Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
[The effect of carvedilol on cardiac function and autoantibodies against the cardiac receptors].

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of carvedilol on the cardiac function and autoantibodies against the cardiac beta(1), beta(2) and alpha(1)-adrenergic receptors in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). METHODS 54 patients with CHF were divided randomly into two groups, one was regular treatment group treated with ACE inhibitor, digoxin and diuretic, another was carvedilol treatment group treated with carvedilol on the basis of above regular treatment. All the patients were followed up for six months and measured the changes of cardiac function and three autoantibodies by echocardiography and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) respectively. RESULTS (1) After carvedilol treatment, LVEDD and LVESD (57.50 +/- 7.29) mm and (43.17 +/- 8.27) mm were smaller than that in regular treatment group [(64.09 +/- 7.40) mm and (52.93 +/- 8.35) mm], and LVEF [(50.41 +/- 10.91)%] was higher than that [(41.70 +/- 7.45)%] in regular treatment group (P < 0.01). (2) After carvedilol treatment, the positive ratios and average titers of autoantibodies against the cardiac beta(1), beta(2) and alpha(1)-adrenergic receptors all decreased significantly compared with that of pre-treatment (P < 0.05). The positive ratios of autoantibodies against the three receptors in carvedilol treatment group were lower than those in regular treatment group (P < 0.05). The average titers of autoantibodies against the cardiac beta(1), beta(2) and alpha(1)-adrenergic receptors in carvedilol treatment group (1:72.44, 1:61.66 and 1:67.30) were lower than those in regular treatment group (1:113.24, 1:110.66 and 1:113.24), P < 0.05. CONCLUSIONS Carvedilol decreased positive ratio and average titer of autoantibodies against the beta(1), beta(2) and alpha(1) receptors accompanied with the obvious improvement of cardiac function though the blockade of beta(1), beta(2) and alpha(1) receptors. It suggests that the autoantibodies might be involved in the process of pathophysiology and development of CHF. Carvedilol can inhibit this process.
Co-operation and competition in international container transport: strategies for ports

This paper focuses on the response of port authorities to the changing market environment in which they operate. It documents the changes taking place in the relationships between port authorities and terminal management companies and considers the strategic issues faced by these groups and other port interests. In particular, it investigates the potential conflicts of interest for a port authority in matters related to the level of competition amongst terminals within a port and the amount of competition amongst ports.
The Value-Added Organisation: Trends in Human Resource Management

Western societaes have been facing the challenge of new ways in which to sustain and create wealth for almost two decades. has not occurred as a result of incremental change in their economic, technological and social environments. Rather it has been because of fast-moving, almost cataclysmic change going to the core of their economic and social structures, with widespread implications for organisational functioning and human resource management practice.
Spread of a Salmonella typhimurium Clone Resistant to Expanded-Spectrum Cephalosporins in Three European Countries

ABSTRACT Twelve Salmonella typhimurium strains resistant to broad-spectrum cephalosporins were isolated from cases of gastroenteritis during 1996 to 1998 in Russia, Hungary, and Greece. Resistance was due to the production of CTX-M-type extended-spectrum β-lactamases encoded by similar 12-kb plasmids. By pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, all strains shared the same chromosomal type. These data suggest that an S. typhimurium clone resistant to broad-spectrum cephalosporins is present in at least three European countries.
Outsourcing Public Service Delivery: Management Responses in Noncompetitive Markets

Capturing the benefits of competition is a key argument for outsourcing public services, yet public service markets often lack sufficient competition. The authors use survey and interview data from U.S. local governments to explore the responses of public managers to noncompetitive markets. This research indicates that competition is weak in most local government markets (fewer than two alternative providers on average across 67 services measured), and that the relationship between competition and contracting choice varies by service type. Public managers respond to suboptimal market competition by intervening with strategies designed to create, sustain, and enhance provider markets. In monopoly service markets, managers are more likely to use intergovernmental contracting, while for-profit contracting is more common in more competitive service markets. The strategies that public managers employ to build and sustain competition for contracts often require tangible investments of administrative resources that add to the transaction costs of contracting in noncompetitive markets.
The International Salt Case

INTERNATIONAL Salt Company owned patents on a machine (called a Lixator) which dissolved rock salt into brine for use in a variety of industrial processes. In areas of the country where International sold salt, it only leased its machine and required that salt used in it be purchased from International. In 1946, International had outstanding 840 leases of an equal number of Lixators. All but 13 leases contained the "standard" tying clause. Probably under 10 per cent of International's total shipments of rock salt were for use in Lixators, an amount equal to about 4 per cent of the total rock salt consumed in areas where International sold salt.1
Incorporation and Gated Communities in the Greater Metro-Los Angeles Region as a Model of Privatization of Residential Communities

