Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exhaled Breath and Oxygenator Sweep Gas Propionaldehyde in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Background: Oxidative stress-induced lipid peroxidation (LPO) due to neutrophil-derived reactive oxygen species plays a key role in the early stage of the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Monitoring of oxidative stress in this patient population is of great interest, and, ideally, this can be done noninvasively. Recently, propionaldehyde, a volatile chemical compound (VOC) released during LPO, was identified in the breath of lung transplant recipients as a marker of oxidative stress. The aim of the present study was to identify if markers of oxidative stress appear in the oxygenator outflow gas of patients with severe ARDS treated with veno-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). Methods: The present study included patients with severe ARDS treated with veno-venous ECMO. Concentrations of acetone, isoprene, and propionaldehyde were measured in inspiratory air, exhaled breath, and oxygenator inflow and outflow gas at corresponding time points. Ion-molecule reaction mass spectrometry was used to measure VOCs in a sequential order within the first 24 h and on day three after ECMO initiation. Results: Nine patients (5 female, 4 male; age = 42.1 ± 12.2 year) with ARDS and already established ECMO therapy (pre-ECMO PaO2/FiO2 = 44.0 ± 11.5 mmHg) were included into analysis. VOCs appeared in comparable amounts in breath and oxygenator outflow gas (acetone: 838 (422–7632) vs. 1114 (501–4916) ppbv; isoprene: 53.7 (19.5–244) vs. 48.7 (37.9–108) ppbv; propionaldehyde: 53.7 (32.1–82.2) vs. 42.9 (24.8–122) ppbv). Concentrations of acetone, isoprene, and propionaldehyde in breath and oxygenator outflow gas showed a parallel course with time. Conclusions: Acetone, isoprene, and propionaldehyde appear in breath and oxygenator outflow gas in comparable amounts. This allows for the measurement of these VOCs in a critically ill patient population via the ECMO oxygenator outflow gas without the need of ventilator circuit manipulation.
Impact of Interactions between Ferulic and Chlorogenic Acids on Enzymatic and Non-Enzymatic Lipids Oxidation: An Example of Bread Enriched with Green Coffee Flour

This study investigated the activity, mode of inhibition, and interactions between lipoxygenase (LOX) inhibitors and compounds able to inhibit lipids oxidation (LPO) derived from green coffee beans (GCBs), wholemeal wheat flour (WF), and bread enriched with GCB, in comparison with pure chemical standards of the main active components—ferulic (FA) and chlorogenic acids (CGA). Both GCB and WF contain potentially bioaccessible and bioavailable LPO inhibitors acting synergistically. Both FA and CGA presented nearly additive interaction. Potentially bioaccessible LOX inhibitors from GCB and WF acted synergistically, whereas moderate antagonism was found for potentially bioavailable compounds. The activity of CGA and FA was quite similar (EC50 = 18.56 and 22.36 g DW/ml, respectively) and synergistic action between these components was found. The LPO activity of functional breads was positively correlated with the percentage of GCB (R2 = 0.98). Ferulic acid and CGA acted as competitive LOX inhibitors, whereas potentially bioaccessible compounds from bread enriched with GCB demonstrated an uncompetitive mode of action. Green coffee beans, WF, and the proposed functional product could be helpful in dietary therapy and prevention of so-called lifestyle disorders related with the lipid metabolism. Moreover, this paper highlights the need to study the interactions between the active ingredients of newly designed functional products.
Social Inclusion and Mental Health of Children with Physical Disabilities in Gaza, Palestine

Purpose: Social inclusion of children with physical disabilities is essential for their mental health. The long-standing conflict and political instability in Palestine since 1948 has resulted in an unprecedented number of children with disabilities. This study aimed to assess social inclusion and mental health of children with physical disabilities in Palestine. Method: A mixed methods research design was used. The 12-item General Health Questionnaire and a Social Inclusion Questionnaire were administered to 100 children with amputations, 12-18 years of age, in the Gaza Strip. Ten semi-structured interviews were also conducted with personnel working across civil society rehabilitation services in the area, particularly in services that focussed on the physical rehabilitation of children who had lost a limb. Results: Quantitative findings indicated that 88% of children’s disabilities were caused by war-related incidents. While the sample of children showed on average relatively low levels of psychological distress, males reported feeling more socially included and having better mental health than did females. Furthermore, there was a strong positive correlation between mental health and social inclusion, and a moderate positive correlation between psychological distress and social inclusion. The qualitative data identified different factors that hinder social inclusion, mainly: political instability; under-resourced disability organisations; lack of coordinated efforts; and negative societal attitudes towards disability. Conclusion: A new questionnaire for social inclusion was developed, which can now be used as a tool to assess social inclusion in similar contexts; as well as a culturally-adapted form of the General Health Questionnaire-12 to assess mental health. There is a clear need for service-providers to move beyond a medical model of care to one that embraces community-based rehabilitation and the realisation of rights, in order to promote the social inclusion and mental health of children with disabilities in Palestinian society.
Perspectives of Protocol Based Breaking Bad News among Medical Patients and Physicians in a Teaching Hospital, Ethiopia

