Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The metabolic profile in active acromegaly is gender-specific.

CONTEXT The sexual dimorphism of the somatotroph axis has been documented, but whether the acromegaly-related metabolic alterations are gender-dependent has never been investigated. OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of gender on the metabolic parameters in acromegaly. DESIGN We conducted a retrospective, comparative, multicenter study. PATIENTS The 307 newly diagnosed acromegalic patients included in the study were grouped by gender: 157 men (aged 48.01 ± 14.28 yr), and 150 women (aged 48.67 ± 14.95 yr; of which 77 were premenopausal and 73 postmenopausal). OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS We measured each component of the metabolic syndrome (MS), hemoglobin A1c, the areas under the curve (AUCs) of glucose and insulin during 2-h oral glucose tolerance test, basal insulin resistance using the homeostasis model assessment of the insulin resistance index, stimulated insulin sensitivity using the insulin sensitivity index, early insulin-secretion rate using the insulinogenic index, β-cell function relative to insulin sensitivity using the oral disposition index and the visceral adiposity index (VAI) as the surrogate of visceral fat function. RESULTS Women showed a higher prevalence of MS (P < 0.001), higher fasting insulin levels (P < 0.001), AUC for insulin (P = 0.002), homeostasis model assessment of the insulin resistance index (P < 0.001), and VAI (P < 0.001) and a lower insulin sensitivity index (P = 0.002) than men, whereas no difference was found in fasting glucose, AUC for glucose, hemoglobin A1c, insulinogenic index, and oral disposition index. In women, fasting glucose and fasting insulin showed a significant trend toward increase (P < 0.001) and decrease (P = 0.004), respectively, from the first to the fourth quartiles of age, whereas VAI showed a trend toward increase in both groups (P < 0.001). A significantly higher prevalence of MS (P < 0.001), increased waist circumference (P < 0.001), low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (P < 0.001), and overt diabetes mellitus (P < 0.001) was found in postmenopausal women compared with premenopausal women, as well as with men. CONCLUSIONS The majority of metabolic features in acromegaly are gender-specific. Active acromegaly in women is strongly associated with higher visceral adiposity dysfunction, insulin resistance, and the features of MS. We suggest more accurate metabolic management in acromegalic women, especially in the postmenopausal years.
Theory of mind and perceptual context‐processing in schizophrenia

Introduction. A series of studies have suggested that schizophrenia patients are deficient in theory of mind (ToM). However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying ToM deficits in schizophrenia are largely unknown. The present study examined the hypothesis that impaired ToM in schizophrenia can be understood as a deficit in context processing. Methods. Disorganised schizophrenia patients (N = 12), nondisorganised schizophrenia patients (N = 36), and nonpsychotic psychiatric patients (N = 26) were tested on three ToM tasks and a visual size perception task, a measure of perceptual context processing. In addition, statistical analyses were carried out which compared chronic, treatment‐refractory schizophrenia patients (N = 28) to those with an episodic course of illness (N = 20). Results. Overall, ToM performance was linked to deficits in context processing in schizophrenia patients. Statistical comparisons showed that disorganised as well as chronic schizophrenia patients were more impaired in ToM but more accurate in a visual size perception task where perceptual context is misleading. Conclusions. This pattern of results is interpreted as indicating a possible link between deficits in ToM and perceptual context processing, which together with deficits in perceptual grouping, are part of a broader dysfunction in cognitive coordination in schizophrenia.
RF-2 gene modulates proteinuria and albuminuria independently of changes in glomerular permeability in the fawn-hooded hypertensive rat.

We report that Rab38 , a gene within the Rf-2 locus appears to influence the development of proteinuria (UPV) and albuminuria (UAV) in fawn-hooded hypertensive rats (FHH). Using congenic animals, we narrowed the region to eight genes; however, only one gene had a sequence variant. Rab38 has a
Online and in the Know: Uses and Gratifications of the Web for Political Information

The uses and gratifications approach is well suited for studying the World Wide Web as a whole and for examining specific types of sites within the Web. This study, therefore, examines the uses and gratifications of accessing online sources for political information. A factor analysis revealed 4 primary motivations for connecting to online political information: guidance information-seeking surveillance, entertainment, and social utility. Additionally, significant correlations emerged between the 4 motivations and amount of use, trust in government, feelings of efficacy, interest in politics, and the likelihood of voting.
Flexible and Reconfigurable Mismatch-Tolerant Serial Clock Distribution Networks

