Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic and integrated care in Catalonia

Introduction The Chronicity Prevention and Care Programme set up by the Health Plan for Catalonia 2011–2015 has been an outstanding and excellent opportunity to create a new integrated care model in Catalonia. People with chronic conditions require major changes and transformation within the current health and social system. The new and gradual context of ageing, increase in the number of chronic diseases and the current fragmented system requires this transformation to be implemented. Method The Chronicity Prevention and Care Programme aims to implement actions which drive the current system towards a new scenario where organisations and professionals must work collaboratively. New tools should facilitate this new context- or work-like integrated health information systems, an integrative financing and commissioning scheme and provide a new approach to virtual care by substituting traditional face-to-face care with transfer and shared responsibilities between patients, citizens and health care professionals. Results It has been observed some impact reducing the rate of emergency admissions and readmission related to chronic conditions and better outcome related to better chronic disease control. Some initiative like the Catalan Expert Patient Program has obtained good results and an appropriate service utilization. Discussion The implementation of a Chronic Care Program show good results but it is expected that the new integrated health and social care agenda could provoke a real change and transformation. Some of the results related to better health outcomes and a decrease in avoidable hospital admissions related to chronic conditions confirm we are on the right track to make our health and social system more sustainable for the decades to come.
“My Skin Color Stops Me from Leading”: Tracking, Identity, and Student Dynamics in a Racially Mixed School

0 0 1 103 589 VFCC 4 1 691 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:. 0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language:JA;} The practice of separating students according to ability level, also known as academic tracking, allows racially mixed schools to maintain segregated classrooms. This article examines the effects of academic tracking on the racial identity and educational opportunities of students at a mixed-race suburban charter school. Through five months of participant observation research, I found that the long-term practice of academic tracking created racial boundaries among students, silenced students of color in honors classes, and limited educational opportunity for all students. However, subsequent efforts to detrack, although superficial, resulted in positive outcomes for all students.
Active psoriasis and profound CD4+ lymphocytopenia

We report the case of a patient with a long‐standing history of widespread chronic plaque psoriasis, who was recently found to have a profound CD4+ lymphocytopenia. He is human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) negative. His psoriasis remains active and widespread, and he has had 60 cutaneous malignancies, including many squamous cell carcinomas, excised over the last 10 years. In the past he has had numerous cutaneous viral warts. Despite a low peripheral blood CD4+ T‐cell count, similar numbers of activated T cells, identified by double labelling for CD4 and HLA‐DR antigens, were found in the epidermis of our patient as other individuals with psoriasis. Thus, there appear to be sufficient activated CD4+ T cells in our patient's psoriatic plaques to maintain the psoriatic process.
Runtime Systems for Extreme Scale Platforms

Abstract : Future extreme-scale systems are expected to contain homogeneous and heterogeneous many-core processors, with O(103) cores per node and O(106) nodes overall. Effective combination of inter-node and intra-node parallelism is recognized to be a major software challenge for such systems. Further, applications will have to deal with constrained energy budgets as well as frequent faults and failures. To aid programmers manage these complexities and enhance programmability, much of recent research has focused on designing state-of-art software runtime systems. Such runtime systems are expected to be a critical component of the software ecosystem for the management of parallelism, locality, load balancing, energy and resilience on extreme-scale systems. In this dissertation, we address three key challenges faced by a runtime system using a dynamic task parallel framework for extreme-scale computing.
A Comparative Study of Different Topologies for Network-On-Chip Architecture

Network on Chip (NoC) is one solution for designing communication among components in the SoC circuits with several billion transistors that will reach the market in approximately 5-10 years from now. Different topologies having various advantages according to their applications. This paper present brief idea about topologies depending on parameter.
A 122-GHz SiGe-Based Signal-Generation Chip Employing a Fundamental-Wave Oscillator With Capacitive Feedback Frequency-Enhancement

