Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leptin Binding Activity (LBA) in Plasma of Nondiabetic and Diabetic Adolescents and Obese Children: Relation to Auxologic and Hormonal Data

Leptin circulates in serum bound to high molecular weight proteins. Hypothesizing that leptin binding proteins may regulate the functional efficiency of leptin, we characterized auxologic and hormonal factors that influence leptin binding in three disparate groups: normal adolescents, obese children, and teenagers with type I diabetes mellitus (IDDM). Specific leptin binding activity (sLBA) was assessed by column chromatography after incubation of serum with 125I-leptin in the presence and absence of excess unlabeled leptin. Mean sLBA was 17.0 +/- 7% (SD) in the healthy adolescents (n=41), 6.6 +/-4.3% in the obese children (n=26), and 14.9 +/-7.3% in the diabetic teenagers (n=17). At any value of sLBA, obese children had higher serum leptin levels than non-obese adolescents or diabetic teenagers, consistent with "leptin resistance" in the obese group. sLBA was higher in males than in females only in those with diabetes (18.6 +/- 7.3 vs 10.9 +/- 5.1%, p<0.05). sLBA correlated inversely with serum insulin-like growth factor-I values in the normal group (r= -0.45, p<0.01) and with insulin in the obese children (r= -0.53, p<0.01). There was no correlation between sLBA or serum leptin values and HbA1c, in the diabetic group. The serum leptin concentration was the principal determinant explaining the total variability of sLBA in all three cohorts. However, body mass index (BMI = weight/ height2) accounted for more of the total variability of percent specific binding in the healthy adolescents than in the other groups. We conclude that sLBA reflects circulating leptin levels, body composition, and hormonal milieu. Thus, in addition to leptin, qualitative and quantitative characteristics of leptin binding may play a physiological role in the regulation of appetite and in the "leptin resistance" of obesity.
Management and ownership control in foreign investments: An analysis of the influence of isomorphism and quality of institutions

Abstract According to new institutionalism, this work simultaneously analyzes different methods of operating abroad – that is, joint venture, acquisition and greenfield – in terms of the level of management and ownership control they provide. This research studies the regulative and cognitive institutions that explain the multinational company’s choice of a particular level of that control for its subsidiaries years after entering a foreign country. We analyze 109 German firms with subsidiaries in Spain. The results show that the level of management and ownership control for the subsidiary responds to the institutional quality of the host country and the internal and especially external isomorphic pressures.
Biomonitoring of Mycotoxins in Urine: Pilot Study in Mill Workers

ABSTRACT Contamination of grains with mycotoxins results in a dietary background exposure of the general population. In occupational settings such as during processing of raw materials as in milling, an additional mycotoxin exposure by inhalation is possible. Biomonitoring is an integrative approach to assess human exposure from various sources and by all routes. To investigate possible workplace exposure to mycotoxins, a pilot study was conducted that compared levels of urinary biomarkers in mill workers to those in a control group with dietary mycotoxin intake alone. Workers (n = 17) from three grain mills in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany, provided spot urines during shift; volunteers (n = 13, IfADo staff) with matched age structure served as control group. The mycotoxins selected for biomarker analysis were citrinin (CIT) deoxynivalenol (DON), ochratoxin A (OTA), and zearalenone (ZEN). Immunoaffinity columns (CIT, DON, ZEN) or liquid–liquid extraction (OTA) was employed for urine sample cleanup prior to targeted analysis by liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) or by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). In addition, mycotoxin metabolites that may be formed in the organism were analyzed, including deepoxy-deoxynivalenol (DOM-1), ochratoxin alpha (OTα), dihydrocitrinone (DH-CIT), and α- and β-zearalenol (α- and β-ZEL), as well as phase II metabolites that were hydrolyzed with β-glucuronidase/arylsulfatase prior to sample cleanup. All analyte concentrations were adjusted for creatinine (crea) content in the spot urine samples. Citrinin, DON, OTA, and ZEN were detected in nearly all urine samples from mill workers and controls. Interestingly, DH-CIT was found at higher mean levels than the parent compound (~0.14 and 0.045 µg/g crea, respectively), suggesting an effective metabolism of CIT in humans. Other metabolites DOM-1, OTα, and α- and β-ZEL were detected less frequently in urine. Deoxynivalenol was detected at the highest concentrations (mean ~6 µg/g crea), followed by OTA (mean ~0.08 µg/g crea); ZEN (mean ~0.03 µg/g crea) and its metabolites appeared in urine at lower levels. Mycotoxin biomarker levels in urine from mill workers and controls were not significantly different. From these results it is concluded that biomarker levels measured in urine samples from the two cohorts reflect mainly dietary mycotoxin exposure. An additional occupational (inhalational) exposure of mill workers, if any, is apparently low at the investigated workplaces.
Designing optimal quantum detectors via semidefinite programming

