Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding preferences and characteristics of japanese tourists to Hawaii

Japanese tourists are the largest and most important international segment of tourists to Hawaii. Over the past few years, the number of Japanese tourists to Hawaii has declined significantly. The purpose of this study is to explore the differences in attitudinal and behavioral characteristics, and preferences of Japanese tourists in Hawaii according to key sociodemographic variables. The results of this study conclude that sociodemographic variables show significant differences in attitudinal or behavioral characteristics. For example, compared with those with a high school diploma or lower level of education, respondents with a higher level of education were likely to have greater interest in Hawaiian culture. Those who had some college education or a higher level of education showed a greater preference for swimming and taking a cruise tour than respondents with a lower level of education. The results of this study are likely to be beneficial for understanding Japanese tourists and establishing marketing policies to enhance their satisfaction and raise their intention to revisit Hawaii. The findings of this study could be helpful for all stakeholders, including local tour operators, the Japanese Tourism Board (JTB), and Hawaii's tourism officials.
Muscle Interstitial Fibroblasts Are the Main Source of Collagen VI Synthesis in Skeletal Muscle: Implications for Congenital Muscular Dystrophy Types Ullrich and Bethlem

Abstract Mutations in the extracellular matrix molecule collagen VI underlie the congenital muscular dystrophy types Ullrich and Bethlem. Establishing the origin of collagen VI in muscle is important for understanding the pathophysiology of these diseases and for developing future treatment approaches involving cell-specific delivery. Because the cells that produce collagen VI cannot be identified by histologic analysis, we examined the production of collagen VI in pure cultures of primary myogenic cells and muscle interstitial fibroblasts from limb muscle of neonatal mice. Immunofluorescence staining and Western blot analysis revealed secretion and matrix deposition of collagen VI by interstitial fibroblasts but not by myogenic cells in vitro. Using Northern blot and real-time reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction analysis for the collagen VI genes col6a1, col6a2, col6a3, transcript levels for the 3 mRNAs were high in interstitial fibroblasts, whereas in primary myogenic cells, they were indistinguishable from background. Furthermore, retention of mutant collagen VI in muscle from 3 patients with collagen VI mutation was identified in interstitial fibroblastic cells but not in their myofibers. These results suggest that interstitial fibroblasts but not myogenic cells contribute significantly to the deposition of collagen VI in the extracellular matrix in skeletal muscle and imply major roles of this cell type and the extracellular matrix in the pathogenesis of these diseases.
Case Study on Design Space Exploration of MPSoC architecture

The growth of the integration technology increases the complexities of SoC architecture, which is hard to be covered by a SoC designer. The paper presents the effective method to explore the designing space with less effort in the early designing stages of SoC. Multiple processors and various communication architectures are employed as architectural options. Case study which applies complex MIMO detection scheme(LSD) illustrates the architectural decisions in terms of the system performances such as latency and throughput.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on health policy and practice: Competing interests or complementary interpretations?

Introduction. Health Care Reforms: the New Managerialism and the Traditional Professional Duty of Care". Managers and Measurement: Managerial Discourse on NHS Reforms. self-sacrifice: Nurses' Response to the Rationalist Challenge. Discipline and Visibility in Nursing Practice. The Performance of Nursing Identity. Practical and Moral Dilemmas in Global Health Care Reform. Health Care Reform in Englandand Wales. On Politics and Need. Utilitarianism and Deontological Perspectives in Political Discourse. Conclusion: Why Nurses Need to Develop a Political and Philosophical Awareness "
Argentina: on the slippery slope to full nationalization?

Now that Argentina has almost completely nationalized energy producer YPF, where will it go next? Marcia Carmo in Buenos Aires reports that though more than 50% of Argentines approve the move, which reversed President Kirchner’s recent fall in popularity, investors and corporate executives are far less enthusiastic, seeing it as part of a series of controversial moves. Brazilian investors are wary.
Security Communities: An emerging security community in South America?

The paucity of major wars in Latin America constitutes a major challenge to international relations theory and provides especially fertile ground for thinking about the nature of security communities. For the first half-century following independence, the region was beset by persistent and widespread wars of state formation and nation building, both internal and external. In this, as in so many other ways, Latin America foreshadowed the pattern of subsequent postcolonial conflicts and, by no stretch of the imagination, could be viewed as constituting a security community. However, since the late nineteenth century both the number and the intensity of interstate wars between Latin American states have been remarkably low - despite the existence of large numbers of protracted and militarized border disputes, many cases of the threatened use of force and of military intervention by outside powers, high levels of domestic violence and political instability, and long periods of authoritarian rule. Explanations follow predictable lines. Realists and neorealists look to geopolitical location, to the varying degree of insulation from extraregional influences, and to the hegemonic or policing role of, first, Britain and then the United States. Within the region, they highlight the emergence of relatively autonomous regional balances of power (for example between Brazil, Argentina and Chile), as well as other material factors which worked to restrain conflict - the absence of transport links, borders that were geographically removed from centres of political and economic activity, and military technologies that made it extremely difficult to bring power to bear in offensive wars of conquest.
Teaching Methods in Higher Education: A Student Perspective

