Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical and epidemiological profile of diabetes mellitus in pregnancy, Isle of Youth, 2008.

INTRODUCTION Diabetes in pregnancy threatens both maternal and neonatal health, with risks of lung immaturity, fetal macrosomia, dystocia and impaired maternal kidney function. Before insulin, diabetes resulted in maternal mortality rates of 30-50% and perinatal mortality rates of 50-60%. Global prevalence estimates vary by population, geographical area and diagnostic criteria. Diabetes accounts for some 90% of endocrine complications in pregnancy. OBJECTIVES Determine diabetes mellitus prevalence in pregnancy and characterize the population of diabetic women who gave birth in the Isle of Youth Special Municipality in 2008. METHODS A descriptive retrospective study was carried out from January to December 2008. Clinical records were reviewed of 180 diabetic women who gave birth on the Isle of Youth in 2008, their diagnosis based on WHO criteria modified by municipal health authorities. Study variables were: maternal age, nutritional status, glucose tolerance, gestational age at diagnosis, history of diabetes, and pregnancy outcome; as well as risk factors such as diabetes family history, pregnancy weight gain and comorbidities. RESULTS Overall prevalence (pregestational and gestational diabetes) among these cases was 17.3%; highest in the group aged ≥ 35 years. Gestational diabetes was more frequent (96.1% of cases) than pre-gestational diabetes. Multiparity (62.1%), a first-degree family history of diabetes mellitus (26.1%), excess weight before pregnancy (50%) and adequate weight gain during pregnancy (54.4%) were the most frequent conditions found. Among gestational diabetics, diabetes was most frequently detected at 20-28 weeks gestation (31.8%). Fetal macrosomia appeared in 4.4% of cases and a high percentage of deliveries were by Cesarean section (30%). There were no low Apgar scores or congenital abnormalities among neonates. CONCLUSIONS Despite using modified, more inclusive, WHO diagnostic criteria, the clinical and demographic characteristics of the population studied were comparable to those in other studies of diabetes in pregnancy, except for the low frequency of fetal macrosomia and absence of birth defects present in our study.
Why start a higher degree by research? An exploratory factor analysis of motivations to undertake doctoral studies

Despite the increasing numbers of candidates embarking on higher degrees by research (HDRs, e.g., PhD, professional doctorate, practice-based doctorate), we still have limited knowledge about why they are choosing this path. What are the factors that motivate students to embark on research degrees? Given that many of those who succeed in completing their doctorates will not go into academic positions, the motivations for choosing to undertake a research degree may not match the experience or outcomes (and hence, perhaps, contribute to incompletion rates). This article investigates the motivations of students in all faculties embarking on HDRs at an Australian university. A survey of 405 students was subjected to a factor analysis. Five factors emerged: family and friends, intrinsic motivation, lecturer influence, research experience, and career progression.
Retrospective clinical study on the notable efficacy and related factors of infliximab therapy in a rheumatoid arthritis management group in Japan: one-year outcome of joint destruction (RECONFIRM-2J)

The anti-TNF-α chimeric monoclonal antibody infliximab is the first biologic to be approved for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Japan, and post-marketing surveillance of all of the Japanese cases treated with infliximab has been conducted to explore the safety of infliximab therapy. In addition, a retrospective clinical study on the notable efficacy and related factors of infliximab therapy in an RA management group in Japan (RECONFIRM and RECONFIRM-2) has demonstrated clinical responses. However, information on the effect of infliximab on joint destruction in Japanese RA patients remains insufficient. In this study, we retrospectively analyzed X-ray data from 67 patients in whom both hand and foot X-rays at baseline and at 54 weeks had been available among the 410 cases in the RECONFIRM-2 study. By scoring the X-rays according to the modified van der Heijde (vdH)–Sharp method, we found that the total vdH–Sharp score in the RA patients before infliximab therapy was 104.40 ± 87.34 and the yearly progression was 21.33, indicating relatively rapid progression. After infliximab therapy for 54 weeks, the total vdH–Sharp score at 54 weeks was 104.37 ± 86.87 and the estimated yearly progression was −0.03, indicating the almost complete inhibition of progression. The RECONFIRM-2J study confirmed the significant ability of infliximab to halt joint destruction in Japanese RA patients, and showed that joint destruction was significantly associated with disease activity and the dose of MTX in the patients with moderate and advanced disease durations, respectively, before infliximab therapy.
Book Review: Community Education, Learning and Development

