Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Transplacental Administration of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 on Fetal Lung Development in the Rabbit Model of Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia

Objective: Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) increases surfactant protein expression in type 2 pneumocytes. Herein, we determine if transplacental GLP-1 treatment accelerates lung growth in the fetal rabbit model of congenital diaphragmatic hernia (DH). Methods: Time-mated does had an induction of DH on day 23 followed by daily GLP-1 or placebo injection until term. At that time, the does were weighed, fetal blood was obtained for GLP-1 assay, and the lungs were dissected. Fetal outcome measures were lung-to-body-weight ratio (LBWR), morphometry, and Ki67 and surfactant protein B (SPB) expression. Results: Maternal weight loss in the GLP-1 group was 7.1%. Fetal survival was lower in GLP-1 fetuses compared to placebo controls (27/85, 32% vs. 35/57, 61%; p < 0.05). Fetal GLP-1 levels were increased 3.6-fold. The LBWR of GLP-1 DH fetuses fell within the range of DH placebo fetuses (1.166 ± 0.207% vs. 1.312 ± 0.418%), being significantly lower than that of placebo-exposed unoperated fetuses (2.280 ± 0.522%; p < 0.001). GLP-1 did not improve airway morphometry. GLP-1 DH lungs had a reduced adventitial and medial thickness within the range of controls, and lesser muscularization of vessels measuring 30-60 µm. There were no differences in Ki67 and SPB expression. Conclusion: GLP-1 at this dosage improves peripheric pulmonary vessel morphology in intra-acinar vessels with no effect on airway morphometry but with significant maternal and fetal side effects. Thus, it is an unlikely medical strategy.
Migrating-remitting-'building'-dwelling: house-making as 'proxy' presence in postsocialist Albania

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants' house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house as such. I propose that such 'house-making' by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic 'proxy' presence for migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.
Preschoolers' Understanding of Memory-relevant Variables.

WELLMAN, HENRY M. Preschoolers' Understanding of Memory-relevant Variables. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1720-1723. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were presented an array of metamemory tasks designed to test their understanding of variables which affect the difficulty of memory performance. 10 variables were tested, including, for example, that more items make a task harder, more time to study makes memorization more certain, distractions and interference make the task harder, etc. By age 5 children understood most of these variables. Understanding of the memory relevance of the variables was acquired in an ordered developmental sequence.
Luminescent Properties of Oxazine 170 Perchlorate Doped PMMA Fiber

The article presents fabrication and luminescent properties of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) fiber doped by Oxazine 170 perchlorate. The bright fluorescence of polymeric fiber (at molar fluorescent organic dye concentration 4.3 × 10−5) was characterized in terms of spectrum and signal attenuation vs. the fiber length. The significant changes in fluorescence spectrum (λmax red shift average slope 4.6 nm/cm and Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) increasing slope 6.7 nm/cm) have been noticed for the length of the fiber (0.02–0.08 m) which corresponds to a high overlapping region of absorption and emission spectra of used dye. The red shift of λmax (c.a. 80 nm) was presented in fabricated polymeric fiber at distance 0.85 m. The obtained characteristics can be used for luminescent properties optimization of fluorescent organic-dye-doped PMMA fiber.
Efficacy of Recreational and Occupational Activities Associated to Psychologic Support in Mild to Moderate Alzheimer Disease: A Multicenter Controlled Study

We evaluated the efficacy of a stimulation program mainly based on recreational and occupational activities, associated with a brief cycle of support psychotherapy for patients and caregivers, in mild to moderate Alzheimer Disease (AD) associated or not with cerebrovascular lesions. Sixty-seven patients and 31 controls from 2 Italian towns entered the study. The control group was comprised of AD subjects who voluntarily declined to participate in the program for practical reasons. Patients were divided in groups of 4 subjects: treatment was delivered for 6 weeks. Multidimensional efficacy assessment of functional, behavioral, and neuropsychologic aspects was performed. When comparing baseline with posttraining condition, patients displayed a substantial reduction in disruptive behavior, and a tendency to a general reduction of behavioral symptoms compared with controls (Revised Memory and Behavior Problems Checklist—RMBPC—symptoms frequency-total P=0.07; frequency of disruptive behavior P=0.008). This reduction was mirrored by a significant reduction of caregiver reaction to behavioral disturbances (RMBPC caregiver reaction-total P=0.035; reaction to disruptive behavior, P=0.011). At 3 months follow-up, the reduction of caregiver reaction to behavioral symptoms results was confirmed (RMBPC caregiver reaction-total P=0.014, caregiver reaction to disruptive behavior P=0.028). No other significant difference was detected. These results partially confirm findings of previous studies, showing that AD patients treated with similar techniques demonstrated an improvement in behavioral disturbances.
American Journal of Epidemiology Original Contribution Association of Particulate Air Pollution with Daily Mortality the China Air Pollution and Health Effects Study