ABSTRACT The privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing, redesign, and policing of public parks and plazas, the development of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that monitor and control local streets and parks, and the transfer of public air rights for the building of corporate plazas ostensibly open to the public. In the suburbs, privatization also takes the form of conservation easements that restrict access to public lands, the creation of shopping malls and new town centers relocated within these private commercial developments, and the building of gated residential communities. Accompanying this expansion of private interests are changes in strategies of governance and regional differences in how local governments and residents are encouraging private encroachment on public space. This article focuses this third set of privatization practices by discussing how gated communities manipulate municipal and town planning laws to control public space and tax dollars. To accomplish this task, I discuss the emergence of gated communities as a new form of privatization of urban/suburban space and then tease out the legal and institutional underpinnings of this spatial governance. The geography of gated communities in greater metro-Los Angeles region and their use of the strategy of incorporation to capture public taxes for private use is employed as a model for understanding the future of gating in the United States. The Los Angeles model is then compared to current gating patterns in urban and suburban gated communities in New York and Texas. These manipulations of private land use controls in the United States are not necessarily new, but with gating there is an accelerating trend away from governmental and public control of land use toward an increased reliance on privately created controls. The consequences of this shift toward privatization of land use control is an impoverishment of the public realm and access to public resources, especially public space.
Robust feature matching by learning descriptor covariance with viewpoint synthesis

For images taken from very different viewpoints, we propose a new feature matching algorithm that provides accurate matches while preserving high matchability. Our method first synthesizes images by simulating the viewpoint changes. It then learns variation of local feature descriptors induced by the viewpoint changes. Finally, we robustly match feature descriptors by measuring the similarity using the learned variation. Our method is particularly useful for matching new query images to target image archived in a database. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method in terms of accuracy and computational time through experiments using several wide-baseline image datasets.
Rough Clustering of Destination Image Data Using an Evolutionary Algorithm

Abstract This article describes a hybrid computational intelligence technique, an evolutionary algorithm based rough clustering algorithm. The technique of cluster analysis is fundamental in traditional data analysis and data mining, and is used to group similar objects together. Many clustering methods have been identified, including the commonly used k-means approach, which is dependent on initial starting points and requires the number of clusters to be specified in advance. The rough clustering algorithm described in this article is able to overcome these limitations. Rough clusters are defined in a similar manner to the rough set concept developed by Pawlak—that is, using a lower and upper approximation. This allows for multiple cluster membership for objects in the data set. The lower approximation of a rough cluster contains objects that only belong to that cluster. The upper approximation of a rough cluster contains objects that belong to more than one cluster. The article describes the template, the data structure used to describe rough clusters. It also provides an overview of the evolutionary algorithm used to develop viable cluster solutions, consisting of an optimal number of templates, which provide easily interpreted descriptions of the clusters. This evolutionary algorithm based rough clustering algorithm was tested on a large data set of perceptions of city destination image attributes. Some preliminary results are presented.
PERFORMANCE AUDITING: THE JURISDICTION OF THE AUSTRALIAN AUDITOR‐GENERAL ‐ A NOTE OF CLARIFICATION

Much confusion has arisen in recent years concerning the audit mandate of the Australian Commonwealth Auditor-General. It is this author's contention that this mandate is, in practice, little different to that afforded to his Canadian and United Kingdom counterparts. That is, he has a mandate that permits him to examine the economy and efficiency of operations as well as the effectiveness of management of departments and other Commonwealth bodies.
Population pharmacokinetics and pharmacogenetics of alcohol in Chinese and Indians in Singapore

What is known and Objective: Interindividual variability in alcohol pharmacokinetics is influenced by a number of factors, including polymorphisms in genes mediating alcohol pharmacology, ethnicity, sex and body size. Several studies have evaluated the population pharmacokinetics of alcohol from breath alcohol measures. None of these studies, however, have evaluated ethnicity and alcohol‐metabolizing enzyme genotypes as covariates in their population pharmacokinetic modelling. We aimed to develop a population pharmacokinetic model using clinical and genetic factors and to identify covariates that influenced interindividual variability in alcohol clearance and volume of distribution.
Religion and Youth Support for the European Union

Religion is an important influence on adult attitudes toward European integration, as devout Catholics strongly support integration, while committed Protestants are less enthusiastic. Here we consider whether this relationship holds for reputedly secularized European youth. Using Eurobarometer 47.2OVR, we show that devout Catholic and Orthodox youth do in fact support the European Union, as do committed Protestants, and generically religious youths, but at lower levels. Atheists and agnostics are more critical of the EU. High levels of social capital and pro-immigration sentiments also predict euro-enthusiasm. We conclude by analysing the variation in youth attitudes across Member States.
Biodegradation of Endosulfan by a Soil Bacterium

