Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of tissue factor pathway inhibitor on hepatic ischemic reperfusion injury of the rat.

BACKGROUND Tissue factor (TF) is an initiation factor for blood coagulation, and its expression is induced on macrophages and endothelial cells during the inflammatory or immune responses. In a previous study, we reported the significance of TF expression in hepatic ischemic reperfusion injury using a rat model. Recently, tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI) has been discovered, and the effect of TFPI has been assessed in vivo. In this study, therefore, we studied the effect of TFPI on hepatic ischemic reperfusion injury of the rat. METHODS After laparotomy of Lewis rats, the branches of the hepatic artery and portal vein leading to the median, left, and caudate lobes of the liver were clamped. The liver was reperfused after 120 or 180 min of ischemia. Simultaneously, recombinant human TFPI (4 mg/kg) was injected via a superiomesenteric vein. Rats were sacrificed at 5, 12, and 24 hr after reperfusion, and liver tissues were harvested. TF expression was studied by immunohistochemical staining with the monoclonal antibody (HTF-K108). RESULTS Survival rates over a 5-day period were examined after the ischemic time of 120 and 180 min. Seven of 10 rats in the 120-min ischemia group (n=10), and only 1 (10%) rat of 10 in the 180-min ischemia group (n=10) survived. However, by the treatment with TFPI, all of the rats in the 120-min ischemia group (n=10), and six rats in the 180-min ischemia group (n=10) survived (P<0.05). The serum concentrations of alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and thrombin-antithrombin complex (TAT) before ischemia were 30.0+/-2.3 IU/L and 4.7+/-1.4 ng/ml, respectively (n=5). These levels showed a peak at 3-5 hr after reperfusion (ALT: 13909+/-1900 IU/L, TAT: 30.4+/-7.0 ng/ml) (P<0.01). However, both peak levels were decreased by the treatment with TFPI (ALT: 6017+/-1290 IU/L, TAT: 5.4+/-2.1 ng/ml) (P<0.01). Although TF was strongly stained on endothelial cells and Kupffer cells accumulating to the site of the necrosis in the control group, the area of the necrosis and the grade of TF staining were significantly reduced in the TFPI-treated group. CONCLUSIONS These results indicated that TFPI strongly inhibited the injury of the ischemic reperfusion, and confirmed that TF played a pivotal role in the development of ischemic reperfusion injury.
Design and first experimentation of an electromagnetically actuated ferrofluidic micropump

A volumetric micropump whose ferrofluid piston is actuated by a fixed arrangement of ferromagnetic materials and windings is presented. The main steps of the design that led to this solution are detailed. The first implements an optimization approach to determine the shape of the magnetic circuit maximizing the static backpressure withstand by the ferrofluid piston. The result is a structure consisting of ferromagnetic teeth whose width and spacing are directly related to the pipe diameter of the pump. The second step consists in analyzing and using this solution to ensure the piston actuation in a to and fro motion. The solution is formed by the repetition of three identical basic structures angularly and linearly shifted along the pipe and supplied successively, like in a stepper motor. First experimental tests performed on a prototype show the validity of the concept and the interest of fragmenting the piston into several bubbles to increase the maximal working pressure of the pump.
WHO NEEDS STRATEGIC PLANNING

Managers need neither swallow whole an elaborate strategic planning system, nor be discouraged into total rejection. Many of the problems businesses experience with strategic planning can be traced to a mismatch of their planning system and their companies' structure. This article presents a framework for conducting an audit of a company's structural need for strategic planning.
Intellectual capital measurement: a critical approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate intellectual capital (IC) measurement critically so that the dynamics of intangible value creation can be better understood and to provide insights into how IC is constructed rather than what IC is.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a case study on how a division of a large Australian financial institution utilised an approach based on complexity theory to investigate IC in practice. The method utilises narrative, numbers and visualisations to make sense of IC at a particular point in time.Findings – It is argued that trying to “fit” existing popular frameworks to gather IC measurements inside organisations has little relevance to understanding the value‐creation process. As a result of the investigation of IC in this paper, it is found that, to date, IC measurement has relied heavily on “accountingisation” and that alternate methods to understand IC need to be developed. The paper highlights that academics and practitioners need to deve.
Software development: Knowledge-intensive work organizations

