Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Where do rural women obtain postabortion care? The case of Uttar Pradesh, India.

CONTEXT Although Indian law permits abortion for a broad range of social and medical indications, millions of unsafe and illegal abortions and countless subsequent complications occur annually. Nonetheless, in the central Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, few women with abortion complications are reported to seek care at registered private and public health facilities. Information is needed about where rural women seek care for abortion complications and about the quality of care they receive. METHODS Qualitative data were collected in 1999 in four villages in rural Uttar Pradesh. The study team conducted community mapping exercises, focus group discussions with female and male community members, and in-depth interviews with women of reproductive age and with postabortion care providers. RESULTS Postabortion care is widely available in the villages studied, largely from untrained or inappropriately trained providers. Because village-level providers are the front line of care for many women, abortion complications may be exacerbated rather than alleviated, appropriate care delayed and the cost of treatment increased. Village-level postabortion care does not include family planning and contraceptive counseling services or links to reproductive and other health services. CONCLUSIONS : Existing village-level postabortion care services are inadequate. There is an urgent need to increase women's access to higher-quality postabortion care. This can be done by simultaneously engaging village-level providers in the formal system of postabortion care service delivery, as appropriate, and addressing the prevailing social and cultural mores that discourage women with abortion complications from seeking higher-level care.
State Variables of the Arm May Be Encoded by Single Neuron Activity in the Monkey Motor Cortex

Revealing the type of information encoded by neurons activity in the motor cortex is essential not only for understanding the mechanism of motion control but also for developing a brain-machine interface. Thus far, the concept of preferred direction (PD) vector has dominated the discussion regarding how neural activity encodes information; however, a unified view of exactly what information is encoded has not yet been established. In this study, a model was constructed to describe temporal neuron activity by a dot product of the PD and the movement variables vector consisting of joint torque and angular velocity. The plausibility of this model was tested by comparing estimated neural activity with that recorded from the monkey motor cortex, and it was found that this model was able to explain the temporal pattern of neuron activity irrespective of its passive responsiveness. The mean determination coefficients of neurons that responded to proprioceptive stimuli and that responded to visual stimuli were relatively high values of 0.57 and 0.58, respectively. These results suggest that neurons in the monkey motor cortex encode state variables of the arm in a framework of modern control theory and that this information could be decoded for controlling a brain-machine interface.
A study using ifosfamide and etoposide in patients with cisplatin-refractory recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the efficacy and safety of combination therapy with ifosfamide and etoposide in cisplatin-refractory recurrent/metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. METHODS Thirty patients with cisplatin-refractory recurrent/metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck were treated with ifosfamide (1000 mg/m(2)/day) as a continuous 24 h infusion for 3 days and etoposide (100 mg/m(2)/day) as a bolus 1 h infusion on the same 3 days. The treatment was repeated every 4 weeks until disease progression. RESULTS The overall rate of response was 27% (8/30), and 20% (6/30) of the patients achieved stable disease status. Median overall survival was 7.7 months. Subgroup analysis demonstrated significant improvement in overall survival in the group that achieved control of disease. Thirteen (43.3%) patients developed grade 3-4 neutropenia, and five (16.6%) developed grade 3-4 non-hematologic mucositis. CONCLUSIONS This combination chemotherapy had an effective and safe profile and improved survival in patients with cisplatin-refractory recurrent/metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck who achieved disease control.
Recent progress on nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems for cancer therapy

The development of cancer nanotherapeutics has attracted great interest in the recent decade. Cancer nanotherapeutics have overcome several limitations of conventional therapies, such as nonspecific biodistribution, poor water solubility, and limited bioavailability. Nanoparticles with tuned size and surface characteristics are the key components of nanotherapeutics, and are designed to passively or actively deliver anti-cancer drugs to tumor cells. We provide an overview of nanoparticle-based drug delivery methods and cancer therapies based on tumor-targeting delivery strategies that have been developed in recent years.
Etude du processus d'instabilité modulationnelle dans les fibres optiques présentant un profil de dispersion périodique.