A bacterium capable of metabolizing endosulfan (6,7,8,9,10,10-hexachloro-1,5,5a,6,9,9a-hexahydro-6,9-methano-2,4,3-benzodioxathiepine3-oxide) was isolated from cotton-growing soil and effectively shown to degrade endosulfan into endosulfan sulfate. The bacterium degraded 50% of the compound within 3 days of incubation. Endosulfan sulfate was the only terminal product and no other metabolites were formed during the incubation. Endosulfan and its metabolites were analyzed by gas chromatography. The metabolites formed indicated that the organism follows an oxidative pathway for metabolism of this pesticide. Therefore, the present study, microbial degradation of endosulfan by a soil bacterium, may provide a basis for the development of bioremediation strategies to remediate the pollutants in the environment.
The Effects of Cochlear Implant on Parental Mental Health

A child who is to have cochlear implant surgery, is in need of its parents care. It is very important for the parents to be in a safe and unstressed psychological state, in order to provide an adequate level of care and attention to the child. The aim of this paper is the evaluation of parents’ psychological stress and behavior indicators during the course of this treatment. A sample of 29 families with children referred for cochlear implant surgery were selected during the years 2011-2012 in Baghiyatallah hospital in Iran. The General Health Questionnaire(GHQ) has been used as the main analysis tool which the target population responded to both before and six months after surgery. Descriptive statistics and paired T-tests in have been used. This study shows parental mental health increases with cochlear implant surgery. The results also indicate that after this operation, maternal anxiety and somatic symptoms in mothers are reduced more than in fathers. Sleep perturbation, social functioning perturbation and depression have a higher reduction rate in fathers than in mothers. The findings show that cochlear implant has an effective impact in increasing parental mental health. Keyword: Cochlear, Mental health, Parents, Child.
Targeting and tailoring an intervention for adolescents who are overweight

There are important ethical issues to be examined before launching any public health intervention, particularly when targeting vulnerable groups. The aim of this article is to identify and discuss ethical concerns that may arise when intervening for health behavior change among adolescents identified as overweight. These concerns originate from an intervention designed to capacitate adolescents to increase self-determined physical activity. Utilizing an ethical framework for prevention of overweight and obesity, we identified three ethical aspects as particularly significant: the attribution of responsibility for health behavior, liberty to choose, and the effect on the participants’ psychosocial well-being. It is discussed whether and how measures can be taken to deal with these aspects. It seems evident that the ethical aspects are mainly concerned with the vulnerability of adolescents identified as overweight. However, we claim that when individual feedback and counseling is provided, tailored interventions have a unique potential to empower adolescents to make ethically anchored decisions about their own health behavior.
Document subjectivity and target detection in opinion mining using HMM POS-Tagger

With the abundance of digital text documents, opinion mining is an emerging research topic at this time. A significant problem in opinion mining is a problem of document subjectivity. This problem is related to how to determine a sentence that is extracted from a text is an opinion or not. Another important issue is to find the target of an opinion. In the business world opinion mining is used for automatically analyzing customer opinions about products. In the education world opinion mining can be applied to evaluate and utilize the textual advices in an educational evaluation using questionnaire. In this study we used a technique of two order HMM Based Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagger to identify opinions from the text. This technique was also used to determine the target opinion in an opinion sentence. Both document subjectivity and target opinion was implemented using rule-based techniques, i.e the use of patterns of part-of-speech couples as a characteristic pattern of opinion and target opinion. The data used for the evaluation was student comments of learning evaluation in IST AKPRIND Yogyakarta. The results showed that the precision and recall of subjectivity documents amounted to 0.95 and 0.92, and for the detection targets are 0.91 and 0.89.
HETEROZYGOSITY AND ITS UNEXPECTED CORRELATIONS WITH HYBRID STERILITY

In general, heterozygosity is considered to be advantageous, primarily because it masks the effects of deleterious recessive alleles. However, there is usually a reduction in fitness in individuals that are heterozygous due to the pairing of two species (heterospecific). Because the parental alleles arose along separate evolutionary paths, they may not function properly when brought together within an individual. The formation of these unfit interspecies hybrids is one of the mechanisms that maintains species isolation. Interestingly, it has been observed that later‐generation individuals resulting from a backcross to one parent are more often sterile than those resulting from a backcross to the other parent, but the mechanism underlying this trend is unknown. Here, I show that one direction of backcross produces offspring with more heterospecific genome, and that this is correlated with the directionality seen in backcross hybrid sterility. Therefore, the directionality in sterility is likely due to the different amounts of heterospecific genome present in the two backcrosses. Surprisingly, in spite of the potential fitness consequences, I also find that interspecies laboratory backcrosses in general yield an excess of heterospecific individuals, and that this trend is consistent across multiple taxa.
Robot training enhanced motor outcome in patients with stroke maintained over 3 years

