Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Concurrent functional and structural cortical alterations in migraine

Aim: Various animal and human studies have contributed to the idea of cortical structural–functional alterations in migraine. Defining concurrent cortical alterations may provide specific insights into the unfolding adaptive or maladaptive changes taking place in cortex in migraine. Methods: From a group of 60 episodic migraineurs, 20 were recruited to the study. Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging, structural and functional cortical measures were compared in migraineurs who experienced increased frequency of attacks (HF; 8–14 days/month; n = 10), to those who experienced less frequent migraine attacks (LF; < 2 days/month; n = 10), and to healthy controls (HC; n = 20). Results: Parallel structural and functional differences were found as follows: (i) HF patients showed higher thickness in the area representing the face in the post-central gyrus, which correlated with the observed stronger functional activation, suggesting adaptation to repeated sensory drive; (ii) smaller cortical volume was observed in the cingulate cortex that correlated with lower activation in the HF group; and (iii) similarly significant structural and functional differences (HF > LF) were observed in the insula that may reflect potential alteration in affective processing. Conclusion: These results suggest differential response patterns in the sensory vs. affective processing regions in the brain that may be an adaptive response to repeated migraine attacks.
A Survey of MPI Related Debuggers and Tools ?

Message Passing Interface is a widely used standard in the High Performance and Scientific Computing Community for writing programs that can exploit the capability of parallel platforms. However, the inherent complexity and the size of the communication standard have made it difficult for programmers to use it efficiently and more importantly correctly. There are numerous tools and debuggers written by various academic/industry communities to find bugs in the MPI programs written by users. Some of them are MPI-CHECK (Iowa state Univ, [12]), MPIDD (UNBC, Canada [6]), UMPIRE (LLNL, [15]), Intel Message Checker (Intel, [5]), MARMOT (HLRS, [8]) and TotalView ([1]). A brief analysis and comparison of these tools are presented below. In addition, this report presents an overview of the debugging support build into some of the currently popular MPI libraries.
Global spread of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii.

OBJECTIVES We have investigated the molecular epidemiology and distribution of carbapenemase genes in 492 imipenem-non-susceptible Acinetobacter baumannii worldwide isolates (North and Latin America, Europe, Asia, South Africa and Australia). METHODS MICs were determined by broth microdilution and Etest. The presence of carbapenemase-encoding genes was investigated by PCR. Molecular epidemiology was performed by repetitive sequence-based PCR (rep-PCR; DiversiLab), sequence-type multiplex PCR and PFGE. RESULTS Imipenem non-susceptibility was associated with ISAba1 upstream of the intrinsic bla(OXA-51-like) or the acquired carbapenemase bla(OXA-23-like), bla(OXA-40-like) or bla(OXA-58-like). Isolates were grouped into eight distinct clusters including European clones I, II and III. European clone II was the largest (246 isolates) and most widespread group (USA, pan-Europe, Israel, Asia, Australia and South Africa). CONCLUSIONS The global dissemination of eight carbapenem-resistant lineages illustrates the success this organism has had in epidemic spread. The acquired OXA enzymes are widely distributed but are not the sole carbapenem resistance determinant in A. baumannii.
Self-Evaluation Accuracy among High School and Middle School Instrumentalists

The purposes of this study were to examine (a) whether grade-level differences exist on self-evaluation tendencies over time, (b) if grade-level differences and evaluator differences exist, alone and in combination, on music performance evaluation, (c) if relationships exist between student self-evaluation and expert evaluations of music performance by grade level, and (d) whether differences exist between grade level and music performance subarea (tone, intonation, melody, etc.) on self-evaluation accuracy. Middle (N=92) and high school (N=51) instrumentalists participating in two summer music programs self-evaluated their performances during rehearsals, while expert evaluators judged an individual final performance. Results indicated differences between grade levels on performance self-evaluation as the week progressed for some subareas. High school students were more accurate in their self-evaluations than were middle school musicians for all subareas except melody and rhythm. Middle school students' scores showed greater correlation with experts than did those of high school musicians. Both groups were most accurate in their evaluation of melody and least accurate in evaluation of technique/articulation. January 3, 2005 May 11, 2005.
Linear plasmids of Borrelia burgdorferi have a telomeric structure and sequence similar to those of a eukaryotic virus

