Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A multicenter prospective trial to asses a new real-time polymerase chain reaction for detection of Treponema pallidum, herpes simplex-1/2 and Haemophilus ducreyi in genital, anal and oropharyngeal ulcers.

Treponema pallidum, herpes simplex virus types 1 or 2 (HSV-1/2) and Haemophilus ducreyi are sexually transmitted pathogens that can cause genital, anal and oropharyngeal ulcers. Laboratory evaluation of these pathogens in ulcers requires different types of specimens and tests, increasing the risk of improper specimen handling and time lapse until analysis. We sought to develop a new real-time PCR (TP-HD-HSV1/2 PCR) to facilitate the detection of T. pallidum, HSV-1/2 and H. ducreyi in ulcers. The TP-HD-HSV1/2 PCR was tested (i) in a retrospective study on 193 specimens of various clinical origin and (ii) in a prospective study on 36 patients with genital, anal or oropharyngeal ulcers (ClinicalTrials.gov # NCT01688258). The results of the TP-HD-HSV1/2 PCR were compared with standard diagnostic methods (T. pallidum: serology, dark field microscopy; HSV-1/2: PCR; H. ducreyi: cultivation). Sensitivity and specificity of the TP-HD-HSV1/2 PCR for T. pallidum were both 100%, for HSV-1 100% and 98%, and for HSV-2 100% and 98%, respectively. T. pallidum and HSV-1/2 were detected in 53% and 22% of patients in the prospective study; H. ducreyi was not detected. In the prospective study, 5/19 (26%) specimens were true positive for T. pallidum in the TP-HD-HSV1/2 PCR but non-reactive in the VDRL. The TP-HD-HSV1/2 PCR is sensitive and specific for the detection of T. pallidum and HSV-1/2 in routine clinical practice and it appears superior to serology in early T. pallidum infections.
Methylglyoxal augments intracellular oxidative stress in human aortic endothelial cells

Abstract Methylglyoxal (MGO) is a non-enzymatic metabolite in the glycolytic pathway and its concentration in blood and tissues is elevated in diabetes and renal failure. MGO induces tissue injuries via ROS; however, the mechanism remains to be clarified. The present study examined the harmful actions of MGO. Human aortic endothelial cells were assessed under real-time fluorescent microscopy with continuous superfusion. Increases in intracellular ROS were measured with fluorescent indicator, 5-(and-6)-chloromethyl-2’,7’-dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate acetyl ester (DCFH-DA). The addition of MGO rapidly increased the ROS in a dose-dependent manner. The increment of DCF was entirely abolished by pre-treatment with superoxide anion scavenger and membrane-permeable catalase, indicating that MGO induces superoxide production. The increment was completely inhibited by 2-thenoyltrifluoroacetone or carbonyl cyanide 3-chlorophenylhydrazone and partially inhibited by N-methyl-L-arginine. These data suggest that MGO stimulates superoxide production from mitochondria and partially stimulates nitric oxide synthase in human endothelial cells.
Doherty power amplifiers with improved load modulation for 100 MHz LTE-advanced application

This paper presents the methods to improve load modulation in Doherty along with two modified GaN Doherty power amplifiers (PAs) with high efficiency and linearity at large back-off power for 100 MHz LTE-advanced application. To improve load modulation, the peaking amplifier is designed to achieve similar output current with that of the carrier amplifier by choosing optimal load impedances in class C mode and higher gate biasing voltage. Moreover, to achieve enhanced efficiency at large back-off power, a modified load modulation network (LMN) is designed. To verify those methods, an enhanced Doherty PA and a Doherty PA exploiting modified LMN are designed and measured, respectively. When driven by 100 MHz LTE-advanced signals, the designed PAs achieve adjacent channel leakage ratio of below -48 dBc after digital pre-distortion at 9 dB back-off output power with efficiency higher than 40%.
The importance of enhancing self-efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVE To examine relationships among changes in self-efficacy and changes in other clinically relevant outcome measures. METHOD Subjects (n = 44) were participants in a prospective, randomized stress-management study followed over 15 months. Outcome measures included self-efficacy, depression, pain, health status, and disease activity. RESULTS Correlational analyses revealed significant associations between changes in self-efficacy (particularly total self-efficacy) and changes in selected measures of depression, pain, health status, and disease activity. The observed associations were not due to changes in medication regimen or to nonadherence to the stress-management program. CONCLUSIONS Evidence is provided that induced changes in self-efficacy following a stress-management program were significantly related to other clinically important outcome measures.
Peripheral blood fibrocytes : novel fibroblast-like cells that present antigen and mediate tissue repair

