Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The value of serum ischemia-modified albumin for assessing liver function in patients with chronic liver disease

Abstract Background: Ischemia-modified albumin (IMA), measured by the cobalt-binding capacity of albumin, is a promising biomarker for cardiac ischemia. The IMA-to-serum albumin ratio (IMAR) has been reported to relate to the severity of decompensated liver cirrhosis. This study aimed to assess IMA and IMAR as a liver function test and to investigate whether albumin infusion changes IMAR in patients with liver cirrhosis. Methods: Blood samples were collected from healthy volunteers (n=51) and patients with chronic hepatitis (n=25), liver cirrhosis (n=24) and uremia (n=13). Parameters examined included serum levels of IMA, albumin, total bilirubin, creatinine, international normalized ratio (INR), model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score, childturcotte-pugh (CTP) score, indocyanine green (ICG) retention rate and total antioxidant capacity (TAC). Paired serum samples from patients pre- and post-albumin infusion (n=9) were collected and the changes were compared. Results: IMA and IMAR increased in patients with chronic hepatitis or cirrhosis, as compared to healthy volunteers. In patients with liver disease, IMA and IMAR were significantly associated with ICG retention, bilirubin, TAC and INR. In addition, IMAR was associated with CTP and MELD score in patients with cirrhosis. Albumin therapy improved patients’ serum levels of creatinine and bilirubin and MELD score, but not IMA and IMAR. Conclusions: IMAR, reflecting liver function and oxidative stress, is a more objective liver function test as it was not affected after a 3-day albumin infusion. More investigations, however, are needed to validate the use of IMAR in cases of chronic liver disease.
Head Circumference and Body Proportions Before and During Growth Hormone Treatment in Short Children Who Were Born Small for Gestational Age

Objective. Although short children who were born small for gestational age (SGA) seem to have normal body proportions, objective data both before and during growth hormone (GH) treatment are very limited. Therefore, we investigated in a large group of short children who were born SGA the effects of GH treatment versus no treatment on head circumference (HC) and body proportions. Furthermore, we studied differences in linear growth and HC between SGA children who were born with a low birth length and birth weight (SGAL+W) and SGA children who were born with a low birth length only (SGAL). Methods. An open-labeled, GH-controlled, multicenter study was conducted for 3 years. Non–GH-deficient short SGA children (n = 87), with a mean age (standard deviation) of 5.9 (1.5) years, were randomized to either a GH group (n = 61), receiving GH in a dose of 33 μg/kg/day, or an untreated control group (n = 26). Height; weight; HC; sitting height; armspan; and hand, tibial, and foot size were measured and expressed as standard deviation score (SDS) adjusting for gender and age. Results. At baseline, all anthropometric measurements, except HC SDS, were significantly lower compared with −2 SDS. During GH treatment, all anthropometric measurements normalized in accordance to the normalization of height SDS. At the start of the study, mean HC SDS was significantly lower in SGAL+W children compared with SGAL children. It is interesting that most (14 of 16) children with an HC SDS less than −2.00 had been born SGAL+W. During GH treatment, the 3-year increase in height, HC, and other anthropometric measurements was comparable between SGAL+W and SGAL children. In both SGAL+W and SGAL control subjects, no changes in SDSs of height, HC, and other anthropometric measurements were found during the 3-year follow-up period. Conclusions. Untreated short SGA children have normal body proportions with the exception of HC, which is relatively large in many of these children. SGAL+W children still had a smaller HC at the age of 5.9 years compared with SGAL children. Three years of GH treatment induced a proportionate growth resulting in a normalization of height and other anthropometric measurements, including HC, in contrast to untreated SGA control subjects.
Profound difference in pharmacokinetics between morin and its isomer quercetin in rats

Morin and quercetin are isomeric antioxidant flavonols widely distributed in plant foods and herbs. The pharmacokinetics of both flavonols at two doses were investigated and compared in rats. Parent forms and their glucuronides and sulfates in serum were determined by HPLC before and after enzymatic hydrolysis, respectively. After oral dosing of morin, both the parent form, morin, and its glucuronides and sulfates were present in the bloodstream. The conjugated metabolites predominated at the dose of 25 mg kg−1, whereas the parent form was predominant at the dose of 50 mg kg−1. Moreover, the AUC of morin parent form increased by a factor of 37 when the dose doubled, indicating that morin showed nonlinear pharmacokinetics. On the other hand, quercetin presented only as glucuronides and sulfates in the blood, indicating negligible bioavailability of quercetin, and the metabolites showed linear pharmacokinetics at the two doses studied. When considering the total AUC of parent form with conjugated metabolites, the extent of absorption of morin was 3 fold that of quercetin at the dose of 50 mg kg−1. The results indicated that the difference in hydroxylation pattern on B‐ring of flavonol markedly affected their fates in rats.
Organizational Design in Industry—Towards a Democratic, Socio‐technical Approach

