Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics of Alfentanil in P-Glycoprotein-Competent and P-Glycoprotein-Deficient Mice: P-Glycoprotein Efflux Alters Alfentanil Brain Disposition and Antinociception

Previous studies have indicated that P-glycoprotein (P-gp) attenuates the central nervous system penetration and central activity of some opioids. The impact of P-gp-mediated efflux on the disposition and efficacy of the synthetic opioid alfentanil currently is unknown. In this study, P-gp-competent [mdr1a(+/+)] and P-gp-deficient [mdr1a(–/–)] mice were used to investigate the impact of P-gp-mediated efflux on the systemic pharmacokinetics, brain disposition, and central activity of alfentanil. Equipotent doses of alfentanil were administered to mdr1a(+/+) and mdr1a(–/–) mice (0.2 and 0.067 mg/kg, respectively), and the time course of brain and serum concentrations as well as antinociception were determined. A pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic (PK-PD) model was fit to the data and used to assess the impact of P-gp on parameters associated with alfentanil disposition and action. The mdr1a(+/+) mice were less sensitive to alfentanil than mdr1a(–/–) mice, requiring a 3-fold higher dose to produce similar antinociception. PK-PD modeling revealed no differences in alfentanil systemic pharmacokinetics between P-gp expressers and nonexpressers. However, the steady-state brain-to-serum concentration ratio (Kp,brain,ss) was ∼3-fold lower in mdr1a(+/+) mice compared with mdr1a(–/–) mice (0.19 ± 0.01 versus 0.54 ± 0.04, respectively). Consistent with the ∼3-fold lower Kp,brain,ss, the antinociception versus serum concentration relationship in mdr1a(+/+) mice was shifted ∼3-fold rightward compared with mdr1a(–/–) mice. However, there was no difference in the antinociception versus brain concentration relationship, or in the brain tissue EC50 (11 ± 1.8 versus 9.2 ± 1.7 ng/g), between mdr1a(+/+) and mdr1a(–/–) mice. These results indicate that alfentanil is an in vivo P-gp substrate and are consistent with the hypothesis that P-gp-mediated efflux attenuates antinociception by reducing alfentanil Kp,brain,ss.
Trainer Motives in Training Communication

This study aims to construct about the trainers and communication motive instead of the trainer in providing training toward the communication context. The method used in this study is phenomenology under the paradigm constructivist and interpretive analysis techniques. The data collection techniques used are indepth interviews and participant observation. Data validation is done through: extended observation, increased persistence, triangulation, and discussion with colleagues. The study findings should be concluded that the trainer's motives will be grouped into two, namely trainers’ motives and trainers’ communication. To be happy as a motive trainer in public speaking, should be active in organization, having a sense of sharing, and being inspired by a book. While the communicating motives trainers are there: 1. in order to motive among others: hope trainers (can be useful for themselves, myself and others and provide inspiration and goals for trainers (trainers as motivators and inspirers). 2. Correlation of motive among others: the attitude of trainers (learning partners, friendly, and good prejudice) and attract attention (giving surprises, friendly with problems, smiles, ice breaking, brain breaking, eye breaking, games). Suggestions from this research are being able to conduct further research that focuses on trainer’s communication experience in one special training.
Thiopental or etomidate for rapid sequence induction with rocuronium.