This paper presents a highly integrated and fully balanced signal generation block comprising a fundamental-wave voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), an output buffer, and a configurable frequency divider stage (prescaler). The VCO introduces a negative resistance structure in conjunction with capacitive cross-coupling. This compound structure allows fundamental oscillation to be sustained at high frequencies while providing wide tuning ranges. The capabilities of the capacitive feedback were analyzed using a linear transistor model, and boundary conditions, which support the early design phase, were derived. The chip was fabricated in a SiGe technology with 300-GHz fmax HBTs. The output frequency of the monolithic microwave integrated circuit is centered at 122 GHz and provides a tuning range of 16 GHz at an average single-sideband phase noise of -95 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency. Possible applications include ISM applications at 122 GHz and short-range radar systems with wide tuning ranges.
The P2Y 12 receptor as a therapeutic target in cardiovascular disease

Coronary thrombosis complicating rupture of atherosclerotic plaque is the predominant cause of acute coronary syndromes and platelets play a crucial role in this thrombus formation. Whilst aspirin has been successful in reducing cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, appreciation of its limited antiplatelet effects has stimulated the search for more effective antiplatelet agents. The thienopyridines, ticlopidine and clopidogrel, act, via metabolites, on the platelet ADP receptor subtype now designated P2Y 12 (formerly P 2T , P2T AC , P2Y ADP or P2Y cyc ) and these agents have proven clinical efficacy. Analogues of the natural P2Y 12 receptor antagonist ATP have been developed that act directly on the receptor and have a rapid onset of action. One such antagonist, AR-C69931MX, is being developed for clinical use. AR-C69931MX is a potent antagonist of ADPinduced platelet activation, aggregation and secretion and also antagonises platelet responses, including procoagulant activity, induced by all other agonists in view of the central role of the P2Y 12 receptor in amplifying platelet responses. Phase II studies of intravenous AR-C69931MX in patients with acute coronary syndromes show that this agent has a rapid onset of action, rapidly achieving steady-state inhibition of platelet aggregation, with a half-life of only a few minutes. AR-C69931MX appears to be safe and well tolerated as adjunctive therapy in these patients, and more effective inhibition of platelet function is achieved than with clopidogrel. Orally active ATP analogues are also being developed that may be more effective than clopidogrel. Limitations of platelet glycoprotein IIb/IIIa antagonists leave scope for development of alternative antiplatelet agents.
Caustics in Tachyon Matter and Other Born-Infeld Scalars

We consider scalar Born-Infeld type theories with arbitrary potentials V(T) of a scalar field T. We find that for models with runaway potentials V(T) the generic inhomogeneous solutions after a short transient stage can be very well approximated by the solutions of a Hamilton-Jacobi equation that describes free streaming wave front propagation. The analytic solution for this wave propagation shows the formation of caustics with multi-valued regions beyond them. We verified that these caustics appear in numerical solutions of the original scalar BI non-linear equations. Our results include the scalar BI model with an exponential potential, which was recently proposed as an effective action for the string theory tachyon in the approximation where high-order spacetime derivatives of T are truncated. Since the actual string tachyon dynamics contain derivatives of all orders, the tachyon BI model with an exponential potential becomes inadequate when the caustics develop because high order spatial derivatives of T become divergent. BI type tachyon theory with a potential decreasing at large T could have interesting cosmological applications because the tachyon field rolling towards its ground state at infinity acts as pressureless dark matter. We find that inhomogeneous cosmological tachyon fluctuations rapidly grow and develop multiple caustics. Any considerations of the role of the tachyon field in cosmology will have to involve finding a way to predict the behavior of the field at and beyond these caustics.
Arterial Baroreceptor Reflex Control of Sympathetic Nerve Activity in the Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat

SUMMARY The combined and individual carotid sinus and aortic baroreceptor control of sympathetic nerve activity (SNA) and mean arterial pressure (MAP) were studied by direct measurement In groups of spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) and normotensive Kyoto Wistar rats (WKY) of 5 to 40 weeks of age. The SHR showed a significantly greater SNA and resultant MAP increase as a function of age compared to that of the WKY rats. Both SHR and WKY rats showed a significant rise in SNA and MAP with ablation of all four major baroreceptors. The proportionate change of SNA and MAP after ablation was greater in the younger SHR than In the younger WKY groups and the change in these decreased as a function of age in the SHR. The reflex inhibition of SNA via baroreceptor stimulation also decreased as a function of age in the SHR, due to a 43% loss of aortic inhibitory function; no significant loss of carotid sinus function was found in either the SHR or WKY. The decrement in aortic function occurred after the rapid phase of blood pressure development; therefore baroreceptor dysfunction cannot be the cause of the high SNA and MAP observed in young SHR. An upward resetting of central sympathetic centers was evaluated via the baroreceptor deafferentatlon; and, it appears that the hyperactive sympathetic nervous system and resultant hypertension in the SHR is due to central resetting of sympathetic centers rather than baroreceptor dysfunction.
Documenting gifted program results for key decision‐makers

One basic purpose of evaluation of gifted programs is to document the results or impact of the program. This purpose is particularly important to governing bodies such as state legislatures, state school offices, and local school boards which usually provide the funding for gifted programs. In documenting program results for such entitles, leaders in gifted education should consider the differences between evaluation and advocacy; should provide information in brief, clear, and timely ways; and should provide decision‐makers with the information they want, as well as the information they need.
Logic Programming with Max-Clique and its Application to Graph Coloring (Tool Description)

This paper presents pl-cliquer, a Prolog interface to the cliquer tool for the maximum clique problem. Using pl-cliquer facilitates a programming style that allows logic programs to integrate with other tools such as: Boolean satisfiability solvers, finite domain constraint solvers, and graph isomorphism tools. We illustrate this programming style to solve the Graph Coloring problem, applying a symmetry break that derives from finding a maximum clique in the input graph. We present an experimentation of the resulting Graph Coloring solver on two benchmarks, one from the graph coloring community and the other from the examination timetabling community. The implementation of pl-cliquer consists of two components: A lightweight C interface, connecting cliquer’s C library and Prolog, and a Prolog module which loads the library. The complete tool is available as a SWI-Prolog module. 1998 ACM Subject Classification D.1. 6 Logic Programming
Mitochondrial Proliferation and Paradoxical Membrane Depolarization during Terminal Differentiation and Apoptosis in a Human Colon Carcinoma Cell Line

Herbimycin A, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, induces cellular differentiation and delayed apoptosis in Colo-205 cells, a poorly differentiated human colon carcinoma cell line. Cell cycle analysis in conjunction with end labeling of DNA fragments revealed that G2 arrest preceded apoptotic cell death. Ultrastructural examination of herbimycin-treated cells demonstrated morphologic features of epithelial differentiation, including formation of a microvillar apical membrane and lateral desmosome adhesions. A marked accumulation of mitochondria was also observed. Fluorometric analysis using the mitochondrial probes nonyl-acridine orange and JC-1 confirmed a progressive increase in mitochondrial mass. However these cells also demonstrated a progressive decline in unit mitochondrial transmembrane potential (ΔΨm) as determined by the ΔΨm-sensitive fluorescent probes rhodamine 123 and JC-1 analyzed for red fluorescence. In concert with these mitochondrial changes, Colo-205 cells treated with herbimycin A produced increased levels of reactive oxygen species as evidenced by oxidation of both dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate and dihydroethidium. Cell-free assays for apoptosis using rat-liver nuclei and extracts of Colo-205 cells at 24 h showed that apoptotic activity of Colo-205 lysates requires the early action of mitochondria. Morphological and functional mitochondrial changes were observed at early time points, preceding cleavage of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase. These results suggest that apoptosis in differentiated Colo-205 cells involves unrestrained mitochondrial proliferation and progressive membrane dysfunction, a novel mechanism in apoptosis.
[Neuroendocrine tumours of the GI tract--data from the German NET Registry].

