Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Mucolytic Agents on COPD Exacerbations: A Pair-wise and Network Meta-analysis

ABSTRACT Mucolytics are potentially useful for the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), although there is conflicting advice on their use in different guideline documents. Furthermore, there is paucity of data comparing the efficacy of the different mucolytic agents in reducing the odds of COPD exacerbations. We performed pair-wise and network meta-analyses to evaluate the impact of mucoly-tics in COPD. Randomized clinical trials lasting at least 3 months and investigating the effects of mucolytics on COPD exacerbations were identified from published studies and repository databases. Mucolytics significantly reduced the odds of exacerbation vs. placebo (11 studies analyzed: odds ratio (OR) 0.51, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.39–0.67; p < 0.001). The most effective drugs were carbocysteine, erdosteine, and N-acetylcysteine 1,200 mg/day (SUCRA 68.0–79.0%), whereas the OR was similar to placebo for ambroxol and N-acetylcysteine 600 mg/day. Only N-acetylcysteine 1,200 mg/day significantly protected against exacerbations vs. placebo (2 studies analyzed: OR 0.56, 95% CI 0.35–0.92; p < 0.05; high quality of evidence). A signal of effectiveness was detected for carbocysteine (2 studies analyzed: OR 0.45, 95% CI 0.20–1.01; p ≥ 0.05; moderate quality of evidence). Specific differences in study designs and patient-related characteristics, such as history of exacerbations and ethnicity, were potential effect modifiers for our statistical models, whereas neither respiratory function nor the use of corticosteroids influenced the analysis. This meta-analysis demonstrates that mucolytics are useful in preventing COPD exacerbations as maintenance add-on therapy to patients with frequent exacerbations. The effectiveness of mucolytics is independent of the severity of airway obstruction and the use of inhaled corticosteroids.
World English and world Englishes: Trends, tensions, varieties, and standards

The current condition of the English language worldwide is both straightforward and convoluted. It is straightforward in that English is now widely agreed to be the global lingua franca (see Panel 1); it is convoluted in that the term lingua franca has traditionally referred to low-level makeshift languages, whereas English is a vast complex whose 'innumerable clearly distinguishable varieties' range from high social and scientific registers through to some of the most maligned basilects on earth.What then does 'lingua franca' mean when used by such commentators with regard to English? Not the pidgin and creole 'Englishes' scattered throughout the world, or the 'fractured' or 'broken' English that other commentators have called (more conventionally) the lingua franca of world business. The answer in these instances has to be Standard English — an haute cuisine lingua franca if ever there was one. But whose Standard English, and what in any case constitutes the standard for a language whose users are counted in hundreds of millions worldwide (however uncertain the total)? In 1900, the answer would have been easy: it was the Queen's or King's English, also known quite simply as 'good English' or 'proper English': the usage of a British minority so socially assured that its accent stills serves, a century later, as an institutionalized pronunciation target for learners in many parts
Configurations and mathematical models of parallel link mechanisms using multi drive linear motors

In this paper, parallel link mechanisms for multi drive linear motors (MDLMs) are proposed. The multi drive is a control method for linear motors in which a number of moving parts are individually driven on one stator part. Various configurations of parallel link mechanisms which were constructed for MDLMs are proposed. These mechanisms offer a wide range of motion in addition to the existing characteristics that parallel mechanisms provide, namely, rigid mechanisms, high precision, and high speed. Moreover, they are suitable for force control because of their low friction direct drive actuators. In this paper, the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of 2-DOF (xy) and 3-DOF (xyθ) planar parallel link mechanisms are investigated. A singularity analysis and internal force control method for a 3-DOF with 4 redundant moving parts is derived. The condition of dynamic decoupling and the constant inertia design of a 2-DOF with 2 moving parts and a 3-DOF with 4 moving parts are derived. The effectiveness of these analyses is then confirmed by numerical simulation. Based on this analysis, a prototype of the 3-DOF with 4 moving parts is designed and developed.
Moonlighting Functions of Polypeptide Elongation Factor 1: From Actin Bundling to Zinc Finger Protein R1-Associated Nuclear Localization

