference in radiosensitivity between the cell lines established before and after radiation therapy in Patient S. K.
pneumonia in cystic fibrosis aeruginosa Pseudomonas oxygen in sputum from chronic Polymorphonuclear leucocytes consume

http://thorax.bmj. com/content/65/1/57.full. html Updated information and services can be found at: These include: References http://thorax.bmj. com/content/65/1/57.full. html#ref-list-1 This article cites 34 articles, 15 of which can be accessed free at: service Email alerting box at the top right corner of the online article. Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the Notes
Exploring Negation Annotations in the DrugDDI Corpus

Detecting drug-drug interactions (DDI) is an important research field in pharmacology and medicine and several publications report every year the negative effect of combining drugs and chemical treatments. The DrugDDI corpus is a collection of documents derived from the DrugBank database and contains manual annotations for interactions between drugs. We have investigated the negated statements in this corpus and found that they consist of approximately 21% of its sentences. Previous works have shown that considering features related to negation can improve results for the DDI task. The main goal of this paper is to describe the process for annotating the DDI-DrugBank corpus with negation cues and scopes, to show the correlations between these and the DDI annotations and to demonstrate that negations can be used as features for a DDI detection system. Basic experiments have been carried out to show the benefits when considering negations in the DDI task. We believe that the extended corpus can be a significant progress in training and testing algorithms for DDi
Ecological Origins of Freedom: Pathogens, Heat Stress, and Frontier Topography Predict More Vertical but Less Horizontal Governmental Restriction

What kinds of physical environments make for free societies? The present research investigates the effect of three different types of ecological stressors (climate stress, pathogen stress, and frontier topography) on two measurements of governmental restriction: Vertical restriction involves select persons imposing asymmetrical laws on others, while horizontal restriction involves laws that restrict most members of a society equally. Investigation 1 validates our measurements of vertical and horizontal restriction. Investigation 2 demonstrates that, across both U.S. states and a sample of nations, ecological stressors tend to cause more vertically restrictive societies but less horizontally restrictive societies. Investigation 3 demonstrates that assortative sociality partially mediates ecological stress→restriction relationships across nations, but not in U.S. states. Although some stressor-specific effects emerged (most notably, cold stress consistently showed effects in the opposite direction), these results in the main suggest that ecological stress simultaneously creates opposing pressures that push freedom in two different directions.
Identification and Immunogenicity of Group AStreptococcus Culture Supernatant Proteins

ABSTRACT Extracellular proteins made by group A Streptococcus(GAS) play critical roles in the pathogenesis of human infections caused by this bacterium. Although many extracellular GAS proteins have been identified and characterized, there has been no systematic analysis of culture supernatant proteins. Proteins present in the culture supernatant of strains of serotype M1 (MGAS 5005) and M3 (MGAS 315) mutants lacking production of the major extracellular cysteine protease were separated by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis and identified by amino-terminal amino acid sequencing and interrogation of available databases, including a serotype M1 genome sequence. In the aggregate, amino-terminal amino acid sequence data for 66 protein spots were generated, 53 unique sequences were obtained, and 44 distinct proteins were identified. Sixteen of the 44 proteins had apparent secretion signal sequences and 27 proteins did not. Eight of the 16 proteins with apparent secretion signal sequences have not been previously described for GAS. Antibodies against most of the apparently secreted proteins were present in sera from mice infected subcutaneously with MGAS 5005 or MGAS 315. Humans with documented GAS infections (pharyngitis, acute rheumatic fever, and severe invasive disease) also had serum antibodies reacting with many of the apparently secreted proteins, indicating that they were synthesized in the course of GAS-human interaction. The genes encoding four of the eight previously undescribed and apparently secreted culture supernatant proteins were cloned, and the proteins were overexpressed inEscherichia coli. Western blot analysis with these recombinant proteins and sera from GAS-infected mice and humans confirmed the immunogenicity of these proteins. Taken together, the data provide new information about the molecular aspects of GAS-host interactions.
Comparison between ender and unreamed interlocking nails in tibial shaft fractures.

