Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tailored Education for Older Patients to Facilitate Engagement in Falls Prevention Strategies after Hospital Discharge—A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

Background The aims of the study were to evaluate the effect of providing tailored falls prevention education in hospital on: i) engagement in targeted falls prevention behaviors in the month after discharge: ii) patients’ self-perceived risk and knowledge about falls and falls prevention strategies after receiving the education. Methods A pilot randomized controlled trial (n = 50): baseline and outcome assessments conducted by blinded researchers. Participants: hospital inpatients 60 years or older, discharged to the community. Participants were randomized into two groups. The intervention was a tailored education package consisting of multimedia falls prevention information with trained health professional follow-up, delivered in addition to usual care. Outcome measures were engagement in falls prevention behaviors in the month after discharge measured at one month after discharge with a structured survey, and participants’ knowledge, confidence and motivation levels before and after receiving the education. The feasibility of providing the intervention was examined and falls outcomes (falls, fall-related injuries) were also collected. Results Forty-eight patients (98%) provided follow-up data. The complete package was provided to 21 (84%) intervention group participants. Participants in the intervention group were significantly more likely to plan how to safely restart functional activities [Adjusted odds ratio 3.80, 95% CI (1.07, 13.52), p = 0.04] and more likely to complete other targeted behaviors such as completing their own home exercise program [Adjusted odds ratio 2.76, 95% CI (0.72, 10.50), p = 0.14] than the control group. The intervention group was significantly more knowledgeable, confident and motivated to engage in falls prevention strategies after receiving the education than the control group. There were 23 falls (n = 5 intervention; n = 18 control) and falls rates were 5.4/1000 patient days (intervention); 18.7/1000 patient days (control). Conclusion This tailored education was received positively by older people, resulted in increased engagement in falls prevention strategies after discharge and is feasible to deliver to older hospital patients. Trial registration The study was registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry; ACTRN12611000963921 on 8th November 2011.
Relay Selection Based on the Secrecy Rate Criterion for Physical-Layer Security in Buffer-Aided Relay Networks

In this paper, we investigate an opportunistic relay and jammer scheme along with relay selection algorithms based on the secrecy rate criterion in multiple-input multiple-output buffer-aided down link relay networks, which consist of one source, a number of relay nodes, legitimate users and eavesdroppers, with the constraints of physical layer security. The opportunistic relay and jammer scheme is employed to improve the transmission rate and different relay selection policies are performed to achieve better secrecy rate with the consideration of eavesdroppers. Among all the investigated relay selection policies, a relay selection policy which is developed to maximize the secrecy rate based on exhaustive searches outperforms other relay selection policies in terms of secrecy rate. Based on the secrecy rate criterion, we develop a relay selection algorithm without knowledge of the channels of the eavesdroppers. We also devise a greedy search algorithm based on the secrecy rate criterion to reduce the computational complexity of the exhaustive search technique. Simulations show the superiority of the secrecy rate criterion over competing approaches.
Mechanism of collisionless sound damping in dilute Bose gas with condensate

We develop a microscopic theory of sound damping due to Landau mechanism in dilute gas with Bose condensate. It is based on the coupled evolution equations of the parameters describing the system. These equations have been derived in earlier works within a microscopic approach which employs the Peletminskii-Yatsenko reduced description method for quantum many-particle systems and Bogoliubov model for a weakly nonideal Bose gas with a separated condensate. The dispersion equations for sound oscillations were obtained by linearization of the mentioned evolution equations in the collisionless approximation. They were analyzed both analytically and numerically. The expressions for sound speed and decrement rate were obtained in high and low temperature limiting cases. We have shown that at low temperature the dependence of the obtained quantities on temperature significantly differs from those obtained by other authors in the semi-phenomenological approaches. Possible effects connected with non-analytic temperature dependence of dispersion characteristics of the system were also indicated.
Angiotensin II type 1 receptor blockers suppress neointimal hyperplasia after stent implantation in carotid arteries of hypercholesterolemic rabbits

Abstract Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine whether oral administration of an angiotensin II type 1 receptor blocker (ARB) inhibited in-stent neointimal hyperplasia in carotid arteries of hypercholesterolemic rabbits. Methods: Eleven male New Zealand white rabbits were subjected to endothelial injuries of the right common carotid arteries using a balloon catheter and then received chow containing 1% cholesterol for 6 weeks. A balloon-expandable stainless steel stent was subsequently inserted at the injured sites of the arteries. After stenting, five rabbits were randomly treated with an oral ARB, candesartan cilexetil (5 mg/kg per day orally), while the remaining six rabbits acted as untreated controls. Four weeks after the implantation, the rabbits were killed, followed by collection of the arteries including the stents. After careful removal of the stents, tissue sections were prepared and analyzed by morphometric and immunohistochemical methods. Results: The mean thickness of the neointima was 53·6±17·0 μm in the ARB-treated group, which was significantly reduced compared to 95·9±16·7 μm in the control group (P = 0·0012). Immunohistochemistry showed a decrease in accumulation of macrophages and tenascin-C expression in the arterial wall in the ARB-treated animals. Discussion: This study suggested that systemic administration of an ARB suppressed neointimal hyperplasia in the carotid artery following stent implantation by the anti-inflammatory effects, although the animal cohort tested was rather small. This finding implies that ARBs may be useful and practical agents for protection against in-stent restenosis in humans, and warrants further basic and clinical studies.
Consumers' Repurchase Probability in Online Marketplace: A Belief Updating Perspective