We present a clock distribution network that emphasizes flexibility and layout independence. It suits a variety of applications, clock domain shapes and sizes using a modular, standard cell-based design approach that mitigates the effect of intra-die temperature and process variances. We route the clock line serially, using an averaging technique to eliminate skew between clock regions in a domain. Routing clock lines serially allows optimal wire usage for clock networks by eliminating the redundant wires required to match path delays. Our clock network provides control over regional clock skews, can be used in beneficial skew applications and facilitates silicon-debug. Serial clocking permits the use of routing switches in the clock network and allows post-silicon resizing and reshaping of clock domains. Defective sections of the clock network can be bypassed, providing post silicon repair capability. The system uses a closed-loop synchronization phase to combine the clock skew reduction of an actively synchronized clock network with an open-loop operating phase that minimizes power consumption like passive clock networks. Our clock network provides significant flexibility for application-specific integrated circuit, system-on-chip, and field-programmable gate-array designs, exhibiting good operating characteristics everywhere in the design envelope. Our silicon implementation achieves a maximum edge-to-edge uncertainty of 80 ps for regional clocks, which is roughly equal to the cycle-to-cycle jitter of the on-chip clock source.
An Observational Study of Children's Attempts to Monitor Their Expressive Behavior.

SAARNI, CAROLYN. An Observational Study of Children's Attempts to Monitor Their Expressive Behavior. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1504-1513. This observational study examined developmental patterns in children's attempts to regulate their expressive behavior in a mildly conflictful situation that was contrived by creating expectations in children for receiving a desirable reward but in fact receiving an undesirable one. This situation provided a limited sample of children's expressive behavior when faced with an implied display rule: "Look pleased, despite receiving a disappointing gift. " Videotapes of the children's expressive behavior were analyzed, and the major findings included significant age x sex interactions wherein the youngest children (especially boys) were more likely to show negative behavior on receiving an undesirable gift (i.e., a drab baby toy), while the older children (especially girls) were more likely to maintain their positive expressive behavior. The results are discussed in terms of developmental differences in (a) awareness of social rules for management of expressive behavior, (b) ability to implement the rule, and (c) motivation to carry out the rule.
On the communication process: Speaker-listener interaction and the development of speech*

The reason why humn a communication is so powerful is tied not only to language but also to the phenomenon of communicative empathy. When communication breaks down, the causes may be found in the signal, or the transmission channel linking sender and receiver. But it is important to recognize that they may also derive from the sender's failure to “take the receiver's point of view” and to adapt ot it constructively and in accordance with his communicative goals. This paper reviews current reseacrch in several research areas: The development of more natural voice quality in speech synthesizers for the vocally handicapped as well as experimental work on the production, perception and development of normal speech. On the basis of the evidence reviewed a model is presented that makes sender-receiver empathy and mutuality the key element of successful nondisabled as well as augmentative and alternative communication.
Familiarity facilitates feature-based face processing

Recognition of personally familiar faces is remarkably efficient, effortless and robust. We asked if feature-based face processing facilitates detection of familiar faces by testing the effect of face inversion on a visual search task for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Because face inversion disrupts configural and holistic face processing, we hypothesized that inversion would diminish the familiarity advantage to the extent that it is mediated by such processing. Subjects detected personally familiar and stranger target faces in arrays of two, four, or six face images. Subjects showed significant facilitation of personally familiar face detection for both upright and inverted faces. The effect of familiarity on target absent trials, which involved only rejection of unfamiliar face distractors, suggests that familiarity facilitates rejection of unfamiliar distractors as well as detection of familiar targets. The preserved familiarity effect for inverted faces suggests that facilitation of face detection afforded by familiarity reflects mostly feature-based processes.
Desa Informasi: The role of digital libraries in the preservation and dissemination of indigenous knowledge

Abstract This paper talks about Desa Informasi (Information Village), an initiative to document local information resources at Petra Christian University through the implementation of an institutional repository (IR) system. The author argues that IRs have potential and an important role in the effort to preserve and disseminate indigenous knowledge. The author also describes the relationship between institutional repositories and digital libraries, that both are interchangeable terms. The paper also describes the impacts of the project to the campus community and the society, and how projects such as Desa Informasi are important especially for developing countries.
Community experience at OpenOffice.org

