Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
inpatients: qualitative study Appropriateness of use of medicines in elderly

Objectives To explore the processes leading to inappropriate use of medicines for elderly patients admitted for acute care. Design Qualitative study with semistructured interviews with doctors, nurses, and pharmacists; focus groups with inpatients; and observation on the ward by clinical pharmacists for one month. Setting Five acute wards for care of the elderly in Belgium. Participants 5 doctors, 4 nurses, and 3 pharmacists from five acute wards for the interviews; all professionals and patients on two acute wards for the observation and 17 patients (from the same two wards) for the focus groups. Results Several factors contributed to inappropriate prescribing, counselling, and transfer of information on medicines to primary care. Firstly, review of treatment was driven by acute considerations, the transfer of information on medicines from primary to secondary care was limited, and prescribing was often not tailored to elderly patients. Secondly, some doctors had a passive attitude towards learning: they thought it would take too long to find the information they needed about medicines and lacked self directed learning. Finally, a paternalistic doctor-patient relationship and difficulties in sharing decisions about treatment between prescribers led to inappropriate use of medicines. Several factors, such as the input of geriatricians and good communication between members of the multidisciplinary geriatric team, led to better use of medicines. Conclusions In this setting, improvements targeted at the abilities of individuals, better doctor-patient and doctor-doctor relationships, and systems for transferring information between care settings will increase the appropriate use of medicines in elderly people.
Time-Calibrated Phylogenomics of the Classical Swine Fever Viruses: Genome-Wide Bayesian Coalescent Approach

The phylogeny of classical swine fever virus (CSFV), the causative agent of classical swine fever (CSF), has been investigated extensively. However, no evolutionary research has been performed using the whole CSFV genome. In this study, we used 37 published genome sequences to investigate the time-calibrated phylogenomics of CSFV. In phylogenomic trees based on Bayesian inference (BI) and Maximum likelihood (ML), the 37 isolates were categorized into five genetic types (1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.3, and 3.4). Subgenotype 1.1 is divided into 3 groups and 1 unclassified isolate, 2.1 into 4 groups, 2.3 into 2 groups and 1 unclassified isolate, and subgenotype 1.2 and 3.4 consisted of one isolate each. We did not observe an apparent temporal or geographical relationship between isolates. Of the 14 genomic regions, NS4B showed the most powerful phylogenetic signal. Results of this evolutionary study using Bayesian coalescent approach indicate that CSFV has evolved at a rate of 13×. 010-4 substitutions per site per year. The most recent common ancestor of CSFV appeared 2770.2 years ago, which was about 8000 years after pig domestication. The effective population size of CSFV underwent a slow increase until the 1950s, after which it has remained constant.
A Physiology-Based Seizure Detection System for Multichannel EEG

Background Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals play a critical role in the diagnosis of epilepsy. Multichannel EEGs contain more information than do single-channel EEGs. Automatic detection algorithms for spikes or seizures have traditionally been implemented on single-channel EEG, and algorithms for multichannel EEG are unavailable. Methodology This study proposes a physiology-based detection system for epileptic seizures that uses multichannel EEG signals. The proposed technique was tested on two EEG data sets acquired from 18 patients. Both unipolar and bipolar EEG signals were analyzed. We employed sample entropy (SampEn), statistical values, and concepts used in clinical neurophysiology (e.g., phase reversals and potential fields of a bipolar EEG) to extract the features. We further tested the performance of a genetic algorithm cascaded with a support vector machine and post-classification spike matching. Principal Findings We obtained 86.69% spike detection and 99.77% seizure detection for Data Set I. The detection system was further validated using the model trained by Data Set I on Data Set II. The system again showed high performance, with 91.18% detection of spikes and 99.22% seizure detection. Conclusion We report a de novo EEG classification system for seizure and spike detection on multichannel EEG that includes physiology-based knowledge to enhance the performance of this type of system.
Non-metastatic 2 (NME2)-mediated suppression of lung cancer metastasis involves transcriptional regulation of key cell adhesion factor vinculin

