Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy in Pillar Pain after Carpal Tunnel Release: A Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of extracorporeal shockwave therapy (ESWT) on pillar pain after carpal tunnel release. Materials and Methods: In this prospective randomized controlled trial, forty patients with pillar pain for at least 1 month after carpal tunnel release surgery were randomly assigned in two groups. ESWT group received four sessions of ESWT at weekly intervals, and patients in the control group received sham ESWT treatment at the same intervals, involved sound but no energy. At baseline, 1st month, and 3rd month, hand function (using Brief-Michigan Hand Outcome Questionnaire) and pain score were assessed and compared between groups. Results: At baseline, pain score and hand function score were similar in both groups. After 1st month, pain score in ESWT and control groups was 3.7 versus 4.7, respectively (P = 0.066), and hand function score was 60.7 versus 52.2, respectively (P = 0.032). After 3 months, pain score in ESWT group was significantly lower than the control group (1.6 versus 3.6, respectively, P < 0.0001), hand function score in ESWT group was significantly better than the control group (75.4 vs. 63.7, respectively, P < 0.0001). Trend of decrease in pain score between groups was significantly different, but trend of increase in hand function score was not significantly different. Conclusion: After ESWT, hand function and pain score in patients with pillar pain improved faster compared to control patients. Hence, ESWT can be used as a safe and effective noninvasive technique in patients with pillar pain after carpal tunnel release.
Influence of early conditioning exercise on the development of gross cartilage defects and swelling behavior of cartilage extracellular matrix in the equine midcarpal joint.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the influence of early conditioning exercise on the development of gross cartilage defects and swelling behavior of cartilage extracellular matrix (ECM) in the midcarpal joint of horses. ANIMALS 12 Thoroughbreds. PROCEDURES 6 horses underwent early conditioning exercise from birth to 18 months of age (CONDEX group), and 6 horses were used as control animals (PASTEX group). The horses were euthanized at 18 months of age, and the midcarpal joints were harvested. Gross defects of the cartilage surface were classified and mapped. Opposing surfaces of the third and radial carpal bones were used to quantify swelling behavior of the cartilage ECM. RESULTS A wide range of gross defects was detected in the cartilage on the opposing surfaces of the bones of the midcarpal joint; however, there was no significant difference between the CONDEX and PASTEX groups. Similarly, no significant difference in swelling behavior of the cartilage ECM was evident between the CONDEX and PASTEX groups. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE In the study reported here, we did not detect negative influences of early conditioning exercise on the prevalence of gross defects in cartilage of the midcarpal joint or the quality of the cartilage ECM as defined by swelling behavior. These results suggested that early conditioning exercise may be used without negative consequences for the midcarpal joint and the cartilage ECM of the third and radial carpal bones.
The retention of cast metal dowels fabricated by direct and indirect techniques.

PURPOSE To explore the effect of fabrication technique, cement type, and cementation procedure on retention of cast metal dowels. METHODS AND MATERIALS Eighty intact single-rooted teeth were selected. The clinical crown was removed at the cementoenamel junction level. Each root was prepared to receive a cast metal dowel of 10-mm length and 1.45 mm in diameter. The 80 specimens were divided into two major groups of 40 based on fabrication technique (direct and indirect). Each group was further divided into four subgroups of ten based on the cement type (zinc phosphate and glass ionomer), and cementation procedure (with and without lentulo spiral). The dowels were subjected to a constantly increasing tensile force, in a universal Instron testing machine, at crosshead speed of 5 mm/min until failure. RESULTS The most significant factor to affect retention was the cementation procedure, as cementation with lentulo spiral produced greater retention than cementation without the use of lentulo spiral (p < 0.05); however, there seems to be a close interaction between fabrication technique, cement type, and cementation procedure (p= 0.051). The least retentive group was the one fabricated by direct technique, cemented with zinc phosphate without the use of lentulo spiral. CONCLUSION Fabrication technique does not affect retention of cast dowels, except when zinc phosphate was the luting agent and placed in the canal space without using a lentulo spiral. The cementation procedure had a significant effect on retention; thus, it is recommended that cementation should be done using the lentulo spiral.
Minimizing makespan for a no-wait flowshop using tabu mechanism improved iterated greedy algorithm

This paper proposes a tabu mechanism improved iterated greedy (TMIIG) algorithm to solve the no-wait flow-shop scheduling problem with makespan criterion. The motivation of seeking for further improvement in the iterated greedy (IG) algorithm framework is based on the observation that the construction phase of the original IG algorithm may lead to repeated search when applying the insertion neighborhood search. To overcome the drawback, we modified the IG algorithm by a tabu-based reconstruction strategy to enhance its exploitation ability. A powerful neighborhood search method which involves insert, swap, and double-insert moves is then applied to obtain better soluions from the reconstructed solution in the previous step. Numerical computations verified the advantages of utilizing the new reconstruction scheme. In addition, comparisons with other high-performing algorithms demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.
Has accession to the EU affected business cycles

