Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resilience and sustainability: a complementary relationship? Towards a practical conceptual model for the sustainability–resilience nexus in tourism

ABSTRACT “Sustainability” has endured as an important concept for tourism scholars, and volumes have been written about how to achieve this holy grail of the tourism industry. Sustainable tourism destinations are often promoted as the ethical choice for discerning travellers, with some marketers taking full advantage of the widely acknowledged ambiguities implicit in the term. More recently “resilience” has generated appeal in the academic tourism literature as a term that might capture core aspects of sustainability, while acknowledging the considerable influences that multiple contexts have on the capacity of communities to adapt and ultimately sustain their tourism enterprises. The resilience concept encompasses an inclusive and integrative “social ecological systems” approach which gives it a firm interdisciplinary underpinning in its application in tourism. While in a tourism context sustainability and resilience are kindred terms, relatively little scholarly effort has been committed to a critical treatment of these concepts. Addressing this deficiency, we present a conceptual model to discuss the relationship between sustainability and resilience in tourism. Drawing on examples from New Zealand's nature-based tourism sector, this conceptual paper explores the insights that a critical treatment of the sustainability–resilience nexus might offer both academics and practitioners in the field of tourism studies.
Prophylactic Intravenous Ondansetron Reduces the Incidence of Intrathecal Morphine-Induced Pruritus in Patients Undergoing Cesarean Delivery

Pruritus is a common side effect of intrathecal morphine injection for postoperative pain control. Its incidence is especially high in patients undergoing cesarean delivery. We investigated the effectiveness of ondansetron in preventing intrathecal morphine-induced pruritus in such patients. We included 60 consecutive nonbreastfeeding women who were scheduled for elective cesarean delivery. After the administration of spinal anesthesia with bupivacaine and intrathecal morphine 0.15 mg injection, the patients were randomly divided into three groups. Group 1 received placebo (normal saline) IV injection, Group 2 diphenhydramine 30 mg IV injection, and Group 3 ondansetron 0.1 mg/kg IV injection. The incidence of pruritus was significantly lower in the ondansetron group (25%) when compared with that in the placebo group (85%) and in the diphenhydramine group (80%) (both P < 0.05). The postoperative pain score and time to flatus passage were not significantly different among the three groups. There were no headache or extrapyramidal signs associated with ondansetron use. In conclusion, ondansetron prophylaxis significantly reduced the incidence of intrathecal morphine-induced pruritus in patients undergoing cesarean delivery. Implications Ondansetron prophylaxis significantly decreases the incidence of pruritus, a common side effect of intrathecal morphine used to treat postcesarean delivery pain.
Structural Entropy of the Stochastic Block Models

With the rapid expansion of graphs and networks and the growing magnitude of data from all areas of science, effective treatment and compression schemes of context-dependent data is extremely desirable. A particularly interesting direction is to compress the data while keeping the “structural information” only and ignoring the concrete labelings. Under this direction, Choi and Szpankowski introduced the structures (unlabeled graphs) which allowed them to compute the structural entropy of the Erdős–Rényi random graph model. Moreover, they also provided an asymptotically optimal compression algorithm that (asymptotically) achieves this entropy limit and runs in expectation in linear time. In this paper, we consider the stochastic block models with an arbitrary number of parts. Indeed, we define a partitioned structural entropy for stochastic block models, which generalizes the structural entropy for unlabeled graphs and encodes the partition information as well. We then compute the partitioned structural entropy of the stochastic block models, and provide a compression scheme that asymptotically achieves this entropy limit.
Potent and stage‐specific action of glutathione on the development of goat early embryos in vitro