Spirochetes of the genus Borrelia have double-stranded linear plasmids with covalently closed ends. The physical nature of the terminal connections was determined for the 16-kb linear plasmid of the B31 strain of the Lyme disease agent Borrelia burgdorferi. Native telomeric fragments representing the left and right ends of this plasmid were isolated and subjected to Maxam-Gilbert sequence analysis. At the plasmid ends the two DNA strands formed an uninterrupted, perfectly palindromic, AT-rich sequence. This Borrelia linear plasmid consisted of a continuous polynucleotide chain that is fully base paired except for short single-stranded hairpin loops at each end. The left and right telomeres of the 16-kb plasmid were identical for 16 of the first 19 nucleotide positions and constituted an inverted terminal repeat with respect to each other. The left telomere of the 49-kb plasmid of strain B31 was identical to the corresponding telomere of the 16-kb plasmid. Different-sized plasmids of other strains of B. burgdorferi also contained sequences homologous to the left end of the 16-kb plasmid. When the borrelia telomeres were compared with telomeric sequences of other linear double-stranded DNA replicons, sequence similarities were noted with poxviruses and particularly with the iridovirus agent of African swine fever. The latter virus and a Borrelia sp. share the same tick vector. These findings suggest that the novel linear plasmids of Borrelia originated through a horizontal genetic transfer across kingdoms.
To hardware prefetch or not to prefetch?: a virtualized environment study and core binding approach

Most hardware and software venders suggest disabling hardware prefetching in virtualized environments. They claim that prefetching is detrimental to application performance due to inaccurate prediction caused by workload diversity and VM interference on shared cache. However, no comprehensive or quantitative measurements to support this belief have been performed. This paper is the first to systematically measure the influence of hardware prefetching in virtualized environments. We examine a wide variety of benchmarks on three types of chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) to analyze the hardware prefetching performance. We conduct extensive experiments by taking into account a number of important virtualization factors. We find that hardware prefetching has minimal destructive influence under most configurations. Only with certain application combinations does prefetching influence the overall performance. To leverage these findings and make hardware prefetching effective across a diversity of virtualized environments, we propose a dynamic prefetching-aware VCPU-core binding approach (PAVCB), which includes two phases - classifying and binding. The workload of each VM is classified into different cache sharing constraint categories based upon its cache access characteristics, considering both prefetch requests and demand requests. Then following heuristic rules, the VCPUs of each VM are scheduled onto appropriate cores subject to cache sharing constraints. We show that the proposed approach can improve performance by 12% on average over the default scheduler and 46% over manual system administrator bindings across different workload combinations in the presence of hardware prefetching.
Networks in Context: The Social Flow of Political Information

We examine the effects of individual political preferences and the distribution of such preferences on the social transmission of political information. Our data base combines a 1984 election survey of citizens in South Bend, Indiana with a subsequent survey of people with whom these citizens discuss politics. Several findings emerge from the effort. First, individuals do purposefully construct informational networks corresponding to their own political preferences, and they also selectively misperceive socially supplied political information. More important, both of these individual-level processes are shown to be conditioned by constraints imposed due to the distribution of political preferences in the social context. Thus, individual control over socially supplied political information is partial and incomplete. Finally, these information-transmitting processes interact with the social context in a manner that favors partisan majorities while undermining political minorities.
Business Ethics Assessment Criteria: Business V. Philosophy—Survey Results

Abstract: This paper presents the results of and conclusions from a survey of 2,830 college and university undergraduate business and philosophy departments regarding their business ethics offerings. The impetus for this survey included seeking a better understanding of the problems for which business ethics courses are the solution. It was proposed that, if we knew what it is that professors teaching business ethics believe they are teaching—not in terms of content or methods, but in terms of what criteria they are using to assess students’ achievement of the course objectives—we would have a better understanding of what issues business ethics attempts to resolve. The survey focused on ranking six possible assessment criteria drawn from the literature on teaching business ethics. In addition to disclosing the specific survey results, the paper draws conclusions based on the fact that there are statistically significant differences between the rankings assigned to the six assessment criteria by business professors as contrasted with philosophy professors. The results of the survey indicate that there is more uniformity expressed in the responses by the philosophy professors teaching business ethics than by the business professors.
Ethnic and civic dealings with newcomers: naturalization policies and practices in twenty-six immigration countries

Abstract Over the last decade or so, the comparative study of nationalism has produced a large number of cogent critiques of classifying nations according to how ethnic or civic they are. In fact, these critiques have been so convincing that many scholars today seem to agree that any mention of the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ is unwarranted. This is unfortunate, because the distinction still offers a useful heuristic device to compare and classify different nation-building practices. This article analyses naturalization policies in twenty-six Western immigrant-receiving democracies in order to show that the distinction constitutes a valuable analytical tool to explore how different countries deal with newcomers. The naturalization policy index developed in this article proves to have a high degree of face validity, to be a good predictor of actual naturalization practices, and to match up well with previous classifications of ethnic and civic nation-building practices.
The Dynamics of Herds: From Individuals to Aggregations