Abstract We report the findings from three studies of software development projects using a series of questions framed to provide a more detailed understanding than usually pertains of the management and organization, outcomes and derivations of work organization. We discuss some practical and theoretical implications of this work; in particular we conclude that these are knowledge intensive work organizations, that current theory is illequipped to address these practices, and that their analysis and understanding requires both organizational and cognitive explanations.
Savings Accounts and the Life-Cycle Approach to Social Insurance

Using Danish data, we find that about three fourths of the taxes levied to finance public transfers actually finance benefits that do not redistribute between people but redistribute income over the life cycle of individual taxpayers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social insurance via mandatory individual savings accounts. An account system that offers liquidity insurance and a lifetime income guarantee helps to alleviate the dilemma between insurance and incentives. To illustrate this, we analyse a specific proposal for reform of the Danish system of social insurance, involving the use of individual accounts. We estimate how the reform would affect the distribution of lifetime incomes, the public budget, and economic efficiency. Our analysis suggests that, even with conservative assumptions regarding labor supply elasticities, the proposed reform would generate a Pareto improvement and would imply only a minor increase in the inequality of lifetime income distribution.
Studies on the mechanism of superoxide release from human neutrophils stimulated with arachidonate.

cis-Unsaturated fatty acids stimulate release of superoxide (O-2) by human neutrophils (Badwey, J. A., Curnutte, J. T., Robinson, J. M., Berde, C. B., Karnovsky, M. J., and Karnovsky, M. L. (1984) J. Biol. Chem. 259, 7870-7877). The rate of O-2 release due to arachidonate (105 +/- 24 S.D., nmol of O-2/min/10(7) cells) was comparable to optimal values obtained with other stimuli. Antagonists of calcium-binding proteins (i.e. phenothiazines, naphthalene sulfonamides) inhibited the release of O-2 in a fashion compatible with the involvement of calmodulin in these phenomena. Synthetic substrates for and an inhibitor of chymotrypsin-like proteases (e.g. N-benzoyl-L-tyrosine ethyl ester, L-1-tosylamido-2-phenylethyl chloromethyl ketone) also blocked O-2 release. Antagonists of calcium-binding proteins and of proteases were effective in this context with neutrophils stimulated with a variety of agents. The implications of these data for recent reports concerning the mechanism of action of cis-unsaturated fatty acids on phagocytes is discussed.
Laparoscopic Treatment of Complex Small Bowel Obstruction: Is It Safe?

Laparoscopic treatment of small bowel obstruction has many reported advantages, yet it is infrequently performed. Criticisms include reduced working space, difficult abdominal access, and bowel injury. The experience with laparoscopic treatment of small bowel obstruction to determine its safety has been reviewed. Nineteen patients underwent laparoscopic treatment of small bowel obstruction. A cut-down technique was used for abdominal access and avoided manipulation of dilated bowel. The average number of prior operations was 1.4. The average size of maximally dilated bowel was 3.5 cm, including 6 patients whose diameter was greater than 4 cm. Laparoscopic treatment was successful in 16 patients; 3 patients required laparotomy. There were no complications from abdominal access and no iatrogenic bowel injuries. This series demonstrated that abdominal access and relief of bowel obstruction can be safely performed laparoscopically in patients with complex small bowel obstruction. Neither massively dilated bowel nor multiple previous abdominal operations precluded safe conduct of the operation laparoscopically.
Exploring the usage and impact of “transformational” mobile financial services: the case of M-PESA in Kenya