China is one of the few countries with some of the highest particulate matter levels in the world. However, only a small number of particulate matter health studies have been conducted in China. The study objective was to examine the association of particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of less than 10 lm (PM 10) with daily mortality in 16 Chinese cities between 1996 and 2008. Two-stage Bayesian hierarchical models were applied to obtain city-specific and national average estimates. Poisson regression models incorporating natural spline smoothing functions were used to adjust for long-term and seasonal trends of mortality, as well as other time-varying covariates. The averaged daily concentrations of PM 10 in the 16 Chinese cities ranged from 52 lg/m 3 to 156 lg/m 3. The 16-city combined analysis showed significant associations of PM 10 with mortality: A 10-lg/m 3 increase in 2-day moving-average PM 10 was associated with a 0.35% (95% posterior interval (PI): 0.18, 0.52) increase of total mortality, 0.44% (95% PI: 0.23, 0.64) increase of cardiovascular mortality, and 0.56% (95% PI: 0.31, 0.81) increase of respiratory mortality. Females, older people, and residents with low educational attainment appeared to be more vulnerable to PM 10 exposure. Conclusively, this largest epidemiologic study of particulate air pollution in China suggests that short-term exposure to PM 10 is associated with increased mortality risk. Ambient air pollution is a complex mixture composed of both solid particles and gaseous pollutants. Among the various air pollutants, particulate matter shows the strongest evidence for adverse health effects (1). Short-term exposure to particulate matter has been linked to adverse health effects, including increased mortality, increased rates of hospital admissions and emergency department visits, exacerbation of chronic respiratory conditions, and decreased lung function (2). Recent multicity analyses conducted in North America and Europe provide further evidence supporting the coherence and plausibility of short-tem association of particulate matter with cardiorespiratory disorders (3–5). Most of these studies were conducted in developed countries; to our knowledge, only 1 multicity study, the Public Health and Air Pollution in Asia (PAPA) project, has examined the acute health effects of particulate matter in Asian developing countries (6). China is one of the few countries with highest particulate matter levels in the world (7). However, only a small number of health studies of particulate matter have been conducted in China (8). The PAPA project includes only 2 mainland Chinese cities—Shanghai and Wuhan. There remains …
Generalized adaptors with memory for nonlinear wave digital structures

The problem of modeling a nonlinear resistor in the Wave Digital domain can be seen as that of applying to its nonlinear characteristic the affine transformation that maps Khirchhoff variables into wave variables. When dealing with nonlinear elements with memory, such as nonlinear capacitors and inductors, the above approach cannot be applied, as affine transformations are memory less. In this paper, a new approach is proposed for modeling nonlinear elements with memory in the wave domain. The method we propose defines a more general class of wave variables and adaptors with memory that, under some conditions, can incorporate the "memory" of a nonlinear circuit and allow us to treat some nonlinear elements with memory as if they were instantaneous.
Computer-assisted bone age assessment: image preprocessing and epiphyseal/metaphyseal ROI extraction

Clinical assessment of skeletal maturity is based on a visual comparison of a left-hand wrist radiograph with atlas patterns. Using a new digital hand atlas an image analysis methodology is being developed. To assist radiologists in bone age estimation. The analysis starts with a preprocessing function yielding epiphyseal/metaphyseal regions of interest (EMROIs). Then, these regions are subjected to a feature extraction function. Accuracy has been measured independently at three stages of the image analysis: detection of phalangeal tip, extraction of the EMROIs, and location of diameters and lower edge of the EMROIs. Extracted features describe the stage of skeletal development more objectively than visual comparison.
Flash pulmonary oedema during anidulafungin administration

What is known and Objective: Anidulafungin is an echinocandin antifungal used to treat invasive fungal infections caused by Candida or Aspergillus species. While the echinocandins are generally well tolerated, novel adverse reactions may occur. Specifically, echinocandins have been associated with histamine‐mediated infusion reactions. We describe a novel case of flash pulmonary oedema associated with anidulafungin administration, which may be related to histamine release.
Rates of hemorrhage during warfarin therapy for atrial fibrillation