Eukaryotic polypeptide elongation factor EF-1 is not only a major translational factor, but also one of the most important multifunctional (moonlighting) proteins. EF-1 consists of four different subunits collectively termed EF-1αββ′γ and EF-1αβγδ in plants and animals, respectively. EF-1α•GTP catalyzes the binding of aminoacyl-tRNA to the A-site of the ribosome. EF-1ββ′γ (EF-1β and EF-1β′), catalyzes GDP/GTP exchange on EF-1α•GDP to regenerate EF-1α•GTP. EF-1γ has recently been shown to have glutathione S-transferase activity. EF-2 catalyzes the translocation of peptidyl-tRNA from the A-site to the P-site on the ribosome. Recently, molecular mimicry among tRNA, elongation factors, releasing factor (RF), and ribosome recycling factor (RRF) has been demonstrated and greatly improved our understanding of the mechanism of translation. Moreover, eukaryotic elongation factors have been shown to be concerned or likely to be concerned in various important cellular processes or serious diseases, including translational control, signal transduction, cytoskeletal organization, apoptosis, adult atopic dermatitis, oncogenic transformation, nutrition, and nuclear processes such as RNA synthesis and mitosis. This article aims to overview the recent advances in protein biosynthesis, concentrating on the moonlighting functions of EF-1.
An analysis of predictors of long-term cadaveric renal allograft survival.

To determine factors predictive of long-term graft function in patients treated prophylactically with an antilymphocyte antibody, 670 first cadaveric adult renal transplant procedures performed between 1985 and 1991 were reviewed. The actuarial 1- and 5-year patient survival in this group was 95% and 87% respectively, and graft survival was 84% and 70% respectively. The final analysis was based on a study group of 635 patients which excluded 28 patients who lost grafts to early technical failures and 8 patients who were not induced with an antilymphocyte preparation. Multivariate analysis showed that 5-year graft survival was lower in patients with delayed graft function (p = 0.0001), in those who had an acute rejection episode in the first 6 months post-transplant (p = 0.0001), recipients greater than 55 years of age at the time of transplant (p = 0.0001), in patients who were highly sensitized at the time of transplant (p = 0.0331) and, finally, in those who received a graft from an older donor (p = 0.044). The 209 patients with delayed graft function had a 16% lower long-term graft survival than 425 patients with early graft function (62% vs. 78% respectively at 5 years). One or more rejection episodes in the first 6 months post-transplant (329 patients) reduced long-term graft survival by 13% compared to those who did not have a rejection episode (67% vs. 80% respectively at 5 years). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Leisure-Time Activity Participation during Preadolescence and the Related Wellness Outcomes

This study examined the association between the free-time activities in which adolescents participate and their self-reported wellness. Free-time activities provide contexts for adolescents to experiment and develop their identity and interests (Coatsworth et al. 2006). The activity patterns established during the years of adolescence are often indicative of patterns that will continue into adulthood (Myers & Sweeney 2005). While numerous studies have examined the relationship between free-time activities and physical health relatively few studies have investigated the associations between the types of free-time activities and overall wellness. This study relied on The Perceived Wellness Survey as a guiding framework. Questionnaires were administered to preadolescents between the ages of 8-13 who were attending one of five summer camps located in Pitt County North Carolina. Activities were examined in terms of High Yield and Low Yield activities where High Yield included those that required active engagement and Low Yield were more passive activities. The Perceived Wellness Survey was administered. This yields scores for overall wellness as well as for six subscales which included psychological emotional social physical spiritual and intellectual dimensions. This study found no relationship between High Yield or Low Yield activities and overall wellness. However for this sample High Yield activities were associated with Social Wellness. Due to a number of methodological limitations that were encountered further research is recommended to better understand the relationship between various types of activities and outcomes of wellness.
Managing flood risk in the UK: towards an integration of social and technical perspectives

In recent years, an apparent increase in the frequency and severity of floods in the UK has led to growing concerns about societal exposure and vulnerability to flooding, particularly in the context of climate change, floodplain development and changing insurance practices. Despite the important link between assessments of exposure to flooding (hazard assessments) and issues of societal vulnerability, this link has rarely been explored in detail and has often been reflected in policy terms by a highly technocratic approach to flood risk management. Indeed, more comprehensive studies have usually favoured rigid and deterministic definitions of vulnerability, in keeping with the wider technocratic paradigm pervading management institutions. In an attempt to redress the balance, this paper considers the role of hazard assessment and issues of societal vulnerability as mutually informative debates and advocates a movement away from the technocratic ideals currently favoured in the UK.
Deduction on XML Documents: A Case Study

This papers shows the deployment of the processing and computational facilities of Prolog to query on XML documents and to reason about their content. Based on a case study we show that it is feasible and useful to deploy Prolog in complex, mobile agent environments. We introduce a rule-based system component which reasons about XML documents and their content respectively. It provides a state-of-the-art World Wide Web interface to connect to multi agent applications.
Innovations in Parent-Infant Psychotherapy