Abstract Since its introduction in March of 2007, the M-PESA application has grown rapidly, acquiring a user base of over seven million and an agent network of over ten thousand. Because of its rapid growth, the application has received a significant amount of attention. There have been assertions that it can engender transformational benefits by providing the unbanked with new opportunities to access financial services. There is, however, very little discussion of what these transformational benefits are and how they are brought about. This paper will contribute to filling this gap in the literature. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over fourteen months in two locations – an informal settlement near Nairobi and a farming village in Western Kenya. It will show that the M-PESA application was utilized for the cultivation of livelihood strategies. Such strategies helped residents to cope with (temporarily adjust) and recover from (longer-term shifts in livelihood strategies) stresses and shocks. It will also explain the outcomes resulting from these strategies. In particular, it will show how M-PESA was utilized for the solicitation and accumulation of financial assets and the maintenance of social networks. Attention will also be given to some of the negative outcomes, or unintended consequences, that were generated through usage.
Phase I trial of combined-modality therapy for localized esophageal cancer: escalating doses of continuous-infusion paclitaxel with cisplatin and concurrent radiation therapy.

PURPOSE To define the maximum-tolerated dose (MTD) of paclitaxel when given as a weekly 96-hour infusion with cisplatin and radiotherapy for patients with esophageal cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS Thirty-four patients with locally advanced esophageal cancer and three patients with local recurrence or positive resection margins were treated. Weekly paclitaxel doses of 10, 20, 30, 40, 60, and 80 mg/m(2), given as a continuous 96-hour infusion, were administered with weekly cisplatin, 30 mg/m(2) on day 1, weeks 1 to 6, and concurrent radiation (50.4 Gy). Plasma paclitaxel steady-state levels were measured. RESULTS Dose-limiting toxicity, defined as a treatment break longer than 2 weeks for toxicity, occurred in one patient in the 80-mg/m(2)/wk dose level. Major causes for any (including < or = 2 weeks) treatment breaks were mediport complications and neutropenic fever, which occurred mostly at that dose level. At a paclitaxel dose of 60 mg/m(2)/wk, myelosuppression, mostly neutropenia, was relatively mild and transient; stomatitis, esophagitis, diarrhea. and peripheral neuropathy were uncommon and usually of grade 2 or less. Therefore, the MTD was established at 60 mg/m(2)/wk. The mean steady-state concentration of paclitaxel at the MTD was 17.2 nmol/L. Complete (R0) resection was possible in 16 (73%) of 22 patients who underwent subsequent surgery, and the pathologic complete response rate was 24%. CONCLUSION Weekly, 96-hour infusion of paclitaxel 60 mg/m(2)/wk, given with concurrent cisplatin and radiotherapy, is a safe and tolerable regimen for patients with localized esophageal cancer. Preliminary efficacy data are encouraging. This regimen is the basis of ongoing Radiation Therapy Oncology Group phase II randomized trials in esophageal and gastric cancers.
Fiscal federalism in South Africa

The constitutional change in South Africa in the 1990s brought about the decentralization of substantial budgetary responsibility to newly created provincial governments. This study captures the new assignment of functions and resources to the different spheres of government in South Africa and provides an assessment on the basis of a framework derived from fiscal federalism principles. It concludes that there is a substantial congruence between what can be viewed as theoretically desirable and what is outlined in the South African Constitution of 1996, but observes significant divergences between the Constitution and actual practice.
Adenosine A(2A) receptor antagonist treatment of Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND Observations in animal models suggest that A(2A) antagonists confer benefit by modulating dopaminergic effects on the striatal dysfunction associated with motor disability. This double-blind, placebo-controlled, proof-of-principle study evaluated the pathogenic contribution and therapeutic potential of adenosine A(2A) receptor-mediated mechanisms in Parkinson disease (PD) and levodopa-induced motor complications. METHODS Fifteen patients with moderate to advanced PD consented to participate. All were randomized to either the selective A(2A) antagonist KW-6002 or matching placebo capsules in a 6-week dose-rising design (40 and 80 mg/day). Motor function was rated on the Unified PD Rating Scale. RESULTS KW-6002 alone or in combination with a steady-state IV infusion of each patient's optimal levodopa dose had no effect on parkinsonian severity. At a low dose of levodopa, however, KW-6002 (80 mg) potentiated the antiparkinsonian response by 36% (p < 0.02), but with 45% less dyskinesia compared with that induced by optimal dose levodopa alone (p < 0.05). All cardinal parkinsonian signs improved, especially resting tremor. In addition, KW-6002 prolonged the efficacy half-time of levodopa by an average of 47 minutes (76%; p < 0.05). No medically important drug toxicity occurred. CONCLUSIONS The results support the hypothesis that A(2A) receptor mechanisms contribute to symptom production in PD and that drugs able to selectively block these receptors may help palliate symptoms in levodopa-treated patients with this disorder.
Gankyrin Is an Ankyrin-repeat Oncoprotein That Interacts with CDK4 Kinase and the S6 ATPase of the 26 S Proteasome*