Ce travail de these concerne l’etude du processus d’instabilite modulationnelle (MI) dans des fibres optiques presentant un profil de dispersion periodique. La MI est un phenomene bien connu mais la majorite des etudes realisees dans le contexte des fibres optiques concerne le cas de dispersion uniforme axialement. L’objectif de ces travaux est de demontrer experimentalement l’etablissement de la MI dans une fibre optique micro-structuree (PCF) dont la dispersion varie de facon sinusoidale. La premiere partie presente les principales caracteristiques des fibres optiques et les principaux processus physiques mis en jeu, ainsi que les outils de simulations numeriques employes. La seconde partie debute par une presentation du contexte de l’etude et est ensuite consacree aux resultats. Tout d’abord, nous introduisons le concept du mecanisme de quasi-accord de phase (QPM) dans les systemes periodiques longitudinaux. Ensuite, nous presentons la demonstration experimentale du processus de MI dans ce type de fibre. Le spectre obtenu est compose de dix lobes de MI sur 10 THz. De plus, nous proposons une description detaillee de la dynamique de formation des differents lobes de MI. Nous demontrons theoriquement et experimentalement la generation d’une nouvelle famille de lobes de MI due a une combinaison entre la dispersion oscillante et la dispersion d’ordre quatre. Enfin, cette seconde partie est cloturee par l’elaboration d’un outil analytique, base sur le modele a trois ondes tronque. Il permet d’interpreter simplement la dynamique de formation des lobes de MI et de controler le spectre de MI d’une fibre a dispersion oscillante.
Spectroscopic Foundations of Lasers: Spontaneous Emission Into a Resonator Mode

We review the physics underlying the process of spontaneous emission, with a special focus on spontaneous emission into a resonator mode. We define the mode volume, verify the fundamental modal dimensions, present the spectral mode profile, the coherence time, the Q-factor, the Füchtbauer-Ladenburg equation, and the Purcell factor, and discuss their influence on different types of lasers. We obtain the relation between peak emission cross section, radiative lifetime, and emission linewidth. By interpreting spontaneous emission as stimulated emission driven by vacuum fluctuations, we derive the spontaneous-emission rate into a resonator mode and establish physical expressions for the fractions of spontaneous emission and total decay from the upper laser level into this mode. Furthermore, we discuss coupling of the atomic system with the coherent field inside a lasing resonator mode, resulting in the formation of a Mollow triplet, and demonstrate that it leads to a reduction of the spontaneous-emission rate by a factor of 2.
Reducing 30‐Day Inpatient Psychiatric Recidivism and Associated Costs Through Intensive Case Management

Purpose of the Study Intensive case management (ICM) holds promise in reducing 30-day inpatient psychiatric recidivism and associated costs. The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of ICM on 30-day inpatient psychiatric recidivism and associated costs among adult health plan members at elevated risk of psychiatric hospitalization. Primary Practice Setting Psychiatric settings. Methodology and Sample An intent-to-treat, historical control design was used to examine utilization differences between 305 intervention group members eligible to receive ICM services and a cohort of 347 baseline group members identified retrospectively using identical criteria during a similar 1-year time period before implementation of the ICM program. Results The 30-day recidivism rate for baseline group members was 29.11% as compared with 8.52% among intervention group members. Logistic regression results indicated a significant main effect for the ICM intervention. Inpatient psychiatric costs for the 30-day outcome period were on $1,528.91 lower per member in the intervention group. Regression results indicated a main effect for the ICM intervention. Program costs were estimated at $41.39 per member. Implications for Case Management Practice The ICM intervention was associated with significant reductions in inpatient, psychiatric 30-day readmission rates, and associated costs among adult members who are at elevated risk of inpatient, psychiatric recidivism. The intervention, enrollment process, and measurement strategies can be adapted for use by case managers in a variety of different settings.
Three types of suffixes in French: Discarding the learned / non-learned distinction

Traditionally a two-way distinction is made in French between learned and non-learned suffixes, based on etymology. However, this distinction does not account for all suffixes. Furthermore, suffixes are traditionally considered as categorial heads, but some suffixes derive words of multiple categories. This paper proposes an alternative analysis of French suffixes, distinguishing three instead of two types, using a theory by Creemers et al. (2015) proposed for Dutch. In their analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology, Creemers et al. distinguish three instead of two types of suffixes, proposing an alternative to Lowenstamm (2010). Starting from their proposal, we show that it is possible to distinguish three types of suffixes in French as well, accounting for the categorial flexibility of some suffixes, without resorting to the vague distinction between learned and non-learned.
Peri-talar re-alignment osteotomy for joint preservation in asymmetrical ankle osteoarthritis

Various types of re-alignment surgery are used to preserve the ankle joint in cases of intermediate ankle arthritis with partial joint space narrowing. The short-term and mid-term results after re-alignment surgery are promising, with substantial post-operative pain relief and functional improvement that is reflected by high rates of patient satisfaction. In this context, re-alignment surgery can preserve the joint and reduce the pathological load that acts on the affected area. Good clinical and radiological outcomes can be achieved in asymmetrical ankle osteoarthritis by understanding the specific deformities and appropriate indications for different surgical techniques. Cite this article: EFORT Open Rev 2017;2:324-331. DOI: 10.1302/2058-5241.2. 160021
When Do Information Signals Convey Quality in Digital Platforms ?