Total 156 100 . 0 100.0 Introdudion Once a society becomes self-conscious about the nurture of its young, the seed of educational theory is sown. Because men are anxious to control the educative process, they hypothesize how the outcomes they envision for their pupils can be best secured. The systematic concern with how to teach stimulates the growth of educational theory both among the professionals who apply it and among the laymen who, in all history, probably have never been completely satisfied with what schools do to and for their children (Broudy and Palmer, 1965). This state of affairs has not changed since this statement was made in 1965. Teachingmethods, however, have been consistently modified by educators to adapt to the characteristics of the students to whom they are asked to provide a dimension of value designed to make them successful. In this study I look at student input on teaching strategies in order to provide educators with a framework for teaching a housekeeping/engineering management class. Hospitality programs usually f ind housekeeping and engineering courses difficult to teach, either because the professor has limited or no practical experience in these hotel departments or because the instructor, drawn from industry, has no sound pedagogical background.
DO MEMBER STATES MAKE EUROPEAN POLICIES WORK? ANALYSING THE EU TRANSPOSITION DEFICIT

This article seeks to systematically describe and explain variation in European Union policy implementation performance across member states and directives. The analyses rely on a new and original dataset comprising comparable information about transposition delay for practically all EU social directives in Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. On the basis of nearly 300 observations, we could establish that only in 42.7 per cent of our cases did member states transpose in time; 17.5 per cent exceeded the deadline by more than two years. The analysis reveals modest variation between social policy areas, more profound cross-country differences and strong cross-area variations within some countries. The need for inter-ministerial coordination and administrative ineffi ciency are strongly associated with transposition delay. Whether a directive is new or merely an amendment is unrelated to transposition delay. The same holds for the directive ’ s complexity and parliamentary involvement in the transposition process. The irrelevance of the latter factors may suggest that member states anticipate some potential challenges to transposition performance and act to mitigate them. Whether and why this is the case merits further research.
Geocoding Tweets Approach Based on Conceptual Representations in the Context of the Knowledge Society

In this paper, an approach to geocode tweets published in Spanish is proposed. The tweets are related to traffic events within an urban context of the Mexico City. They are generated by a particular phenomenon for knowing the behavior of the involved geographic entities. In order to disambiguate and verify the consistency of information, an application ontology was defined. Thus, the core goal is to identify location as well as spatial relationships between entities presented in the events, using semantic and spatial analysis of the collected dataset. In consequence, a visualization method for presenting the results was also proposed. The paper describes the methodology for enabling the discovery of spatial patterns within traffic tweets and provides useful information to make timely decisions and contribute in the context of Knowledge Society.
Strong association between frequency of intermittent inflow occlusion and transient increase in serum liver enzymes after hepatic resection.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Although significantly higher serum levels of liver transaminases are commonly observed after hepatic resection, the factors responsible for the increase and the association between the increase and the postoperative course remain unclear. METHODOLOGY The study population comprised 70 patients who had undergone hepatic resection except hepatectomy with vascular and biliary reconstruction. The relation between the perioperative factors and postoperative aspartic aminotransferase (AST) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) elevations were analyzed. Outcome parameters, i.e., postoperative total bilirubin level, hospital stay and complications were also analyzed. RESULTS The average maximum postoperative serum AST and ALT levels were 444.6 IU/L and 390.1 U/L. None of the preoperative factors examined, such as AST, ALT, associated liver disease, Liver Damage Classification, intraoperative hypotension, intraoperative blood loss or types of liver resection, were significantly correlated with liver enzyme elevations. The only factor that was significantly correlated was frequency of intermittent inflow occlusion (p < 0.001). The elevations of AST and ALT were not significantly correlated with length of hospital stay and postoperative serum bilirubin level. ALT also was not correlated to complications, whereas AST was significantly correlated to the frequency of the postoperative complications. CONCLUSIONS The frequency of intermittent inflow occlusion is the only factor that affects the postoperative enzyme elevation.
Ontogenesis of olivocerebellar relationships. II. Spontaneous activity of inferior olivary neurons and climbing fibermediated activity of cerebellar Purkinje cells in developing rats