very culture of the museum as it stood. As she says, citing Jane Miller, “It is very difficult [for adults] to make sense of texts which reject our questions and our replies” (p. 163). So too the university needs to rethink its mission. The book then is challenging. Rather than turn away from the universities to other providers in order to increase adult/continuing and lifelong learning, Jean Barr calls on them to take a central role, particularly working with new social movements. Part of her argument is that any approach to building up adult education must be based firmly on the specific culture of the society in question; one-size-fits-all approaches deny the specificity of adult learning. Scotland must find its own path through this quagmire; it cannot try to build a road to the specifications of other cultures. The problem with the book, however, is that it is difficult to determine quite for whom it is written. It is extremely dense in its style; it engages in deep debate with texts most of us have never heard of (and which the book itself would deter us from ever having to read! ). Only very occasionally do we hear the voice of Jean Barr (the museum chapter is a very welcome exception)—more than 90% of the text of some chapters comes from other writers—talking heads. The book appears to have been written for a very academic audience, perhaps her own students. (I note Jean calls herself now an “adult educationalist” instead of the “adult educator” of years past.) It is not easy to read, unlike when Jean Barr writes using her own voice. A pity—for she has much of value to tell us, not just in Scotland but to the wider adult education world. A search for comprehensiveness can lead to a lack of clarity.
Resignificación del ocio. Aportes para un aprendizaje transformacional

Este articulo tiene como objetivo principal el repensar el ocio en las sociedades contemporaneas latinoamericanas, buscando generar aportes para su resignificacion. Para esto, el ocio es abordado considerando sus vinculos con las emergentes realidades de la actualidad. Se empieza construyendo definiciones de lo que se entiende por ocio, basandose en los desarrollos teoricos ya existentes. Ampliando la perspectiva, se realiza un analisis critico de la forma en que el ocio es percibido en el imaginario social latinoamericano actual. Posteriormente se analizan los avances y retrocesos sociales como indicadores que expresan la situacion actual del ocio. Para concluir se elabora una primera propuesta en la cual el ocio sera resignificado buscando la posibilidad de construir nuevos conocimientos y practicas para un aprendizaje comprometido con la transformacion social.
Actuarial Assessment of Risk for Reoffense Among Adult Sex Offenders

This study extended previous research comparing a set of widely employed actuarial risk assessment schemes as well as a new instrument, the Static-2002, in a sample of 468 sex offenders followed for an average of 5.9 years. All of the risk assessment instruments (Violence Risk Appraisal Guide [VRAG], Sex Offender Risk Appraisal Guide [SORAG], Rapid Risk Assessment for Sex Offense Recidivism [RRASOR], Static-99, Static-2002, and Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-Revised [MnSOST-R]) were found to predict the recidivism outcomes for which they were designed. Although significant, indices of accuracy were generally lower than those reported by the developers of these instruments, even under conditions that have been shown to optimize predictive performance. For serious recidivism, the predictive accuracy of the Static-2002 and SORAG was significantly superior to that of the RRASOR, and the SORAG was significantly superior to the MnSOST-R as well. There were no significant differences among instruments in accuracy of predicting sexual recidivism.
Neural Predictive Control of Unknown Chaotic Systems

In this work, a neural networks is developed for modelling and controlling a chaotic system based on measured input-output data pairs. In the chaos modelling phase, a neural network is trained on the unknown system. Then, a predictive control mechanism has been implemented with the neural networks to reach the close neighborhood of the chosen unstable fixed point embedded in the chaotic systems. Effectiveness of the proposed method for both modelling and prediction-based control on the chaotic logistic equation and Henon map has been demonstrated.
Monocrotaline-lnduced Pulmonary Endothelial Dysfunction in Rats

Abstract To study the role of endothelial damage in the pathogenesis of lung injury induced by the pyrrolizidine alkaloid monocrotaline, three functions (angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) activity, plasminogen activator (PLA) activity, and prostacyclin (PGI2) production) associated with the pulmonary endothelium were examined, and were correlated with pulmonary arterial perfusion and ultrastructure in rats receiving monocrotaline in their drinking water (20 mg/liter) for 1-12 weeks. Lung ACE activity increased after 1 week of monocrotaline, then decreased steadily from 1 to 6 weeks, before plateauing at approximately 55% of normal. PLA activity in monocrotaline-treated lungs did not change significantly for the first 2 weeks, then decreased to 59 and 79% of the control value after 6 and 12 weeks, respectively. In contrast, PGI2 production increased progressively, reaching 140 and 270% of the control level after 6 and 12 weeks of monocrotaline treatment, respectively. These endothelial functional changes were not accompanied by significant changes in pulmonary arterial perfusion as visualized by 99mTc lung scans. Electron microscopy of monocrotaline-treated lungs revealed endothelial damage (perivascular and subendothelial edema, degeneration) starting at 1 week, and inflammatory and hemorrhagic reactions starting at 2 weeks. At 6 and 12 weeks, monocrotaline-treated rats also exhibited increased pulmonary arterial wall thickness, right heart enlargement, and cardio- and hepatomegaly. Thus, monocrotaline-induced pulmonary injury is accompanied, and in some cases preceded, by structural and functional abnormalities in the pulmonary endothelium.
Two-stage electrochemical treatment of bio-digested distillery spent wash using stainless steel and aluminum electrodes

