Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Oral controlled release dosage forms: dissolution versus diffusion

ABSTRACT Introduction Controlled release (CR) dosage forms comprise a wide range of technologies, which modify the drug pharmacokinetic (PK) profile by avoiding the immediate release (IR) of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API). They are particularly of interest in chronic diseases, for narrow therapeutic index drugs or for targeting a particular gastrointestinal tract (GI) segment. Areas covered Diffusion and dissolution limited controlled release systems are described in terms of release kinetics and formulation strategies with e xamples marketed or under development. Additionally, the physiological variables affecting the release (such as fluid pH, volume and composition, physical forces, and transit times) and the in vitro dissolution techniques currently available are reviewed. Expert opinion Selection of the appropriate release mechanism is not a straightforward process, as it requires a balance based on the desired target, the API properties and the technological challenges of the dosage form structure. Diffusion, dissolution or a combination of both could be adequate without an absolute superiority of one mechanism over the other. The combination of in vivo predictive dissolution systems, with mathematical modeling of the release mechanism and its correlation with formulation composition could help to design prototype candidates, with enhanced probabilities of success in human clinical trials.
Analysis of risk communication teaching in psychosocial and other medical departments

ABSTRACT Aims: Teaching students about risk communication is an important aspect at medical schools given the growing importance of informed consent in healthcare. This observational study analyzes the quality of teaching content on risk communication and biostatistics at a medical school. Methods: Based on the concept of curriculum mapping, purpose-designed questionnaires were used via participant observers to record the frequency, characteristics and context of risk communication employed by lecturers during teaching sessions for one semester. The data was analyzed quantitatively and descriptively. Results: Teaching about risk communication was observed in 24.4% (n = 95 of 390) sessions. Prevalence varied significantly among different departments with dermatology having the highest rate (67.9%) but lesser in-depth teaching than medical psychology where risk communication concepts were discussed on a higher scale in 61.4% sessions. Relevant statistical values were not mentioned at all in 69% of these 95 sessions and clinical contexts were used rarely (55.8%). Supplementary teaching material was provided in 50.5% sessions while students asked questions in 18.9% sessions. Conclusions: Students are infrequently taught about communicating risks. When they are, the teaching does not include the mention of core biostatistics values nor does the teaching involve methods for demonstrating risk communication.
The Relationship Between Military Occupation and Diagnosed Insomnia Following Combat Deployment.

STUDY OBJECTIVES Our objective was to investigate the relationship between military occupation and diagnosed insomnia following combat deployment. METHODS This retrospective cohort study was conducted using existing electronic military databases. Eligible participants were military personnel with a deployment to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kuwait between 2005 and 2009. A total of 66,869 US Navy and Marine Corps service members comprised the study sample and were categorized by military occupation. Military medical databases were used to abstract information on insomnia diagnoses and prescription medications. RESULTS The overall prevalence of diagnosed insomnia was 3.4%. In multivariable logistic regression, law enforcement (odds ratio [OR] = 1.62, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.28-2.04), motor transport (OR = 1.38, 95% CI = 1.14-1.66), and healthcare occupations (OR = 2.24, 95% CI = 1.85-2.71) had significantly higher odds of an insomnia diagnosis following deployment than infantry occupations. These results remained unchanged after excluding those who reported posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Non-benzodiazepine sedative/hypnotics were prescribed for 44.2% of those with insomnia, and prescription patterns differed by occupation. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that military occupation may play a primary role in the onset and management of insomnia. The findings provide rationale for targeting individuals in insomnia-susceptible occupations with better methods to prevent and/or minimize sleep issues during and after combat deployment.
The effects of methanol and ethanol foliar application under salinity stress on some physiological characteristics of Pelargonium graveolens L.