We have assessed the effect of the choice of i.v. induction agent on intubation conditions, 60 s after administration of rocuronium 0.6 mg kg-1. We studied 60 adult patients, allocated randomly to one of two groups. Anaesthesia was induced with alfentanil 10 micrograms kg-1 followed by thiopental 5 mg kg-1 (AT-R group; n = 30) or etomidate 0.3 mg kg-1 (AE-R group; n = 30). Both groups received rocuronium 0.6 mg kg-1. Laryngoscopy was started 60 s later and intubation conditions were evaluated according to a standard score, which considered ease of laryngoscopy, condition of the vocal cords and reaction to intubation. In the AT-R group, overall intubation conditions were scored as excellent in 20 patients, good in nine and fair in the remaining patient. In the AE-R group, overall intubating conditions were excellent in 24 and good in six patients. The difference between the two groups was not significant. Of the three components of the intubation score assessed, response to intubation stimulus was significantly less pronounced in group AE-R compared with group AT-R (P < 0.05): group AE-R, no reaction in 24 patients, slight diaphragmatic movement in five and mild coughing in one patient; group AT-R, no reaction in 13, slight diaphragmatic movement in 14, mild coughing in two and severe coughing in one patient. We conclude that etomidate as part of an induction regimen containing alfentanil and rocuronium attenuated the reaction to intubation to a greater extent than thiopental.
On the Decomposition of Posets

In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to decompose a partially ordered set S into a minimum set of chains. It requires only O (k×n2) time and space, where n is the num¬ber of the elements in S and k is the size of a maximum anti¬chain of S.
Panoramic Background Generation using Mean-Shift in Moving Camera Environment

In this paper, we present a novel method to generate a panoramic background image from a sequence of moving camera images. Our method is based on nonparametric statistics and robust model estimation using meanshift. Each frame is projected to panoramic space by homography matrix which is calculated by SURF(Speeded Up Robust Features) matching. To generate reliable panoramic background image, we use mean-shift. Our proposed method allows the generation of very clear panoramic backgrounds in moving camera environment. Experimental results from real sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of our method Keyword : background generation, mean-shift, background modeling, object detection, obect tracking
An innovative strategy in community development through corporate social responsibility: practices and outcomes

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an innovative strategy in developing community resources in Malaysia. This article reports on results of a study on CSR practices and outcomes. The practices are examined based on orientations of the CSR implemented by corporations in community development particularly on living standards, education, and health of the community. These community development components are adopted from the Human Development Report (HDR) indices. CSR orientations are defined by adopting Carroll‘s (1991) conceptualization of CSR, which includes economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities. The outcomes are examined through relationships between the CSR orientations and community development components. A structured 7-likert scale questionnaire was used to gather data from 204 respondents. The data showed significant positive relationship between CSR orientations with the living standards and education of the sample. The results also show significant positive relationship between legal and philanthropic CSR orientations with respondents‘ health component. The legal responsibility becomes the utmost priority, followed by the philanthropic, economic and ethical responsibility. Implications to CSR practices and research are put forth.
Service-Based Specification of Reactive Systems

Requirement conflicts are very common. They can result from different stakeholders’ views, different knowledge of the operating environment, different interpretations of the same concept, etc. Requirement conflicts are harmless, as long as they are detected and resolved directly in the requirements engineering phase. Software development practice shows, however, that the conflicts often remain unperceived until implementation. In this case conflict resolution becomes much more expensive. In the presented paper we suggest an approach to formalization of functional requirements, based on the service concept introduced by Broy [5]. This allows us to model every functional requirement as a partial function and to identify conflicting functions. This results in a formally well-founded conflict detection method, applicable in the requirements engineering phase. Applicability of the method was tested on an industrial case study.
Large-Scale Clustering of Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasars: Impact of the Baryon Density and the Cosmological Constant