Tumor metastasis refers to spread of a tumor from site of its origin to distant organs and causes majority of cancer deaths. Although >30 metastasis suppressor genes (MSGs) that negatively regulate metastasis have been identified so far, two issues are poorly understood: first, which MSGs oppose metastasis in a tumor type, and second, which molecular function of MSG controls metastasis. Herein, integrative analyses of tumor-transcriptomes (n = 382), survival data (n = 530) and lymph node metastases (n = 100) in lung cancer patients identified non-metastatic 2 (NME2) as a key MSG from a pool of >30 metastasis suppressors. Subsequently, we generated a promoter-wide binding map for NME2 using chromatin immunoprecipitation with promoter microarrays (ChIP-chip), and transcriptome profiling. We discovered novel targets of NME2 which are involved in focal adhesion signaling. Importantly, we detected binding of NME2 in promoter of focal adhesion factor, vinculin. Reduced expression of NME2 led to enhanced transcription of vinculin. In comparison, NME1, a close homolog of NME2, did not bind to vinculin promoter nor regulate its expression. In line, enhanced metastasis of NME2-depleted lung cancer cells was found in zebrafish and nude mice tumor models. The metastatic potential of NME2-depleted cells was remarkably diminished upon selective RNA-i-mediated silencing of vinculin. Together, we demonstrate that reduced NME2 levels lead to transcriptional de-repression of vinculin and regulate lung cancer metastasis.
The Alcohol Hangover

Hangovers are a frequent, though unpleasant, experience among people who drink to intoxication. Despite the prevalence of hangovers, however, this condition is not well understood scientifically. Multiple possible contributors to the hangover state have been investigated, and researchers have produced evidence that alcohol can directly promote hangover symptoms through its effects on urine production, the gastrointestinal tract, blood sugar concentrations, sleep patterns, and biological rhythms. In addition, researchers postulate that effects related to alcohol’s absence after a drinking bout (i.e., withdrawal), alcohol metabolism, and other factors (e.g., biologically active, nonalcohol compounds in beverages; the use of other drugs; certain personality traits; and a family history of alcoholism) also may contribute to the hangover condition. Few of the treatments commonly described for hangover have undergone scientific evaluation.
Markets, Market Failures, and Development

A central question in development economics is, how can we account for differences in the levels of income and the rates of growth between the developed and less developed economies? In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a standard answer to this question: the poor are just like the rich, except they are poorer-they have less human and nonhuman capital. There was an immediate prescription for this diagnosis: increase the resources of LDCs, either by transferring capital to them (either direct aid or education) or by encouraging them to save more. Today, these answers seem less convincing that they did two decades ago. If the problem were primarily a shortage of physical capital, the return to capital should be much higher in LDCs than in developed countries, and the natural avarice of capitalists would lead to a flow of capital from the more developed to the less developed economies (see Howard Pack, 1984 and my 1988 paper). If the problem were primarily a shortage of human capital, then the educated in LDCs should receive a higher (absolute as well as relative) income than the educated in more developed economies. How then can we account for high levels of unemployment among the educated and the migration of the educated from LDCs to more developed economies? Moreover, the predictions of the standard neoclassical growth model, of a convergence of growth rates in per capita income, with permanent differences in per capita consumption being explained by differences in savings rates and reproduction rates, do not seem to have been borne out. These observations suggest that the LDCs differ from the developed countries in at least some other important respects, and this view is corroborated by those studies which have looked at the productivity of similar plants operating in developed and less developed economies. (See Pack, 1984; 1987.) The difference can be attributed, perhaps tautologically, to differences in economic organization, to how individuals (factors of production) interact, and to the institutions which mediate those interactions. Among the most important of these "institutions" are markets. It is by now well recognized that there are many instances of market failures in more developed economies (see Bruce Greenwald and myself, 1986). In some cases, market failures may be ameliorated by nonmarket institutions. If, for instance, capital markets do not function well ("perfectly"), if only because of costly and imperfect information, nonmarket institutions (internal capital markets within large conglomerates) may develop. ' Market failure is more prevalent in LDCs, and the nonmarket institutions that ameliorate its consequences are, at least in many instances, less successful in doing so. The objective of this paper is to explore the causes and consequences of these market failures and the failure of private nonmarket solutions, and to suggest possible roles for government intervention. tDiscussants: Anne 0. Krueger, Duke University; Stanley Fischer, World Bank.
Analysis and simulation of a model of polyelectrolyte gel in one spatial dimension

We analyse a model of polyelectrolyte gels that was proposed by the authors in previous work. We first demonstrate that the model can be derived using Onsager's variational principle, a general procedure for obtaining equations in soft condensed matter physics. The model is shown to have a unique steady state under the assumption that a suitably defined mechanical energy density satisfies a convexity condition. We then perform a detailed study of the stability of the steady state in the spatially one-dimensional case, obtaining bounds on the relaxation rate. Numerical simulations for the spatially one-dimensional problem are presented, confirming the analytical calculations on stability.
A New Key Pre-distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

According to the limitation of resources in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), this paper presents a new key pre-distribution scheme based on plane grid. It helps not only to economize the space of storage and keep low consumption, but also ensure that all neighbors’ nodes can establish pair-wise keys directly, however, has a poor safety performance. Then we extend the scheme to three-dimensional grid and propose a novel key pre-distribution called three-dimensional grid key pre-distribution scheme. The results of analysis indicate that the scalability and resilience of the scheme are much better.
Solitons on compact and non-compact spaces in large non-commutativity