We consider the problem of designing an optimal quantum detector to minimize the probability of a detection error when distinguishing among a collection of quantum states, represented by a set of density operators. We show that the design of the optimal detector can be formulated as a semidefinite programming problem. Based on this formulation, we derive a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an optimal quantum measurement. We then show that the optimal measurement can be found by solving a standard (convex) semidefinite program. By exploiting the many well-known algorithms for solving semidefinite programs, which are guaranteed to converge to the global optimum, the optimal measurement can be computed very efficiently in polynomial time within any desired accuracy. Using the semidefinite programming formulation, we also show that the rank of each optimal measurement operator is no larger than the rank of the corresponding density operator. In particular, if the quantum state ensemble is a pure-state ensemble consisting of (not necessarily independent) rank-one density operators, then we show that the optimal measurement is a pure-state measurement consisting of rank-one measurement operators.
Exploring Veteran Disconnection: Using Culturally Responsive Methods in the Evaluation of Veterans Treatment Court Services

Returning veterans often experience difficulties engaging with community-based treatment services. This article describes a collaborative effort between social work evaluators and veteran community leaders to investigate a perceived social disconnection between returning veterans and a treatment court attempting to assist them. Collaborators conducted an exploratory evaluation with individuals participating in a veterans treatment court (VTC) in Hamilton County, Ohio. The evaluation utilized both ecological theory and culturally responsive methods to explore participant perceptions. The analysis made explicit a chain of participant perceptions expected to promote program engagement and retention. Recommendations are made for program evaluation, training, and avenues for further study.
Protein-Bound Uremic Toxins: New Insight from Clinical Studies

The uremic syndrome is attributed to the progressive retention of a large number of compounds which, under normal conditions, are excreted by healthy kidneys. The compounds are called uremic toxins when they interact negatively with biological functions. The present review focuses on a specific class of molecules, namely the family of protein-bound uremic toxins. Recent experimental studies have shown that protein-bound toxins are involved not only in the progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD), but also in the generation and aggravation of cardiovascular disease. Two protein-bound uremic retention solutes, namely indoxyl sulfate and p-cresyl sulfate, have been shown to play a prominent role. However, although these two molecules belong to the same class of molecules, exert toxic effects on the cardiovascular system in experimental animals, and accumulate in the serum of patients with CKD they may have different clinical impacts in terms of cardiovascular disease and other complications. The principal aim of this review is to evaluate the effect of p-cresyl sulfate and indoxyl sulfate retention on CKD patient outcomes, based on recent clinical studies.
The TUNA Challenge 2008: Overview and Evaluation Results

The TUNA Challenge was a set of three shared tasks at REG ’08, all of which used data from the TUNA Corpus. The three tasks covered attribute selection for referring expressions ( TUNA - AS ), realisation ( TUNA - R ) and end-to-end referring expression generation ( TUNA - REG ). 8 teams submitted a total of 33 systems to the three tasks, with an additional submission to the Open Track. The evaluation used a range of automatically computed measures. In addition, an evaluation experiment was carried out using the peer outputs for the TUNA - REG task. This report describes each task and the evaluation methods used, and presents the evaluation results.
Automated Grading of DFA Constructions

One challenge in making online education more effective is to develop automatic grading software that can provide meaningful feedback. This paper provides a solution to automatic grading of the standard computation-theory problem that asks a student to construct a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) from the given description of its language. We focus on how to assign partial grades for incorrect answers. Each student's answer is compared to the correct DFA using a hybrid of three techniques devised to capture different classes of errors. First, in an attempt to catch syntactic mistakes, we compute the edit distance between the two DFA descriptions. Second, we consider the entropy of the symmetric difference of the languages of the two DFAs, and compute a score that estimates the fraction of the number of strings on which the student answer is wrong. Our third technique is aimed at capturing mistakes in reading of the problem description. For this purpose, we consider a description language MOSEL, which adds syntactic sugar to the classical Monadic Second Order Logic, and allows defining regular languages in a concise and natural way. We provide algorithms, along with optimizations, for transforming MOSEL descriptions into DFAs and vice-versa. These allow us to compute the syntactic edit distance of the incorrect answer from the correct one in terms of their logical representations. We report an experimental study that evaluates hundreds of answers submitted by (real) students by comparing grades/feedback computed by our tool with human graders. Our conclusion is that the tool is able to assign partial grades in a meaningful way, and should be preferred over the human graders for both scalability and consistency.
Microbiological and clinical effects of probiotics and antibiotics on nonsurgical treatment of chronic periodontitis: a randomized placebo- controlled trial with 9-month follow-up