During development of vertebrate cerebellum, a multiple innervation of each Purkinje cell (PC) by several climbing fibers (CFs) (Crepel, F., J. Mariani, and N. Delhaye-Bouchaud (1976) J. Neurobiol. 7: 567–578; Mariani, J., and J. -P. Changeux (1981) J. Neurosci. 1: 696–702) precedes the one-to-one relationship characteristic of the adult stage. In the present study, the spontaneous activity of inferior olivary neurons (whose axons constitute the CFs) and the spontaneous activity elicited in PCs by the CF system were investigated in developing rats. Extracellular unitary recordings were obtained in medial and dorsal accessory olives from 249 neurons from 1-day-old to adult animals. The mean discharge rate varied from 0.19 spike . sec-1 on day 1 to 1.69 spikes . sec-1 on postnatal day 21 and 1.78 spikes . sec-1 in adult animals. Although the spontaneous discharge was low, interspike interval histograms were constructed for a sample of cells. Their modal value varied from a mean value of 660 msec on day 1 to 250 msec in the adult with, however, marked variations at each age in the young animals. Intracellular recordings from PCs were performed in rats ranging in age from 5 to 15 postnatal days. The spontaneous (i.e., asynchronous) discharge of excitatory postsynaptic potentials mediated neurons at the same age. The main results are the following: (1) In PCs innervated by one CF, the mean frequency of CF-EPSPs was similar to the discharge of inferior olivary neurons; (2) in PCs innervated by several CFs, the mean discharge of CF-EPSPs was much higher than the discharge of inferior olivary neurons; (3) as a whole, the CF-mediated activity of PCs decreased from day 5 to day 11, while the multiple innervation disappeared; from then on, the activity increased with the maturation of inferior olivary neurons until adult values. The ratio of the frequencies of CF-EPSPs and olivary neurons discharges gives an approximate mean number of CF collaterals per PC at each age; it varied from 3.6 on day 5 to values close to 1 on day 11 and the following days.
Nosocomial Urinary Tract Infections

Complicated urinary tract infections (cUTIs) are a major cause of hospital admissions and are associated with significant morbidity and health care costs. Knowledge of baseline risk of urinary tract infection can help clinicians make informed diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. Prevalence rates of UTI vary by age, gender, race, and other predisposing risk factors. In this regard, this book provides comprehensive information on etiology, epidemiology, immunology, pathology, pathogenic mechanisms, symptomatology, investigation and management of urinary tract infection. Chapters cover common problems in urinary tract infection and put emphasis on the importance of making a correct clinical decision and choosing the appropriate therapeutic approach. Topics are organized to address all of the major complicated conditions frequently seen in urinary tract infection. The authors have paid particular attention to urological problems like the outcome of patients with vesicoureteric reflux, the factors affecting renal scarring, obstructive uropathy, voiding dysfunction and catheter associated problems. This book will be indispensable for all professionals involved in the medical care of patients with urinary tract infection.
Rate adaptive hierarchical modulation assisted two-user opportunistic scheduling

We propose and study a two best user opportunistic scheduling algorithm using discrete rate adaptive hierarchical constellations (known also as embedded, multi-resolution, or asymmetrical constellations). The key idea is to rely on hierarchical constellations to transmit information to the two best users opportunistically. The newly proposed scheme transmits information to single or two best users jointly considering the channel qualities of these users. We present expressions for the information transmission probability and the overall average spectral efficiency [Bits/Sec/Hz] defined as the overall average transmitted data rate per unit bandwidth for a specified number of users, average carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR), and bit error rate (BER). Numerical results for an identical and independent (i.i.d.) fading environment, where the channel variation among the users is i.i. d. , are presented. The results show that in such i.i. d. fading environment, our newly proposed discrete rate adaptive hierarchical modulation assisted two best user scheduling provides more frequent access to the information (almost double) without any average spectral efficiency degradation compared to the classical single best user opportunistic scheduling.
PERSISTENCE OF PASTEURELLA MULTOCIDA IN NEBRASKA WETLANDS UNDER EPIZOOTIC CONDITIONS

Gleason Basin, a marsh located in the western part of the Rainwater Basin in Nebraska, was selected during the 1980 spring waterfowl migration as a study site to determine the presence and persistence of virulent Pasteurella multocida. Avian cholera mortality in migratory waterfowl using the Basin increased during a 2-wk period of a die-off beginning the first week of March when 2,409 carcasses were collected from the marsh. Study sites within the marsh were established for sampling water associated with and not associated with intact and scavenged carcasses. Isolations of virulent P. multocida were made from five of six study sites associated with either intact or scavenged carcasses for 3 days and from three of five non-carcass-associated study sites for 2 days. Recovery of these bacteria from this environment suggested a possible source of infection for susceptible waterfowl using the contaminated site.
"Below the Line": The tobacco industry and youth smoking.

