Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is a computer questionnaire of childhood asthma acceptable in general practice?

OBJECTIVES To determine whether a previously-validated touch screen computer program of symptoms and management of childhood asthma is acceptable to parents who accompany their children to consult a GP, and to examine whether any parent characteristics are associated with acceptability. METHODS Conducted in general practice in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. A cross sectional pen and paper survey was given to parents of children consulting a GP after completing the computer questionnaire on childhood asthma in the waiting room. Measurements were frequencies of Likert scale responses to statements concerning the computer questionnaire, compared with demographic and personal characteristics. RESULTS High levels of acceptability of the asthma computer questionnaire were reported by the 198 respondents, with most being willing to do the same program once or twice a year (87%), or to do similar programs on other topics (91%). Most respondents (81%) agreed that the computer program was enjoyable, and very few (8%) would have preferred to answer the asthma questions by pen and paper rather than by computer. Two or more children accompanying the parent was the characteristic most associated with less positive responses. CONCLUSIONS Overall the high acceptability of this questionnaire suggests that this computerised format is an appropriate method of screening children for asthma and determining their current management. As a large component of underdiagnosis of asthma is lack of reporting to the doctor, this valid and acceptable diagnostic aid has the potential to improve detection of unreported asthma, and also to identify high-risk individuals.
The Snf1‐activating kinase Sak1 is a key regulator of metabolic adaptation and in vivo fitness of Candida albicans

The metabolic flexibility of the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans is important for colonisation and infection of different host niches. Complex regulatory networks, in which protein kinases play central roles, link metabolism and other virulence‐associated traits, such as filamentous growth and stress resistance, and thereby control commensalism and pathogenicity. By screening a protein kinase deletion mutant library that was generated in the present work using an improved SAT1 flipper cassette, we found that the previously uncharacterised kinase Sak1 is a key upstream activator of the protein kinase Snf1, a highly conserved regulator of nutrient stress responses that is essential for viability in C. albicans. The sak1Δ mutants failed to grow on many alternative carbon sources and were hypersensitive to cell wall/membrane stress. These phenotypes were mirrored in mutants lacking other subunits of the SNF1 complex and partially compensated by a hyperactive form of Snf1. Transcriptional profiling of sak1Δ mutants showed that Sak1 ensures basal expression of glyoxylate cycle and gluconeogenesis genes even in glucose‐rich media and thereby contributes to the metabolic plasticity of C. albicans. In a mouse model of gastrointestinal colonisation, sak1Δ mutants were rapidly outcompeted by wild‐type cells, demonstrating that Sak1 is essential for the in vivo fitness of C. albicans.
Superficial siderosis of the central nervous system: pathogenetic heterogeneity and therapeutic approaches

Objective –Superficial siderosis of the central nervous system (CNS) is a rare chronic progressive disorder caused by chronic subarachnoid hemorrhage. We present four patients with superficial siderosis of the CNS to describe the characteristic symptoms, and to discuss the pathogenetic heterogeneity and possible new therapeutic approaches. Results– The causes of chronic subarachnoid bleeding in superficial siderosis were different. In two patients surgical treatment of ependymoma or cerebral cavernomas were the underlying diseases. No cause was detected in one patient. For the first time, we present one patient with vasculitis of the central nervous system associated with systemic hemochromatosis in superficial siderosis. Therapeutic approaches included exstirpation of cavernomas as the source of chronic bleeding in one patient, immunosuppressive therapy and venupunctures in the patient with vasculitis and hemochromatosis, and symptomatic treatment with chelating agents and antioxidants. The patients remained clinically stable for the follow‐up period of up to 2 years. Conclusions– Our cases underline the pathogenetic heterogeneity of superficial siderosis and favor the early diagnosis for prompt initiation of therapy. Besides treatment of the underlying condition, antioxidants and radical scavengers may be effective in halting the progression of the disease.
Breastfeeding Patterns in a Community of Native Hawaiian Mothers Participating in WIC

Although Hawaii has high breastfeeding initiation rates (89%), Native Hawaiian WIC* participants have much lower initiation (64%) rates. Little is known about why these disparities occur. The study's aim was to describe the breastfeeding patterns of Hawaiian/part-Hawaiian women enrolled in the WIC who had initiated breastfeeding. Retrospective descriptive data (N = 200) were gathered from WIC records. Descriptive and parametric statistics with univariate and multivariate analysis of breastfeeding patterns were completed. Mothers exclusively breastfeeding at initiation weaned significantly later and were significantly more likely to breastfeed for 6 months than were mothers who partially breastfed. Practice and policy implications of these findings are discussed.
Characterization of On-chip Interconnections and Capacitive Coupling Effect on CMOS Operational Amplifier