We study solitons at the minima of scalar field potentials for Moyal spaces and torii in large non-commutativity and interpret these solitons in terms of non-BPS D-branes of string theory. We derive a mass spectrum formula linking different D-branes together on quantum torii and suggest that it describes general systems of D-brane bound states, which extend the \mbox{{\rm D}2-{\rm D}0} one. Then we propose a shape for the effective potential approaching these quasi-stable bound states. We give the gauge symmetries of these systems of branes and show that they depend on the quantum torii representations.
Narrow Price Limit and Stock Price Volatility in Emerging Markets: Empirical Evidence from Amman Stock Exchange

This paper empirically investigates the behaviour of daily stock return volatility around price limit hits for a sample of 159 (189) securities listed in Amman Stock Exchange (ASE), over the years 2003(2004). More specifically, we investigate whether daily return volatility for stocks that hit a price limit is lower (higher) in the post limit hit period than in the pre limit hit period. Such a finding would be consistent with the overreaction hypothesis, also referred to as the volatility spill over hypothesis. Our results indicate that stocks-hit experience their highest level of volatility on the day when stocks-hit reach their upper daily price limits of 5% (day 0), and decreases significantly one day after the hit. Similar results are found when stock hits reach their lower daily price limits of -5%, however with less magnitude. Results on the different sectors reveal that the banking sector experiences the highest volatility. However, when the stocks-hit reach its lower limit, the service sector shows the highest volatility as compared to the other sectors in the industry. Therefore, our results are more consistent with the overreaction hypothesis and that the price-limit technique is effective in reducing the volatility by providing a time-out to cool-off.
Information System Life Cycle: Applications in Construction and Manufacturing

— In this paper, we present the information life cycle, and analyze the importance of managing the corporate application portfolio across this life cycle. The approach presented here does not correspond just to the extension of the traditional information system development life cycle. This approach is based in the generic life cycle employed in other contexts like manufacturing or marketing. In this paper it is proposed a model of an information system life cycle, supported in the assumption that a system has a limited life. But, this limited life may be extended. This model is also applied in several cases; being reported here two examples of the framework application in a construction enterprise, and in a manufacturing enterprise.
Life on the stoichiometric knife-edge: effects of high and low food C:P ratio on growth, feeding, and respiration in three Daphnia species

Abstract Recently, data have emerged indicating that not only high food carbon:phosphorus (C:P) ratio but also low food C:P (P-rich food) can have negative effects on the growth of consumers. The shape of this “stoichiometric knife edge,” however, is not yet well-documented, and the mechanisms underpinning it are not understood. Here we report the results of experiments using 3 species of Daphnia (D. magna, D. pulicaria, D. pulex) consuming the green alga Scenedesmus acutus with widely varying C:P ratios (from <50 to >1500 by atoms). The experiments were designed to (1) characterize the potential stoichiometric knife edge for each species, and (2) evaluate potential changes in feeding and respiration rates that may underpin the unimodal response to food C:P. All 3 Daphnia species grew more slowly when food C:P (atomic) exceeded ~250–300 but also when C:P was <120. Both high and low C:P foods were associated with increased respiration rates, indicating that the negative effects of food C:P imbalance at least partially involve increased metabolic costs of dealing with stoichiometrically imbalanced food. Feeding rate experiments indicated that, in contrast with limited previous data, animals generally increased their feeding rate on P-rich food. Overall, the “lower threshold elemental ratio” we identify here (~120) is surprisingly high, in an ecologically meaningful range, suggesting that negative effects of excessive food P content may play an under-recognized role in affecting Daphnia performance in P-rich lakes with low seston C:P ratio. Such effects also need to be incorporated into stoichiometrically explicit models of planktonic trophic interactions.
The Krüppel-associated box repressor domain induces reversible and irreversible regulation of endogenous mouse genes by mediating different chromatin states

The Krüppel-associated box (KRAB) domain is a transcription repression module from the largest family of transcriptional regulators encoded by higher vertebrates. We developed a drug-controllable regulation system based on an artificial KRAB-containing repressor (tTS) that targets the endogenous Hprt gene to explore the regulatory mechanism and molecular basis of KRAB-containing regulators within the context of an endogenous gene in vivo. We show that KRAB can mediate irreversible and reversible regulation of endogenous genes in mouse that is dependent on embryonic developmental stage. KRAB-induced stable DNA methylation within the KRAB binding region during the early embryonic stage, resulting in irreversible gene repression. In later stages, KRAB mainly induced de-acetylation and methylation of histone, resulting in reversible gene repression. Thus, we have characterized the KRAB-mediated regulation system within the context of an endogenous gene and multiple spatiotemporal ranges, thereby providing a basis for identifying the function of KRAB-containing regulators and aiding development of novel KRAB-based gene regulation tools in vivo.
Unsupervised Modeling of Latent Topics and Lexical Units in Speech Audio