BACKGROUND Neuroendocrine tumours (NET) are rare and heterogeneous neoplasia. To obtain valid data on epidemiology, diagnostics, therapy, prognosis and risk factors is the aim of the German NET registry. PATIENTS AND METHODS Data from 2009 histologically proven NET were collected from 35 NET centres between 1999 and 2010. Data collection has been performed prospectively since 2004. Results: Median follow-up was 34.5 months and median age at diagnosis 56.4 years. Primary tumour localisations were pancreas (34.2%), midgut (5.8%), stomach (6.5%), bowel (6.9%), duodenum (4.8%) and neuroendocrine CUP (12.6%). Synchronous metastases were seen in 46% and second malignancies in 12%. From 860 patients, 402 (46.7%) had functional tumours with the following hormone excess syndromes: carcinoid syndrome (19.1%; n = 164), persistent hyperinsulinaemic hypoglycaemia (17.7%; n = 152), Zollinger- Ellison syndrome (7.1%; n = 61), glucagonoma (0.7%; n = 15), Verner-Morrison syndrome (0.4%; n = 8) and somatostatinoma syndrome(0.1%; n = 2). Surgical therapy was performed in 78%, therapy with somatostatin receptor analogues(SSA) in 28%, peptide radioreceptor therapy (PRRT) in 19%, chemotherapy in 18% and interferon therapy in 6.5%. Only surgery was done in 47%, whereas 53% received a second therapy. General mortality rate during follow-up was 14.9%. The tumour-specific survival rates for 2, 5 and 10 years were 94, 85 and 70%. The 5-year survival is dependent on the surgical or non-surgical therapy (82 versus 61%, p < 0.001) and also on the primary tumour site (90/30% for midgut, 85/65% for pancreas, p < 0.001). Grading (G1, G2, G3) based on proliferation index Ki-67 recommended by the ENETS guidelines and WHO classification is highly correlated to the 5-year survival rate (88, 82, 33%, p < 0.001). CONCLUSION The German NET registry provides valid multicentric data on NET in Germany. Surgical therapy is the most frequent and important therapy with good clinical outcome. In non-resectable, metastatic tumours, systemic therapies are common. Continuation and evaluation of the new WHO and TNM classifications for NET and their therapies will be a future focus of the registry.
Performance Comparison of On-Demand and Table Driven Ad Hoc Routing Protocols Using NCTUns

The main aim of any ad-hoc network routing protocol is to meet the challenges of the dynamically changing topology and establish a correct and an efficient communication path between any two nodes with minimum routing overhead and bandwidth consumption. The design problem of such a routing protocol is not simple since an ad hoc environment introduces new challenges that are not present in fixed networks. A number of routing protocols have been proposed for this purpose like Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Destination- Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV). In this paper, we study and compare the performance of the following three routing protocols AODV, DSR and DSDV. NCTUns 4.0 is used to study the relative performance of the routing protocols according to different criteria. The notable point of our analysis is that, it is based on varying number of nodes in the ad hoc network.
A distributed tree data structure for real-time OLAP on cloud architectures

In contrast to queries for on-line transaction processing (OLTP) systems that typically access only a small portion of a database, OLAP queries may need to aggregate large portions of a database which often leads to performance issues. In this paper we introduce CR-OLAP, a Cloud based Real-time OLAP system based on a new distributed index structure for OLAP, the distributed PDCR tree, that utilizes a cloud infrastructure consisting of (m + 1) multi-core processors. With increasing database size, CR-OLAP dynamically increases m to maintain performance. Our distributed PDCR tree data structure supports multiple dimension hierarchies and efficient query processing on the elaborate dimension hierarchies which are so central to OLAP systems. It is particularly efficient for complex OLAP queries that need to aggregate large portions of the data warehouse, such as “report the total sales in all stores located in California and New York during the months February-May of all years”. We evaluated CR-OLAP on the Amazon EC2 cloud, using the TPC-DS benchmark data set. The tests demonstrate that CR-OLAP scales well with increasing number of processors, even for complex queries. For example, on an Amazon EC2 cloud instance with eight processors, for a TPC-DS OLAP query stream on a data warehouse with 80 million tuples where every OLAP query aggregates more than 50% of the database, CR-OLAP achieved a query latency of 0.3 seconds which can be considered a real time response.
Exploration électrophysiologique des biais attentionnels envers les expressions faciales émotionnelles dans l'anxiété