It is commonly recognized that online transactions are “one-shot” transactions. However, a contemporary dataset from a dominant online marketplace in China reveals that averagely 24.3% transactions are repurchase transactions. Given that consumers already have purchase experience with a specific seller, their repurchase behavior may be influenced by both the seller’s reputation and their perceived seller performance. A consequent research question is: Whether and how do these two streams of information jointly affect consumers’ repurchase behavior? We adopt a belief update model, and also collect actual transaction data to examine this research question. Our findings include: (1) both seller reputation and consumers’ perceived seller performance have positive effects on consumers’ repurchase probability; (2) the effect of seller reputation is positively moderated by performance ambiguity; (3) consumers’ perceived seller performance has stronger effects on their repurchase probability when the seller has low reputation (vs. high reputation).
Computational approaches for discovery of mutational signatures in cancer

The accumulation of somatic mutations in a genome is the result of the activity of one or more mutagenic processes, each of which leaves its own imprint. The study of these DNA fingerprints, termed mutational signatures, holds important potential for furthering our understanding of the causes and evolution of cancer, and can provide insights of relevance for cancer prevention and treatment. In this review, we focus our attention on the mathematical models and computational techniques that have driven recent advances in the field.
Assertion-based QA with Question-Aware Open Information Extraction

We present assertion based question answering (ABQA), an open domain question answering task that takes a question and a passage as inputs, and outputs a semi-structured assertion consisting of a subject, a predicate and a list of arguments. An assertion conveys more evidences than a short answer span in reading comprehension, and it is more concise than a tedious passage in passage-based QA. These advantages make ABQA more suitable for human-computer interaction scenarios such as voice-controlled speakers. Further progress towards improving ABQA requires richer supervised dataset and powerful models of text understanding. To remedy this, we introduce a new dataset called WebAssertions, which includes hand-annotated QA labels for 358,427 assertions in 55,960 web passages. To address ABQA, we develop both generative and extractive approaches. The backbone of our generative approach is sequence to sequence learning. In order to capture the structure of the output assertion, we introduce a hierarchical decoder that first generates the structure of the assertion and then generates the words of each field. The extractive approach is based on learning to rank. Features at different levels of granularity are designed to measure the semantic relevance between a question and an assertion. Experimental results show that our approaches have the ability to infer question-aware assertions from a passage. We further evaluate our approaches by incorporating the ABQA results as additional features in passage-based QA. Results on two datasets show that ABQA features significantly improve the accuracy on passage-based QA.
A Psychology of Wisdom: History and Recent Developments

Wisdom is a phenomenon characterized by a rich cultural history and complex associations. Across cultures and history, wisdom has been discussed as the ideal of human knowledge and character. Starting from the dictionary definition of wisdom as “good judgment and advice in difficult and uncertain matters of life,” psychologists have described wisdom as the search for the moderate course between extremes, a dynamic between knowledge and doubt, a sufficient detachment from the problem at hand, and a well-balanced coordination of emotion, motivation, and thought. Within psychological research on wisdom, two broad approaches can be distinguished. One is the study of lay conceptions of wisdom, and the other is the measurement of wisdom in individuals. In the latter case a personal and a general form of wisdom needs to be distinguished. Age trajectories and antecedents of general and personal wisdom are discussed.
Parenteral fish oil lipid emulsions in the critically ill: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

