Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Asthma Outcomes in Minority Children: A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Parent Mentors

OBJECTIVE: Because asthma disproportionately affects minorities, we evaluated the effects of parent mentors (PMs) on asthma outcomes in minority children. METHODS: This randomized, controlled trial allocated minority asthmatic children to the PM intervention or traditional asthma care. Intervention families were assigned PMs (experienced parents of asthmatic children who received specialized training). PMs met monthly with children and families at community sites, phoned parents monthly, and made home visits. Ten asthma outcomes and costs were monitored for 1 year. Outcomes were examined by using both intention-to-treat analyses and stratified analyses for high participants (attending ≥25% of community meetings and completing ≥50% of PM phone interactions). RESULTS: Patients were randomly assigned to PMs (n = 112) or the control group (n = 108). In intention-to-treat analyses, intervention but not control children experienced significantly reduced rapid-breathing episodes, asthma exacerbations, and emergency department (ED) visits. High participants (but not controls or low participants) experienced significantly reduced wheezing, asthma exacerbations, and ED visits and improved parental efficacy in knowing when breathing problems are controllable at home. Mean reductions in missed parental work days were greater for high participants than controls. The average monthly cost per patient for the PM program was $60.42, and net savings of $46.16 for high participants. CONCLUSIONS: For asthmatic minority children, PMs can reduce wheezing, asthma exacerbations, ED visits, and missed parental work days while improving parental self-efficacy. These outcomes are achieved at a reasonable cost and with net cost savings for high participants. PMs may be a promising, cost-effective means for reducing childhood asthma disparities.
Mycophenolate mofetil is as efficacious as, but safer than, cyclophosphamide in the treatment of proliferative lupus nephritis: a meta-analysis and meta-regression.

OBJECTIVE Since mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) has emerged as an immunosuppressant for treating proliferative lupus nephritis, the role of cyclophosphamide (CYC)-containing regimens is being challenged. Efficacy data from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and previous meta-analyses comparing these two agents for treating lupus nephritis have been inconsistent as they were heterogeneous in design and of small sample size. An updated meta-analysis is therefore required. METHODS Publications in the English literature were searched with the keywords 'mycophenoate', 'mycophenolic', 'lupus nephritis', 'nephritis' and 'glomerulonephritis' for RCTs in electronic databases. Primary outcome was relative risk (RR) of renal remission at 6 months. Secondary outcome included RRs of mortality, development of end-stage renal failure (ESRF) and side effects. Meta-regression was performed to identify factors explaining the heterogeneity of the effect sizes. RESULTS Ten eligible RCTs involving 847 patients were included. MMF offers similar efficacy in inducing renal remission as CYC (RR 1.052; 95% CI 0.950, 1.166) and the risks of death (RR 0.709; 95% CI 0.373, 1.347) and ESRF (RR 0.453; 95% CI 0.183, 1.121) were comparable. Significantly fewer patients receiving MMF developed amenorrhoea (RR 0.212; 95% CI 0.094, 0.479) and leucopenia (RR 0.473; 95% CI 0.269, 0.832) while the risks of herpes infection and pneumonia tended to be lower and that of diarrhoea appeared higher in the MMF groups. Meta-regression revealed that the non-white and non-Asian ethnicities contributed significantly to the heterogeneity of the effect sizes of renal remission. CONCLUSION MMF offers similar efficacy in renal remission and survival as CYC. MMF appears safer than CYC in the treatment of proliferative lupus nephritis.
Analysis of NMOS and PMOS Difference in $V_{T}$ Variation With Large-Scale DMA-TEG