Article abstract In an attempt to improve motor recovery of the upper limb after stroke, we added a robot (MIT-Manus) experience that provided additional goal-directed sensorimotor activity to standard rehabilitation treatments. The first trial produced a significant decrease in motor impairment in the upper limb for the treated group. In re-evaluating 12 of those 20 patients, nearly 3 years later, robot-trained patients showed further significant decreases in impairment measures of the affected limb. The groups were comparable at the start of the study.
Self-aligned gate-last surface channel In0.53Ga0.47As MOSFET with selectively regrown source and drain contact layers

III-V MOSFETs are currently being considered as a candidate for future high performance transistors [1]. In particular, In1-xGaxAs compounds are investigated for application in digital logic due to their advantageous electronic properties [2]. III-V technologies may be introduced beyond the 22 nm node, which will require a self aligned III/V device architecture as well as integration of high-¿ gate oxides.
Policy Duration Effect under the Zero Interest Rate Policy in 1999-2000: Evidence from Japan's Money Market Data

This paper quantifies the policy duration effect of the zero interest rate policy implemented in Japan from February 1999 to August 2000. Our empirical analysis shows that the policy duration effect observed in Japanese financial markets emerged via the expectations channel on the future course of monetary policy actions, supplemented significantly by liquidity effects in the severe financial conditions. This finding leads to the policy implication that the effectiveness of the zero interest rate policy depends crucially on the financial and economic conditions.
Association between CYP17 gene polymorphism and risk of breast cancer in young women

Long‐term exposure to oestrogens is a well‐recognised risk factor for breast cancer, whereas little is known about the influence of polymorphisms of genes involved in oestrogen biosynthesis and metabolism. A candidate, containing a single bp polymorphism, T→C, (designated, A2 allele), might be the CYP17 gene, which codes for an enzyme involved in oestrogen synthesis. This polymorphism creates an additional Sp1‐type promoter site (CCACC box), which has been shown to be associated with increased serum oestrogen levels. We performed a case‐control study, to evaluate association of the CYP17 gene polymorphism with risk of breast cancer in young women (younger than 37 years). We found a statistically significant increased risk in carriers of at least 1 A2 allele [odds ratio (OR), 2.0; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.1–3.5, p = 0.027], and a trend toward a gene‐dose effect illustrated by a slightly higher risk for A2‐homozygous subjects (OR, 2.8) than for heterozygous women (OR, 1.9). Furthermore, when we investigated the CYP17 genotype in relation to tumour characteristics, breast cancer patients with 1 or 2 A2 alleles tended to have lower oestrogen receptor levels (risk ratio, 0.70; CI, 0.41–1.2, p = 0.44). Our findings suggest that CYP17 gene polymorphism influences breast carcinogenesis in young women. Int. J. Cancer (Pred. Oncol.) 84:350–353, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Who won the Sydney 2000 Olympics?: an allometric approach

If the table of Olympic medals is ordered by total medals won, it is dominated by the larger wealthier nations. However, when ordered by medals per capita, small island nations dominate, and the eastern bloc dominates when ordering is on medals per gross domestic product. This situation changes only somewhat when medal `points' are considered (gold, 3, silver, 2, bronze, 1, for example). This paper examines the least squares fitting of a log-linear allometric model to data relating all these variables for the 80 countries which won at least one bronze medal in Sydney. This analysis suggests that Cuba `won' convincingly, that the USA finished 18th and that gold and silver medals are both valued about twice as much as bronze medals.
Job Satisfaction In The Public Sector

This study examines the influence of the work environment on public employee feelings of job satisfaction, linking characteristics of the work context perceived to be more prevalent in public organizations with specific job characteristics that serve as important antecedents of job satisfaction. In particular, this study analyzes the effects of three components of the work context—organizational goal conflict, organizational goal specificity, and procedural constraints—and four job characteristics—job specificity, routineness, feedback, and human resource development—faced by public employees. Building on previous research, a causal model of job satisfaction was tested in a covariance analysis (LISREL) using data from a survey of state government employees. The model explained two thirds of the variation in employee job satisfaction and suggests that the work context may not only be important in distinguishing between public and private sector employment but also may be at the root of any sector differences in job satisfaction.