Zero-resource speech processing involves the automatic analysis of a collection of speech data in a completely unsupervised fashion without the benefit of any transcriptions or annotations of the data. In this thesis, we describe a zero-resource framework that automatically discovers important words, phrases and topical themes present in an audio corpus. This system employs a segmental dynamic time warping (S-DTW) algorithm for acoustic pattern discovery in conjunction with a probabilistic model which treats the topic and pseudo-word identity of each discovered pattern as hidden variables. By applying an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, our method estimates the latent probability distributions over the pseudo-words and topics associated with the discovered patterns. Using this information, we produce informative acoustic summaries of the dominant topical themes of the audio document collection. Thesis Supervisor: James R. Glass Title: Senior Research Scientist Thesis Supervisor: Timothy J. Hazen Title: Principal Scientist, Microsoft
Managing attendance at work: the role of line managers in the UK grocery retail sector

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of line managers in managing attendance at work in the lean regime of grocery retailing. The increasing competitiveness within the sector, coupled with the sophisticated control systems in place put pressure on managers to keep labour costs low. Attendance, therefore, becomes a critical factor, particularly as staffing levels become leaner. Taking this into account, it is necessary to understand the parameters of the line managers’ role in managing attendance, especially within the lean food retail market and the antagonistic terrain of the supermarket shop floor. The paper discusses the impact of lean retailing on line managers’ authority and provides a fresh sociological analysis regarding their role in managing attendance, offering insights into managerial practices on the UK supermarket shop floor. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on qualitative research evidence from two case study grocery retail organizations in the UK. It r.
Predicting Stock Prices Returns Using Garch Model

-------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT --------------------------------------------------This study focus on forecasting properties of Linear GARCH model for daily closing stocks prices of Zenith bank Plc in Nigeria stocks Exchange. The Alaike and Bayesian Information Criteria (AIC $ BIC) techniques was used to obtain the order of the GARCH (p,q) that best fit the Zenith Bank Returned series . GARCH (1,2) was identified as the models. The results of statistical properties obtained supported the claim that the financial data are Leptokurtic. We therefore concluded that the Optimal values of p and q GARCH (p,q) model depends on location, the types of the data and model order selected techniques being used.
Does mammographic screening and a negative result affect attitudes towards future breast screening?

OBJECTIVES:To investigate the impact of an experience of a benign mammographic result on intention to seek medical help immediately in the case of breast abnormalities, and on intentions and thoughts about future participation in screening. SETTING:The Dutch Breast Cancer Screening Programme for women aged 50–69. METHODS:Subjects were women who were invited for an initial breast examination: 223 women filled out a questionnaire about 10 days before and about 6 weeks after their initial breast examination. To be able to control for possible test effects, another group of 293 women filled out a questionnaire only after mammography. Changes in thoughts and intentions were examined. RESULTS:Most women were very satisfied with the course of their initial breast examination, although pain or discomfort was often mentioned. No clues to suggest false reassurance were found: more than 99% of the women would consider the possibility of breast cancer if they felt a lump in one of their breasts. In such a situation, most women intended to seek medical help within a week. These variables were not influenced by the experience of mammography with a benign result. In general, women were very positive about (repeat) participation, both before and after screening. After screening, the average woman perceived fewer costs in participating, and perceived her own ability to engage in future screening as higher. However, the experience of pain and anxiety during the initial screening did lead to reverse effects. Women who were less satisfied about their treatment by the staff were more likely to change their intentions to reparticipate in a negative way. CONCLUSIONS:As, in general, women became more positive about regular participation after they had attended breast cancer screening, efforts to improve first round attendance must be continued. At the same time, the screening organisations must continue to prioritise the high level of client friendliness throughout the screening. No evidence for detrimental effects of screening through false reassurance among participants was found.
Morbidity, Mortality, Health Expenditures and Annuitization

In this paper we explore the implication of a morbidity risk for the relationship between longevity and annuitization. We divide old-age life into two periods with uncertain survival from the end of the first to the end of the second. We show that a rise in the survival rate causes different patterns of change in annuitization, depending on the initial survival rate. When the initial survival rate is low (high), there is full (partial) annuitization. There is thus an inverse relationship between longevity and annuitization.