The mechanism of the VT variation difference between NMOS and PMOS is investigated. It is clarified that there is no correlation between VT and physical parameters such as gate length, gate width, gate oxide thickness, gate taper angle, sidewall width, channel strain, and gate poly-Si grain structure by integrated physical analysis (IPA). In IPA, the physical parameters of transistors with VT of -5sigma, median, and +5sigma are evaluated. It is also clarified that the variations of gate depletion and random charges at the gate oxide interface are not the dominant factors of VT variation, by electrical analyses using the Takeuchi plot. In these analyses, VT variations with varying process parameters are investigated. As a result of the analyses, only random channel dopant fluctuation (RDF) has a significant effect on VT variation. Since the simple RDF model alone cannot explain the VT variation difference between NMOS and PMOS, the channel boron clustering model is proposed as a possible mechanism of NMOS VT enhancement.
Design, Fabrication, and Characteristics of a MEMS Micromirror With Sidewall Electrodes

This paper presents a 2-DOF silicon-on-insulator (SOI) microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) mirror with sidewall (SW) electrodes. The biaxial MEMS mirror with SW is actuated by electrostatic actuators. The dimension of mirror plate is 1000¿m × 1000¿m, with a thickness of 35 ¿m. The analytical modeling, fabrication process, and performance characteristics are described. This paper analyzes the effects of the three-end single crystal serpentine torsion bar width and the bottom and SW electrodes on the performance of the mirror. A new fabrication process based on SOI wafer, hybrid bulk/surface micromachined technology, and a high-aspect-ratio shadow mask is presented. In comparison to previous fabrication processes and the Optical iMEMS process, the process is novel, easily understood, and simple to realize. The measured maximum angular deflection achieved is ±11°(mechanical angle) at a static operating voltage and is ± 21°(mechanical angle) at resonance frequency driving. This mirror is well suited for applications where these characteristics are critical, such as in confocal or endoscopic scanning elements
Pyrophosphate-producing protein dephosphorylation by HPr kinase/phosphorylase: A relic of early life?

In most Gram-positive bacteria, serine-46-phosphorylated HPr (P-Ser-HPr) controls the expression of numerous catabolic genes (≈10% of their genome) by acting as catabolite corepressor. HPr kinase/phosphorylase (HprK/P), the bifunctional sensor enzyme for catabolite repression, phosphorylates HPr, a phosphocarrier protein of the sugar-transporting phosphoenolpyruvate/glycose phosphotransferase system, in the presence of ATP and fructose-1,6-bisphosphate but dephosphorylates P-Ser-HPr when phosphate prevails over ATP and fructose-1,6-bisphosphate. We demonstrate here that P-Ser-HPr dephosphorylation leads to the formation of HPr and pyrophosphate. HprK/P, which binds phosphate at the same site as the β phosphate of ATP, probably uses the inorganic phosphate to carry out a nucleophilic attack on the phosphoryl bond in P-Ser-HPr. HprK/P is the first enzyme known to catalyze P-protein dephosphorylation via this phospho–phosphorolysis mechanism. This reaction is reversible, and at elevated pyrophosphate concentrations, HprK/P can use pyrophosphate to phosphorylate HPr. Growth of Bacillus subtilis on glucose increased intracellular pyrophosphate to concentrations (≈6 mM), which in in vitro tests allowed efficient pyrophosphate-dependent HPr phosphorylation. To effectively dephosphorylate P-Ser-HPr when glucose is exhausted, the pyrophosphate concentration in the cells is lowered to 1 mM. In B. subtilis, this might be achieved by YvoE. This protein exhibits pyrophosphatase activity, and its gene is organized in an operon with hprK.
Customer retaliation at the employee–customer interface

Abstract The service encounter is the point where employees and customers interact both positively and negatively. When things go wrong (service failure), initially it is the employee who is required to remedy the situation (recover the service). While positive service recovery outcomes are well investigated, there is little research that investigates whether specific service recovery strategies can be used to reduce customer anger and retaliation. Further, there is little research regarding whether an organisation's acceptance of blame has an effect on customer anger and retaliation. These gaps are addressed using a quasi-experimental study of 120 respondents that examines customers' emotional and behavioural responses to specific service recovery strategies following a service failure. The results show that high-level service recovery strategies directly reduce the occurrence of retaliation, as well as indirectly reduce retaliation through the mediating effects of customer anger. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.
Social network analysis of the movement of poultry to and from live bird markets in Bali and Lombok, Indonesia

Highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 has resulted in large losses to the Indonesian poultry sector. Evidence suggests that live bird markets (LBMs) play an important role in the epidemiology of the disease. Knowledge of the frequency and type of contact between the various poultry market players should allow animal health authorities to develop a better understanding of factors influencing virus transmission between Indonesian villages. A questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey was conducted in 17 LBMs on the neighbouring Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok to investigate the movement patterns of poultry to and from markets. Using social network analyses, a network of contacts was created for each island from a total of 413 live poultry traders and 134 customers. Individual nodes with high degree and/or betweenness were identified in each network. The Lombok network was more dense and connected than the Bali network indicating that disease transmission would be more efficient in the Lombok network. Our findings indicate that whilst live poultry are typically transported over relatively short distances of approximately 10 km, it is not uncommon for traders and customers to travel in excess of 100 km to buy or sell poultry, which may facilitate the spread of disease over a large geographical area. This study highlights the different roles markets play in poultry movement networks and their potential for disease dissemination. The identification of highly influential market nodes allows authorities to target HPAI surveillance activities to locations where disease is more likely to be present, which is crucial in low-resource settings.
Community-based tourism: an exploration of the concept(s) from a political perspective.

Tourism is always seen as a viable alternative means of boosting development in developing countries. Similarly, community-based tourism (CBT) is generally associated with development in poor, especially rural, communities. This article first presents CBT as a possible community development tool, exploring its conceptual and historical evolution, and then offers solutions for enhancing the opportunities and capacity of CBT in facilitating rural community development. To that end, a definition of community and notions of development are proposed, and a community development strategy, based on issues of empowerment, self-reliance, and sustainability, is explored. Special attention is given to local context issues in relation to community development. In addition, the origin and evolution of the CBT concept, and the linkages between the concept and alternative development paradigms from the 1970s are explored, including the notions of empowerment and self-reliance. This article makes two contributions. Firstly, it proposes that the current meaning of CBT does not coincide with the original concept of CBT because the contemporary policy milieu has changed. Secondly, it presents different CBT typologies in line with contemporary CBT concept(s) and issues of community development.
The Asymptotics of Ranking Algorithms

We consider the predictive problem of supervised ranking, where the task is to rank sets of candidate items returned in response to queries. Although there exist statistical procedures that come with guarantees of consistency in this setting, these procedures require that individuals provide a complete ranking of all items, which is rarely feasible in practice. Instead, individuals routinely provide partial preference information, such as pairwise comparisons of items, and more practical approaches to ranking have aimed at modeling this partial preference data directly. As we show, however, such an approach raises serious theoretical challenges. Indeed, we demonstrate that many commonly used surrogate losses for pairwise comparison data do not yield consistency; surprisingly, we show inconsistency even in low-noise settings. With these negative results as motivation, we present a new approach to supervised ranking based on aggregation of partial preferences, and we develop $U$-statistic-based empirical risk minimization procedures. We present an asymptotic analysis of these new procedures, showing that they yield consistency results that parallel those available for classification. We complement our theoretical results with an experiment studying the new procedures in a large-scale web-ranking task.
Dangerous learning in edgy contexts: creativity and innovation in the South African arts domain

In this paper, we outline a pilot project aimed at exploring the role of contextual factors in the facilitation of creativity and innovation within a range of South African art forms. Interviews with 11 people who have rich experience of the South African art domain delivered an insightful perspective on the contextual factors driving lifelong creativity and its continuous realization in innovative outcomes within these art forms.
A Formal Characterization of Explicature and its Consequences to Explicating in Chinese

This paper studies the notion of explicature and the process of explicating in relevancetheoretic pragmatics against the background of the minimalism versus contextualism controversy. It attempts to give a formal definition of explicature, which has not yet been spelt out in the literature. It then applies the formal characterization to the study of a range of related cases in Chinese grammar. The findings are used to reexamine the minimalism/contextualism debate. We argue that explicature theory does not by nature favour either of the two sides. Keywords: explicature; minimalism; contextualism
Justice, Law, and Argument: Essays on Moral and Legal Reasoning