To study the effects of methanol and ethanol foliar application (0, 10 and 20 % v/v) and NaCl salinity stress (0, 75 and 150 mM) on yield and some physiological traits of geranium (Pelargonium graveolens L.), a factorial experiment was conducted based on completely randomized design with three replications. Salinity showed significant effect on all characteristics, except root dry weight, chlorophyll b and Fe content. Effect of foliar application of methanol and ethanol was significant on proline, protein, chlorophyll a, essential oil, Fe and K content, root dry weight and IC50. The results also revealed the significant interaction of salinity by foliar application of alcohol in relation to the chlorophyll a and protein content. The greatest protein and chlorophyll a contents were recorded by the NaCl0 + methanol20% treatment, which was significantly different from the corresponding control. Dry weight of aerial parts, K/Na ratio, essential oil, K, P, Fe and Zn contents were negatively affected by the salinity stress. With increasing salinity stress the amounts of malondialdehyde and H2O2 were elevated. Among alcohol treatments, methanol foliar application was more effective than ethanol. Methanol had better effect on IC50, root dry weight, Fe, K and essential oil content, while ethanol20% increased the proline content significantly as compared to the methanol and control treatments. Overall, the results indicated that foliar application of methanol ameliorated the negative effects of salinity in geranium, when averaged over the salinity levels under study.
Grid expansion and firm turnover in Indonesia

I ask whether electrification causes industrial development. I combine newly digitized data from the Indonesian state electricity company with rich manufacturing census data. To understand when and how electrification can cause industrial development, I shed light on an important economic mechanism firm turnover. In particular, I study the effect of the extensive margin of electrification (grid expansion) on the extensive margin of industrial development (firm entry and exit). To deal with endogenous grid placement, I build a hypothetical electric transmission grid based on colonial incumbent infrastructure and geographic cost factors. I find that electrification causes industrial development, represented by an increase in the number of manufacturing firms, manufacturing workers, and manufacturing output. Electrification increases firm entry rates, but also exit rates. Higher turnover rates lead to higher average productivity and induce reallocation towards more productive firms in electrified areas. This is consistent with electrification lowering entry costs, increasing competition and forcing unproductive firms to exit more often. Without the possibility of entry or competitive effects of entry, the effects of electrification are likely to be smaller. (JEL D24, L60, O13, O14, Q41) ∗ Department of Economics and STICERD, London School of Economics, d.kassem@lse.ac. uk. I thank Robin Burgess and Oriana Bandiera for helpful advice and continuous support. I also thank Gharad Bryan, Michel Azulai, Clare Balboni, Matteo Benetton, Jan De Loecker, Thomas Drechsel, Greg Fischer, Alessandro Gavazza, Maitreesh Ghatak, Hanwei Huang, Rachael Meager, Panos Mavrokonstantis, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, Michael Peters, Alex Rothenberg, Mark Schankerman, Pasquale Schiraldi, Arthur Seibold, John Sutton, Junichi Yamasaki, and various seminar and conference participants. I am grateful for the support of Suroso Isnandar, Muhammad Ikbal Nur, Musa Partahi Marbun, Ahmed Yusuf Salile and various others at the Indonesian State Electricity Company Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN). Financial support from the IGC and STICERD is gratefully acknowledged.
Scientific opinion on dietary reference values for copper.

Following a request from the European Commission, the EFSA Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies (NDA) derived Dietary Reference Values (DRVs) for copper. Owing to the absence of appropriate biomarkers of copper status and the limitations of available balance studies, the Panel was unable to derive Average Requirements (ARs) and Population Reference Intakes (PRIs). Hence, Adequate Intakes (AIs) were defined based on mean observed intakes in several European Union (EU) countries, given that there is no evidence of overt copper deficiency in the European population. Data from balance studies were used as supportive evidence. For adults, AIs of 1.6 mg/day for men and 1.3 mg/day for women are proposed. For children, AIs are 0.7 mg/day for children aged 1 to < 3 years, 1 mg/day for children aged 3 to < 10 years, and 1.3 and 1.1 mg/day for boys and girls aged 10 to < 18 years, respectively. For infants aged 7–11 months, based on mean observed intakes in four EU countries, an AI of 0.4 mg/day is proposed, which is supported by upwards extrapolation of estimated copper intake in exclusively breast-fed infants. For pregnant women, an increment of 0.2 mg/day is estimated to cover the amount of copper deposited in the fetus and the placenta over the course of pregnancy and in anticipation of the needs for lactation, and for lactating women the same increment is estimated to cover the amount of copper secreted with breast milk. Thus, for pregnant and lactating women, the Panel derived an AI of 1.5 mg/day. © European Food Safety Authority, 2015
Graph Attention Topic Modeling Network