Abstract The dynamic behavior of small herds is investigated by means of simulations of two-dimensional discrete-stochastic models. An individual-based approach is used to relate collective behavior to individual decisions. In our model, the motion of an individual in a herd is assumed to be the combined result of both density-independent and density-dependent decisions, in the latter case based on the influence of surrounding neighbors; assumed decision rules are hierarchical, balancing short range repulsion against long-range attraction. The probability of fragmentation of the model herd depends on parameter values. We explore the variety and characteristics of spatial patterns that develop during migration, for herds that are homogeneous and heterogeneous regarding intrinsic walking speeds. Group integrity can be maintained even in mixed populations, but fragmentation results for these more easily than for a homogeneous herd. Observations of natural populations suggest that animals move away from individuals that intrude too closely into their environment, but are attracted to individuals at a distance. Between these extremes, there appears to be a neutral zone, within which other individuals engender no response. We explore the importance of this neutral zone, and offer evolutionary interpretations. In particular, the neutral zone, if not too large, permits the individual to remain in contact with the herd, while reducing the frequency with which acceleration or deceleration must be undertaken. This offers obvious energetic benefits.
Association of combined CYP2E1 gene polymorphism with the risk for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in Huai'an population, China.

BACKGROUND Cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) has an important role in the metabolic activation of precarcinogens such as N-nitrosoamines and other low relative molecular mass, organic compounds. This study examined whether CYP2E1 RsaI and DraI polymorphism are associated with susceptibility to esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and the correlation between the genotypes and expression levels of CYP2E1 mRNA. METHODS Seventy-seven patients with newly diagnosed, untreated esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and 79 healthy controls matched in age, gender and residence were recruited for the control study. An RsaI polymorphism in the 5'-flanking region and a DraI polymorphism in the sixth intron of the CYP2E1 gene, which could possibly affect its transcription, were determined in this study by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and mRNA level of CYP2E1 was measured by quantitative real-time reverse transcription PCR. RESULTS No significant association of RsaI or DraI polymorphism of CYP2E1 with susceptibility of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma were demonstrated (OR = 1.67, 95% CI: 0.89 - 3.15, P = 0.11; OR = 1.11, 95% CI: 0.59 - 2.09, P = 0.74, respectively). With SHEsis software, no linkage disequilibrium was detected between RsaI and DraI polymorphism (D' = 0.528, r(2) = 0.27). When combined RsaI polymorphism with DraI polymorphism, the association between that carrying c2 allele and DD genotype and the risk for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma were found (OR = 5.77, 95% CI: 1.65 - 20.22). Compared with the normal controls, the mRNA levels with RsaI polymorphism, DraI polymorphism, or any combined genotypes in cases showed no statistical difference. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests that carrying c2 allele and DD genotype conferreded an elevated risk for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. There was no significant statistical relationship between the genotypes c1/c2, D/C, or the combined allele and mRNA expression.
Quality of life and cancer pain: satisfaction and side effects with transdermal fentanyl versus oral morphine.

PURPOSE To compare pain-related treatment satisfaction, patient-perceived side effects, functioning, and well-being in patients with advanced cancer who were receiving either transdermal fentanyl (Duragesic, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Titusville, NJ) or sustained-release oral forms of morphine (MS Contin, Perdue Frederick Co, Norwalk, CT, or Oramorph SR, Roxanne Laboratories, Columbus, OH). PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 504 assessable cancer patients participated in this cross-sectional, quality-of-life study. Relevant elements of four validated scales were used--the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-General (FACT-G) scale, the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI), the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) questionnaire, and the Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale (MSAS)--as well as original scales that were developed and validated for this study. RESULTS The majority of patients in both treatment groups had late-stage (IV/D) cancer. Patients who received transdermal fentanyl were more satisfied overall with their pain medication than those who received sustained-release oral forms of morphine (P = .035). Fentanyl patients also experienced a significantly lower frequency (P < .002) and impact (P < .001) of pain medication side effects. These results occurred despite the fact that cancer patients who received fentanyl were significantly older (P < .001) and had significantly lower functioning and well-being scores (P = .001). Measures of pain intensity, sleep adequacy, and symptoms demonstrated no significant differences between treatment groups. CONCLUSION These data suggest that patients are more satisfied with transdermal fentanyl compared with sustained-release oral forms of morphine. A lower frequency and reduced impact of side effects with transdermal fentanyl may be one reason cancer patients who receive fentanyl are more satisfied with their pain management.
EBP regulates macrophage activation and systemic metabolism

Bonggi Lee, Liping Qiao, Min Lu, Hyung Sun Yoo, Wai Cheung, Robert Mak, Jerome Schaack, Gen-Sheng Feng, Nai-Wen Chi, Jerrold M. Olefsky, and Jianhua Shao Department of Pediatrics, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California; Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California; Department of Microbiology, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, Aurora, Colorado; Department of Pathology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California; Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare system, and Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California
False recall and false memory: the effects of instructions on memory errors