1. Concerning Justice. - Five Lectures on Justice. - 2. Justice and Its Problems. - 3. Equity and the Rule of Justice. - 4. On the Justice of Rules. - 5. Justice and Justification. - 6. Justice and Reason. - 7. Justice and Reasoning. - 8. Equality and Justice. - 9. Justice Re-examined. - 10. The Use and Abuse of Confused Notions. - 11. The Justification of Norms. - 12. Law and Morality. - 13. Law and Rhetoric. - 14. Legal Reasoning. - 15. Law, Logic and Epistemology. - 16. Law, Philosophy and Argumentation. - 17. What the Philosopher May Learn from the Study of Law. - Index of Names. - Index of Subjects.
Holonic risk management framework

The purpose of this work is to develop an adaptive risk management framework capable of preventing, identifying and responding in critical time to threats. Our focus is on protecting critical infrastructure (e.g. public utilities) which depends vitally on network and information security. As a solution we propose a holonic cybersecurity system that unfolds into an emergency response management infrastructure capable of reacting in due time to unknown and new kinds of attacks/threats. The system can adapt to its changing environment through its self-organizing organic capability. Mimicking the way immunity works in biological organisms the system can dynamically adapt to embrace new risk situations and can dynamically create and learn new risk models as it encounters new risk situations.
Topisch-neuropsychologische Diagnostik sprachlicher Gedächtnisdefizite nach kortikalen Durchblutungsstörungen

: In recent years a consensus has been reached about the neuroanatomical substrate of verbal memory, but this state of knowledge has not yet been implemented in clinical practice. One reason for this may be that most of the neuroscientific studies on verbal memory used different neuropsychological instruments and that only a small set of patient groups with the same etiology but different lesion sites were analysed. Returning to three earlier studies, we analyse the possibility to make differential judgements on the verbal memory impairments of four different patient groups by using the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT). We compare patients with left-sided (n = 16) and right-sided (n = 10) posterior cerebral artery infarcts and patients with infarcts of the left (n = 10) or right (n = 21) frontal lobe, and we integrated data about their retention errors that had not been analysed so far. Our findings reveal significant differences between these patient groups, concerning the quantitative aspects of impairments, and also the profiles of memory errors (recall, interference and perseverations). Our study documents a relation between the site of the lesion and the type of verbal memory impairment, agreeing with some of the most recent neuroscientific findings. Starting from this observation we try to define a neuropsychological pattern of memory impairment which enables differential clinical diagnoses using the CVLT as a memory test.
Downlink Throughput Maximization: TDMA versus CDMA

We consider the downlink throughput maximization problem for interference limited mul- tiuser systems. Our goal is to characterize the op- timum base station transmission policy (TDMA or CDMA), and find the corresponding power allocation. We model the interference by the aid of the orthogo- nality factor and determine the transmission strategy for a range of the values of the orthogonality factor, and users' channel gains, so as to maximize the system throughput, subject to a total power constraint. Al- though the resulting optimization problem may turn out to be non-convex depending on the value of the orthogonality factor, we show that valuable observa- tions regarding the optimum solution can be obtained based on the properties of the problem. In particular, we propose an exact and a near-exact algorithm to de- termine whether TDMA is the optimum strategy, or simultaneous users (CDMA) should be transmitted to.
Comparison of Surgical Outcomes in Primary Endoscopic Dacryocystorhinostomy with and without Silicone Intubation