Background Discussing potentially bad outcomes is a standard communication task in clinical care. Physicians' awareness on ways to communicate bad news is considered low. SPIKES protocol is the most popular strategy used by physicians, but its practice and patients' perception are not known. This study attempted to fill the knowledge gap on protocol implementation, patient preference and physician effects. Methods Hospital-based descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at SPHMMC from May 1 to June 30 using structured interviews administered to patients and physicians. Three hundred and sixty patients and 111 physicians were included. Assessment of SPIKES performance, patient satisfaction, patient preference, and physician awareness, attitude and effects were studied. Results Performance of SPIKES protocol was setting (74.5%), perception (51.1%), invitation (56.3%), knowledge (15.9%), emotion (22.3%) and summary (10.1%). Only 30.6% of the patients were entirely satisfied with the interaction, and 19.2% with knowledge attained. Patient satisfaction was associated with physician asking how much information they like (P=0.025). Patient desire and report showed variation. Eighty-two percent of the physicians were not aware of the protocol, and 83.8% had no training. Half of the physicians feel depressed after disclosure. Conclusions Patient satisfaction with communication process and knowledge is poor, as is performance of SPIKES components. Satisfaction is related to being asked how much patients want to know. Patients' desires on how to be told news is different from how it is done. Breaking bad news increases feeling of depression. Awareness and training on the protocol are deficient; medical schools should incorporate it into their studies and implement proper follow-up.
East‐West Coast differences in total electron content over the continental US

Total electron content (TEC) measurements made by a network of dense GPS receivers over the continental US are used to investigate ionospheric longitudinal differences. We find that the evening TEC is substantially higher on the US east coast than on the west, and vice versa for the morning TEC; the longitudinal difference displays a clear diurnal variation. Through an analysis of morning‐evening variability in the east‐west TEC difference, minimum variability is found to coincide with the longitudes of zero magnetic declination over the continental US. We suggest that these new findings of longitudinal differences in ionospheric TEC at midlatitudes are caused by the longitudinal difference in magnetic declination combined with the effects of thermospheric zonal winds which are subject to directional reversal over the course of a day. This study indicates that longitudinal variations in TEC measurements contain critical information on thermospheric zonal winds. The proposed declination‐zonal wind mechanism may also provide a new insight into longitude/UT changes at midlatitudes on a global scale, as well as into some geospace disturbances.
Encoder Decoder based Nepali News Headline Generation

In this paper, a method for Nepali News Headline Generation is presented. The proposed method uses GRUs, in an encoder-decoder fashion, taking the news content as input and generating a headline as the output. The news is converted into word tokens, which are vectorized using FastText, trained on a corpus of Nepali news articles and headlines collected from several web portals. The headline generation model is also trained on the same corpus. A sequence to sequence model, with an encoder and a decoder GRU is used as the generation model. The model was able to attain a BLEU score of 22.1 on the test set.
Evaluation of the Robustness of Surface Characterisation of Carbon Fibre Composites Using Wavelet Texture Analysis

The mechanical properties of advanced composites are essential for their structural performance, but the surface finish on exterior composite panels is of critical importance for customer satisfaction. Previous work by the authors established the feasibility of wavelet texture analysis (WTA) for the task of automatically classifying the surface finish of carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) samples based on computer image processing. This paper presents an evaluation of the robustness of the WTA method to common process errors that can occur in the imaging of material samples. WTA creates a rich representation of the texture in an image that includes features related to both scale and orientation. Principal components analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of the texture feature vector to a single principal component that could be used as the basis for discrimination between grades of CRFP sample surface finish quality. The results obtained indicate that the WTA method is robust to: significant horizontal and/or vertical translations of the sample being imaged; significant rotation of the sample being imaged; and significant dilation of the sample being imaged. The results obtained suggest that as long as reasonable precautions are taken in sample imaging, then the WTA method will yield repeatable results.
ADAMTS1 Supports Endothelial Plasticity of Glioblastoma Cells with Relevance for Glioma Progression