The effect of glutathione (GSH) addition on the development of 1‐ or 2‐cell goat early embryos in vitro was examined. Embryos were collected from superovulated Korean black goat (Capra hircus aegagrus) and cultured for 6 days in synthetic oviduct fluid medium supplemented with either bovine serum albumin (BSA) or serum. Without GSH addition, almost all embryos could not develop beyond 8‐ to 16‐cell block. However, GSH addition greatly improved in vitro development of early embryos to blastocyst stage, and its action was highly dependent on the presence and source of proteins supplemented into the culture medium. Among the protein‐supplemented cultures, GSH effect was most prominent in 10% FBS‐supplemented culture, in which the proportion (91%) of blastocysts developed from early embryos was much higher than that of BSA‐ (42–64% depending on its content) or goat serum (GS)‐supplemented cultures (21%), or even than that of somatic cell‐supported co‐culture (60%). As well as in terms of the morphological development, mean cell number of blastocysts (185 ± 12) developed from FBS condition was significantly higher than that of blastocysts developed from any other culture conditions and moreover comparable to that of blastocysts developed in vivo (190 ± 9). The viability of these blastocysts was finally confirmed by their term development (6/12) from embryo transfer. To delineate action time of GSH during embryo development, GSH was treated at 1‐day intervals through 6‐days culture periods excepting the last day. In the GSH‐treated embryos at day 3 of culture, which corresponds to the time of in vitro 8‐ to 16‐cell block stage, the proportion of blastocyst was markedly increased up to 77% of cultured embryos and conversely that of the arrested embryos was decreased to 7%. In the embryos treated later, however, their developmental potency decreased abruptly. Therefore, these results clearly demonstrated that GSH could greatly improve the in vitro development of goat early embryos by specifically acting on the 8‐ to 16‐cell block stage during in vitro development, suggesting that GSH may be one of the important regulators on the development of goat embryos in vivo. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 57:48–54, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Combined parecoxib and I.V. paracetamol provides additional analgesic effect with better postoperative satisfaction in patients undergoing anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction

Background: Adequacy of postoperative analgesia is one of the most important factors that determine early hospital discharge and patients’ ability to resume their normal activities postoperatively. The optimal non-opioid analgesic technique for postoperative pain management would reduce pain and enhance patient satisfaction, and it also facilitates earlier mobilization and rehabilitation by reducing pain-related complications after surgery. The aim of this study was to evaluate the analgesic efficacy of intravenous paracetamol and parecoxib when used alone, or in combination. Methods: Sixty American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) physical status I and II adult patients who were scheduled for anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction were included in this study. Patients were allocated into three groups: group I patients received 1g intravenous paracetamol after induction and another 1 g 4 h later, group II received 40 mg parecoxib after induction, while group III received combination of both drugs (paracetamol 1 g and parecoxib 40 mg). Pain during rest and mobility was assessed in the immediate postoperative period, 2 h and 8 h successively using visual analog scale (VAS). Patient satisfaction was rated according to satisfaction score. Results: Total morphine requirements were lower in group III patients (6.9±2.7 mg) in comparison to group I patients (12.6±3.6 mg) or group II patients (9.8±2.8 mg). The least VAS scores were recorded during knee movement (3.8±1.1) in group III patients compared to group I (6.0±1.8) and group II patients (4.8±1.9). Eight hours postoperatively, group III patients were more satisfied regarding the postoperative pain management. Conclusion: Combination of intravenous paracetamol and parecoxib provided better analgesia and higher patient satisfaction than each drug when used separately.
Online condition monitoring of surge arresters based on third-harmonic analysis of leakage current

Surge arresters play an important role in maintaining the reliability and protection of the high voltage power systems. Various diagnostic online monitoring methods of surge arrester are based on the decomposition of the measured leakage current into their capacitive and resistive components. The arrester's resistive component of the leakage current, in particular, the third harmonic component, is known as to be directly related to the degree of degradation of the ZnO blocks. This paper proposes an online monitoring technique for the surge arrester under dry and pollution conditions when measuring either the total leakage current or both the internal and external leakage currents of three different types of surge arresters. This technique based on feature extraction of the magnitudes, frequencies, and phase angles of all frequency components of the real measured current signals using Prony analysis-Hilbert transform approach and MATLAB program. The observed results illustrate the viability of this technique for online monitoring of surge arrester. Furthermore, the effect of voltage harmonics on the measured leakage currents is investigated through surge arrester model simulation performed with PSCAD program.
Role of Heat Shock Proteins in Protection from and Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases

SUMMARY Increased synthesis of heat shock proteins (hsp) occurs in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells when they are exposed to stress. By increasing their hsp content, cells protect themselves from lethal assaults, primarily because hsp interfere with the uncontrolled protein unfolding that occurs under stress. However, hsp are not produced only by stressed cells; some hsp are synthesized constitutively and perform important housekeeping functions. Accordingly, hsp are involved in the assembly of molecules which play important roles in the immune system. It is not surprising that due to their wide distribution and their homology among different species, hsp represent target antigens of the immune response. Frequent confrontation of the immune system with conserved regions of hsp which are shared by various microbial pathogens can potentiate antimicrobial immunity. However, long-term confrontation of the immune system with hsp antigens which are similar in the host and invaders may convert the immune response against these host antigens and promote autoimmune disease. This review provides an overview of the role of hsp in immunity with a focus on infectious and autoimmune diseases.
[Cardiovascular morbidity in patients with obstructive sleep apnea in relation to the severity of respiratory disorder].

BASIC PROBLEM AND OBJECTIVE Untreated patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) have an increased risk of death from cardiovascular (cv) disease. This study was undertaken to determine the disease spectrum in patients with sonographically proven OSA (apnoea-hypopnoea index > or = 5), with special reference to cv risk factors and accompanying diseases in relation to the severity of their respiratory abnormalities. The study's aim was to clarify what risk factors and accompanying diseases were associated with different degrees of OSA. PATIENTS AND METHODS A systematic recording of cv risk factors and accompanying diseases as well as their association to the severity of nocturnal respiratory disorders was made for 175 patients (165 men, 10 women, mean age 54 +/- 10.2 years) with sonographically proven OSA (mean apnoea-hypopnoea index 37 +/- 24.4). RESULTS The body mass index (BMI) was significantly related to the severity of the respiratory disorder (apnoea-hypopnoea index, AHI, P < 0.05, odds ratio [OR]: 1.95; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.15-3.31). In a multivariate analysis, nocturnal breathing pause (P < 0.05; OR: 3.8; 95% CI: 1.3-11.1), left ventricular hypertrophy (P < 0.01; OR: 3.9; 95% CI: 1.5-10.3) and diabetes mellitus (P < 0.05; OR: 4.2, 95% CI: 1.2-14.7) were independently associated with a high-grade breathing disorder (AHI > or = 20). The incidence of left ventricular hypertrophy rose with an increasing severity of nocturnal OSA. CONCLUSION These data indicate that in patients with high-grade OSA (AHI > or = 20) there is a further grouping together of cardiovascular risk factors, namely increasing body weight, diabetes mellitus, arterial hypertension and left ventricular hypertrophy; they explain the increased mortality rate among these patients from vascular complications.
Aeromonas Exoenzyme T of Aeromonas salmonicida Is a Bifunctional Protein That Targets the Host Cytoskeleton*

Type III protein secretion has been shown recently to be important in the virulence of the fish pathogen Aeromonas salmonicida. The ADP-ribosylating toxin Aeromonas exoenzyme T (AexT) is one effector protein targeted for secretion via this system. In this study, we identified muscular and nonmuscular actin as substrates of the ADP-ribosylating activity of AexT. Furthermore, we show that AexT also functions as a GTPase-activating protein (GAP), displaying GAP activity against monomeric GTPases of the Rho family, specifically Rho, Rac, and Cdc42. Transfection of fish cells with wild type AexT resulted in depolymerization of the actin cytoskeleton and cell rounding. Point mutations within either the GAP or the ADP-ribosylating active sites of AexT (Arg-143 as well as Glu-398 and Glu-401, respectively) abolished enzymatic activity, yet did not prevent actin filament depolymerization. However, inactivation of the two catalytic sites simultaneously did. These results suggest that both the GAP and ADP-ribosylating domains of AexT contribute to its biological activity. This is the first bacterial virulence factor to be described that has a specific actin ADP-ribosylation activity and GAP activity toward Rho, Rac, and Cdc42, both enzymatic activities contributing to actin filament depolymerization.
Scalable Probabilistic Models for Face and Speaker Recognition