INTRODUCTION ω-3 Polyunsaturated fatty acids contained in fish oils (FO) possess major anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and immunologic properties that could be beneficial during critical illness. We hypothesized that parenteral FO-containing emulsions may improve clinical outcomes in the critically ill. METHODS We searched computerized databases from 1980-2012. We included randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in critically ill adult patients that evaluated FO-containing emulsions, either in the context of parenteral nutrition (PN) or enteral nutrition (EN). RESULTS A total of 6 RCTs (n = 390 patients) were included; the mean methodological score of all trials was 10 (range, 6-13). When the results of these studies were aggregated, FO-containing emulsions were associated with a trend toward a reduction in mortality (risk ratio [RR], 0.71; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.49-1.04; P = .08; heterogeneity I (2) = 0%) and a reduction in the duration of mechanical ventilation (weighted mean difference in days [WMD], -1.41; 95% CI, -3.43 to 0.61; P = .17). However, this strategy had no effect on infections (RR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.42-1.36; P = .35) and intensive care unit length of stay (WMD, -0.46; 95% CI, -4.87 to 3.95; P = .84, heterogeneity I (2) = 75%). CONCLUSION FO-containing lipid emulsions may be able to decrease mortality and ventilation days in the critically ill. However, because of the paucity of clinical data, there is inadequate evidence to recommend the routine use of parenteral FO. Large, rigorously designed RCTs are required to elucidate the efficacy of parenteral FO in the critically ill.
Statins Use a Novel Nijmegen Breakage Syndrome-1–Dependent Pathway to Accelerate DNA Repair in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells

Although the hydroxymethylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) are widely used in atherosclerosis to reduce serum cholesterol, statins have multiple other effects, including direct effects on cells of the vessel wall. Recently, DNA damage, including telomere shortening, has been identified in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) in human atherosclerosis. Although statins reduce DNA damage in vitro, the mechanisms by which they might protect DNA integrity in VSMCs are unknown. We show that human atherosclerotic plaque VSMCs exhibit increased levels of double-stranded DNA breaks and basal activation of DNA repair pathways involving ataxia telangiectasia–mutated (ATM) and the histone H2AX in vivo and in vitro. Oxidant stress induced DNA damage and activated DNA repair pathways in VSMCs. Statin treatment did not reduce oxidant stress or DNA damage but markedly accelerated DNA repair. Accelerated DNA repair required both the Nijmegen breakage syndrome (NBS)-1 protein and the human double minute protein Hdm2, accompanied by phosphorylation of Hdm2, dissociation of NBS-1 and Hdm2, inhibition of NBS-1 degradation, and accelerated phosphorylation of ATM. Statin treatment reduced VSMC senescence and telomere attrition in culture, accelerated DNA repair and reduced apoptosis in vivo after irradiation, and reduced ATM/ATR (ATM and Rad3-related) activity in atherosclerosis. We conclude that statins activate a novel mechanism of accelerating DNA repair, dependent on NBS-1 stabilization and Hdm2. Statin treatment may delay cell senescence and promote DNA repair in atherosclerosis.
A Generic Architecture for Scalable and Highly Available Content Serving Applications in the Cloud

The cloud computing paradigm allows service providers to offer scalable and highly available applications to their end users. Typical cases where this is required are content serving applications, where a large number of connected users manage arbitrary data amounts. In the Big Data era, where the amount of information that is being produced and consumed grows exponentially, centralized legacy approaches are inefficient, as they cannot adequately scale according to the number of connected users or the dataset sizes. In these cases, an efficient cloudification of content serving applications is required in order to benefit from the cloud's offerings. In this work, we present a generic architecture that can be used by almost any content serving application in order to offer scalable and highly available data management operations to their users by employing cloud management techniques. We describe the architectural blocks of our approach along with how they can be efficiently deployed in a cloud environment. We document our experiences with an actual deployment of a typical content serving application over ~okeanos, an Openstack compatible public cloud service. We describe the open source frameworks that we have selected from a plethora of existing tools, we justify our choices and we describe our initial observations during their operation. We give a detailed overview of how we installed and configured these systems to achieve high availability and scalability in a public cloud setting. Finally, we document our initial performance evaluation where we showcase the system's ability to handle increasing workloads by elastically scaling its resources.
, Mellitus Altered Mitochondrial Dynamics Contributes to Endothelial Dysfunction in Diabetes

Background—Endothelial dysfunction contributes to the development of atherosclerosis in patients with diabetes mellitus, but the mechanisms of endothelial dysfunction in this setting are incompletely understood. Recent studies have shown altered mitochondrial dynamics in diabetes mellitus with increased mitochondrial fission and production of reactive oxygen species. We investigated the contribution of altered dynamics to endothelial dysfunction in diabetes mellitus. Methods and Results—We observed mitochondrial fragmentation (P 0.002) and increased expression of fission-1 protein (Fis1; P 0.0001) in venous endothelial cells freshly isolated from patients with diabetes mellitus (n 10) compared with healthy control subjects (n 9). In cultured human aortic endothelial cells exposed to 30 mmol/L glucose, we observed a similar loss of mitochondrial networks and increased expression of Fis1 and dynaminrelated protein-1 (Drp1), proteins required for mitochondrial fission. Altered mitochondrial dynamics was associated with increased mitochondrial reactive oxygen species production and a marked impairment of agonist-stimulated activation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase and cGMP production. Silencing Fis1 or Drp1 expression with siRNA blunted high glucose–induced alterations in mitochondrial networks, reactive oxygen species production, endothelial nitric oxide synthase activation, and cGMP production. An intracellular reactive oxygen species scavenger provided no additional benefit, suggesting that increased mitochondrial fission may impair endothelial function via increased reactive oxygen species. Conclusion—These findings implicate increased mitochondrial fission as a contributing mechanism for endothelial dysfunction in diabetic states. (Circulation. 2011;124:444-453.)
Glucose monitoring at the arm: risky delays of hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia detection.