The operational amplifier is one of the most important circuits to compose ADCs, DACs and active filters. Now, there are many papers which deal with noise characters of op amps. Most of them are focused on the input signal noises which flow into circuits without account about noise source. Capacitive coupling is one of the most frequent sources of signal noise. The capacitive coupling is inevitable because of high integration. This paper investigates mechanism of input noises flowing into the op amp and effects of capacitive coupling on the op amp as on-chip interconnection modeling and analytical model of the DC output offset voltage of the OPamp are proposed. Furthermore, the models are verified by experimental measurement.
La gestión de la calidad según las normas ISO 9000:1994 en el sector agro-alimentario europeo, el caso de una región mediterranea

Este articulo presenta los resultados que la implementacion de la Gestion de la calidad segun las normas ISO 9000:1994 produce en las empresas agro-alimentaria cer-tificadas en una region mediterranea de la Union Europea. El presente analisis esta dividido en tres partes. En la primera se ofrece un cuadro sobre la evolucion de la certi-ficacion en el marco europeo e italiano. En la segunda parte se realiza un enfoque de lo que es la realidad numerica y geografica de las empresas investigadas. En la tercera parte se exponen los resultados de la investigacion limitados al caso de las empresas agro-alimentarias sicilianas. Los resultados del estudio nos permiten de afirmar que la eleccion de la certificacion como instrumento precursor de la diversificacion parece actualmente la mejor opcion y esta destinada a representar un modelo a emular para todas las empresas que esperan mantenerse e incluso incrementar su presencia en los mercados nacionales y sobre todo extranjeros.
Factors affecting growth and decolorization Effect of different direct blue dye concentrations on decolorization by Aspergillus flavus and Penicillium canescens in liquid media

Article history: Received on: 10/11/2016 Accepted on: 11/12/2016 Available online: 27/02/2017 Six fungal species were isolated from Egyptian soil and identified as Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus niger, Penicillium canescens, Penicillium crustosum, Penicillium sp. and Fusarium sp. and were tested for their decolorization activity of direct blue dye (DB). Aspergillus flavus and Penicillium canescens were the best active fungal species for decolorization of direct blue dye. The optimum conditions for direct blue dye decolorization by both fungi grown on Czapek’s Dox liquid medium were at a concentration of 0.01% Direct blue dye, sucrose as a carbon source, NaNO3 as a nitrogen source, incubation temperature 30°C and 35°C and pH 4, 5 for both fungi respectively and incubation time for 7 days. Addition of some metals (Ca, Ni, Co) to the growth medium exhibited little effect on dye decolorization. Whereas, Cu (2+) highly inhibited dye decolorization by both fungi.
Cellular hypoxia and adipose tissue dysfunction in obesity

Expansion of adipose tissue mass, the distinctive feature of obesity, is associated with low-grade inflammation. White adipose tissue secretes a diverse range of adipokines, a number of which are inflammatory mediators (such as TNFα, IL-1β, IL-6, monocyte chemoattractant protein 1). The production of inflammatory adipokines is increased with obesity and these adipokines have been implicated in the development of insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome. However, the basis for the link between increased adiposity and inflammation is unclear. It has been proposed previously that hypoxia may occur in areas within adipose tissue in obesity as a result of adipocyte hypertrophy compromising effective O2 supply from the vasculature, thereby instigating an inflammatory response through recruitment of the transcription factor, hypoxic inducible factor-1. Studies in animal models (mutant mice, diet-induced obesity) and cell-culture systems (mouse and human adipocytes) have provided strong support for a role for hypoxia in modulating the production of several inflammation-related adipokines, including increased IL-6, leptin and macrophage migratory inhibition factor production together with reduced adiponectin synthesis. Increased glucose transport into adipocytes is also observed with low O2 tension, largely as a result of the up-regulation of GLUT-1 expression, indicating changes in cellular glucose metabolism. Hypoxia also induces inflammatory responses in macrophages and inhibits the differentiation of preadipocytes (while inducing the expression of leptin). Collectively, there is strong evidence to suggest that cellular hypoxia may be a key factor in adipocyte physiology and the underlying cause of adipose tissue dysfunction contributing to the adverse metabolic milieu associated with obesity.
Efficient Wireless Microphone sensing: Subband energy detector principle and measured performance

Spectrum scarcity has become a critical concern in wireless communication systems due to the limited availability of frequency spectrum. Hence, cognitive radio (CR) has been introduced as a solution for more effective use of the spectrum resources. Spectrum sensing (SS) is one of the key elements in the implementation of effective and reliable CR systems. Energy detection (ED) based SS is the most common sensing algorithm due to its low complexity. The main drawback of ED based SS is that it is highly dependent on the precise knowledge of the receiver noise variance. Hence, the performance of the ED algorithm is degraded significantly, when there is noise uncertainty in the estimation of the noise variance. In this study, we apply a recently proposed enhanced ED based algorithm to the sensing of Wireless Microphone (WM) signals, demonstrating robustness to noise uncertainty in real-time testing with actual WM signals. This so-called Max-Min ED algorithm is based on subband division of a wideband signal using an analysis filter bank (AFB) and utilizing the difference of maximum and minimum subband energies as the test statistic. Following the introduction of analytical models and scenarios of ED based SS algorithms, the sensing algorithms are implemented and tested using National Instruments (NI) Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) and the NI-LabVIEW software platform, together with the necessary toolboxes.
Robust visual inertial monocular using nonlinear optimization