ABSTRACT Objective The aim of this double-blind, placebo-controlled and parallel- arm randomized clinical trial was to evaluate the effects of Lactobacillus rhamnosus SP1-containing probiotic sachet and azithromycin tablets as an adjunct to nonsurgical therapy in clinical parameters and in presence and levels of Tannerella forsythia, Porphyromonas gingivalis and Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans. Material and Methods Forty-seven systemically healthy volunteers with chronic periodontitis were recruited and monitored clinically and microbiologically at baseline for 3, 6 and 9 months after therapy. Subgingival plaque samples were collected from four periodontal sites with clinical attachment level ≥1 mm, probing pocket depth ≥4 mm and bleeding on probing, one site in each quadrant. Samples were cultivated and processed using the PCR technique. Patients received nonsurgical therapy including scaling and root planing (SRP) and were randomly assigned to a probiotic (n=16), antibiotic (n = 16) or placebo (n = 15) group. L. rhamnosus SP1 was taken once a day for 3 months. Azithromycin 500mg was taken once a day for 5 days. Results All groups showed improvements in clinical and microbiological parameters at all time points evaluated. Probiotic and antibiotic groups showed greater reductions in cultivable microbiota compared with baseline. The placebo group showed greater reduction in number of subjects with P. gingivalis compared with baseline. However, there were no significant differences between groups. Conclusions The adjunctive use of L. rhamnosus SP1 sachets and azithromycin during initial therapy resulted in similar clinical and microbiological improvements compared with the placebo group.
PATHOLOGIC LAUGHING AND CRYING

The occurrence of affective responses, such as involuntary laughing or crying, associated with lesions of the nervous system has been the topic of several contributions. By pathologic laughing and crying we mean involuntary and uncontrollable attacks of emotional expressions as a result of a cerebral lesion or lesions. The few attempts at correlation of these emotional expressions on a neuroanatomic and physiologic basis in man have led to various interpretations. The problem is beset by many difficulties because in most instances the lesions are neither isolated nor limited to specific areas of the nervous system. This is especially true in the cases of cerebrovascular disease and multiple sclerosis with multiple and bilateral lesions, in which pathologic laughing and crying commonly occur. At times, however, these affective responses appear in case of cerebrovascular disease at the same time as, or soon after, the ictus. In such cases, with utilization of the
A novel compact and lightweight actuator for wearable robots

Advanced robotics needs a new breed of actuators, capable to exhibit a large number of desirable features, ranging from high power/torque density, high efficiency, zero backlash and low noise, to low reflected mechanical impedance, high bandwidth and accuracy. Even if it is quite evident that to fully match these requirements new basic actuation principles have to be investigated and developed in the long term, there is still scope now for innovating the field by combining mature components into new actuation schemes. This paper reports the development and the experimental evaluation of a new actuator, aiming at improving the torque density and the mechanical efficiency. The device has shown impressive performances being able to exert up to 500Nm continuous torque and 800Nm peak torque with 85% mechanical efficiency and zero backlash, up to 60°/s maximum output speed for a total weight of just 6Kg, comprising the structural case covering the internal mechanics. The actuator has been expressly conceived as an actuation module to be integrated in a fully powered whole body exoskeleton intended for material handling in tight and unstructured environments (see Fig.1).
Cache Discovery Over a Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Multihop ad hoc wireless networks consist of mobile nodes that communicate with each other without any fixed infrastructure. The nodes in these networks are power constrained, since they operate in limited battery energy. Cooperative caching is an attractive solution for reducing network traffic and bandwidth demands in mobile ad hoc networks. Deploying caches in mobile nodes can reduce the overall traffic considerably. Cache hits eliminate the need to contact the data source frequently, which avoids additional network overhead. In this paper we propose a cache discovery policy for cooperative caching, which reduces the power usage, caching overhead and delay. This is done by power control and transmission range adjustment. A cache discovery process based on position coordinates of neighboring nodes is developed for this. The simulation results gives a promising result based on the metrics of studies.
Feedforward and deterministic fuzzy control of balance and posture during human gait

The primary objective of this research is to model the biomechanical control system employed by the central nervous system (CNS) to maintain posture and balance of the head-arms-torso (HAT) during gait. More specifically, the intent is to stabilize a model of the upper body so that the HAT response is similar to that found experimentally in human subjects during gait. This is accomplished by using appropriate physiological parameters as feedback to generate realistic control signals at the hip musculature. The modelling includes the HAT musculoskeletal characteristics as well as pure neural time delays. The CNS control system is modelled by a linear state feedback controller as well as a hybrid fuzzy controller that has been adapted from a linear quadratic regulator. In addition, a newly derived feedforward component is demonstrated. It is expected that a better understanding of the human fait process will prove valuable in designing assistive devices and bipedal robots.
Constrained codes for joint energy and information transfer with receiver energy utilization requirements