We report on the first result from the clustering analysisof SDSS quasars. We computed the two-point correlation function (2PCF) of SDSS quasars in redshift space at 8 h −1 Mpc <s <500 h −1 Mpc, with particular attention to its baryonic signature. Our sample consisted of 19986 quasars extracted from the SDSS Data Release 4. The redshift range of the sample is 0.72 ≤ z ≤ 2.24 (the mean redshift is z =1 .46) and the reddening-corrected i-band apparent magnitude range is 15.0 ≤ mi,rc ≤ 19.1. Due to the relatively low number density of the quasar sample, the bump in the power spectrum due to the baryon density, Ωb, is not clearly visible. The effect of the baryon density is, however, to distort the overall shape of the 2PCF. The degree of distortion makes it an interesting alternate measure of the baryonic signature. Assuming a scale-independent linear bias and a spatially flat universe, we combined the observed quasar 2PCF and the predicted matter 2PCF to put constraints on Ωb and ΩΛ (the cosmological constant). Our result was fitted as 0.80 −2. 8Ωb < ΩΛ < 0.90 −1. 4Ωb at the 2 σ confidence level. The “mean” bias parameter of our quasar sample is 1.59 σ8 −1 (for Ωb =0 .04 and ΩΛ =0 .7), where σ8 is the top-hat mass fluctuation amplitude at 8 h −1 Mpc. We also estimated the corresponding bias parameter of quasars at z =0 ,bQSO,Fry(0), assuming Fry’s bias evolution model. For Ωb =0 . 04, ΩΛ =0 . 73, and Ωd =0 . 23, we found bQSO,Fry(0) = 0.54 + 0.83 σ8 −1 which is valid for 0.6 <σ 8 < 1.0.
Developmental Genes and the Reconstruction of Metazoan Evolution—Implications of Evolutionary Loss, Limits on Inference of Ancestry and Type 2 Errors1

Abstract We consider three issues that appear to be important in the interpretation of developmental genetics in an evolutionary context. The three issues under discussion are 1) evolutionary loss as applied to evo-devo data; 2) the limits on our ability to infer ancestry based on tree reconstruction; and 3) “type 2” errors in the assessment of homology of developmental gene expression data. Lack of consideration of any or all of these disparate issues narrows the set of hypotheses under consideration. We examine these issues through examples drawing on new data on POU domain genes as well as through reference to published work on Distal-less, engrailed and Nk2 genes.
Improving pain recognition through better utilisation of temporal information

Automatically recognizing pain from video is a very useful application as it has the potential to alert carers to patients that are in discomfort who would otherwise not be able to communicate such emotion (i.e young children, patients in postoperative care etc.). In previous work [1], a "pain-no pain" system was developed which used an AAM-SVM approach to good effect. However, as with any task involving a large amount of video data, there are memory constraints that need to be adhered to and in the previous work this was compressing the temporal signal using K-means clustering in the training phase. In visual speech recognition, it is well known that the dynamics of the signal play a vital role in recognition. As pain recognition is very similar to the task of visual speech recognition (i.e. recognising visual facial actions), it is our belief that compressing the temporal signal reduces the likelihood of accurately recognising pain. In this paper, we show that by compressing the spatial signal instead of the temporal signal, we achieve better pain recognition. Our results show the importance of the temporal signal in recognizing pain, however, we do highlight some problems associated with doing this due to the randomness of a patient's facial actions.
Does moral evaluation mediate the relationship between cognitive moral development and reduced audit quality behavior?

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether cognitive moral development and moral evaluation factors impact an auditor’s decision to engage in reduced audit quality behaviors. A total of 289 auditors participated in the survey. The Defining Issues Test (DIT) and Multidimensional Ethics Scale Revision (MES-R1) were used to measure cognitive moral development and moral evaluation. The results show that cognitive moral development and moral evaluation have a direct influence on reduced audit quality behavior. The study results also show that moral evaluation (deontology and teleology) mediates the relationship between cognitive moral development and reduced audit quality behavior. The study results have significant implications for accounting organizations and regulators concerning the effect of cognitive moral development and moral evaluation in preventing the negative impact of reduced audit quality behaviors, such as premature sign-off. Corresponding author: Pupung Purnamasari Email addresses for the corresponding author: purnamasariunisba@gmail.com First submission received: 6th April 2018 Revised submission received: 1st July 2018 Accepted: 18th July 2018
Educational intervention to improve effectiveness in treatment and control of patients with high cardiovascular risk in low-resource settings in Argentina: study protocol of a cluster randomised controlled trial