In the biometrics community, face and speaker recognition are mature fields in which several systems have been proposed over the past twenty years. While existing systems perform well under controlled recording conditions, mismatch caused by the use of different sensors or a lack of cooperation from the subject still significantly affects performance, especially in challenging scenarios such as in forensics. Furthermore, existing methods suffer from scalability issues, which prevents them from taking advantage of increasingly large amounts of training data. This is otherwise a promising approach to improve accuracy in such challenging scenarios. In this thesis we address these problems of mismatch and complexity by developing scalable probabilistic models that we apply to face, speaker and bimodal recognition. Our contributions are four-fold. First, we propose a unified framework for session variability modeling techniques based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM), that encompasses inter-session variability (ISV) modeling, joint factor analysis (JFA) and total variability (TV) modeling. Second, we propose a novel exact and scalable formulation of probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA), which is a probabilistic and generative framework that models between-class and within-class variations. This formulation solves a major scalability issue, by improving both the time complexity of the training procedure from cubic to linear with respect to the number of samples per class, and the complexity of the scoring procedure. Furthermore, the implementations of all the proposed techniques are integrated into a novel collaborative open source software library called Bob 1 that enforces fair evaluations and encourages reproducible research. Fourth and finally, large-scale experiments are conducted with all of the above machine learning algorithms on several databases such as FRGC for face recognition, NIST SRE12 for speaker recognition and MOBIO for bimodal recognition, showing competitive performances.
Ribosomal Vaccines II. Specificity of the Immune Response to Ribosomal Ribonucleic Acid and Protein Isolated from Salmonella typhimurium

Ribosomal proteins isolated from Salmonella typhimurium were effective in inducing immunity in mice. This immunity was specific since animals immunized with ribosomal proteins from S. typhimurium were not protected against challenge with S. cholerae-suis or S. enteritidis. Immunity was evident as early as 5 days after immunization. Ribosomal ribonucleic acid (RNA) failed to provide any effective immunity in mice. Polyinosinic acid: polycytidylic acid (poly I: C) induced a rapid, short-lived immunity to all three Salmonella species. In contrast, ribosomal RNA failed to elicit any rapid nonspecific response to infection.
IV-Controlling in mittelständischen Industrieunternehmen - Ergebnisse einer empirischen Studie

The 244 small and medium sized industry enterprises in the area of Bielefeld in East-Westfalia /Germany have been asked for the state of implementation of IS-controlling. The answers contained 95 questionnaires. Questions did not ask for opinions or planned actions, a very common research method, but intended to explore what firms really do. Therefore questions asked for basic metrics, which are necessary for every kind of IS-controlling. A summary of the results is, that IS-controlling is only rudimentary implemented. There are signals of severe deficits in information management, especially in the large percentage of self-developed software.
Severe cutaneous adverse drug reactions: a review on epidemiology, etiology, clinical manifestation and pathogenesis.

PURPOSE To review the current progress in epidemiology, etiology, clinical manifestation, and pathophysiology of severe cutaneous adverse drug reactions (SCADRs). DATA SOURCES Data were acquired by using Blackwell-Synergy, PubMed, original articles published in the main Chinese journals and related medical textbooks materials. Study selection and data extraction Throughout the literature review 49 articles were selected. RESULTS SCADRs cases are rare, however, the implication is life threatening with significant mortality rates. Epidemiology studies have shown various incidences from different regions, gender, age, race and concurrent illness. There are typical signs and symptoms for each type of SCADRs, but this is not always so. Drugs associated with inducing SCADRs are anticonvulsants, antibiotics, NSAIDs and antirheumatic drugs. In some countries, especially in Asia, traditional drugs are often the cause of SCADRs. Genetic polymorphisms and viral infections are predisposition factors of SCADRs. Patients with certain genetic alleles and underlying diseases are vulnerable to SCADRs. The exact pathogenesis of SCADRs is not well defined. Nonetheless, recent study showed that reactive metabolites and immunological processes have a significant role in SCADRs. CONCLUSIONS The different SCADRs reactions are attributed by different intrinsic factors, such as genetic polymorphisms, gender, age and race as well as extrinsic factors, such as underlying diseases. Different regions and culprit drugs also play a role in the various types of SCADRs.
Effect of Hydrogen Exposure on Mechanical and Tribological Behavior of CrxN Coatings Deposited at Different Pressures on IN718