In various wireless systems, such as sensor RFID networks and body area networks with implantable devices, the transmitted signals are simultaneously used both for information transmission and for energy transfer. In order to satisfy the conflicting requirements on information and energy transfer, this paper proposes the use of constrained run-length limited (RLL) codes in lieu of conventional unconstrained (i.e, random-like) capacity-achieving codes. The receiver's energy utilization requirements are modeled stochastically, and constraints are imposed on the probabilities of battery underflow and overflow at the receiver. It is demonstrated that the codewords' structure afforded by the use of constrained codes enables the transmission strategy to be better adjusted to the receiver's energy utilization pattern, as compared to classical unstructured codes. As a result, constrained codes allow a wider range of trade-offs between the rate of information transmission and the performance of energy transfer to be achieved.
HyTER: Meaning-Equivalent Semantics for Translation Evaluation

It is common knowledge that translation is an ambiguous, 1-to-n mapping process, but to date, our community has produced no empirical estimates of this ambiguity. We have developed an annotation tool that enables us to create representations that compactly encode an exponential number of correct translations for a sentence. Our findings show that naturally occurring sentences have billions of translations. Having access to such large sets of meaning-equivalent translations enables us to develop a new metric, HyTER, for translation accuracy. We show that our metric provides better estimates of machine and human translation accuracy than alternative evaluation metrics.
New Forms of Management: Shared and Distributed Leadership in Organizations

The Journal of Personnel Psychology (JPP) announces a special issue focusing on shared and distributed leadership in organizations. The focus will be on possible antecedents, moderators, and processes and outcomes of shared leadership in organizations. In today’s organizations, hierarchies are often replaced by team-based work structures. Organizations are faced with uncertainty and fast-changing environments, and work tasks are becoming increasingly complex. To succeed, organizations therefore need new forms of leadership to integrate the challenging and complex demands. Shared leadership describes a leadership in today’s organizations that is distributed on different levels and can be defined as “a dynamic interactive influence among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both” (Pearce & Conger, 2003, p. 1). While our knowledge on these concepts, particularly from the theoretical point of view but also from the practitioner side, has grown, systematic investigations of the potential antecedents, processes, and contingencies of shared leadership in organizations are still relatively scarce. More research isneeded here (see Pearce, 2008; Pearce & Conger, 2003), and the current special issue is aimed toward filling this gap. This special issue will consider papers that explore the antecedents, processes, moderating variables, and outcomes of shared leadership and distributed leadership across different levels of the organization. Topics that are consistent with this purpose include: – What are the key antecedents of shared leaders? What causes shared leadership to occur? Why do leadership transitions occur? – What are the important mediating processes of shared and distributed leadership in organizations? – How does shared leadership impact on employee health, well-being, and satisfaction? – How can supervisors strengthen and encourage the collective leadership of their team members? – What role does empowerment and employee influence play? How important is organizational participation in its different forms, intensities, and levels? – How do we measure shared and distributed leadership? – How important is employee self-leadership? What role do self-management skills or proactivity of the members play? – Does shared leadership reduce employee turnover? – How does team composition (e.g., diversity in terms of members’ personality or other aspects) relate to or interact with shared leadership? – How important and how effective is shared leadership in modern and globalized or “virtual” workplaces? – Does shared leadership have only positive consequences, or are there also possible caveats? What might be important hindrances of shared leadership effectiveness?
Influencing Factors on Eating Disorders in College Students

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the influencing factors on eating disorders in college students. Method: A descriptive correlational study design was used. Eight hundred fifty-nine college students were administered self-report questionnaires to examine eating habits, self-efficacy, depression, and parent-adolescent communication from May to June, 2010. Collected data were analyzed by the SPSS 15.0 program for t-test, ANOVA, Pearson`s correlation coefficient, and stepwise multiple regression. Result: The level of an eating disorder in participants was moderate and it differed by gender, major, and type of living. The eating disorder showed a significant correlation with self-efficacy (r
The MONARCA self-assessment system: a persuasive personal monitoring system for bipolar patients

An increasing number of persuasive personal healthcare monitoring systems are being researched, designed and tested. However, most of these systems have targeted somatic diseases and few have targeted mental illness. This paper describes the MONARCA system; a persuasive personal monitoring system for bipolar patients based on an Android mobile phone. The paper describes the user-centered design process behind the system, the user experience, and the technical implementation. This system is one of the first examples of the use of mobile monitoring to support the treatment of mental illness, and we discuss lessons learned and how others can use our experience in the design of such systems for the treatment of this important, yet challenging, patient group.