A large body of behavioral studies has evidenced attentional biases towards emotions in anxiety. Anxious people show enhanced detection, faster orienting and sustained attention towards threat stimuli, as for instance fearful or angry faces. This bias phenomenon has often been attributed to an hypervigilance to threat cues. However, an alternative explanation has proposed a main implication of disengagement process. Hence, controversies remain about the exact nature of the attentional processes implicated in the development of emotional biases. Due to their excellent temporal resolution, ERPs allow to explore the timing of emotional modulation and to identify which stages of cognitive processing (e.g. perceptive, attentional or executive) are affected and involved. As a consequence, we conducted six ERPs studies in order to answer to four questions: first, where is located the cognitive origin of emotional biases in anxiety, and what is the role of anxiety subtypes Second, do some emotions give rise to more pronounced processing biases? Third, what kind of attentional processes are mostly involved in the deployment of emotional biases? Fourth, does the addition of a depressive state modify the level of occurrence of emotional biases? Our thesis presents insights from six ERPs studies approaching social anxiety and trait anxiety through different paradigms, and shows how these points can be clarify. First, we observed that social anxiety is associated with enhanced perceptive processing of faces, indexed by increased P1/N1 waves. This initial orientation towards faces objects is followed by difficulties to disengage attentional resources from them, leading to reduced visual processing of subsequent targets to detect. In contrast, trait-anxiety did not modulated perceptive or attentional stages of cognitive processing but rather impacted on later stages related to response preparation (P300). Beside, the modulation of the emotional appraisal stage, indexed by the N300 component, was a common point between social anxiety and trait-anxiety. Lastly, the addition of an anxious state and depressive affects alters the strategic deployment of attentional resources towards emotional stimuli. Bias towards threat was not amplified in sub-clinical anxious states, but social anxiety was correlated with a perceptual hypervigilance towards all types of emotional expressions, positive or negative. To sum up, these studies suggest earlier modulations of emotional processing linked to social anxiety, while trait-anxiety influences later decisional stage through hyper-reactivity. Theoretical implications and clinical applications are raised, and different propositions concerning futures works are proposed.
Performance enhancement of microstrip patch antenna using metamaterial cover

A patch antenna (or microstrip antenna) is a type of radio antenna with exclusive features like low profile, low volume, very low power consumption, compactness and ease of fabrication. Due to these factors or capabilities, patch antennas are able to overcome the rising demands in the field of wireless communication like high gain, high power, maximized throughput and low losses. Metamaterials are the synthetic materials that are engineered to have some exclusive properties those are not found in any naturally existing materials. These materials possess their properties due to their structure and not because of the material they are composed of. The stacking of patch antennas i.e. the use of one patch over other is an effective method to improve their performance for the dual frequency and broadband operation which is required in most of the high frequency wireless applications. The closure between the two conducting surfaces subjected to an excitation will lead to a strong mutual coupling between them. This is the reason for the bandwidth enhancement and the use of it for operation at multiple frequencies. The objective of the work presented in the paper is to study the performance of the patch antenna by stacking its dielectric with a metamaterial. The paper presents a theoretical study of the use of metamaterial superstrates to improve the performance of patch antennas. The output parameters of patch antenna without and with the metamaterial superstrate were obtained using MATLAB and their comparison is done to understand the effect of the metamaterial when it is used in a patch antenna.