Existing topic modeling approaches possess several issues, including the overfitting issue of Probablistic Latent Semantic Indexing (pLSI), the failure of capturing the rich topical correlations among topics in Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and high inference complexity. In this paper, we provide a new method to overcome the overfitting issue of pLSI by using the amortized inference with word embedding as input, instead of the Dirichlet prior in LDA. For generative topic model, the large number of free latent variables is the root of overfitting. To reduce the number of parameters, the amortized inference replaces the inference of latent variable with a function which possesses the shared (amortized) learnable parameters. The number of the shared parameters is fixed and independent of the scale of the corpus. To overcome the limited application of amortized inference to independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data, a novel graph neural network, Graph Attention TOpic Network (GATON), is proposed to model the topic structure of non-i.i. d documents according to the following two observations. First, pLSI can be interpreted as stochastic block model (SBM) on a specific bi-partite graph. Second, graph attention network (GAT) can be explained as the semi-amortized inference of SBM, which relaxes the i.i. d data assumption of vanilla amortized inference. GATON provides a novel scheme, i.e. graph convolution operation based scheme, to integrate word similarity and word co-occurrence structure. Specifically, the bag-of-words document representation is modeled as a bi-partite graph topology. Meanwhile, word embedding, which captures the word similarity, is modeled as attribute of the word node and the term frequency vector is adopted as the attribute of the document node. Based on the weighted (attention) graph convolution operation, the word co-occurrence structure and word similarity patterns are seamlessly integrated for topic identification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness of GATON on topic identification not only benefits the document classification, but also significantly refines the input word embedding.
BROWNIAN MOTION AFTER EINSTEIN AND SMOLUCHOWSKI: SOME NEW APPLICATIONS AND NEW EXPERIMENTS∗

Danish Polymer Centre, Risø National Laboratory DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark Department of Biological Physics, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) H-1117 Budapest, Hungary c Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems Nöthnitzer Strasse 38, D-01187, Dresden, Germany Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics Pfotenhauer Strasse 108, D-01307 Dresden, Germany Biosystems Department, Risø National Laboratory DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark Building 309, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
Antimicrobial Resistance of Fungi Isolated from Oil-Producing Vicinity

Antimicrobial resistance is a complex problem that affects all society. Some species of fungi are naturally resistant to treatment with certain types of antifungal agents. This study therefore investigated the resistant of fungi to antimicrobial agents in oil producing industry. Fungi were isolated from oilfield wastewater enriched soils obtained from the vicinity of an onshore oil producing platform using standard methods. The total fungi counts ranged between 1.15 x 10to 4.09 x 10 CFU/g, while the hydrocarbon utilizing fungi ranged between 1.7 x 10 to 5.4 x 10 CFU/g. The fungal isolates were identified as Aspergillusniger, Penicillium sp, Saccharomyces sp, Fusariumlichenicola and Aspergillussydowii. Antifungal sensitivity testing showed that Aspergillusniger, Aspergillussydowii and Fusariumlichenicola were all resistant to Nystatin, Clotrimazole, Fluconazole and Ketoconazole. On the other hand, Penicillium was sensitive to Clostrinazole, Ketoconazole and Fluconazole but intermediate to Nystatrin while Saccharomyces was resistant to all the antifungal agents except Fluconazole with which it recorded an intermediate reaction. The results obtained revealed the occurrence of antifungal resistant in the oil producing vicinity. In order to control the spread of antifungal resistance, it is important to have an understanding of the environments in which such spread is likely as to help mitigate its occurrence to protect public health.
Faster Parallel Graph Connectivity Algorithms for GPU