When do information signals convey quality in digital platforms? Inferring vendor quality in digital microsourcing platforms is challenging due to inherent information asymmetry, which can lead to adverse selection or moral hazard. Many platforms address this challenge by incorporating information signals. However, it is difficult for clients to assess whether and when such signals are true reflections of vendor quality. In this study, we test two kinds of information signals, competency signal and goal signal, as indicators of vendor quality. We argue that these two signals are stronger indicators of vendor quality in jobs of longer duration and in jobs involving greater cultural distance between vendor and client. Our empirical analysis uses a leading online microsourcing platform dataset, which contains over 5000 microsourced IT jobs completed by hundreds of vendors and clients located across dozens of countries. We obtain three main findings. First, goal signal is a more reliable indicator than competency signal without accounting for job and vendor characteristics. Second, both signals are stronger indicators of vendor quality in jobs of longer duration. Finally, both signals are stronger indicators of vendor quality in jobs with greater cultural distance between clients and vendors. This paper contributes to the literature on signaling and digital microsourcing platforms by identifying conditions under which information signals are stronger reflections of vendor quality.
Optimal Control to Increase Energy Production of Wind Farm Considering Wake Effect and Lifetime Estimation

In a wind farm, the upstream wind turbine may cause power loss to the downstream wind turbines due to the wake effect. Meanwhile, the energy production is determined by the power generation and the lifetime of the wind turbine. In this paper, an optimal active power control method is proposed to maximize the energy production of wind farms by considering the wake effect and the lifetime of wind turbine. It starts with the analysis of the pitch angle curve and active power curve seen from the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) of individual wind turbines. Taking the wake effect into account, the pitch angle curve and active power curve are optimized with the aim of Maximum Power Generation (MPG) of the wind farm. Afterwards, considering the lifetime of wind turbines, a comparison is offered between the MPPT method and the MPG method for energy production using a simplified two-turbine wind farm as an example. Due to the small range of the effective wake area, it is found that the energy production is almost the same. Finally, the pitch angle curve and active power curve are optimized according to the Maximum Energy Production (MEP) of a wind farm. Upon considering and contrasting the MPPT method and the MEP method, it can be seen that the energy production of wind farms can be increased even in the case of there not being an effective wake area.
Implementing the Model of Human Occupation across a Mental Health Occupational Therapy Service: Communities of Practice and a Participatory Change Process

The implementation of evidence-based change in practice settings is complex and far reaching, but only limited research has been undertaken in this area. This participatory action research study investigated the implementation of the Model of Human Occupation (MOHO) across a mental health occupational therapy service. Method: The study involved preparatory workshops and 12 months of team-based, monthly group reflective supervision sessions, facilitated by a colleague from academia, with follow-up contact for a further 12 months. Findings: The main findings emphasise the importance of developing a critical learning space, or ‘community of practice’, and identify that barriers to theory implementation can be overcome by collective effort with a shared dialectic. The successful development of a community of practice required the careful consideration of a number of interconnected influences, including those of self, peer and facilitator, and contextual and theoretical relationships. Conclusion: The study concluded that the community of practice was central in supporting the effective implementation of MOHO and its associated assessment tools. A key output of the study is a Participatory Change Process, which illustrates the key steps undertaken and interrelated factors affecting theory uptake. The process requires further testing, but has potential to guide theory implementation in other settings.
Evaluation of the spatial aspects of T-wave complexity in the long-QT syndrome.

BACKGROUND The duration of the QT interval is only a gross estimate of repolarization. Besides its limited accuracy and reproducibility, it does not provide information on the morphology of the T wave; thus, morphologic alterations such as notches can be only qualitatively described but not objectively quantified. METHODS AND RESULTS To measure the complexity of repolarization in the long-QT syndrome (LQTS) patients, we previously applied principal component analysis to body surface mapping and found it useful in distinguishing normal from abnormal repolarization patterns (sensitivity, 87%). In the present study, we applied principal component analysis to 12-lead Holter recordings. The index of complexity of repolarization that we have developed (CR24h) reflects the average 24-hour complexity of repolarization and is mathematically defined as the average ratio between the second and the first eigenvalue. We studied 36 LQTS patients and 40 control subjects. A mean of 22+/-1.3 ECG recordings at 1-hour intervals was used in each patient, and a total of 1655 recordings were analyzed. CR24h was significantly higher in LQTS than in control subjects (34+/-12% versus 13+/-3%; P<.0001). A CR24h exceeding 2 SD above the mean of the control group (>20%) was present in 32 of 36 patients (88%). The negative predictive value of CR24h in LQTS was 88%, and the combination of prolonged QT and abnormal CR24h identified all LQTS patients from normal subjects, including 4 affected symptomatic individuals with a normal QT interval duration, suggesting that CR24h provides information independent of QT duration. CONCLUSIONS Our data suggest that principal component analysis applied to 24-hour, 12-lead Holter recording adequately quantifies the complexity of ventricular repolarization and may become a useful noninvasive diagnostic tool in LQTS.
Efficient view-based 3-D object retrieval via hypergraph learning