OBJECTIVE To compare ender nails and unreamed interlocking nails in a randomized clinical trial study. METHODS From March 2001 to March 2003, 131 patients with tibial fractures of the central two thirds of the tibia were admitted to the emergency ward of Shohada Hospital, Tabriz, Iran and were randomized to either an ender tibial nail or an undreamed interlocking tibial nail as their primary treatment. Age, gender, types of fracture, and surgical outcomes were recorded at the time of surgery, during hospital stay, and during the course of 9 months follow-up. RESULTS Sixty-seven patients underwent surgery with interlocking nails and 64 with ender nails. No statistically significant difference was found between the 2 groups concerning mal-union, delayed union, and device failure. Durations of hospital stay, and time needed to achieve union was significantly higher in the unreamed interlocking group. Non-union and infection rate were higher in the ender group (p<0.05). CONCLUSION The results of our study support those of other studies that indicate the choice between the 2 methods of unreamed nailing is mainly controversial, depending on the priorities of the patient and surgeon.
Nonlinear prediction of speech signals using radial basis function networks

In this paper, we compare the capabilities of various forms of radial basis function networks as nonlinear short-term predictors for speech signals representing sustained utterances of German vowels. We use RBF and RBF-AR1 network architectures, trained using a standard algorithm or alternatively the extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm, and linear least squares predictors. We also look at cascaded forms of linear/nonlinear predictors. We evaluate both prediction gain and spectral flatness measure of the residual. The results indicate: The RBF-AR structure is the most powerful, EKF training yields better results than standard training for RBF networks, and a non-cascaded RBF-AR predictor produces results superior to cascaded predictors.
Examining the effects of gender and genre on interactions in shared book reading

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate whether fathers and mothers read differently to their four‐year‐old sons and daughters and to examine the effect of genre on the interactions that occurred in parent‐child, shared book reading. Twenty‐five dyads shared two narrative texts and two non‐narrative texts. Results indicated that overall, fathers were more interactive than mothers. Fathers and mothers also differed in terms of the types of interactions and there was some gender/genre interaction effect. As well, parents engaged in more interactions in non‐narrative texts than in narrative texts. The child's gender also affected the number and types of interactions. Implications for practice, theory and future research are proposed.
Design of Networked Control Systems With Packet Dropouts

This note is concerned with stability and controller design of networked control systems (NCSs) with packet dropouts. New NCS models are provided considering both single- and multiple-packet transmissions. Both sensor-to-controller (S/C) and controller-to-actuator (C/A) packet dropouts are modeled and their history behavior is described by different independent Markov chains. In term of the given models, sufficient conditions for stochastic stability are derived in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and corresponding control laws are given. Numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the results.
Approximation of Frequentness Probability of Itemsets in Uncertain Data

Mining frequent item sets from transactional datasets is a well known problem with good algorithmic solutions. Most of these algorithms assume that the input data is free from errors. Real data, however, is often affected by noise. Such noise can be represented by uncertain datasets in which each item has an existence probability. Recently, Bernecker et al. (2009) proposed the frequentness probability, i.e., the probability that a given item set is frequent, to select item sets in an uncertain database. A dynamic programming approach to evaluate this measure was given as well. We argue, however, that for the setting of Bernecker et al. (2009), that assumes independence between the items, already well-known statistical tools exist. We show how the frequentness probability can be approximated extremely accurately using a form of the central limit theorem. We experimentally evaluated our approximation and compared it to the dynamic programming approach. The evaluation shows that our approximation method is extremely accurate even for very small databases while at the same time it has much lower memory overhead and computation time.
Simulating full‐sky interferometric observations

Aperture array interferometers, such as that proposed for the Square Kilometre Array, will see the entire sky, hence the standard approach to simulating visibilities will not be applicable since it relies on a tangent plane approximation that is valid only for small fields of view. We derive interferometric formulations in real, spherical harmonic and wavelet space that include contributions over the entire sky and do not rely on any tangent plane approximations. A fast wavelet method is developed to simulate the visibilities observed by an interferometer in the full-sky setting. Computing visibilities using the fast wavelet method adapts to the sparse representation of the primary beam and sky intensity in the wavelet basis. Consequently, the fast wavelet method exhibits superior computational complexity to the real and spherical harmonic space methods and may be performed at substantially lower computational cost, while introducing only negligible error to simulated visibilities. Low-resolution interferometric observations are simulated using all of the methods to compare their performance, demonstrating that the fast wavelet method is approximately three times faster than the other methods for these low-resolution simulations. The computational burden of the real and spherical harmonic space methods renders these techniques computationally infeasible for higher resolution simulations. High-resolution interferometric observations are simulated using the fast wavelet method only, demonstrating and validating the application of this method to realistic simulations. The fast wavelet method is estimated to provide a greater than 10-fold reduction in execution time compared to the other methods for these high-resolution simulations.