Gliomas in general and the more advanced glioblastomas (GBM) in particular are the most usual tumors of the central nervous system with poor prognosis. GBM patients develop resistance to distinct therapies, in part due to the existence of tumor cell subpopulations with stem-like properties that participate in trans-differentiation events. Within the complex tumor microenvironment, the involvement of extracellular proteases remains poorly understood. The extracellular protease ADAMTS1 has already been reported to contribute to the plasticity of cancer cells. Accordingly, this basic knowledge and the current availability of massive sequencing data from human gliomas, reinforced the development of this work. We first performed an in silico study of ADAMTS1 and endothelial markers in human gliomas, providing the basis to further assess these molecules in several primary glioblastoma-initiating cells and established GBM cells with the ability to acquire an endothelial-like phenotype. Using a co-culture approach of endothelial and GBM cells, we noticed a relevant function of ADAMTS1 in GBM cells leading the organization of endothelial-like networks and, even more significantly, we found a blockade of the formation of tumor-spheres and a deficient response to hypoxia in the absence of ADAMTS1. Our data support a chief role of this protease modulating the phenotypic plasticity of GBM.
The Impact of Knowledge Sources on Knowledge Creation: A Study in Thai Innovative Companies

In today fast changing business world, innovation has become the mainstay of every organization. Organizations have to ensure that their business strategies are innovative to build and sustain competitive advantage. Innovation is a result of knowledge acquisition, sharing and assimilation through knowledge creation. However, innovation is extremely dependent on the availability of knowledge and therefore the complexity created by the explosion of richness and reach of knowledge has to be identified and managed to ensure successful innovation. In the context of Thai innovative companies, there are not many studies conducted to investigate the impact of internal and external sources of knowledge on knowledge creation. The main purpose of this study is to identify the sources of knowledge which includes organizational knowledge and market orientation as well as to investigate their impacts on knowledge creation. The dimensions of organizational knowledge consisted of social interaction, organizational routines and information system. Meanwhile, the dimensions of market orientation consisted of customer orientation, competitor orientation and supplier orientation. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the influence of both sources of knowledge on knowledge creation. The study on 209 Thai innovative companies showed that all factors of organizational knowledge significantly impacted knowledge creation. Social interaction became the most influential factor. The result also showed that all factors of market orientation had significant influence on knowledge creation. Customer orientation contributed the most impact on knowledge creation.
Interest rate swap usage for hedging and speculation by Dutch listed non-financial firms

This study investigates the financial characteristics of firms that influence the usage of interest rate swaps among Dutch non-financial firms to either speculate or hedge against interest rate risks, whether those financial characteristics influence the usage of interest rate swaps differently if the purpose of interest rate swaps usage differs, e.g. to hedge or to speculate, and also whether the purpose of IRS usage (hedging or speculation) influence firm values differently. The research model provided a novel way to identify hedgers and speculators by creating an index from the information from financial statements such as managements’ subjective declarations and auditors’ independent judgements on hedge accounting. Based on sample of around 119 companies non-financial Dutch listed firms in Amsterdam exchange from 2010 to 2014, I find that the study shows a positive significant effect of firm size, leverage and a negative significant effect operating risk on IRS usage either for hedging or speculative reasons. It also shows that given a certain level of growth opportunities, firms with higher cash flow sensitivities to interest rate use more IRS to hedge. Empirical results show that hedgers only have significant lower size then speculators and all other financial characteristics do not influence hedgers or speculators significantly differently. I found a positive influence of usage of IRS used for hedging on firm value. IRS used with higher possibility to hedge increase firm value and used with higher possibility to speculate decrease firm value. Contradictory to most of empirical findings, I find a significant negative impact of IRS usage on firm value.
Research on Human Travel Correlation for Urban Transport Planning Based on Multisource Data