Industrial engineers have traditionally made an impact upon the behaviour of people in organizations in two ways. Through the design of technology they have established a technical framework to which the social system has had to adapt. Also because a large proportion of supervisory and managerial positions has been held by engineers, they have often had responsibility for specifying the network of roles and relationships which make up an industrial organization. Usually they have approached this task by taking a technological orientation to human beings and human problems. People have been treated like uniform bits and pieces, capable of being split up and put together at the will of the management. Social systems design has been treated as a one‐off job, such concepts as organizational development or stepwise design have been seldom taken into consideration. The goals of the organization and society have been stated in terms of technology and economy; social and psychological aspects of human behaviour have generally been neglected.
There is No ‘I’ in Recovery: Managements’ Perspective of Service Recovery

In the services industry, service failures occur on a daily basis, therefore it has received heightened attention from academia as well as practitioners over the past years. However, the majority of research and practices are based on either the customers’ or front line employees’ point of view. In the present study, we claim that it is the way that managers approach service recovery strategies that makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful operations. Thus, this case study addressed managements’ involvement in the service recovery process by highlighting the effective and efficient service recovery strategies that are implemented by practitioners utilizing justice theories. In order to investigate this issue, a qualitative case study approach was adopted. The findings confirm three distinct service recovery phases, namely, the pre-recovery stage, the immediate recovery stage, and the follow-up recovery stage. Further, we discovered another stage, “lessons learned,” which has a direct impact on each phase of the service recovery, guiding managers in shaping their service recovery policies and procedures.
A reexamination of the role of microfilaments in neurulation in the chick embryo

Formation of wedge‐shaped neuroepithelial cells, owing to the constriction of apical bands of microfilaments, is widely believed to play a major part in bending of the neural plate. Although cell “wedging” occurs during neurulation, its exact role in bending is unknown. Likewise, although microfilament bands occupy the apices of neuroepithelial cells, whether these structures are required for cell wedging is unknown. Finally, although it is known that cytochalasins interfere with neurulation, it is unknown whether they block shaping or furrowing of the neural plate, or elevation, convergence, or fusion of the neural folds. The purpose of this study was to reexamine the role of microfilaments in neurulation in the chick embryo. Embryos were treated with cytochalasin D (CD) to depolymerize microfilaments and were analyzed 4–24 hr later. CD did not prevent neural plate shaping, median neural plate furrowing, wedging of median neuroepithelial cells, or neural fold elevation. However, dorsolateral neural plate furrowing, wedging of dorsolateral neuroepithelial cells, and convergence of the neural folds were blocked frequently by CD. In addition, neural folds always failed to fuse across the midline in embryos treated with CD, and neural crest cell migration was prevented. These data indicate that only the later aspects of neurulation may require microfilaments, and that certain neuroepithelial cells, particularly those that normally wedge with median furrowing and elevation of the neural folds, become (and remain) wedge‐shaped in the absence of apical microfilament bands. Thus, microfilament‐mediated constriction of neuroepithelial cell apices is not the major force for median neuroepithelial cell wedging and elevation of the chick neural plate. Further studies are needed to localize the motor(s) for these processes.
Harnessing Remittances through Formal Channels for Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper investigates how sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries could harness remittances through formal channels for development using annual data for 35 countries from 1980 to 2008. We control for country heterogeneity, endogeneity and cross-sectional dependence of the error term using the least square dummy variable (LSDV) estimator with Driscoll and Kraay (1998) corrected standard errors, the Kiviet (1995) bias-corrected LSDV estimator and feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) by Parks (1967) and Kmenta (1986). We find that financial deepening in the home country is critical to the use of formal channels and the ability of sub-Saharan African countries to harness remittances for development. Besides remitting home for altruistic reasons, sub-Saharan African migrants would also respond to investment opportunities in their home countries, contingent on a stable exchange rate. Sub-Saharan African migrants also remit more money home when their incomes increase in the host country.
Empowering Women through Social Entrepreneurship: Case Study of a Women's Cooperative in India

Women's cooperatives offer self–employment opportunities that can contribute to women's social inclusion and empowerment. This article seeks to broaden existing understandings of women's entrepreneurship by focusing on less studied types of ventures and contexts—namely, a social entrepreneurial venture in India. A case study analysis was used to assess two primary areas of interest: (1) elements of empowerment embedded in the venture's business model and (2) individual perceptions of empowerment. The personal accounts of sister members reveal that this collective form of entrepreneurship has empowered them in three ways: economic security, development of entrepreneurial behavior, and increased contributions to the family.
Controlled Trial of Physical Training in Chronic Heart Failure: Exercise Performance, Hemodynamics, Ventilation, and Autonomic Function