A yeast two-hybrid screen with the human S6 (TBP7, RPT3) ATPase of the 26 S proteasome has identified gankyrin, a liver oncoprotein, as an interacting protein. Gankyrin interacts with both free and regulatory complex-associated S6 ATPase and is not stably associated with the 26 S particle. Deletional mutagenesis shows that the C-terminal 78 amino acids of the S6 ATPase are necessary and sufficient to mediate the interaction with gankyrin. Deletion of an orthologous gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae suggests that it is dispensable for cell growth and viability. Overexpression and precipitation of tagged gankyrin from cultured cells detects a complex containing co-transfected tagged S6 ATPase (or endogenous S6) and endogenous cyclin D-dependent kinase CDK4. The proteasomal ATPases are part of the AAA (ATPases associated with diverse cellular activities) family, members of which are molecular chaperones; gankyrin complexes may therefore influence CDK4 function during oncogenesis.
Applicability of tools to assess pain in elderly patients after cardiac surgery

Background: Post‐operatively, elderly patients with impaired vision and cognitive dysfunction may experience difficulties understanding standard pain assessment tools such as the 10‐cm Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and the Verbal Rating Scale (VRS). Thus, there is a need to identify more feasible post‐operative pain assessments for elderly patients. With this goal in mind, we compared the VAS and VRS with two more expressive tools: the 50‐cm Red Wedge Scale (RWS) and the Facial Pain Scale (FPS).
CENTER FOR COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES Modular Composition of Coordination Services

Coordination services like ZooKeeper, etcd, Doozer, and Consul are increasingly used by distributed applications for consistent, reliable, and high-speed coordination. When applications execute in multiple geographic regions, coordination service deployments trade-off between performance, (achieved by using independent services in separate regions), and consistency. We present a system design for modular composition of services that addresses this trade-off. We implement ZooNet, a prototype of this concept over ZooKeeper. ZooNet allows users to compose multiple instances of the service in a consistent fashion, facilitating applications that execute in multiple regions. In ZooNet, clients that access only local data suffer no performance penalty compared to working with a standard single ZooKeeper. Clients that use remote and local ZooKeepers show up to 7x performance improvement compared to consistent solutions available today.
Line shapes of intersubband and excitonic recombination in quantum wells: Influence of final-state interaction, statistical broadening, and momentum conservation.

A realistic and comprehensive theory of line shapes for spontaneous recombination of two-dimensional carriers in quantum-well (QW) structures is developed. Starting from the line shape for intersubband recombination, which takes into account the QW density of states and the thermal carrier distribution function, the impact of momentum (non)conservation on the luminescence line shape is considered. Then Lorentzian broadening due to the finite lifetime of the final states and Gaussian broadening due to statistical fluctuations of quantum-well eigenenergies characteristic, e.g., of interface roughness is incorporated. The effects of Coulomb interaction of the charge carriers at low densities are considered quantitatively, including both excitonic bound states and excitonic enhancement above the two-dimensional band gap. For a case study, GaAs QW luminescence line shapes are investigated. The line-shape evaluation definitely proves that recombination is excitonic at any temperature up to 300 K in contradiction to previous assumptions of some other authors. At low temperatures all lines consist, on a first view, of unresolved doublets which are very close in energy. The high-energy component is identified as the free-electron--heavy-hole exciton. Momentum is not found and does not need to be conserved in the free-exciton recombination process at low temperatures. At high temperatures, momentum conservationmore » is found to be reestablished: Momentum conservation is understood to depend on the relative amplitude of interface-roughness-induced lateral potential fluctuations as compared to the thermal energy of the excitons. « less
Ectopic expression of dE2F and dDP induces cell proliferation and death in the Drosophila eye.