With the rapid development of positioning techniques, a large amount of human travel trajectory data is collected. These datasets have become an effective data resource for obtaining urban traffic patterns. However, many traffic analyses are only based on a single dataset. It is difficult to determine whether a single-dataset-based result can meet the requirement of urban transport planning. In response to this problem, we attempted to obtain traffic patterns and population distributions from the perspective of multisource traffic data using license plate recognition (LPR) data and cellular signaling (CS) data. Based on the two kinds of datasets, identification methods of residents’ travel stay point are proposed. For LPR data, it was identified based on different vehicle speed thresholds at different times. For CS data, a spatiotemporal clustering algorithm based on time allocation was proposed to recognize it. We then used the correlation coefficient r and the significance test p-values to analyze the correlations between the CS and LPR data in terms of the population distribution and traffic patterns. We studied two real-world datasets from five working days of human mobility data and found that they were significantly correlated for the stay and move population distributions. Then, the analysis scale was refined to hour level. We also found that they still maintain a significant correlation. Finally, the origin–destination (OD) matrices between traffic analysis zones (TAZs) were obtained. Except for a few TAZs with poor correlations due to the fewer LPR records, the correlations of the other TAZs remained high. It showed that the population distribution and traffic patterns computed by the two datasets were fairly similar. Our research provides a method to improve the analysis of complex travel patterns and behaviors and provides opportunities for travel demand modeling and urban transport planning. The findings can also help decision-makers understand urban human mobility and can serve as a guide for urban management and transport planning.
A Better Baseline for Second Order Gradient Estimation in Stochastic Computation Graphs

Motivated by the need for higher order gradients in multi-agent reinforcement learning and meta-learning, this paper studies the construction of baselines for second order Monte Carlo gradient estimators in order to reduce the sample variance. Following the construction of a stochastic computation graph (SCG), the Infinitely Differentiable Monte-Carlo Estimator (DiCE) can generate correct estimates of arbitrary order gradients through differentiation. However, a baseline term that serves as a control variate for reducing variance is currently provided only for first order gradient estimation, limiting the utility of higher-order gradient estimates. To improve the sample efficiency of DiCE, we propose a new baseline term for higher order gradient estimation. This term may be easily included in the objective, and produces unbiased variance-reduced estimators under (automatic) differentiation, without affecting the estimate of the objective itself or of the first order gradient. Importantly it reuses the same baseline function (e.g. the state-value function in reinforcement learning) already used for the first order baseline. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations of our baseline term, which demonstrate that it can dramatically reduce the variance of second order gradient estimators produced by DiCE. This computational tool can be easily used to estimate second order gradients with unprecedented efficiency wherever automatic differentiation is utilised, and has the potential to unlock applications of higher order gradients in reinforcement learning and meta-learning.
Application of Shear Wave Elastography to Evaluate the Stiffness of Normal Testes and Inflammatory Epididymal Tail Masses.

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to investigate the application value of shear wave elastography in examining normal testes and inflammatory epididymal tail masses. METHODS We examined 110 healthy male volunteers (with a total of 220 testes) and 25 patients with epididymitis via conventional scrotal ultrasonography and shear wave elastography. The mean (Emean), minimal (Emin), maximal (Emax), and standard deviation (ESD) values of elasticity were acquired. The inflammatory masses were assessed at initial diagnosis, at weeks 1 and 2 of standard anti-inflammatory treatment, upon remission, and at 2 weeks after remission. RESULTS The Emean values of different regions in testes varied in the following order: center region (3.14 ± 0.35 kPa) < upper- or lower-pole capsule (upper, 3.94 ± 0.90 kPa; lower, 3.94 ± 0.97 kPa) < posterior capsule (5.96 ± 1.46 kPa) < anterior capsule (6.27 ± 1.58 kPa). The Emean value of the center of the testicular parenchyma in the short axis was significantly larger than that in the long axis (3.47 ± 0.32 vs 3.14 ± 0.35 kPa; P < 0.05). There were significant differences in the Emean value between inflammatory epididymal tail masses at initial diagnosis, at 1 and 2 weeks after treatment, upon remission, and at 2 weeks after remission (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Shear wave elastography can be used to reflect the relative hardness of normal testes and inflammatory epididymal tail masses.
The Greenbook and U.S. Monetary Policy

Although very attractive both theoretically and empirically, Taylor rules imply mechanical responses by the policy variable (interest rate) to fundamental ones (inflation and output gap). This study looks for empirical evidence of a more sophisticated monetary policy, one which takes into account expected future developments. An important piece of information added is the "Greenbook" forecast series, calculated by the Federal Reserve staff and which allow evaluation of expected inflation shocks. These shocks are significant in the estimated Taylor rule, confirming that policymaking is forward looking. This paper also demonstrates that a simple Taylor rule may be a misspecification if policymakers have in mind a time-varying inflation target.
Hedgehogs for neutral dissipative germs of holomorphic diffeomorphisms of (C^2,0)

We prove the existence of hedgehogs for germs of complex analytic diffeomorphisms of (C, 0) with a semi-neutral fixed point at the origin, using topological techniques. This approach also provides an alternative proof of a theorem of Pérez-Marco on the existence of hedgehogs for germs of univalent holomorphic maps of (C, 0) with a neutral fixed point.