Background: Although warfarin has been extensively studied in clinical trials, little is known about rates of hemorrhage attributable to its use in routine clinical practice. Our objective was to examine incident hemorrhagic events in a large population-based cohort of patients with atrial fibrillation who were starting treatment with warfarin. Methods: We conducted a population-based cohort study involving residents of Ontario (age ≥ 66 yr) with atrial fibrillation who started taking warfarin between Apr. 1, 1997, and Mar. 31, 2008. We defined a major hemorrhage as any visit to hospital for hemorrage. We determined crude rates of hemorrhage during warfarin treatment, overall and stratified by CHADS2 score (congestive heart failure, hypertension, age ≥ 75 yr, diabetes mellitus and prior stroke, transient ischemic attack or thromboembolism). Results: We included 125 195 patients with atrial fibrillation who started treatment with warfarin during the study period. Overall, the rate of hemorrhage was 3.8% (95% confidence interval [CI] 3.8%–3.9%) per person-year. The risk of major hemorrhage was highest during the first 30 days of treatment. During this period, rates of hemorrhage were 11.8% (95% CI 11.1%–12.5%) per person-year in all patients and 16.7% (95% CI 14.3%–19.4%) per person-year among patients with a CHADS2 scores of 4 or greater. Over the 5-year follow-up, 10 840 patients (8.7%) visited the hospital for hemorrhage; of these patients, 1963 (18.1%) died in hospital or within 7 days of being discharged. Interpretation: In this large cohort of older patients with atrial fibrillation, we found that rates of hemorrhage are highest within the first 30 days of warfarin therapy. These rates are considerably higher than the rates of 1%–3% reported in randomized controlled trials of warfarin therapy. Our study provides timely estimates of warfarin-related adverse events that may be useful to clinicians, patients and policy-makers as new options for treatment become available.
Low complexity frequency offset estimator for OFDM with time-frequency training sequence

A ratio-adjustable time-frequency training sequence and the corresponding carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimator are proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems over frequency-selective fading channels. The proposed method estimates the coarse and fine CFO through the training sequence in frequency domain and time domain separately. Computation complexity can be greatly decreased by employing predefined lookup table. Simulation results show that the proposed estimator has better performance with almost the same overhead compared with Lei's method in (2004).
Gaussian Elimination Based Algorithms on the GPU

We implemented and evaluated several Gaussian elimination based algorithms on Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). These algorithms, LU decomposition without pivoting, all-pairs shortest-paths, and transitive closure, all have similar data access patterns. The impressive computational power and memory bandwidth of the GPU make it an attractive platform to run such computationally intensive algorithms. Although improvements over CPU implementations have previously been achieved for those algorithms in terms of raw speed, the utilization of the underlying computational resources was quite low. We implemented a recursively partioned all-pairs shortest-paths algorithm that harnesses the power of GPUs better than existing implementations. The alternate schedule of path computations allowed us to cast almost all operations into matrix-matrix multiplications on a semiring. Since matrix-matrix multiplication is highly optimized and has a high ratio of computation to communication, our implementation does not suffer from the premature saturation of bandwidth resources as iterative algorithms do. By increasing temporal locality, our implementation runs more than two orders of magnitude faster on an NVIDIA 8800 GPU than on an Opteron. Our work provides evidence that programmers should rethink algorithms instead of directly porting them to GPU.
Buyer's protection in bitcoin

Bitcoin is the most sophisticated ans successful crypto-currency so far. It is a digital currency based on a peer-to-peer distributed system. Bitcoin is in vogue and has changed the face of financial markets. Despite its success there are some privacy and security concerns, which can be worked upon. We propose to introduce a buyer's protection in the existing bitcoin system. Buyer's protection will help us in conflict resolution and thus increasing the reliability of the system. Incorporating this concept does not affect the distributed features currently existing in bitcoin.
Construction of reconfigurable clock trees for MCMM designs

The clock networks of modern circuits must be able to operate in multiple corners and multiple modes (MCMM). Earlier studies on clock network synthesis for MCMM designs focus on the legalization of an initial clock network that has timing violations in different corners or modes. We propose a mode reconfigurable clock tree (MRCT) that is based on a correct-by-construction approach. An MRCT consists of multiple clock trees. Depending on the active mode, the MRCT is reconfigured such that one of the clock trees is activated to deliver the clock signal. To limit the overhead, the bottom part of the network (closer to the clock sinks) is shared among all of the clock trees, and only the top part of the network (closer to the clock source) is mode reconfigurable. The reconfiguration is realized using or-gates and a single one-input-multiple-output demultiplexer. The MRCT is constructed in a bottom-up fashion by iteratively merging subtrees to form larger subtrees. When two sub-trees cannot be merged because of mode-incompatible constraints, an or-gate is inserted to separate the incompatible modes. Corner-incompatible constraints are resolved by reducing safety margins of appropriate skew constraints. The experimental results show that for a set of synthesized MCMM circuits with 715 to 13, 216 sequential elements, the proposed approach can achieve high yield.
Evaluating Public-Participation Exercises: A Research Agenda