BackgroundMany secondary abnormalities in chronic heart failure (CHF) may reflect physical deconditioning. There has been no prospective, controlled study of the effects of physical training on hemodynamics and autonomic function in CHIF. Methods and ResultsIn a controlled crossover trial of 8 weeks of exercise training, 17 men with stable moderate to severe CHF (age, 61.8±1.5 years; left ventricular ejection fraction, 19.6±2.3%), increased exercise tolerance (13.9±1.0 to 16.5±1.0 minutes, p<0.001), and peak oxygen uptake (13.2±0.9 to 15.6±1.0 mI/kg/min, p<0.01) significantly compared with controls. Training increased cardiac output at submaximal (5.9-6.7 1/min, p<0.05) and peak exercise (6.3-7.1 /min, p<0.05), with a significant reduction in systemic vascular resistance. Training reduced minute ventilation and the slope relating minute ventilation to carbon dioxide production (−10.5%, p<0.05). Sympathovagal balance was altered by physical training when assessed by three methods: 1) RR variability (+19.2%, p<0.05); 2) autoregressive power spectral analysis of the resting ECG divided into low-frequency (−21.2%, p<0.01) and high-frequency (+51.3%, p<0.05) components; and 3) whole-body radiolabeled norepinephrine spillover (−16%, p<0.05). These measurements all showed a significant shift away from sympathetic toward enhanced vagal activity after training. ConclusionsCarefully selected patients with moderate to severe CHF can achieve significant, worthwhile improvements with exercise training. Physical deconditioning may be partly responsible for some of the associated abnormalities and exercise limitation of CHF, including abnormalities in autonomic balance.
Towards Ubiquitous Accessibility Digital Maps for Smart Cities

Designing indoor and outdoor spaces to become accessible for people with disabilities is of paramount importance. Accessibility leads to improvements in human rights and business outcomes; due to inclusion of a broader range of the population. For example, adding braille writing to signs and installing ramps allow visually-impaired people and the wheel-chaired to navigate on their own. While digital-maps have evolved in recent years to become a part of our everyday life, available ones primarily cover vehicular roads only with limited, if any, accessibility information. This highly limits the range of applications they can support. In this paper, we present our vision for ubiquitous accessibility digital-maps for smart cities; where the maps' indoor and outdoor spaces are automatically updated with the various accessibility-features and marked to assess their accessibility levels for the different disability types such as vision-impairment, wheel-chaired, deafness, etc. To realize this vision, we describe an architecture for a crowd-sourcing-based system to automatically construct the accessibility maps. In addition, we discuss the multi-disciplinary challenges that have to be addressed to materialize it as well as the current pioneering efforts in the research community related to our vision.
Disciplinary practices and auditors in Europe: a comparison between Germany and the Netherlands

This paper presents the results of a comparative study on auditor responsibility within two members of the European Union: Germany and the Netherlands. Auditor responsibility is an important factor in establishing audit quality. The quality of service within the auditing profession is maintained through the promulgation of professional standards and disciplinary law. In Germany, the Wirtschaftspruferkammer is the supervisory body which oversees compliance with standards and professional duties. In the Netherlands, a special court (Raad van Tucht) is concerned with disciplinary actions against auditors. The results of this study show that the disciplinary laws, regulations and professional codes remain basically national, despite efforts to harmonize auditing to meet an increased demand for international audits. This study identifies characteristics of disciplinary systems common to both countries and provides information on the functioning of both systems that may be useful in a number of ways. The results presented might initiate a more systematic comparison of disciplinary systems within members of the European Union, which would enhance institutional knowledge of the European market for auditing services. This in turn could promote the process of further integration of the internal European market and reduce market inefficiencies.
ASSESSING THE RESPONSE OF FARM HOUSEHOLDS TO DAIRY POLICY REFORM IN ISRAEL

After nearly fifty years of stability and stagnation of dairy market regulations in Israel, a dramatic policy reform has been enacted in 1999. The reform enabled farm households, for the first time, to trade production quotas. In addition, the reform signaled to farmers that milk prices will gradually go down in real terms, and therefore only producers who expand and become more efficient will prevail. The reform allowed for generous financial support for investment in expansion, but also required the adoption of environmental regulations which could be costly to many farm families. This paper uses data from a census of small family-operated dairy enterprises that was conducted in 2001, in order to analyze the response of farm households to the reform. The results imply that the reform was particularly attractive for already strong producers. Weaker producers are less attracted by the reform and will likely fade away by default in the long run. Another finding is that intergenerational succession is an important element of decision making of milk producers. Hence, the response of farm households to changes in the economic environment cannot be disentangled from the occupational decisions of their offspring. These findings imply that the desired structural change in the family-farm milk production sector will take much longer than expected, essentially as long as the current generation of producers is around. This requires, perhaps, an extension of the reform period or a change in incentives in favor of the smaller and older producers.
Haar-based interconnect coding for energy effective medium/long range data transport