"Innovations in Parent-Infant Psychotherapy" has emerged from the authors' and contributors' excitement about the proliferation of parent-infant psychotherapy work around the world. This model of parent-infant work has increasingly been taking place in community settings, adapting to the needs of emotionally deprived people such as refugees and ethnically diverse groups. Skilled workers from a variety of disciplines have benefited from psychodynamic thinking and supervision without necessarily being formally trained psychoanalytically. "Innovations in Parent-Infant Psychotherapy" is referring here to talented clinicians - such as speech and language therapists, health visitors, specialist nurses, child psychiatrists and paediatricians, family therapists, and psychologists, etc - not just child and adult psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. This book coincides with a global consciousness about the necessity to take care of the early years in order to create good outcomes for all young children, to reduce inequalities, and provide more cohesive and accessible early childhood services.
Phonologically disordered Cantonese-speaking children

Speech-disordered children are not a homogeneous group in terms of aetiology, severity, surface error patterns or response to specific treatment approaches. Previous research has suggested that they fall into subgroups that reflect different underlying deficits in the speech-processing chain (Dodd, 1993). One way of evaluating this classification of phonological disorder is by investigating its applicability to languages other than English. In this paper we describe the speech error patterns of 17 monolingual Cantonese-speaking children consecutively referred for assessment of disordered speech. Two had difficulties articulating specific speech sounds; eight showed a delayed pattern of development, i.e. their errors were appropriate for a younger child acquiring phonology normally; five used unusual (non-developmental) phonological rules (as well as some developmental ones); and two showed inconsistent (i.e. variable) patterns of errors. The possible nature of the deficits underlying each of these surface .
On the Development of the Autobiographical Self and Autobiographical Memory—Implicit and Explicit Aspects

The autobiographical self and autobiographical memory are developed in a reciprocal process. Both have implicit aspects, inaccessible to consciousness, as well as explicit, conscious aspects. The latter are lost to infantile amnesia by about the fifth year of life, while the implicit aspects are retained. Implicit memory content strongly influences feeling, thinking, and acting, out of our awareness. Only a fraction of overall brain activity is accessible to consciousness. The individual stages of development are described in terms of their genetically programmed maturation steps, as well as their prerequisites in specific, individual, inter-subjective experience. In its particular significance for development, the verbalization of implicit knowledge (“internal-state talk”) in the form of narration will be explained and illustrated. Knowledge of normal development and possible aberrations facilitates, in psychotherapy as a “talking cure,” the alteration of “implicit relational knowledge” strived for through expression in language of the explicit conscious insights made possible by new experience gathered in the analytic relationship.
Pitfalls and Challenges in Constructing Short Forms of Cognitive Ability Measures

Especially in survey research and large-scale assessment there is a growing interest in short scales for the cost-efficient measurement of psychological constructs. However, only relatively few standardized short forms are available for the measurement of cognitive abilities. In this article we point out pitfalls and challenges typically encountered in the construction of cognitive short forms. First we discuss item selection strategies, the analysis of binary response data, the problem of floor and ceiling effects, and issues related to measurement precision and validity. We subsequently illustrate these challenges and how to deal with them based on an empirical example, the development of short forms for the measurement of crystallized intelligence. Scale shortening had only small effects on associations with covariates. Even for an ultra-short six-item scale, a unidimensional measurement model showed excellent fit and yielded acceptable reliability. However, measurement precision on the individual level was very low and the short forms were more likely to produce skewed score distributions in ability-restricted subpopulations. We conclude that short scales may serve as proxies for cognitive abilities in typical research settings, but their use for decisions on the individual level should be discouraged in most cases.
The name of the deceiver; Foucauldian readings of MCM (anagram of CMM)

The first encounter between social constructionism and systemic theories probably happened in 1980, with the publication of Communication, Action and Meaning. Michel Foucault was considered then by many scholars and practitioners as an obscure French philosopher, totally unrelated to communication and clinical practice. Although he had studied madness, clinical discourse, sexuality and prisons, his ideas seemed too abstract to be applied to both social practice and the analysis of everyday life. This paper describes how the CMM theory provides imagination for everyday communication practices. These methodologies seem to mirror the micro-physics of power, and the hermeneutics of the Self as described by Foucault. I will also apply these considerations to a clinical case study. Summary in the original language Quando negli anni Ottanta l’approccio sistemico incontro il costruzionismo sociale, Foucault era pressoche sconosciuto tra i terapeuti. Nel migliore dei casi era considerato un oscuro filosofo francese che non aveva gran che a che fare con la clinica, sebbene Foucault avesse studiato proprio la follia, la clinica, la sessualita e l’istituzione carceraria. In questo saggio tentero una connessione tra le teorie e le pratiche sociali scaturite dalla CMM e l’approccio analitico di Foucault attraverso lo studio di un caso clinico. Al fine di ottenere un risultato accettabile dovro spostare la mia attenzione dal coordinamento al mistero, lo faro piano piano. Passando attraverso il coordinamento. Tuttavia sosterro una tesi radicale, proponendo un anagramma, da CMM a MCM. La prima M puo significare sia mistero che mistificazione, la differenza non e molta se non che nel mistero l’imbroglio e compiuto da un dio, nella mistificazione da un demone.
Propagation Characteristics of Groove Gap Waveguide Below and Above Cutoff