Finding whether a graph is k-connected, and identifying its k-connected components is a fundamental problem in graph theory. For this reason, there have been several algorithm for this problem in both sequential and parallel settings. Several recent sequential and parallel algorithms for k-connectivity rely on one or more breadth-first traversals of the input graph. It can be also noticed that the time spent by the algorithms on BFS operations is usually a significant portion of the overall runtime of the algorithm. While BFS can be made very efficient in a sequential setting, the same cannot be said in the case of parallel environments. A major factor in this difficulty is due to the inherent requirement to use a shared a queue, balance work among multiple threads in every round, synchronization, and the like. Optimizing the execution of BFS on many current parallel architectures is therefore quite challenging. In this thesis, we present the first GPU algorithms and implementations for 2and 3-connectivity. We improve upon them through the use of certificates to reduce the size of the input graph and provide the fastest implementations yet. We also study how one can, in the context of algorithms for graph connectivity, mitigate the practical inefficiency of BFS operations in parallel. Our technique suggests that such algorithms may not require a BFS of the input graph but actually can work with a sparse spanning subgraph of the input graph. The incorrectness introduced by not using a BFS spanning tree can then be offset by further post-processing steps on suitably defined small auxiliary graphs. We apply our technique to our GPU implementations for 2and 3connectivity and improve upon them further by a factor of 2.2x and 2.1x respectively.
Relevance in the eye of the beholder Relevance in the eye of the beholder

This thesis examines a method for how humans can assess quality of classifications by image based neural network. Through examples visualisations of layerwise relevance propagation (Bach et al. 2015) test participants are tasked with learning to differentiate correctly and incorrectly classified images. To test their learning, they are tasked with evaluating visualisations based on whether they believe the underlying classification to be correct or not. The test was conducted for 20 test participants who after 10 learning examples each were tasked with evaluating the same 72 visualisations. Three different types of visualisations are developed according to different mathematical principles. The results show that the test was often confusing for the test participants indicating both that better preparation and training of test participants might be appropriate but also that the subject is inaccessible to many. There are also small beneficial effects which are expected to increase with better training and preparation.
Investigation of the effect of ventilation system inlet location on particle motion in a room using Multi Relaxation Time-Lattice Boltzmann Method

In this work Multi-Relaxation Time Lattice Boltzmann Method is used to investigate the effect of the inlet air location on particle motion in a room. The scaled modeled room is one-tenth scale of a full-size room with dimensions of 0.914m × 0.305m × 0.457m. For an inlet air with dimension of 0.101m×0.101m, two locations (ceiling and floor) are studied. The Large Eddy Simulation with the standard Smagorinsky model is utilized to simulate the turbulent indoor airflow. Particles with 1 and 10 micrometer sizes are selected for investigation of particle dispersion and deposition in the room. The simulation results for number of deposited particles and those exiting the room show that when the inlet air is on the floor, the number of larger 10μm particles leaving through the exhaust register is more than the case for inlet on the ceiling. For smaller 1 μm particles, however, no significant difference between the floor and ceiling inlet air for particles leaving the room thought the exhaust register was seen. The present results also show that the gravity significantly affects the particle deposition, and the number of deposited 10 μm particles on the floor are about 100 times that of the deposited 1 μm particles when the inlet air is at ceiling.
Electoral violence and firm resilience: Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire∗