BACKGROUND This paper provides a comprehensive account of how the tobacco industry, over time, has promoted its products to young people. METHOD A comprehensive search of tobacco industry documents relating to youth smoking was conducted using documents available on the World Wide Web through the Master Settlement Agreement. RESULTS The documents provide evidence that the industry invested great time and resources in developing strategies to attract young people through Youth Smoking Prevention strategies (including education strategies) and marketing to youth. The results include information from published literature and direct excerpts from the tobacco industry documents. CONCLUSION The tobacco industry documents confirm that the tobacco industry has promoted and supported strategies that are ineffective in reducing smoking by youth, and opposed strategies that have proven to be effective. It is clear from the documents reviewed that the industry values the youth market and through a number of measures continues to promote its products to young people.
The disposition and behavioral effects of methadone in Greyhounds.

OBJECTIVE To determine the behavioral effects and pharmacokinetics of methadone in healthy Greyhounds. STUDY DESIGN Prospective experimental study. ANIMALS Three male and three female healthy Greyhounds. METHODS Methadone hydrochloride, 0.5 mg kg(-1) IV (equivalent to 0.45 mg kg(-1) methadone base), was administered as an IV bolus. Trained observers subjectively assessed the behavioral effects of methadone. Blood samples were obtained at predetermined time points and plasma methadone concentrations were measured by liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry. Pharmacokinetic variables were estimated with computer software. RESULTS Methadone was well tolerated by the dogs with panting and defecation observed as adverse effects. Mild sedation was present, but no vomiting, excitement, or dysphoria was observed. The elimination half-life, volume of distribution, and plasma clearance were 1.53 +/- 0.18 hours, 7.79 +/- 1.87 L kg(-1), and 56.04 +/- 9.36 mL minute(-1) kg(-1), respectively. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Methadone was well tolerated by Greyhounds. The volume of distribution was larger than expected, with resultant lower plasma concentrations than expected. Higher doses may need to be administered to Greyhounds in comparison with non-Greyhound dogs in order to achieve similar plasma drug concentrations. A dosage of 1-1.5 mg kg(-1) every 3-4 hours is suggested for future studies of analgesic efficacy of methadone in Greyhounds.
Amino Acid Changes in the Influenza A Virus PA Protein That Attenuate Avian H5N1 Viruses in Mammals

ABSTRACT The influenza viral polymerase complex affects host tropism and pathogenicity. In particular, several amino acids in the PB2 polymerase subunit are essential for the efficient replication of avian influenza viruses in mammals. The PA polymerase subunit also contributes to host range and pathogenicity. Here, we report that the PA proteins of several highly pathogenic avian H5N1 viruses have attenuating properties in mammalian cells and that the attenuating phenotype is conferred by strain-specific amino acid changes. Specifically, lysine at position 185 of A/duck/Vietnam/TY165/2010 (TY165; H5N1) PA induced strongly attenuating effects in vitro and in vivo. More importantly, the introduction of the arginine residue commonly found at this position in PA significantly increased the viral polymerase activity of TY165 in mammalian cells and its virulence and pathogenicity in mice. These findings demonstrate that the PA protein plays an important role in influenza virulence and pathogenicity. IMPORTANCE Highly pathogenic influenza viruses of the H5N1 subtype cause severe respiratory infections in humans, which have resulted in death in nearly two-thirds of the patients with laboratory-confirmed cases. We found that the viral PA polymerase subunit of several H5N1 viruses possesses amino acid changes that attenuate virus replication in mammalian cells (yet the H5N1 viruses possessing these mutations are highly pathogenic in mice). Specifically, we found that an arginine-to-lysine substitution at position 185 of an H5N1 virus PA protein significantly affected that virus's virulence and pathogenicity in mice. The PA protein thus plays a role in the pathogenicity of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza viruses.
Military Spending and Economic Growth in South Asia: A Panel Data Analysis

Despite the large number and variety of studies addressing the relationship between military spending and economic growth, a consensus regarding the exact nature of any relationship between the two has proven elusive. This study uses a panel co-integration approach to examine the relationship between military spending and economic growth in the five South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh over the period of 1988–2007. It finds that a 1% increase in military spending increases real GDP by only 0.04%, suggesting that the substantial amount of public expenditure that is currently directed towards military purposes in these countries has a negligible impact upon economic growth.
Determinants of India’s Manufactured Exports to South and North: A Gravity Model Analysis

We have analysed the determinants of India’s manufactured exports to its southern (developing countries) and northern (developed countries) markets. We employed an augmented gravity model to examine the determinants of India’s exports. The analysis shows that India’s exports to south and north is explained by the new trade theory variables like total GDP, GDP similarity and the difference in percapita income as an indicator of Heckschor-Ohlin theory of trade. However the distance is more negatively affecting India’s exports to north than the southern market as the proximity to southern market is helping India’s exports to grow in south.