Recently, gap waveguides have been shown as a potential alternative to convenational waveguides in the millimeter-wave band. Until now, groove gap waveguide (GGW) has been studied through direct correspondence with rectangular waveguide with the same physical dimensions. However, there have been observed differences in the above cutoff propagation characteristics between these two waveguide types. Furthermore, the behavior of GGW below cutoff remains unknown. This work presents a discussion of both below and above cutoff propagation characteristics of GGW, and introduces a simple model that explains the observed GGW behavior and establishes well its propagation characteristics. Two thru-reflect-line calibration kits have been manufactured, and the measurements have good agreement with the proposed analysis model results.
Dendritic Low-Threshold Calcium Currents in Thalamic Relay Cells

The low-threshold calcium current (IT) underlies burst generation in thalamocortical (TC) relay cells and plays a central role in the genesis of synchronized oscillations by thalamic circuits. Here we have combined in vitro recordings and computational modeling techniques to investigate the consequences of dendritically locatedIT in TC cells. Simulations of a reconstructed TC cell were compared with the recordings obtained in the same cell to constrain the values of its passive parameters. T-current densities in soma and proximal dendrites were then estimated by matching the model to voltage-clamp recordings obtained in dissociated TC cells, which lack most of the dendrites. The distal dendritic T-current density was constrained by recordings in intact TC cells, which show 5–14 times larger peak T-current amplitudes compared with dissociated cells. Comparison of the model with the recordings of the same cell constrained further the T-current density in dendrites, which had to be 4.5–7.6 times higher than in the soma to reproduce all experimental results. Similar conclusions were reached using a simplified three-compartment model. Functionally, the model shows that the same amount of T-channels can lead to different bursting behaviors if they are exclusively somatic or distributed throughout the dendrites. In conclusion, this combination of models and experiments shows that dendritic T-currents are necessary to reproduce low-threshold calcium electrogenesis in TC cells. Dendritic T-current may also have significant functional consequences, such as an efficient modulation of thalamic burst discharges by corticothalamic feedback.
Blue Stragglers as Tracers of Globular Cluster Evolution

Blue stragglers are natural phenomena in star clusters. They originate through mass transfer in isolated binaries, as well as through encounters between two or more stars, in a complex interplay between stellar dynamics and stellar evolution. While this interplay cannot be modeled quantitatively at present, we will be able to do so in one or two years time. With this prospect, the present paper is written largely as a preview.
Low Power FIR Filter Realization using Minimal Difference Coefficients: Part I - Complexity Analysis

This paper and its companion paper (entitled Part II - algorithm) together present techniques for low power realization of finite impulse response (FIR) filters using improved differential coefficients method (DCM). This paper presents the analysis of the complexity of the coefficient multiplier in DCM. The companion paper describes our algorithm and presents design examples. In contrast to the conventional DCM that uses the difference between adjacent coefficients of the filter, we use the minimal difference differential coefficients to encode the filter coefficients. By employing a differential coefficient-partitioning algorithm (DCPA), we show that the number of full adders and the net memory needed to implement the coefficient multipliers can be significantly reduced. The proposed method is combined with common subexpression elimination method for further reduction of complexity. Experimental results show the average reductions of full adder, memory and energy dissipated achieved by our method over the DCM are 40%, 35% and 50% respectively
I Can't Believe It's Not Causal! Scalable Causal Consistency with No Slowdown Cascades

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of Occult (Observable Causal Consistency Using Lossy Timestamps), the first scalable, geo-replicated data store that provides causal consistency to its clients without exposing the system to the possibility of slowdown cascades, a key obstacle to the deployment of causal consistency at scale. Occult supports read/write transactions under PC-PSI, a variant of Parallel Snapshot Isolation that contributes to Occult's immunity to slowdown cascades by weakening how PSI replicates transactions committed at the same replica. While PSI insists that they all be totally ordered, PC-PSI simply requires total order Per Client session. Nonetheless, Occult guarantees that all transactions read from a causally consistent snapshot of the datastore without requiring any coordination in how transactions are asynchronously replicated.