This paper undertakes to explain the relationship between EU accession and the length of business cycles, focusing specifically on whether participation in a multinational organization has, or has not, altered the length of the cycle. Employing a sample of nine EU countries (Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK) we focused initially on annual data for per capita growth in GDP over a period of 59 years (1950-2008). For each country the sample was divided into two parts, one covering the period preceding accession to the EU and one is covering the accession year and succeeding years. Then, eliminating the background noise with the use of a periodogram, we proceeded to examine their spectral density plots. The results indicated that in the first years following accession, the countries tended to experience shorter cycles than they had previously. In the second phase the cycles were of the same duration as previous cycles. Finally, after a period of some years, the length of the cycles increased, as suggested by the J-shaped curve. This J-shaped growth curve applies for the countries that have joined the EU, strongly suggesting a causal relationship between accession to the EU and these specific characterristics of the curve. We cross-checked with a set of four non-EU member countries (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey) and found no change in the length of the business cycle in these countries.
Do great tits assess rivals by combining direct experience with information gathered by eavesdropping?

Animals frequently use signals that travel further than the spacing between individuals. For every intended recipient of a given signal there are likely to be many other individuals that receive information. Eavesdropping on signalling interactions between other individuals provides a relatively cost–free method of assessing future opponents or mates. Male great tits (Parus major) extract relative information from such interactions between individuals unknown to them. Here, we show that male great tits can take information gathering a stage further and obtain more information about a previously unencountered intruder, by the hitherto unknown capability of combining information gathered by eavesdropping with that derived from their own direct interaction with an individual. Prior experience with an intruder (A) was achieved by subjecting a focal male to different levels of intrusion simulated using interactive playback. This intruder (A) then took part in a simulated interaction with an unknown male (B) outside the territorial boundary of the focal males. In response to subsequent intrusion by the second male (B), focal males showed low song output in response to males that had lost to a male that the subject was able to beat. Males of known high quality, or those about which information was ambiguous, elicited a high level of song output by focal males. We discuss the implications of this finding for the evolution of communication and social behaviour.
US military logistics outsourcing and the everywhere of war

ABSTRACT US military logistics outsourcing and the everywhere of war. Territory, Politics, Governance. Over the past two decades a network-centric ‘revolution in military affairs’ has profoundly reshaped the geographies of war. No less revolutionary has been the US military’s increasing reliance on private companies that employ a global army of civilian labourers to provide logistical support for operations around the world. This article provides an overview of the scale, scope, and emergence of this phenomenon, supplemented by an analysis of contracting activities at the peak of the war in Iraq in 2008. Following this, I detail three notable geopolitical and geo-economic entanglements that logistics contracting has engendered: (1) subcontracting and the exploitation of a largely South and Southeast Asian subcontracting workforce that is fuelled by inadequate military oversight and the down-sourcing of risk, (2) the geopolitics of contractor deaths, travel bans and troop withdrawals instituted by labour exporting countries, and (3) the duality of prosperity and precarity experienced by Bosnians who have worked for US military logistics contractors over the past two decades. Impacting politics, economic livelihoods, and social relations in countries around the world, these entanglements require a rethinking of the spatial dimensions of war.
Yield optimization of spintronic memristor-based memory arrays

The missing fourth passive essential circuit element-memristor enticed a big attention after HP labs evolved the first memristor device in 2008. Aside from the solid-state thin film memristor device, spintronic memristor was also feigned based on the magnetic technology. As it is at nano-scale geometry size, the memristor device suffers from the process variations in the fabrication process. Process variations swerve the actual electrical behavior of memristors from the desired values. This deviation results reduce the yield particularly in the memristor-based memory design. Therefore, it is serious to understand and distinguish the impact of process variations on memristor performance and yield and attempt to optimize the yield of the spintronic memristor-based memory arrays. In this paper, we describe a compact model of the spintronic memristor based on the magnetic-domain-wall motion mechanism.
Audit Industry Dynamics: Factors Affecting Changes in Client-Industry Market Shares

Recently, there has been some interest in various aspects of the market for audit services in the United States. One of these is the extent to which we can explain shifts in market shares of audit firms within the context of generalized economies of scale (Arnett and Danos [1979]). This paper provides results from the application of Stigler's [1958] "survivorship" approach to the detection of economies of scale, based on changes in CPA-firm market share positions over a seven-year period (1972 to 1979). The following section briefly outlines the "survivorship" approach and considers plausible sources of economies of scale in the provision of audit services. Subsequent sections specify the model and data employed in statistical tests and provide both formal test results and descriptive data. The tests indicate that the audit industry is characterized by scale effects which favor CPA firms which are large overall and, on a client-industry basis, those with heavy involvement in regulated client industries. Firms with very large market shares in nonregulated client industries experience erosion of their market shares over time. This erosion was not observed in the sampled regulated industries. The research opportunities suggested by this research are discussed in the final section of the paper.
Measurement of brain concentration of FK960 for development of a novel antidementia drug: a PET study in conscious rhesus monkeys.