An experiment is reported using a list-learning paradigm in which all the words have a common associate, which is known to be frequently but erroneously recalled. Four experimental conditions were used. One group was instructed to think about the meanings of the words, another to relate them to personal experience, another to create images of the words, and another to chain the words into a sentence. Both thinking about the meaning and chaining increased recall of the words actually presented, but in none of the conditions was there any effect on false recall. The implications and relevance of these findings to the controversy over false memories are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Language: en
The impact of caregivers' singing on expressions of emotion and resistance during morning care situations in persons with dementia: an intervention in dementia care.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The aim was to describe expressions of emotions and resistiveness to care among persons with dementia (PWD), during morning care situations without and with music therapeutic caregiving (MTC). BACKGROUND Effective caregiving is dependent on the interpersonal relationship between nurse and patient. PWD suffer from major cognitive impairment, making interaction with others problematic. Such patients often react with problematic behaviours such as resistance and anger towards the care activity and the caregiver. Earlier research suggests that MTC - when caregivers sing for or together with PWD during caregiving - can reduce resistance and evoke positive emotions in PWD. DESIGN This was an intervention study whereby MTC was implemented during morning care situations while PWD were being cared for. METHOD The study included ten, 66-92-year-old men and women with severe dementia living in a nursing home in Sweden. Video observations of eight weekly sessions, consisting of four recordings of usual morning care and four recordings of morning care with MTC, provided data. The resistiveness to care scale and the observed emotion rating scale were used for analysis. RESULTS Pull away was the most common resistant behaviour under both conditions. The PWDs' expressions of resistant behaviour, such as pull away, grab object and adduction, were significantly reduced under the intervention situation. Positively expressed emotions, specifically pleasure and general alertness, significantly increased under the MTC intervention compared with the 'usual' morning care sessions. CONCLUSIONS MTC can be an effective nursing intervention to provide PWD a more pleasant experience of morning care situations as it decreases resistant behaviour and increases positive emotions. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE MTC offers a potential non-pharmacologic treatment that can be used in caring for PWD.
MHD Analysis of Dual Coolant Pb-17Li Blanket for ARIES-CS

Abstract A dual coolant Pb-17Li (DCLL) blanket concept has been selected as reference design for the ARIES-CS compact stellarator power plant study. This configuration is characterized by helium cooled first wall and ferritic steel structures, and a self-cooled breeding zone. Flow channel inserts (FCIs) made of silicon carbide (SiC) composite are placed in the PbLi channels, serving both as thermal and electrical insulator. The goal is to optimize the Pb-17Li inlet and outlet temperatures for high power cycle efficiency while accommodating the material temperature limits, providing reasonable flow distribution and maintaining an acceptable pressure drop. A numerical study of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows in the poloidal channels that distribute the liquid metal in the breeder units has been carried out to assess the performance of such a concept with regard to the above mentioned goals and constraints. The analysis considers the electrical coupling between adjacent poloidal ducts and the influence of various parameters such as the electric conductivity of the SiC insert and the orientation of the magnetic field.
Experiencia en el uso video-Impulso Cefálico (vHIT) en la evaluación del reflejo vestíbulo-ocular para el canal semicircular horizontal

Introduccion: La prueba de impulso cefalico consiste en una herramienta sencilla y rapida para evaluar la funcion del reflejo vestibulo ocular. La implementacion de un acelerometro y una camara de alta velocidad, permiten registrar alteraciones sutiles de este fenomeno, optimizando esta prueba. Objetivo: Describir la experiencia inicial y relevancia clinica de la prueba de impulso cefalico asistida por video y acelerometro (vHIT). Material y metodo: Se realizo prueba vHIT a pacientes con indicacion de estudio funcional de VIII par. Resultados: Utilizando prueba calorica como patron de oro se evaluaron 60 pacientes. vHIT presento una especificidad de 93% y una sensibilidad de 74%. En un paciente con colesteatoma bilateral con vertigo agudo, el examen contribuyo en la identificacion del lado complicado, ademas de registrar fenomenos de compensacion vestibular. Discusion y conclusion: vHIT demostro ser altamente especifico. Los supuestos falsos positivos presentaban sintomatologia vestibular, por lo que consideramos que podrian representar casos donde vHIT es mas sensible que la prueba calorica. vHIT presenta ademas una buena sensibilidad. Los casos de falsos negativos podrian explicarse en relacion a la diferencia de velocidad angular usada en la estimulacion entre vHIT y la prueba calorica. vHIT podria representar un importante complemento al estudio del paciente con patologia vestibular.