In this paper we introduce and evaluate Haar based codec assisted medium and long range data transport structures, e.g., bus segments, Network on Chip interconnects, able to deal with technology scaling related phenomena (e.g., increased susceptibility to proximity coupling noise and transmission delay variability), targeting energy savings at the expense of a reasonably small overhead, i.e., 1 extra wire, a 2-gate encoder, and a 2-gate decoder, for each and every pair of uncoded wires. For practical evaluation we employed a 45nm commercial CMOS technology and different random, uncorrelated workload profiles. For 5mm and 10mm long 8-bit buses (without repeaters), we obtain energy savings of 55% and 34%, and a transmission frequency increase of 35% and 41%, respectively, at the expense of less than 1% area overhead with respect to the reference system (i.e., 8-wire synchronous uncoded bus), which prove energy and delay effectiveness. We further augment our proposal with a Single Error Correction and Double Error Detection (SECDED) scheme particularly adapted to its structure, in order to cope with very deep sub-micron noise (e.g., supply voltage variations, electromagnetic interference) induced transmission errors. When compared to the reference system (not SECDED protected), for 10mm long buses, our Haar tailored SECDED approach consumes 27% less energy at the expense of 2% area overhead.
Strategic HRM as a Budgetary Control Mechanism in the Large Corporation: A Case Study from Engineering Contracting

Abstract This paper presents case study evidence of a rare attempt to make the corporate human resource function strategic. More significantly, the paper’s theoretical approach and the research questions it addresses examine the material beyond the confines of HRM discourse that emphasizes “strategic choice", integration or fit as received management strategies. Alternatively, the empirical, yet theoretically informed research questions suggest that strategic HRM necessarily de-skills the autonomy and discretion of many workers. Further, to be effective HRM must be diluted to reflect what is often (un)spoken budget and financial performance criteria that constitute an internal audit system. The theoretical arguments and empirical material presented in this paper appears relevant to a critically informed accountancy audience for two reasons. First, the case demonstrates how the language of financial management is diffused within other management fields such as HRM. Second, although the centralized system of performance management for project management appeared as a human resource innovation it intensified the significance of financial constraints on human resource staff whose labour process was previously relatively autonomous.
Policy Watch Trade Adjustment Assistance

The Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002 profoundly changed the nature and scope of U.S. policy for addressing dislocations of workers caused by trade. First, the legislation will potentially double the number of TAA recipients and more than triple the total cost of the program to almost $2 billion annually, making it a much more important component of the patchwork of programs serving the unemployed (Congressional Budget Office, 2002). Second, it introduces new elements such as wage insurance and health credits into a program that had previously included primarily only training and cash benefits. The addition of these benefits creates both the opportunity for gains from greater coordination and the potential for costly distortions and serves as a testing ground for the broader use of such provisions. Although the program still covers only a small (and peculiarly
Hybrid intensity models for repairable systems

In recent years, several authors have proposed mathematical models for complex repairable systems, extending the common assumptions of minimal repairs and renewals. These models all have weaknesses but we believe that modifications of existing models offer flexible analyses with realistic physical interpretations, enabling us to model the effects of replacements, repairs, preventive maintenance and inspections. These modifications correspond with specific types of superposed renewal processes and bear some resemblance to proportional intensities models, both described by Cox in 1962 and 1972, respectively. We discuss the properties and interpretations of these variants, explaining why we consider them particularly suited to modelling the effects of typical maintenance interventions. Finally, we illustrate an application of these models to repairable systems of five oil pumps, for which maintenance data were recently published, and demonstrate comparable performance with improved robustness.
RISING DEMAND CURVES IN PRICE LEVEL THEORY

GEOMETRY still retains some persuasive power in economics; usually the same underlying ideas permeate the more general mathematical models. It appears, however, that contrary to a fairly common practice the demand curve proper for consumer price level theory can run partly the 'wrong way', rising from left to right, rather than following the normal 'law' of price theory.2 It thus partakes a 'Giffen' form with its slope strongly contingent on the elasticity of supply. The analysis carries some overtones for policy as well as for theory.
Why Has Crime Fallen? An Economic Perspective

In this paper we consider the reasons why the general level of recorded crime has been falling in the United States and many European countries in the last ten years. We review the time-series statistical evidence on the determinants of crime, and investigate the extent to which these determinants are matched with survey evidence on the offending behaviour of young people. This survey evidence is particularly revealing on the perceptions of young people to various sorts of deterrents, and it also highlights a strong association between illicit drug use and involvement in crime.