UNLABELLED This study used PET to measure the time course of the brain concentration of (18)F-labeled N-(4-acetyl-1-piperazinyl)-p-fluorobenzamide monohydrate (FK960), a novel antidementia drug, after oral administration to conscious rhesus monkeys. METHODS Three young-adult male rhesus monkeys were tested. FK960 (0.1 mg/kg) containing about 370 MBq of (18)F-FK960 was administered orally to each monkey. Dynamic PET images were acquired for 4 h from 5 min after the administration. Arterial blood samples were withdrawn during PET scanning and were analyzed by an automatic well gamma-counter and thin-layer chromatography to determine the time course of authentic (18)F-FK960 activity concentration in plasma. FK960 concentrations in brain and plasma were calculated in units of mol/L using the specific activity of FK960 preparations. RESULTS (18)F-FK960 penetrated the blood-brain barrier and underwent perfusion-dependent distribution in the entire brain. Maximal concentrations in the brain and plasma were 1.11 +/- 0.30 x 10(-7) mol/L (at 3.0 +/- 0.6 h after administration) and 4.04 +/- 1.29 x 10(-7) mol/L (at 2.0 +/- 1.1 h after administration), respectively. CONCLUSION We succeeded in measuring the FK960 concentration in the brains of conscious monkeys and in plasma after oral administration at a dose of 0.1 mg/kg. The results suggested that this method can measure the FK960 concentration in the human brain, and a potential use of the PET technique in drug development was demonstrated.
Transcriptomics Evaluation of Hexavalent Chromium Toxicity in Human Dermal Fibroblasts

Significant exposure to hexavalent chromium, a metal with broad toxicity potential in humans, has been reported. In order to understand the mechanisms of dermal toxicity induced by hexavalent chromium, global gene expression profiling of human dermal fibroblasts exposed to potassium dichromate was performed. Microarray analysis of the gene expression profile in the fibroblasts treated with potassium dichromate identified significant differential expression of approximately 1,200 transcripts compared with the control cells. Functional categorization of the differentially expressed genes identified the enrichment of genes involved in several cellular processes, including apoptosis and oxidative stress, in the fibroblasts exposed to hexavalent chromium. Induction of apoptosis and oxidative stress in the dermal fibroblasts in response to their exposure to chromium was independently confirmed by additional experiments. The potassium dichromate-induced cytotoxicity, apoptosis, and oxidative stress were significantly blocked by the addition of ferrous sulfate, an agent known for its ability to reduce chromium to the insoluble and therefore impermeable trivalent form, to the cell culture medium. Taken together, our data provide insights into the potential mechanisms underlying the dermal toxicity of hexavalent chromium and provide experimental support for the proposed protective role of ferrous sulfate in hexavalent chromium-induced toxicity.
Effect of Part-of-Speech and Lemmatization Filtering in Email Classification for Automatic Reply

We study the automatic reply of email business messages in Brazilian Portuguese. We present a novel corpus containing messages from a real application, and baseline categorization experiments using Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines. We then discuss the effect of lemmatization and the role of part-of-speech tagging ﬁltering on precision and recall. Support Vector Machines classiﬁcation coupled with non-lemmatized selection of verbs and nouns, adjectives and adverbs was the best approach, with 87.3% maximum accuracy. Straightforward lemmatization in Portuguese led to the lowest classiﬁcation results in the group, with 85.3% and 81.7% precision in SVM and Naive Bayes respectively. Thus, while lemmatization reduced precision and recall, part-of-speech ﬁltering improved overall results.
Partial Correlation-and Regression-Based Approaches to Causal Structure Learning Technical Report

We present the Total Conditioning (TC) algorithm for causal discovery suited in the presence of continuous variables. Given a set of n data points drawn from a distribution whose underlying causal structure is a directed acyclic graph (DAG), the TC algorithm returns a structure, i.e., a DAG, over the variables that tends to the correct structure when n tends to infinity. The approach builds on the structural equation modeling framework, well suited for continuous variables, and relies on causal Bayesian networks semantics to handle consistency. We compare TC and a variant, TCbw, which borrows techniques from feature selection for robustness when the number of samples is small, to the state-of-the-art PC algorithm. We show that TCbw has identical or better performance when n exceeds the number of variables, while benefiting from a better time complexity.
Power dynamics in spoken interactions: a case study on 2012 republican primary debates

In this paper, we explore how the power differential between participants of an interaction affects the way they interact in the context of political debates. We analyze the 2012 Republican presidential primary debates where we model the power index of each candidate in terms of their poll standings. We find that the candidates' power indices affected the way they interacted with others in the debates as well as how others interacted with them.
Differences in efficiency between trained and recreational cyclists.