View-based 3-D object retrieval has become an emerging topic in recent years, especially with the fast development of visual content acquisition devices, such as mobile phones with cameras. Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to this task, while it is still difficult to measure the relevance between two objects with multiple views. In recent years, learning-based methods have been investigated in view-based 3-D object retrieval, such as graph-based learning. It is noted that the graph-based methods suffer from the high computational cost from the graph construction and the corresponding learning process. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to accelerate the learning-based view-based 3-D object matching in large scale data. Given a query object Q and one object O from a 3-D dataset D, the first step is to extract a small set of candidate relevant 3-D objects for object O. Then multiple hypergraphs can be constructed based on this small set of 3-D objects and the learning on the fused hypergraph is conducted to generate the relevance between Q and O, which can be further used in the retrieval procedure. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Interaction of Hepatocyte Growth Factor and Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs during Gastric Epithelial Wound Healing

Background/Aims: Expression of the hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) is upregulated at the margins of healing gastric ulcers. We investigated in vitrothe interference of HGF, the selective COX-2 inhibitor NS-398 and the nonselective COX inhibitor indomethacin with gastric epithelial wound healing and actin microfilament (actin-MF) formation. Methods: Standardized gastric epithelial wounds, created in confluent RGM1 rat cell monolayers were treated with: HGF (10 ng/ml), NS-398 (1–100 µM) or indomethacin (0.01– 0.5 mM). The areas of re-epithelialization and cell proliferation were measured 24 h after wounding. Actin-MFs were labeled with fluorescein-conjugated phalloidin and their distribution was examined using a Nikon epifluorescence microscope. Results: HGF caused a significant increase in gastric monolayer wound re-epithelialization and this was not affected by mitomycin C. Both indomethacin and NS-398 inhibited HGF-stimulated re-epithelialization, but the basal wound re-epithelialization rate and cell proliferation was only significantly inhibited by indomethacin. HGF triggered actin stress fiber formation which was inhibited by both indomethacin and NS-398, but only indomethacin interfered with actin-MF formation at the baseline condition. Conclusions: HGF significantly increased gastric wound re-epithelialization by activating cell migration which may be mediated by the COX-2 pathway.
Degradation of Neurofilament Proteins by Purified Human Brain Cathepsin D

Abstract: Cathepsin D (CD) was purified to homogeneity from postmortem human cerebral cortex. Incubation of CD with human neurofilament proteins (NFPs) prepared by axonal flotation led to the rapid degradation of the 200,000, 160,000, and 70,000 NFP subunits (200K, 160K, and 70K) which had been separated by one‐or two‐dimensional sodium dodecyl sulfate‐polyacrylámide gel electrophoresis (SDS‐PAGE). Degradation was appreciable at enzyme activity‐to‐substrate protein ratios that were two‐to threefold lower than those in unfractionated homogenates from cerebral cortex. Quantitative measurements of NFPs separated by PAGE revealed that, at early stages of digestion, the 160K NFP was somewhat more rapidly degraded than the 70K subunit while the 200K NFP had an intermediate rate of degradation. At sufficiently high enzyme concentrations, all endogenous proteins in human NF preparations were susceptible to the action of CD. Human brain CD also degraded cytoskeletal proteins in NF preparations from mouse brain with a similar specificity. To identify specific NFP breakdown products, antisera against each of the major NFPs were applied to nitrocellulose electroblots of NFPs separated by two‐dimensional SDS‐PAGE. In addition to detecting the 200K, 160K, and 70K NFP in human NF preparations, the antisera also detected nonoverlapping groups of polypeptides resembling those in NF preparations from fresh rat brain. When human NF preparations were incubated with CD, additional polypeptides were released in specific patterns from each NFP subunit. Some of the immuno‐cross‐reactive fragments generated from NFPs by CD comigrated on two‐dimensional gels with polypeptides present in unincubated preparations. These results demonstrate that NFPs and other cytoskel‐etal proteins are substrates for CD. The physiological significance of these findings and the possible usefulness of analyzing protein degradation products for establishing the action of proteinases in vivo are discussed.
Quasi-Aesthetic Appraisals

IN the right circumstances and the right frame of mind we are prepared to make aesthetic appraisals of almost anything, from hills, cottages and cars, to symphonies, people and poems. My problem is to try and set a boundary in at least one direction to the catholicity of this kind of judgement. I want to argue that when we use a word from our aesthetic vocabulary for appraising a theory in science or a proof in mathematics we are not properly to be described as making an aesthetic appraisal, though there are close parallels with our normal use of these words.