Introduction Hypercholesterolaemia is estimated to cause 2.6 million deaths annually and one-third of the cases of ischaemic heart disease. In Argentina, the prevalence of hypercholesterolaemia increased between 2005 and 2013 from 27.9% to 29.8%. Only one out of four subjects with a self-reported diagnosis of coronary heart disease is taking statins. Since 2014, statins (simvastatin 20 mg) are part of the package of drugs provided free-of-charge for patients according to cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk stratification. The goal of this study is to test whether a complex intervention targeting physicians and pharmacist assistants improves treatment and control of hypercholesterolaemia among patients with moderate-to-high cardiovascular risk in Argentina. Methods and analysis This is a cluster trial of 350 patients from 10 public primary care centres in Argentina to be randomised to either the intervention or usual care. The study is designed to have 90% statistical power to detect a 0.7 mmol/L reduction in low-density lipoproteins cholesterol from baseline to 12 months. The physician education programme consists of a 2-day initial intensive training and certification workshop followed by educational outreach visits (EOVs) conducted at 3, 6 and 9 months from the outset of the study. An on-site training to pharmacist assistants during the first EOV is performed at each intervention clinic. In addition, two intervention support tools are used: an app installed in physician's smartphones to serve as a decision aid to improve prescription of statins according to patient's CVD risk and a web-based platform tailored to send individualised SMS messages to patients. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval was obtained from an independent ethics committee. Results of this study will be presented to the Ministry of Health of Argentina for potential dissemination and scale-up of the intervention programme to the entire national public primary care network in Argentina. Trial registration number NCT02380911.
The Imprudence of Macroprudential Policy

The literature on macroprudential policy suggests managing the systemic risk of the financial system as a whole is the best way to prevent financial crises. Unfortunately, this literature has not considered the problems of information- and incentive-compatibility that are the foundation of sound economics. The macroprudential policy literature also makes unfounded assumptions as to the stability of capitalist economies, and challenging these assumptions eliminates the case for its policy proposals in the first place. I show that the macroprudential policy literature is fundamentally incapable of delivering on its promises, and that true stability must come from sound monetary institutions rather than ad hoc interventions.
Constraints validation in privacy-preserving attribute-based access control

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) has been found to be extremely useful and flexible and has drawn a lot of research in recent years. It was observed that in the context of new emerging applications, attributes play an increasingly important role both in defining and enforcing more elaborated and flexible security policies. Recently, NIST has proposed more formal definition of ABAC. In this paper we discuss a general privacy-preserving ABAC model (which combines both authentication and authorization) and propose an approach to handle constraints in such privacy preserving setting.
Intracellular Magnesium-Dependent Modulation of Gap Junction Channels Formed by Neuronal Connexin36

Gap junction (GJ) channels composed of Connexin36 (Cx36) are widely expressed in the mammalian CNS and form electrical synapses between neurons. Here we describe a novel modulatory mechanism of Cx36 GJ channels dependent on intracellular free magnesium ([Mg2+]i). We examined junctional conductance (gj) and its dependence on transjunctional voltage (Vj) at different [Mg2+]i in cultures of HeLa or N2A cells expressing Cx36. We found that Cx36 GJs are partially inhibited at resting [Mg2+]i. Thus, gj can be augmented or reduced by lowering or increasing [Mg2+]i, respectively. Similar changes in gj and Vj-gating were observed using MgATP or K2ATP in pipette solutions, which increases or decreases [Mg2+]i, respectively. Changes in phosphorylation of Cx36 or in intracellular free calcium concentration were not involved in the observed Mg2+-dependent modulation of gj. Magnesium ions permeate the channel and transjunctional asymmetry in [Mg2+]i resulted in asymmetric Vj-gating. The gj of GJs formed of Cx26, Cx32, Cx43, Cx45, and Cx47 was also reduced by increasing [Mg2+]i, but was not increased by lowering [Mg2+]i; single-channel conductance did not change. We showed that [Mg2+]i affects both open probability and the number of functional channels, likely through binding in the channel lumen. Finally, we showed that Cx36-containing electrical synapses between neurons of the trigeminal mesencephalic nucleus in rat brain slices are similarly affected by changes in [Mg2+]i. Thus, this novel modulatory mechanism could underlie changes in neuronal synchronization under conditions in which ATP levels, and consequently [Mg2+]i, are modified.
Gaussian particle filter for tracking hip angle in gait cycles