The objective of this study was to determine the effectiveness of two-stage electro-coagulation (EC) process using multi-parameter optimization for treating bio-digested distillery spent wash by stainless steel (SS) and aluminum (Al) electrodes. Operating parameters have been optimized and treatment efficiency of SS and Al electrodes have been compared by central composite design of response surface analysis in terms of COD, color and total organic carbon (TOC) removal. Individual and interactive effects of four independent parameters namely initial pH (pHo: 2–10 and 4–10 for SS and Al electrodes, respectively), current density (j: 30.86–154.32 A m−2), inter-electrode distance (g: 0.5–2.5 cm) and electrolysis time (t: 30–150 min) on the COD, color and TOC removal efficiency were evaluated for both the electrodes. SS electrode was found to be more effective for the removal of COD, color and TOC with removal efficiencies of 70%, 93% and 72%, respectively, as compared to Al electrode, which showed respective removal efficiencies of 59%, 80% and 55%. A two-stage EC process was also conducted to study the predominance of different types of electrodes, and to increase the efficiency of EC process. Results shows that SS followed by Al electrode (with total COD, color and TOC removal efficiency of 81%, 94% and 78%, respectively) was found to be more effective than Al followed by SS electrode combination (with total COD, color and TOC removal efficiency of 78%, 89% and 76%, respectively). Present study shows that EC process can be used as an additional step to bio-methanation process so as to meet effluent discharge standards in distilleries.
Expressing Privacy Policies Using Authorization Views

In this paper, we design a rule-based privacy policy for the RFID Ecosystem, an RFID-based ubiquitous computing system. We start from the physical access control (PAC) rule (Kriplean et al., IEEE Pervasive Computing 2007) that provides a default level of privacy but constrains the possible set of applications. We extend it by using principled ways of defining other access control rules that retain the simplicity of PAC and yet provide increased flexibility for users and applications. We then propose authorization views as a database technique to implent rule-based privacy policies and demonstrate the use of authorization views over the privacy policy designed for the RFID Ecosystem.
Gogol, the Picturesque, and the Desire for the People: AReading of “Rome”

In Designing Dead Souls Susanne Fusso points out the role of the picturesque as an aesthetic category of paramount interest to Gogol. ' This article expands on this line of inquiry, moving from the neatly trimmed hedges of the aesthetic onto the rough field of ideology. I argue that in the works of Gogol the picturesque serves as a kind of master paradigm which informs Gogol's relationship to spheres as diverse as the aesthetic, the erotic, the social, and the narrative. When Gogolian protagonists contemplate an aesthetic object, a woman, or the people, they often experience conflicting impulses, both attraction and fear. They are impelled at once to consummate a relationship with this object and to run away from it. The picturesque enables a paradoxical relationship to the object that suspends these two urges, however fleetingly, and thus allows the beholding subject to absorb himself in the act of contemplation. It obviates the need to choose between the terms of an intolerable binary opposition. After defining the picturesque as a category and discussing its semantic ramifications, I will establish the relevance of the picturesque in the works of Gogol at large and proceed to analyze the fragment "Rome," in which Gogol's resort to the picturesque is most visible and interesting. But first things first. What is the picturesque? This category was introduced and promoted in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century England by the Reverend William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight. The first uses of the word in English date back to the early eighteenth century: Alexander Pope seems to have adopted it from French, ascribing it the meaning of "in the style of a picture. "2 The picturesque became an explicit aesthetic category when Gilpin discussed it in his Essay upon Prints(1768), where he defined it as "a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture. "3 He subsequently spread the term by applying it to various sights in the tour
Sinew: a SQL system for multi-structured data

As applications are becoming increasingly dynamic, the notion that a schema can be created in advance for an application and remain relatively stable is becoming increasingly unrealistic. This has pushed application developers away from traditional relational database systems and away from the SQL interface, despite their many well-established benefits. Instead, developers often prefer self-describing data models such as JSON, and NoSQL systems designed specifically for their relaxed semantics. In this paper, we discuss the design of a system that enables developers to continue to represent their data using self-describing formats without moving away from SQL and traditional relational database systems. Our system stores arbitrary documents of key-value pairs inside physical and virtual columns of a traditional relational database system, and adds a layer above the database system that automatically provides a dynamic relational view to the user against which fully standard SQL queries can be issued. We demonstrate that our design can achieve an order of magnitude improvement in performance over alternative solutions, including existing relational database JSON extensions, MongoDB, and shredding systems that store flattened key-value data inside a relational database.
Global CLF stabilization of systems with respect to a hyperbox, allowing the null-control input in its boundary (positive controls)