The concept of public participation is one of growing interest in the UK and elsewhere, with a commensurate growth in mechanisms to enable this. The merits of participation, however, are difficult to ascertain, as there are relatively few cases in which the effectiveness of participation exercises have been studied in a structured (as opposed to highly subjective) manner. This seems to stem largely from uncertainty in the research community as to how to conduct evaluations. In this article, one agenda for conducting evaluation research that might lead to the systematic acquisition of knowledge is presented. This agenda identifies the importance of defining effectiveness and of operationalizing one’s definition (i.e., developing appropriate measurement instruments and processes). The article includes analysis of the nature of past evaluations, discussion of potential difficulties in the enactment of the proposed agenda, and discussion of some potential solutions.
The Stricter the Better? The Relationship between Targeted HbA1c Values and Metabolic Control of Pediatric Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

Introduction. It remains unclear how HbA1c recommendations influence metabolic control of paediatric patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus. To evaluate this we compared reported HbA1c with guideline thresholds. Materials and Methods. We searched systematically MEDLINE and EMBASE for studies reporting on HbA1c in children with T1DM and grouped them according to targeted HbA1c obtained from regional guidelines. We assessed the discrepancies in the metabolic control between these groups by comparing mean HbA1c extracted from each study and the differences between actual and targeted HbA1c. Results. We included 105 from 1365 searched studies. The median (IQR) HbA1c for the study population was 8.30% (8.00%–8.70%) and was lower in “6.5%” than in “7.5%” as targeted HbA1c level (8.20% (7.85%–8.57%) versus 8.40% (8.20%–8.80%); p = 0.028). Median difference between actual and targeted HbA1c was 1.20% (0.80%–1.70%) and was higher in “6.5%” than in “7.5%” (1.70% (1.30%–2.07%) versus 0.90% (0.70%–1.30%), resp. ; p < 0.001). Conclusions. Our study indicates that the 7.5% threshold results in HbA1c levels being closer to the therapeutic goal, but the actual values are still higher than those observed in the “6.5%” group. A meta-analysis of raw data from national registries or a prospective study comparing both approaches is warranted as the next step to examine this subject further.
Self‐Organization of Vegetation in Arid Ecosystems

Scientists are still searching for possible unifying mechanisms to explain this range of spatial patterns (Tongway and Ludwig 2001), and an important question of this research is whether this range is the result of preexisting environmental heterogeneity, the result of spatial selforganization, or both (Klausmeier 1999; Couteron and Lejeune 2001; HilleRisLambers et al. 2001; Von Hardenberg et al. 2001). Here, we contribute to the ongoing debate about vegetation pattern formation in arid ecosystems by presenting novel, spatially explicit model analyses and results, extending on the work of HilleRisLambers et al. (2001). Our results show that these different vegetation patterns observed in arid ecosystems might all be the result of spatial self-organization, caused by one single mechanism: water infiltrates faster into vegetated ground than into bare soil, leading to net displacement of surface water to vegetated patches. This model differs from earlier model results (Klausmeier 1999; Couteron and Lejeune 2001; HilleRisLambers et al. 2001; Von Hardenberg et al. 2001) primarily in two ways: it is fully mechanistic, and it treats the lateral flow of water above and below the soil as separate, not independent, variables. Although the current model greatly simplifies the biophysics of arid systems, it can reproduce the whole range of distinctive vegetation patterns as observed in arid ecosystems, indicating that the proposed mechanism might be generally applicable. We further show that self-organized vegetation patterns can persist far into regions of high aridity, where plants would become extinct if homogeneously distributed, pointing to the importance of this mechanism for maintaining productivity of arid ecosystems (Noy-Meir 1973). Our analyses are based on the model first developed in HilleRisLambers et al. (2001)
Rape as Viewed By Judges, Prosecutors, and Police Officers

Beliefs about rape held by judges, prosecutors, and police officers were compared with beliefs held by social service personnel. Significant differences were found between social service personnel and members of the criminal justice system in terms of beliefs about (a) causes of rape; (b) ways to reduce the frequency of rape; and (c) the likelihood that any rape complaint is true or false. The groups did not differ in their beliefs about victim characteristics and circumstances associated with "true" and "false" rape reports. These results may account for attributions of responsibility and blame for the rape, and the conflict between social service personnel and members of the criminal justice system in the area of rape.