Hip angle has attracted increasing attention recently because of its wide spectrum of applications, including gait analysis, clinical performance analysis and animation. Accurate and robust estimation of hip angle in ambulatory environment remains a challenge because the non-linear nature of thigh movement has not been well studied yet. We propose to use Hybrid Dynamic Bayesian Network (HDBN) to model the nonlinear hip angle dynamics. Based on the model, Gaussian Particle Filter (GPF) is designed to estimate the hip angle during gait cycles from the measurements of the wearable accelerometers that are attached to the thighs. The experiments have been conducted with four subjects and the results have shown that the proposed methods can achieve robust hip angle tracking for different subjects with significant accuracy improvement over the previous work on the ambulatory gait analysis.
National Implications in Education and Juvenile Justice: Bridging the Gap between Court Ordered Juvenile Mentoring Programs and Secondary Educators.

This article deals with effective strategies to show that educators and school administrators can utilize court-ordered mentors, for at-risk juveniles placed in their classrooms. In the late 1980’s and 1990’s there was a convergence of two major events in juvenile justice. These were the reduction of government funds to address serious social problems, such as crime, and the increase of juvenile crime in the United States. A way to combat this increased juvenile crime problem and decrease of available funds was to pair juveniles under court supervision with responsible adult counterparts to provide a positive influence. These mentoring programs provided a cost-effective and strong influence on juveniles in the court system. The goal of this article is to educate teachers and school administrators about programs that their students might be required to attend and utilizing these programs to assist them in the classroom. This article also provides teachers and administrators support strategies in developing allies with these mentoring programs to better serve the youth and community.
Multifrequency Continuous-Wave Radar Approach to Ranging in Passive UHF RFID

In this paper, we present the extension of a recently published two-frequency continuous-wave (CW) ultra-high-frequency RF identification ranging technique to multiple carriers. The proposed system concept relies on exact phase information; hence, the passive tag cannot be accurately modeled as a frequency-flat linear device. A linearized model of the tag's reflection coefficient is devised to bridge the gap between the nonlinear reality and the linear CW radar theory. Estimation error bounds are derived and effects caused by noise and multipath propagation are analyzed in detail. It has been found that systematic errors introduced by the tag's reflection characteristic cannot be compensated by using multiple carriers due to large variations caused by detuning. Nonetheless the system, while being vulnerable to multipath propagation effects, still performs well under line-of-sight conditions; mean average errors below 15% of the true distance are possible in typical fading environments.
TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub

—This paper presents TumbleBit , a new uni-directional unlinkable payment hub that is fully compatible with today’s Bitcoin protocol. TumbleBit allows parties to make fast, anonymous, off-blockchain payments through an untrusted intermediary called the Tumbler. TumbleBit’s anonymity properties are similar to classic Chaumian eCash: no one, not even the Tumbler, can link a payment from its payer to its payee. Every payment made via TumbleBit is backed by bitcoins, and comes with a guarantee that Tumbler can neither violate anonymity, nor steal bitcoins, nor “print money” by issuing payments to itself. We prove the security of TumbleBit using the real/ideal world paradigm and the random oracle model. Security follows from the standard RSA assumption and ECDSA unforgeability. We implement TumbleBit, mix payments from 800 users and show that TumbleBit’s off-blockchain payments can complete in seconds.
U.S. Cross-Border Leases as a Tool for Corporate Finance

During the last few years Cross Border Leases have become an important source of liquidity for European companies. Transactions have been closed on a wide variety of assets. American investors that use the transactions as a tax shield like to close deals with best rated European companies. In the first part of the paper we describe how a U.S. Cross Border Lease is designed as a vehicle for tax arbitrage between the United States and an European lessee. In the second part we describe what determines the profit of the lessee as well as the potential risks from the long term transaction.