Introduction Wounding is defined as a physical disruption of the normal architecture of a tissue and may be caused by trauma, burns, inflammatory processes or metabolic insufficiency. The host initiates a co-ordinated repair response to wounding that serves to prevent infection and ultimately re-establish normal tissue integrity. This response to injury involves a complex interplay of cellular, humoral and connective tissue elements [1,2]. Platelets play an early role by releasing factors that are required for both clotting and the recruitment of peripheral blood leucocytes to the injured site. Peripheral blood leucocytes then produce mediators that combat infection and co-ordinate successive steps of the tissue repair response [ 1-31. Connective-tissue cells play a critical role in the reparative phase of wound healing by secreting extracellular matrix proteins. The usual outcome of this cascading series of cellular events is elimination of the invasive stimulus followed by connective tissue scar formation and, over time, remodelling of the injured site. Connective-tissue fibroblasts are a quiescent cell population that under normal circumstances remain sparsely distributed throughout the extracellular matrix [4]. As a consequence of injury, fibroblasts enter and proliferate within the injured site [S]. The precise origin of the fibroblast-like cells within wounds has been contro-
Major Issues in the Regulation of Financial Institutions: Comment

THE problem of bank regulation is complicated by the fact that, although there is no necessary logical connection between, on the one hand, the over-all provision and administration of our means of payments and, on the other hand, the provision of loans to borrowers, as a historical matter these two functions are generally linked together in Anglo-Saxon countries. A group of financial intermediaries, the commercial banks, both administer a large portion of the money supply and act as lenders to private and public borrowers. Corresponding to the dual functions of banks are two distinct regulatory roles of the government: first, the role any government must assume of setting the volume and rate of growth of the nominal money supply and, second, the role of the government in regulating financial institutions as purveyors of loanable funds. However, the historical linkage between the role of commercial banks as administrators of our means of payments and their role as a lender in the capital market has led to a logical confusion whereby intervention by the government in the capitalmarket function of banks was defended as necessary to control the volume and rate of growth of the money supply. Despite logical misconceptions by the authorities as to how the money supply is determined and despite their past failure to do so, the authorities have the power to set the over-all nominal stock of money and its rate of growth without intervening in the capital-market function of the commercial banks. ' Regulation by the authorities of
Made in Queensland: planning reform and rhetoric

Queensland has been Australia's fastest growing state over the past 20 years. The rate and scale of development has intensified public debate around planning and sustainability in key areas such as transport infrastructure, housing affordability and economic growth and development. The Queensland Government is not coy about staking out an ambitious and competitive economic reform agenda at the state metro-regional or statutory levels. The most recent reform initiatives promote economic development through ‘planning for prosperity’ and the building of ‘a superior planning framework’ as a way of consolidating and promoting state interests. This paper focuses on the last two decades of planning reform initiatives in Queensland with particular reference to recent changes to the Sustainable Planning Act 1999 (SPA) such as the State Assessment and Referral Agency (SARA) and the single State Planning Policy (SPP). This procedural emphasis on red and green tape reduction, streamlining planning processes and the development of a one-stop shop sits alongside a collaborative ambition at the metro-regional scale through initiatives such as the South East Queensland Regional Plan (SEQRP) as a means of better facilitating sustainable planning reform – not rhetoric – in Queensland.
Returns and volatility in the Kuala Lumpur crude

This article investigates the determinants of daily returns and volatility in the Kuala Lumpur crude palm oil futures market over the period 1980 to 1994. We find significant evidence of month and open interest effects in returns and also find strong evidence of daily, monthly, yearly, volume and open interest effects in volatility when ARCH/ GARCH models are used to estimate volatility. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 18:985–999, 1998
Dynamic AGE model for water economics in the Netherlands (DEAN-W)

This report presents results of using a dynamic Applied General Equilibrium (AGE) model for the Netherlands to study water issues. We simulate the economic consequences for different emission reduction scenarios ranging from 20 to 50 percent emission reduction from 2015 onwards with respect to emission levels in 2000, and compare these to results for scenarios with a derogation of the target until 2027. As marginal abatement costs for small amounts of reduction are relatively low and autonomous developments (including existing policies) have already established a partial decoupling of economic activity and emissions, a 20% of emission reductions can be achieved through adjustments in the economy that are virtually costless from a macro-economic perspective. Although the production level in the Agricultural sector decreases, this is compensated by increases in the Abatement sector. As the stringency of the policy target increases towards a 50 percent emission reduction, the impacts become visible at the macro-economic level: GDP and NNI levels are decreasing, and the welfare loss, measured via the Equivalent Variation, becomes non-negligible
Determinants of Tourism Destination Competitiveness in Asia Pacific: Comprehensiveness and Universality