This paper examines firm resilience after a short-lived, but severe, civil conflict in a context of high uncertainty. Thanks to a rich firm-level database, we follow surviving enterprises before, during and after the 2011 post-electoral crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. Our main findings are summarized as follows. First, there is a rapid recovery one year after the crisis (half of the losses was recoup) but the level of productivity remains lower by ten percent three years after the crisis. Second, the relationship between labor use (before the crisis) and resilience is complex. Labor-intensive firms are more able to rebound, contrary to those relying on skilled workers. Third, credit-constrained firms faced lower resilience, highlighting the importance of access to credit not only in normal times but also during crises.
Competition and Conflict∗

It is debated whether community driven development programs (CDD), or aid more generally, are effective in reducing local conflict or poverty. This paper contributes to our understanding of how to design CDD programs by studying the world’s largest CDD program in Indonesia, which introduced competition for funds among villages. We leverage the design of the program to estimate the causal but unintended impact of competition on conflict. The estimated relationship is U-shaped where moderate levels of competition decrease conflict, and the effect is driven by within-village conflicts. We analyse potential mechanisms and find evidence that one likely channel is the effect of competition on attendance in village meetings, consistent with competition incentivizing participation in local institutions. ∗We thank Sam Bazzi, Larry Chavis, Ben Olken and Luhur Bima for sharing Indonesian data. We thank John Voss for sharing helpful and detailed information about the Kecamantan Development Program. We thank seminar participants at LSE, UCSD, University of Reading, Queen Mary University of London, East Carolina University and Lafayette College and conference participants at the 2016 AAEA meetings, the 2016 AERE meetings and the 2019 EEA congress. We acknowledge funding from ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. †University of California, San Diego. E-mail:teevrat@ucsd.edu ‡Queen Mary University of London, UK. E-mail: c.gennaioli@qmul.ac. uk §University of Reading, UK. E-mail: s.lovo@reading.ac. uk ¶University of California, San Diego. Email: gsinger@ucsd.edu
Effect of Electroacupuncture on Postoperative Gastrointestinal Recovery in Patients Undergoing Thoracoscopic Surgery: A Feasibility Study

Background The aim of this study was to study the feasibility and acceptability of electroacupuncture (EA) for preventing postoperative gastrointestinal complications in patients undergoing thoracoscopic segmentectomy/lobectomy. Material/Methods Sixty patients who underwent video-assisted thoracoscopic (VATS) segmentectomy/lobectomy received either EA treatments plus usual care (EA group) or usual care alone (UC group). Patients in the EA group were given 30 minutes of bilateral electroacupuncture on 3 acupoints [Neiguan (PC6), Zusanli (ST36), and Shangjuxu (ST37)] at 3 time points (24 hours before surgery, and 4 hours and 24 hours after surgery). The primary outcomes were recruitment, retention, acceptability of the EA intervention, incidence and severity of abdominal distension (AD), and time to first flatus and defecation. Secondary outcomes included postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV), pain intensity, and duration of hospital stay. Results We recruited 60 participants and 59 were randomized into 2 groups for this study: 30 in the EA group and 29 in the UC group. In total, 57 participants completed the study. With the exception of one participant in the EA group, all participants completed all three sessions of EA. The one exclusion was a case where a paravertebral block was not used during the surgery. Qualitative findings from the acceptability questionnaire indicated that participants viewed the EA treatment as acceptable. After EA treatment, there was a small but statistically significant improvement in participants’ acceptance of EA for alleviating postoperative gastrointestinal discomfort (P=0.001). The EA group showed improved outcomes compared to the UC group in terms of time to first flatus (20.8±4.6 versus 24.1±6.2 hours, P=0.026) and defecation (53.9±6.0 versus 57.5±7.2 hours, P=0.046). No significant differences appeared regarding AD, rescue medication, or duration of hospitalization. PONV and pain intensity were similar in both groups at the recorded time periods. Conclusions EA is feasible and acceptable to patients undergoing VATS surgery. Our preliminary findings of EA promoting postoperative recovery of gastrointestinal function warrants large randomized controlled trials.