© ACM 1072-5220/07/1100 $5.00 DevelOperS are uSerS tOO. Developers, scratching just their personal itch, are a well-known challenge for open source projects [5]. If the project’s target audience is not the typical software engineer and the application’s interface becomes too technical, intended users will turn away from the product. As a consequence, more-mature projects have established a culture that values—in addition to source code—contributions from other members such as quality testing, user documentation, globalization, and user experience. The cooperation of all teams with their specific expertise makes a usable and successful product. Usability—or the lack thereof—in open source projects has been discussed during recent years and is also the subject of this special section. Usability is not a given. User research, usability testing, and usercentered design need to be actively integrated into the development processes to change the mind-set of engineers. However, this article takes a different angle. It discusses the community perspective for open source projects with OpenOffice.org as an example. Such projects have more than one user interface: the application user interface and the Web user interface of the community sites. If the community portal is designed without a thorough community-centered approach, then the development community (including all participating teams) cannot cooperate properly, and new contributing members are not attracted.
Fast bounded smooth regression with lazy neural trees

Proposes the lazy neural tree (LNT) as the appropriate architecture for the realization of smooth regression systems. The LNT is a hybrid of a decision tree and a neural network. From the neural network it inherits smoothness of the generated function, incremental adaptability, and conceptual simplicity. From the decision tree it inherits the topology and initial parameter setting as well as a very efficient sequential implementation that out-performs traditional neural network simulations by the order of magnitudes. The enormous speed is achieved by lazy evaluation. A further speed-up can be obtained by the application of a windowing scheme if the region of interesting results is restricted. <<ETX>>
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative...?.

How can students better come to see that the study of chemistry can make a difference in their lives, in their communities, and in their world? Just as the field of sociology offers its students the opportunity to study the problems that societies face, our profession might benefit by offering our students opportunities to study the real-world problems that involve chemicals and chemists.
Our Zoo To You: The link between zoo animals in the classroom and science and literacy concepts in first-grade journal writing

This study examined first-grade students’ journal writing to determine how placing live zoo animals in classrooms for science education links to students’ emergent and early writing. Students were asked to write journal entries during the daily language arts period. Although no direct instruction in informational text writing was offered, teachers suggested that journal writing about the current science topic or the live animal was a possible topic. We found that students in classrooms with zoo animals from the Our Zoo To You project wrote significantly longer and more coherent texts about zoo animals when compared with students who learned about the animals in more traditional ways. Students in Zoo classrooms included significantly more science concepts and vocabulary in their writing. Unexpectedly, using directive writing prompts enhanced texts in classrooms without zoo animals but actually hindered both the quality and quantity of writing in Zoo classrooms.
Therapy for word-finding deficits: More on the effects of semantic and phonological approaches to treatment with dysphasic patients

Abstract The word-finding difficulties of dysphasic patients are assisted by providing semantic or phonological cues about objects and their names. Experiments that have evaluated a single application of such cues suggest that semantic assistance is more beneficial. However, both approaches seem helpful in repeated therapy sessions. An experiment to identify the source of this assistance was performed. The results replicated previous reports that therapy effects persist for long periods but the experiment failed to find a difference in the effects of word/pictures-matching tasks where semantic information must be accessed and a task where the picture was seen while its name was repeated. An unexpected finding was that generalisation to non-target items in the therapy task occurred, but only for those unrelated to the targets. Some thoughts are offered on the appropriateness of this approach to therapy.
Facilitating Effects of Marginal Glosses on Foreign Language Reading

larly amenable channel for second language acquisition is well established (Krashen). 1 Recently, arguments have been advanced supporting the reading of L2 literary texts as powerful sources of linguistic and cultural input (Kramsch; Goldenstein). In fact, the use of any authentic selection is apparently very appealing to foreign language students in the US (Swaffar). The understanding of such passages can be improved by the L2 reader's use of knowledge of text topic and structure (Hudson; Carrell). Many literary passages, however, contain so many low-frequency vocabulary items that the reader's background knowledge may be unavailable because of the undue attention required to decode individual word meanings. In this case, reading no longer provides a minimally stressful access to real language but becomes instead a "threeto four-hour ordeal, mainly because of the [non-native reader's] constant recourse to a dictionary" (Crow: p. 242). The importance of vocabulary is underscored by a study which found that, in certain contexts, just one unfamiliar word can render a sentence or even a whole passage incomprehensible (Wittrock, Marks & Doctorow). One traditional means of bridging the gap between the L2 text and the L2 reader's limited cultural
Pre-Adolescent Dieting: Implications for Eating Disorders

Dieting is practised by a large proportion of women in the developed world. Considerations of thinness and overweight promote dieting and its popular appeal is enhanced by the variety and availability of dieting strategies. However, dieting is not a benign practice. The importance of dieting to eating disorders has been recognized in studies of adolescent girls. The focus of the present review is the emergence of dieting in younger age groups. The available research indicates the presence of significant numbers of pre-adolescent girls who both express strong dieting motivation and behave accordingly. In addition, considerations of body weight and shape appear to underlie the dieting motivation of girls as young as nine. The extremely negative views of overweight held by children almost certainly contributes to the appeal of dieting. The presence of dieting and accompanying body weight and shape dissatisfaction increases the proportion of girls at risk of becoming eating disordered. Attention should be pai.
Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics

Constructivists attack the social theory of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (TIP), arguing its positions on change, agent-structure interaction and culture are irrevocably flawed. We argue that many of these criticisms are mispecified, as they overlook the structural-functionalist assumptions of Waltz’s theory. Seen in this light, structural realism specifies mechanisms of change, provides a plausible account of agent-structure interaction; and is less ‘materialist’ and ‘rationalist’ than its critics suppose. Most fundamentally, recognizing Waltz’s sociological commitments reinforces his insight that reductionist theories cannot account for international order. An appreciation of TIP’s structural-functionalist sensibilities also helps us to understand the flaws of the theory, and provides constructivists with a clearer departure point for a reformulated systems theory of international politics.
Comparing Patient and Provider Perceptions of Engagement and Care in Chronic Diseases

The continuing professional development (CPD) community recognizes that optimal health care outcomes depend on coproduction, defined by the partnerships that patients and providers form in processes such as setting goals, making treatment decisions, and assessing care quality andoutcomes. To develop programs that effectively support provider and patient coproduction, CPD professionals must first identify relevant gaps and needs.Generally, our approach to gap analysis and needs assessment for coproduction involves conducting survey studies to compare patients’ and providers’ disease-specific treatment goals, relative knowledge and educational needs, perceptions, barriers, and behaviors. This approach addresses the current lack of comprehensive patient-provider survey studies on various chronic diseases in the literature. Through survey studies approved by independent institutional review boards, we sought to assess and compare patient– provider perceptions regarding hepatitis C and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Genome-Wide Analysis of Human Metapneumovirus Evolution

Human metapneumovirus (HMPV) has been described as an important etiologic agent of upper and lower respiratory tract infections, especially in young children and the elderly. Most of school-aged children might be introduced to HMPVs, and exacerbation with other viral or bacterial super-infection is common. However, our understanding of the molecular evolution of HMPVs remains limited. To address the comprehensive evolutionary dynamics of HMPVs, we report a genome-wide analysis of the eight genes (N, P, M, F, M2, SH, G, and L) using 103 complete genome sequences. Phylogenetic reconstruction revealed that the eight genes from one HMPV strain grouped into the same genetic group among the five distinct lineages (A1, A2a, A2b, B1, and B2). A few exceptions of phylogenetic incongruence might suggest past recombination events, and we detected possible recombination breakpoints in the F, SH, and G coding regions. The five genetic lineages of HMPVs shared quite remote common ancestors ranging more than 220 to 470 years of age with the most recent origins for the A2b sublineage. Purifying selection was common, but most protein genes except the F and M2-2 coding regions also appeared to experience episodic diversifying selection. Taken together, these suggest that the five lineages of HMPVs maintain their individual evolutionary dynamics and that recombination and selection forces might work on shaping the genetic diversity of HMPVs.
A Method for Calculating Acknowledged Project Effort Using a Quality Index

Software size is the fundamental metric for project planning. Effort and duration are calculated based on the size estimate. However, for a given software size, the actual development effort could be significantly different. The question is whether the increase in effort is due to the low productivity of the development team or higher product quality. While higher product quality is highly desirable and usually worth investing in, the reasons for additional effort might be elsewhere. In the research presented in this paper, the focus is on the correlation between code quality and productivity. Code quality is only one aspect of product quality. This paper presents a method for calculating a new type of project effort named “acknowledged effort”. Acknowledged effort is calculated based on the actual effort and code quality. This new type of effort reflects not only the project’s size and the productivity of the development team, but also the quality aspect of the delivered software system. Povzetek: V prispevku je analizrana korelacija med kakovostjo programske kode in produktivnostjo.
Vanishing moments of wavelet packets and wavelets associated with Riesz projectors

In the present paper, we show that, under some conditions wavelet packet basis of L<sup>2</sup>(ℝ) can be used as a tool for the uniform approximation of a function f ∈ (C<sup>M</sup> ∩ L<sup>2</sup>)(ℝ),M > 0. The necessary and sufficient condition on the wavelet packet transform for estimating the Hölder continuity of a function f has been given. Wavelets associated with Riesz projectors have been proposed and various results related to vanishing moments have been presented. Further, we use such wavelets and prove that Hölder continuity of a function aids in the decay of wavelet coefficients and thus helps in approximating it. Finally, we give some properties of wavelets associated with Riesz projectors.