Recent conceptual work on tourism destination competitiveness has proposed a comprehensive approach that adds industry-level competitiveness attributes to more conventional tourism destination attributes. This study builds on these ideas by generating sets of both attributes, developing a methodology for assessing their relative importance and examining the degree to which their relative importance varies across locations. Survey data were gathered from tourism industry practitioners in three closely competing destinations in Asia Pacific and were subjected to statistical testing. The results provide strong empirical support for the inclusion of both industry-level and destination attributes in studies of tourism competitiveness. The results also question approaches to competitiveness that assume that the relative importance of attributes is common across locations, suggesting, rather, that the importance of competitiveness attributes may vary across locations, depending on product mix and target market segments, especially in complex, multifaceted industries such as tourism.
Novel Insight Into Multi-User Channels with Multi-Antenna Users

Multi-user channels with single-antenna users have proven to be favorable in massive multiple-input multiple-output regime as the asymptotic orthogonality of different channel vectors. However, the orthogonality of the channel maybe no longer holds for more general case. In this letter, we consider the scenario, where a base station equipped with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> antennas that simultaneously serves <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> independent multi-antenna users. The orthogonality of channel vectors is examined in both spatially correlated Rayleigh channels and geometry-based channels. The theoretical analysis shows that the correlation matrix of the generalized channel in both cases will not become diagonal, which means that the favorable propagation decays when <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> grows without limit. A novel insight is then derived in the case of multi-antenna users for the more general channels that the inner-user interference still exists when <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M \to \infty $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. However, the analysis of the geometry-based channel indicates that the inter-user interference can still be eliminated by the large array effect.
Randomized study of the dopamine receptor agonist piribedil in the treatment of mild cognitive impairment.

OBJECTIVE Age-related decrease in dopamine D(2) receptors is associated with cognitive decline in healthy elderly individuals. This study was an investigation of whether the dopamine receptor agonist piribedil improves global cognitive function in patients with mild cognitive impairment. METHOD In a 90-day randomized double-blind study, treatment with piribedil was compared to placebo in 60 patients with clinically diagnosed mild cognitive impairment and a Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score of 21 to 25. The primary outcome was change in MMSE score. RESULTS Of the 30 patients randomly assigned to each treatment group, 19 (63.3%) of those taking piribedil and eight (26.7%) of those treated with placebo had increases in MMSE scores, to 26 or more. The response rate and the mean increase in MMSE scores were significantly greater with piribedil. CONCLUSIONS Patients with mild cognitive impairment had improvement in global cognitive function when treated with the dopamine receptor agonist piribedil. The results support the role of age-related dopamine decline in cognitive impairment of the elderly.
Malaria during pregnancy in endemic areas: A lens for examining maternal–fetal conflict

Most of our knowledge about maternal–fetal conflict derives from the battle over scarce nutritional resources. How do other stressors like infectious diseases alter the maternal–fetal relationship? In this article, we use the example of malaria infection during pregnancy to explore the altered maternal–fetal relationship in the presence of an infectious disease. While adults living in regions endemic to Plasmodium falciparum malaria are generally immune, pregnant women experience significantly more frequent and severe infections. These infections generally resolve within a few days of birth and rarely cross the placenta, but the infants often experience poor birth outcomes, particularly low birth weight. This article summarizes what is known about the proximate, or physiological, mechanisms by which malaria causes more severe or frequent infections for pregnant versus nonpregnant women in endemic regions and then utilizes an evolutionary approach to focus on the altered maternal–fetal relationship during malaria‐infected pregnancy. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
WirelessHART Versus ISA100.11a: The Format War Hits the Factory Floor

The first decade of the new millennium has been a stage for the rapid development of wireless communication technologies for low-cost, low-power wireless solutions capable of robust and reliable communication [1]. IEEE Standard 802.15. 4 for low-rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs) [2] has been the enabling technology for numerous applications within the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [3], and more recently, wireless instrumentation. Although WSNs quickly found their way into a wide variety of applications, the adoption of wireless technology in the process automation and manufacturing industries has been slow. None of the industrial solutions based on standards such as IEEE 802.11 [4], Bluetooth [5], ZigBee [6], and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over low-power wireless personal area networks (6L0WPAN) [7] have yet to achieve a breakthrough a widely adopted wireless solution for industrial applications. A major reason for this is believed to be the lack of an open, international standard fulfilling the industrial requirements [8]. This changed in September 2007, when the Highway Addressable Remote Transducer (HART) Communication Foundation (HCF) released the HART Field Communication Protocol Specifi cation, Revision 7.0, which included the definition of a wireless interface to field devices, referred to as Wireless HART [9].
Cost Analysis of Mandibular Distraction versus Tracheostomy in Neonates with Pierre Robin Sequence