OBJECTIVE We have examined whether rapid changes in blood glucose (BG) result in clinically relevant differences between capillary BG values measured at the forearm and the fingertip and whether local rubbing of the skin before blood sampling can diminish such differences. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Capillary BG samples were collected every 15 min for 3-5 h from the fingertip and the forearm of 17 insulin-treated diabetic patients and analyzed with different glucose monitors (FreeStyle, One Touch Ultra, and Soft-Sense). In a subgroup of patients (n = 8), local rubbing of the forearm skin was performed before blood sampling. A rapid increase in BG was induced by oral administration of glucose, and subsequently, a rapid decrease in glucose was induced by intravenous administration of insulin. RESULTS In the fasting state, the BG values at the fingertip and at the forearm were similar (7.8 +/- 2.4 vs. 7.2 +/- 2.3 mmol/l, P = 0.06). However, during rapid increase in glucose, BG values at the fingertip were consistently higher than at the forearm (maximal difference 4.6 +/- 1.2 mmol/l, P < 0.001). During rapid decrease in glucose, lower BG values were recorded at the fingertip (maximal difference to forearm 5.0 +/- 1.0 mmol/l, P < 0.001). At the forearm, BG was delayed by a median of 35 min (P < 0.01) in relation to the fingertip. Rubbing of forearm skin decreased the observed differences but with a large intraindividual and interindividual variability. There were no obvious device-specific differences. CONCLUSIONS To avoid risky delays of hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia detection, BG monitoring at the arm should be limited to situations in which ongoing rapid changes in BG can be excluded.
The developmental selector AS1 is an evolutionarily conserved regulator of the plant immune response

The MYB-related gene ASYMMETRIC LEAVES 1 (AS1) and its orthologs have an evolutionarily conserved role in specification of leaf cell identity. AS1 is expressed in leaf founder cells, where it functions as a heterodimer with the structurally unrelated AS2 proteins to repress activity of KNOTTED 1-like homeobox (KNOX) genes. AS1 therefore confines KNOX activity to the shoot apical meristem, where it promotes stem cell function through the regulation of phytohormone activities. Here, we show that loss-of-function mutations in AS1 unexpectedly convey heightened protection against necrotrophic fungi. AS1 operates as a negative regulator of inducible resistance against these pathogens by selectively binding to the promoters of genes controlled by the immune activator, jasmonic acid (JA), damping the defense response. In contrast, AS1 is a positive regulator of salicylic acid (SA)-independent extracellular defenses against bacterial pathogens. Neither the absence of AS2 nor ERECTA function, which enhances the morphological phenotype of as1, nor the conditional or constitutive expression of KNOX genes impacted disease resistance. Thus, the function of AS1 in responses to phytopathogens is independent of its AS2-associated role in development. Loss of function in the AS1 orthologs PHAN in Antirrhinum majus and NSPHAN in Nicotiana sylvestris produced pathogen-response phenotypes similar to as1 plants, and therefore the defense function of AS1 is evolutionarily conserved in plant species with a divergence time of ≈125 million years.
False Alarms and Missed Events: The Impact and Origins of Perceived Inaccuracy in Tornado Warning Systems

Theory and conventional wisdom suggest that errors undermine the credibility of tornado warning systems and thus decrease the probability that individuals will comply (i.e., engage in protective action) when future warnings are issued. Unfortunately, empirical research on the influence of warning system accuracy on public responses to tornado warnings is incomplete and inconclusive. This study adds to existing research by analyzing two sets of relationships. First, we assess the relationship between perceptions of accuracy, credibility, and warning response. Using data collected via a large regional survey, we find that trust in the National Weather Service (NWS; the agency responsible for issuing tornado warnings) increases the likelihood that an individual will opt for protective action when responding to a hypothetical warning. More importantly, we find that subjective perceptions of warning system accuracy are, as theory suggests, systematically related to trust in the NWS and (by extension) stated responses to future warnings. The second half of the study matches survey data against NWS warning and event archives to investigate a critical follow‐up question—Why do some people perceive that their warning system is accurate, whereas others perceive that their system is error prone? We find that subjective perceptions are—in part—a function of objective experience, knowledge, and demographic characteristics. When considered in tandem, these findings support the proposition that errors influence perceptions about the accuracy of warning systems, which in turn impact the credibility that people assign to information provided by systems and, ultimately, public decisions about how to respond when warnings are issued.