The deregulation of E2F activity is thought to contribute to the uncontrolled proliferation of many tumor cells. While the effects of overexpressing E2F genes have been studied extensively in tissue culture, the consequences of elevating E2F activity in vivo are unknown. To address this issue, transgenic lines of Drosophila were studied in which ectopic expression of dE2F and dDP was targeted to the developing eye. The co‐expression of dDP or dE2F disrupted normal eye development, resulting in abnormal patterns of bristles, cone cells and photoreceptors. dE2F/dDP expression caused ectopic S phases in post‐mitotic cells of the eye imaginal disc but did not disrupt the onset of neuronal differentiation. Most S phases were seen in uncommitted cells, although some cells that had initiated photo‐receptor differentiation were also driven into the cell cycle. Elevated expression of dE2F and dDP caused apoptosis in the eye disc. The co‐expression of baculovirus p35 protein, an inhibitor of cell death, strongly enhanced the dE2F/dDP‐dependent phenotype. These results show that, in this in vivo system, the elevation of E2F activity caused post‐mitotic cells to enter the cell cycle. However, these cells failed to proliferate unless rescued from apoptosis.
Automatic Annotation of Satellite Images via Multifeature Joint Sparse Coding With Spatial Relation Constraint

In this letter, we propose a novel framework for large-satellite-image annotation using multifeature joint sparse coding (MFJSC) with spatial relation constraint. The MFJSC model imposes an l1, 2-mixed-norm regularization on encoded coefficients of features. The regularization will encourage the coefficients to share a common sparsity pattern, which will preserve the cross-feature information and eliminate the constraint that they must have identical coefficients. Spatial dependences between patches of large images are useful for the annotation task but are usually ignored or insufficiently exploited in other methods. In this letter, we design a spatial-relation-constrained classifier to utilize the output of MFJSC and the spatial dependences to annotate images more precisely. Experiments on a data set of 21 land-use classes and QuickBird images show the discriminative power of MFJSC and the effectiveness of our annotation framework.
Unemployment, Investment and Global Expected Returns: A Panel FAVAR Approach

We consider the hypothesis that a common factor, global expected returns, drives unemployment and investment in 21 OECD countries over the period 1960-2002. We investigate this hypothesis using a panel-factor augmented-vector autoregression (FAVAR). We first estimate the common factors of unemployment and investment by principal components and show that the first principal component of unemployment is almost identical to that of investment and that they both show the pattern one would expect of a rate of return as indicated by long interest rates. We then estimate panel FAVARs to measure the dynamic impact of the global factors. Investment appears to drive unemployment and – allowing for a moving natural rate of unemployment driven by the global factor – produces much faster adjustment by unemployment.
Promoting safe and effective genetic tests in the United States: work of the task force on genetic testing.

The Task Force on Genetic Testing was created to review genetic testing in the United States and, when necessary, to make recommendations to ensure the development of safe and effective genetic tests. A survey to explore the state of genetic testing was undertaken for the Task Force and completed in early 1995. The survey, as well as literature reports and other information collected for the Task Force, showed problems affecting safety and effectiveness, as defined by the Task Force: validity and utility of predictive tests, laboratory quality, and appropriate use by healthcare providers and consumers. On the basis of these findings, the Task Force made several recommendations to ensure safe and effective genetic testing. The Secretary of Health and Human Services followed up one recommendation by creating the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing. One of its functions will be to implement other recommendations of the Task Force.