Objective To evaluate costs associated with surgical treatment for neonates with Pierre Robin sequence (PRS). Study Design Retrospective cohort study. Setting Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Subjects and Methods With Institutional Review Board approval, we retrospectively studied neonates with PRS treated from 2001 to 2009 with either tracheostomy (Trach), mandibular distraction (MD), or Trach with subsequent MD (Trach+MD). Actual charges over a 3-year period associated with operative costs, hospital stay, imaging and sleep studies, clinic visits, and related emergency room visits were collected. Home tracheostomy care charges were estimated individually for each patient. Charges were compared using regression and appropriate statistical analyses. Results Forty-seven neonates were included in the study (MD, n = 26; Trach, n = 12; Trach+MD, n = 9). Trach group patients had 2.6-fold higher charges than the MD group despite no difference in length of hospital stay. This difference increased to 7.3-fold when including home trach care-related costs. Trach+MD group patients had longer hospital lengths of stay and higher operation room (OR) fees, but no increased total charges compared with the Trach only group. Conclusions For patients with severe PRS, mandibular distraction provides significant cost savings over tracheostomy ($300,000 per patient over 3 years). Increased costs with tracheostomy come from greater hospital-related charges, more frequent airway procedures, a higher incidence of gastrostomy tube feeds, and home trach care costs. A careful examination of long-term outcomes will be critical as mandibular distraction continues to gain acceptance for treatment of PRS.
A low complexity control system for a hybrid battery-ultracapacitor power source

A low complexity control system for a conventional hybrid battery-ultracapacitor power source with two individual DC/DC converters is proposed in this paper. The advantages of the proposed control system are that it (i) allows to allocate the high frequency current demands to the ultracapacitor, (ii) allows to specify the current limits for both the battery and the ultracapacitor, (iii) maintains operation of the battery within its state of charge limits, (iv) maintains the ultracapacitor voltage at a predefined value and (v) charges the ultracapacitor from the battery rather than from the common DC bus. Presented simulation results verify operation of the proposed system.
Clinical andrology: The missing jigsaw pieces

The introduction of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in 1992 has revolutionized the management of infertile couples. [1] The workup of female partner remains important in the era of ICSI since she has to go through the procedure and pregnancy. Attention has been drawn to assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs) in improving embryo quality and pregnancy outcome. In contrast, the evolution of ART has had an adverse impact on the enthusiasm of researchers and clinicians in clinical andrology. Research into the clinical management of infertile men slowed to a grind in the last three decades because ICSI technology promises the couple a baby without exploring the cause of the underlying male infertility. However, the live birth rate utilizing ICSI as the treatment of male factor infertility has stagnated at 30% despite the advancement in ART over the years. [2] The limitation is linked to abnormalities in male gamete, including high sperm DNA fragmentation. The male gamete contributes half of the DNA content, and the importance of paternal DNA on pregnancy outcome is being increasingly recognized. [3] In view of the high prevalence of male factor-associated infertility among infertile couples, it is essential to improve the outcome by a comprehensive evaluation and correction of male infertility. [4] In this issue of the Indian Journal of Urology, four important topics in the field of male infertility are discussed in the reviews. These articles cover several areas of advances in the evaluation and management of infertile men.
Testing, Comparing, and Combining Value-at-Risk Measures

Value-at-Risk (VaR) has emerged as the standard tool for measuring and reporting financial market risk. Currently, more than eighty commercial vendors offer enterprise or trading risk management systems which report VaR-like measures. Risk managers are therefore often left with the daunting task of having to choose from this plethora of risk measures. Accordingly, this paper develops a framework for answering the following questions about VaRs: 1) How can a risk manager test that the VaR measure at hand is properly specified, given the history of asset returns? 2) Given two different VaR measures, how can the risk manager compare the two and pick the best in a statistically meaningful way? Finally, 3) How can the risk manager combine two or more different VaR measures in order to obtain a single statistically superior measure? The usefulness of the methodology is illustrated in an application to daily returns on the S&P500. In the application, competing VaR measures are calculated from either historical or option-price based volatility measures, and the VaRs are then tested and compared.
The European Company (SE): Power and participation in the multinational corporation

The European Company (Societas Europaea or SE) is a European multinational corporation, established under European Union regulations, intended to institutionalize transnational participation of employees and management in company decision-making. This article analyses a qualitative empirical investigation of the application of participation in European Companies. The experiences of firms adopting this corporate form show that contestability of participatory power is heightened, but its institutional legitimacy retained and diversely utilized. The data display a continuum of actor orientations, formal agreement regarding participation and effectiveness and transnational diffusion of participation. The utilization of this corporate form by labour and management actors is in general underdeveloped.
A System-Level Model for an Analog-to-Digital Converter

A system-level model for an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is described. The main functions of the ADC are identified, then mapped into functional units to give a holistic view of the ADC's behavior and more importantly, what the critical parameters are, and the main sources of errors. A trade off between high and low abstraction level is taken into consideration. The model is independent from a particular physical implementation.