Controversy still exists in the literature as to whether cycling experience affects gross mechanical efficiency (GME). The aim of this study was to identify differences in efficiency between trained and untrained cyclists. Thirty-two participants, 16 trained (mean+/-SD: age, 33+/-4 y; height, 1.76+/-0.05 m; mass 75+/-10 kg; Wmax, 421+/-38 W; maximal oxygen uptake, 62.6+/-7.30 mL.kg(-1). min(-1)) and 16 untrained (22+/-3 y, 175+/-0.06 m, 76+/-10 kg, 292+/-34 W, 42.6+/-7.80 mL.kg(-1). min(-1)), performed two tests of cycling efficiency. One was at the relative workloads of 50% and 60% Wmax and the other was at a fixed workload of 150 W using an electrically braked cycle ergometer. Cadence was maintained at the cyclist's preferred rate throughout. All workloads lasted 10 min with data sampling in the final 3 min. GME was calculated from the gas data. GME was found to be significantly higher in the trained cyclists across all workloads (+1.4%; p=0.03). At workloads of 60% Wmax GME was significantly lower than work at 150 W (-0.8%; p=0.04), but not significantly different from 50% Wmax. These results show that differences do exist between trained and untrained cyclists, illustrating that training experience is a factor that warrants further investigation.
The KCNH2 gene is associated with neurocognition and the risk of schizophrenia

Abstract Objectives. A genetic variant (rs3800779; M30) in the KCNH2 gene has been associated with schizophrenia, a lower intelligence quotient (IQ) and processing speed scores, altered brain functions and increased KCNH2-3.1. mRNA levels in the hippocampus. The aims of this study were to investigate whether the KCNH2 polymorphism is associated with schizophrenia-related neurocognitive deficits and to confirm the association between the variant and schizophrenia. Methods. The effects of the risk genotype on IQ and seven neurocognitive batteries were examined by the analysis of covariance in 191 healthy subjects. We performed a meta-analysis of the association between M30 and schizophrenia using five independent ethnic groups (1,720 cases; 2,418 controls). Results. Consistent with the previous study, we provided evidence that subjects with the risk T carriers had significantly lower IQ scores than those with the G/G genotype (P = 0.048). Of the seven neurocognitive batteries, subjects with the risk genotype demonstrated lower performances on attention/vigilance (P = 0.0079) and working memory (P = 0.0066) relative to subjects with the G/G genotype. Meta-analysis demonstrated evidence for an association between M30 and schizophrenia without showing heterogeneity across studies (odds ratio = 1.18; P = 0.0017). Conclusions. These data suggest that the KCNH2 polymorphism could be associated with schizophrenia-related neuropsychological deficits and the risk of developing schizophrenia.
Imaging pain relief in osteoarthritis (IPRO): protocol of a double-blind randomised controlled mechanistic study assessing pain relief and prediction of duloxetine treatment outcome

Introduction Osteoarthritis (OA) pain is a major cause of long-term disability and chronic pain in the adult population. One in five patients does not receive satisfactory pain relief, which reflects the complexity of chronic pain and the current lack of understanding of mechanisms of chronic pain. Recently, duloxetine has demonstrated clinically relevant pain relief, but only in half of treated patients with OA. Here, the aim is to investigate the neural mechanisms of pain relief and neural signatures that may predict treatment response to duloxetine in chronic knee OA pain. Methods and analysis This is an ongoing single-centre randomised placebo-controlled mechanistic study (2:1 (placebo) allocation), using a multimodal neuroimaging approach, together with psychophysiological (quantitative sensory testing), genetics and questionnaire assessments. Eighty-one subjects with chronic knee OA pain are planned to power for between-group comparisons (placebo, duloxetine responder and duloxetine non-responder). Participants have a baseline assessment and, following 6 weeks of duloxetine (30 mg for 2 weeks, then 60 mg for 4 weeks), a follow-up evaluation. Brain imaging is performed at 3T with blood-oxygen-level dependent functional MRI at rest and during pin-prick nociceptive stimulation for main outcome assessment; arterial spin labelling and structural imaging (T1-weighted) for secondary outcome assessment. Questionnaires evaluate pain, negative affect, quality of sleep and cognition. Ethics and dissemination The study has been approved by the East Midlands, Nottingham and is being carried out under the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki (64th, 2013) and Good Clinical Practice standards. Results will be disseminated in peer-reviewed journals and at scientific conferences. Trial registration number This trial is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02208778). This work was supported by Arthritis Research UK (Grant 18769).