The surgical outcome of endoscopic endonasal dacryocystorhinostomy was analyzed in 30 cases of postsaccal stenosis. Intubation with silicone tubing was used in 14 cases (46.7%) and not used in 16 cases (53.3%). Surgical success was evaluated subjectively and objectively. The patients' complaints were improved in 85.7% of cases in the intubation group, and in 81.3% of the group in which no stent was used. Postoperative endoscopic examinations revealed that the rhinostomy opening was visible in 11 cases without intubation (68.8%) and 9 cases with intubation (64.3%). Six patients in the intubation group (42.9%) had granulation tissue at the rhinostomy site. Four patients (28.6%) had complaints regarding the intubation. Considering the similar surgical success rates, and the granulation formation, patient discomfort, and cost related to intubation, we recommend endoscopic dacryocystorhinostomy without intubation as the treatment of choice in cases of chronic epiphora due to postsaccal stenosis of the lacrimal canal.
Identification of key target genes and pathways in laryngeal carcinoma

The purpose of the present study was to screen the key genes associated with laryngeal carcinoma and to investigate the molecular mechanism of laryngeal carcinoma progression. The gene expression profile of GSE10935 [Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) accession number], including 12 specimens from laryngeal papillomas and 12 specimens from normal laryngeal epithelia controls, was downloaded from the GEO database. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were screened in laryngeal papillomas compared with normal controls using Limma package in R language, followed by Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis and pathway enrichment analysis. Furthermore, the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network of DEGs was constructed using Cytoscape software and modules were analyzed using MCODE plugin from the PPI network. Furthermore, significant biological pathway regions (sub-pathway) were identified by using iSubpathwayMiner analysis. A total of 67 DEGs were identified, including 27 up-regulated genes and 40 down-regulated genes and they were involved in different GO terms and pathways. PPI network analysis revealed that Ras association (RalGDS/AF-6) domain family member 1 (RASSF1) was a hub protein. The sub-pathway analysis identified 9 significantly enriched sub-pathways, including glycolysis/gluconeogenesis and nitrogen metabolism. Genes such as phosphoglycerate kinase 1 (PGK1), carbonic anhydrase II (CA2), and carbonic anhydrase XII (CA12) whose node degrees were >10 were identified in the disease risk sub-pathway. Genes in the sub-pathway, such as RASSF1, PGK1, CA2 and CA12 were presumed to serve critical roles in laryngeal carcinoma. The present study identified DEGs and their sub-pathways in the disease, which may serve as potential targets for treatment of laryngeal carcinoma.
Medical Burden, Cerebrovascular Disease, and Cognitive Impairment in Geriatric Depression: Modeling the Relationships With the CART Analysis

ABSTRACT Herein, the background information reflecting roles of medical burden, cerebrovascular disease and risk factors, and cognitive impairment in geriatric depression are reviewed. The authors then propose a nonparametric statistical approach to the data analysis of multiple putative causal variables for late-life depression, the Classification and Regression Tree Analysis. This analysis presents a useful approach to modeling nonlinear relationships and interactions among variables measuring physical and mental health, as well as magnetic resonance imaging and cognitive measures in depressed elderly. This method uncovers the existing interactions among multiple predictor variables, and provide thresholds for each variable, at which its predictive power becomes statistically significant. It presents a “hierarchy” of the predictors in a form of a decision tree by finding the best combination of predictors of an outcome. The authors present two models based on demographic variables, measures of vascular and nonvascular medical burden, neuroimaging indices, the Mini-Mental State Examination score, and neuropsychological test scores of 81 elderly depressed subjects. Cognitive tests of verbal fluency and executive function are identified as the best predictors of depression, followed by the frontal lobe volume and Mini-Mental State Examination. The authors observed that an interaction between frontal lobe volume, total lesion volume, and medical burden was predictive of depression.
Verifying Determinism of Concurrent SystemsWhich Use

Our main result says that determinism of a concurrent system which uses unbounded arrays (i.e. memories) can be veriied by considering an appropriate nite array size. That is made possible by restricting the ways in which array indices and values can be used within the system. The restrictions are those of data independence: the system must not perform any operations on the indices and values, but it is only allowed to input them, store them, and output them. Equality tests between indices are also allowed. The restrictions are satissed by many concurrent systems which use arrays to model memories or databases. As a case study, we have veriied that a database system which allows users to lock, read and write records at multiple security levels is secure.