Our main aim in this work is to study how to render an affine control system globally asymptotically stable (GAS), when the control value set (CVS) is given by an m-hyperbox B<sub>r</sub><sup>m</sup> (∞) := [-r<sub>1</sub><sup>-</sup>, r<sub>1</sub><sup>+</sup>] × . × [-r<sub>m</sub><sup>-</sup>, r<sub>m</sub><sup>+</sup>] with 0 ∈ B<sub>r</sub><sup>m</sup> (∞). Hence we allow the null-control input in its boundary, 0 ∈ ∂B<sub>r</sub><sup>m</sup> (∞), i.e. positive/signed control input components. Working along the line of Artstein and Sontag's control Lyapunov function (CLF) approach, we study the conditions that feedback controls of the decentralized form u(x) = (ρ<sub>1</sub>(x) ω̅<sub>1</sub>(x), . , ρ<sub>m</sub>(x) ω̅<sub>m</sub>(x))<sup>T</sup>, should satisfy in order to be admissible (regular and valued in B<sub>r</sub><sup>m</sup> (∞)) and render a system GAS. Here, ω̅(x) is an optimal control w.r. t. a CLF and ρ<sub>j</sub>(x) are rescaling functions. Finally, we design of an explicit control formula valued in B<sub>r</sub><sup>m</sup> (∞) (with signed/positive input components) that renders a system GAS, given a known CLF.
Systematic Unit Testing in a Read-eval-print Loop

Lisp programmers constantly carry out experiments in a read-eval-print loop. The experimental activities convince the Lisp programmers that new or modified pieces of programs work as expected. But the experiments typically do not represent systematic and comprehensive unit testing efforts. Rather, the experiments are quick and dirty one shot validations which do not add lasting value to the software, which is being developed. In this paper we propose a tool that is able to collect, organize, and re-validate test cases, which are entered as expressions in a read-eval-print loop. The process of collecting the expressions and their results imposes only little extra work on the programmer. The use of the tool provides for creation of test repositories, and it is intended to catalyze a much more systematic approach to unit testing in a read-eval- print loop. In the paper we also discuss how to use a test repository for other purposes than testing. As a concrete contribution we show how to use test cases as examples in library interface documentation. It is hypothesized—but not yet validated—that the tool will motivate the Lisp programmer to take the transition from casual testing to systematic testing.
Role of Emoticons for Multidimensional Sentiment Analysis of Twitter

Microblogging systems such as Twitter and Facebook have become popular. People can easily post their sentiments to the Internet in real time using such microblogging systems. Twitter is a text-based communication tool. Users cannot use non-verbal communication tools such as gestures and eye contact on Twitter. Users sometimes use emoticons as an alternative non-verbal communication tool to tweet delicate sentiments. In this paper, we propose a method of determining sentiment of a tweet based on the emoticon role. Specifically, we propose the following: (1) compilation of a sentiment lexicon and an emoticon lexicon; (2) emoticon roles can be classified into four types showing "Emphasis", "Assuagement", "Conversion", and "Addition", with roles determined based on a relation between sentiments of sentences and emoticons; and (3) the relation can be formalized using regression analysis in all roles excepting for "Addition".
Effect of the Serotonin Blocker Sarpogrelate on Circulating Interleukin-18 Levels in Patients with Diabetes and Arteriosclerosis Obliterans

We aimed to evaluate the effect of treatment with sarpogrelate, a serotonin 2A receptor antagonist, on circulating interleukin (IL)-18 levels in patients with diabetes and arteriosclerosis obliterans. Patients received sarpogrelate (100 mg 3 times daily) for 2 months. We evaluated the degree of cryaesthesia (a feeling of cold in the foot and toes) as the clinical outcome, and measured circulating IL-18, IL-6 and lipid protein concentrations. An improvement in clinical outcome occurred after initiation of sarpogrelate therapy;a significant decrease in IL-18 levels was observed after 2 months of therapy. Levels of IL-6 and lipid proteins, including triglyceride, total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, were not significantly altered by treatment. Our data suggest that by reducing circulating IL-18 levels, sarpogrelate treatment may contribute to the inhibition of arteriosclerosis obliterans progression in patients with diabetes.
Matching and Making Labour Demand and Supply: Agents in Polish Migrant Networks of Domestic Elderly Care in Germany and Italy

This paper explores the role of agents in migrant networks in the domestic elderly care sector. It is based on a study of female migrants from Poland who work in the sector in Germany and Italy. Using evidence gathered from qualitative interviews, we illustrate the importance of ties other than friends, families and communities in the migration process, including actors such as employers and recruitment agents. We also show that agents—in contrast to intermediaries—are significant actors in migrant networks and can be regarded as perpetuators of migration within these networks. Furthermore, we conclude that the role of agents in migrant networks has been underestimated. Rather than simply helping to match labour supply with labour demand, agents appear to offer migrants social and emotional support as well.