In the current study, the properties of the CrxN coatings deposited on the Inconel 718 superalloy using direct current reactive magnetron sputtering are investigated. The influence of working pressure on the microstructure, mechanical, and tribological properties of the CrxN coatings before and after high-temperature hydrogen exposure is studied. The cross-sectional scanning electron micrographs indicate the columnar structure of the coatings, which changes from dense and compact columns to large columns with increasing working pressure. The Cr/N ratio increases from 1.4 to 1.9 with increasing working pressure from 300 to 900 mPa, respectively. X-ray diffraction analysis reveals a change from mixed hcp-Cr2N and fcc-CrN structure to approximately stoichiometric Cr2N phase. After gas-phase hydrogenation, the coating deposited at 300 mPa exhibits the lowest hydrogen absorption at 600 °C of all investigated coatings. The results indicate that the dense mixed cubic and hexagonal structure is preferential for hydrogen permeation resistance due to the presence of cubic phase with higher packing density in comparison to the hexagonal structure. After hydrogenation, no changes in phase composition were observed; however, a small amount of hydrogen is accumulated in the coatings. An increase of coating hardness and elastic modulus was observed after hydrogen exposure. Tribological tests reveal that hydrogenation leads to a decrease of the friction coefficient up to 20%–30%. The best value of 0.25 was reached for hydrogen exposed CrxN coating deposited at 300 mPa.
Regulation of the visna virus long terminal repeat in macrophages involves cellular factors that bind sequences containing AP-1 sites

Visna virus gene expression is highly restricted in monocytes but is induced by monocyte-macrophage differentiation in vivo. Deletion and linker-scanning mutants, gel shift assays, and DNase I footprinting were used to identify sequences in the visna virus long terminal repeat involved in the developmental regulation of gene expression in the U937 monocytic cell line. We found that an AP-1 and an AP-4 binding site were critical for basal activity and that the AP-1 site was required for phorbol ester-inducible gene expression. These results suggest that cellular factors that interact with AP-1 sites are involved in the developmental regulation of visna virus gene expression in macrophages.
A novel asynchronous wrapper using 1-of-4 data encoding and single-track handshaking

Globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) design style has evolved as a solution to increasing problems of distributing clock at high frequency in DSM technology. Most wrapper designs proposed in some recent literature are based on bundled data protocols and suffer from the same timing closure problem as synchronous designs. Delay insensitive (DI) protocols offer a solution to this problem. However, most of the work on DI schemes was limited to asynchronous circuits so far. This is, to our knowledge, the first paper that presents a complete asynchronous wrapper architecture for GALS designs based on a DI protocol. It uses 1-of-4 data encoding with single-track handshaking. The resulting circuit shows a throughput of 1.66 Gbps, significantly higher than previous asynchronous DI templates.
Bioethics in the 21st Century

Due to much lower prices and ebook availability, we encourage you purchase your books online (Amazon now offers free shipping if you have a .edu address) and/or share it with a classmate. Nonetheless, the Weston is available at the bookstore. Skloot is due toward the end of the course and should be read in advance. Weston is very useful for improving your argumentative essay writing, but is not required. Additional readings and multimedia materials will be distributed via eCommons. You will be required to print some readings in order to discuss them closely in section (<100 pages total). Otherwise, printing is optional, but reading is not.