Recently, visual inertial has became popular due to its excellent result. However, the excellent result severely depends on the accuracy of estimation of initial parameters. The existing method is not effective on estimating the initial parameters and lacks the function to perform the closed loop detection, which will cause the error accumulation and low accurate estimation to system's state. In the paper, to estimate high accurate initial parameters (scale, IMU biases, gravity direction and velocity), we propose an effective method to estimate these parameters by using nonlinear optimization method. Besides, we also address the issue of state accumulation drift with preintegral theory among selected keyframes and perform an closed loop detection. Experiments on EuRoc datasets show that our method helps get good initial result with scale factor error less than 0.01, the gravity magnitude converging to 9.8, accelerometer biases converging to 0 and gyroscope biases converging to the level of 10E-3. We also get results with error less than 1 degree in rotation and 0.08m in translation. Our method performs better effect comparing with other state-of-the-art visual inertial monocular SLAM methods.
Processor Architecture for Road Extraction Based on Projective Transformation

This paper presents a processor architecture for a robust road-extraction algorithm using stereo images. The road-extraction method estimates a projective-transformation matrix H that represents the geometrical features of road regions. The road region can be robustly extracted using sum of absolute differences (SAD) between one image and a transformed image of the other one. To accelerate the projective transformation, dedicated multipliers are employed. A dynamically reconfigurable architecture for robust estimation and SAD-based extraction is presented. For image size 720times480, the execution time on the proposed processor is 0.05 seconds whereas that on a microprocessor is 2.5 seconds
Extent of Salmonellae Contamination in Primary Breeder Hatcheries in 1998 as Compared to 1991

SUMMARY Eggshell fragments, paper pads from chick boxes, and fluff samples were obtained from three commercial primary breeder hatcheries and analyzed for the presence and level of salmonellae with identical laboratory methods in 1991 and 1998. Overall, 29 of 180 samples (16.1%) from the three hatcheries in 1998 were contaminated with salmonellae, whereas in 1991, 11.1% of the overall samples were found to be salmonellae positive. Salmonellae were detected in 1.7% of eggshell fragments, 1.7% of fluff samples, and 48% of the paper pad samples in 1998, whereas 15.2, 4.5, and 12% of these type samples, respectively, were salmonellae positive in 1991. Although the percentage of positive samples was slightly higher in 1998 than 1991, from an enumeration standpoint, the salmonellae contamination in primary breeder hatcheries seems to have improved in the past 7 yr. In 1998, less than 4% of the positive samples had high levels of salmonellae, whereas in 1991 36% of the positive samples had high numbers of salmonellae. Primary broiler breeder and broiler hatcheries present critical control points in the prevention of salmonellae contamination during commercial poultry production. The cycle of salmonellae contamination will not likely be broken until contamination at these critical points is dramatically reduced or eliminated.
Noncompliant Capacity Ratio for Systems With an Arbitrary Number of Polarization Hinges

We study the statistics of transmission impairments due to polarization-mode dispersion in systems characterized by the hinge model. In particular, we validate the use of a computationally efficient expression for the probability density function (PDF) of the differential group delay (DGD) of systems with an arbitrary number of hinges. We then combine this expression for the PDF of the DGD with the outage map approach to compute outage probabilities and noncompliant capacity ratios for transmission links with varying numbers of sections (from 4 up to 20), each for several values of mean DGD and different system parameters.
Heart: excitation and contraction.

concerning cardiac muscle within the 2 year period ending early July 1970 (ca 1500 references). Overwhelmed at this number of papers, we were very willing to obey one of the editors' instructions to be selective in our choice of papers for review, to confine ourselves to "critical description and evaluation of outstanding papers", and to direct our review to those areas in which we have particular interest. vVe have focused on one active and controversial area which wc considered to be funda­ mental and about which wc had thought most and had parti cular interest­ voltage-clamp of cardiac muscle. Wc have tricd to rccognize and include relevant information in other areas. In reviewing the literaturc we were imprcssed by thc lack of a serious attempt to build up a rcalistic model of the cxpcrimcntal method and prep­ aration. With the appropriate physical laws and mathematics, a rigorous, critical analysis could have been made which would have taken into con­ sideration the reasonableness of the assumptions on which the presentation, analysis, and interpretation of the data were based. Although such disregard is not confined to the field of voltage-clamp, it exemplifies, we think, the consequences of it. Furthermore, the conclusions drawn from the data con­ cern those fundamental properties of cardiac muscle on which our under­ standing of its electrical activity is based. The detail required to illustrate this need for more rigorous premeditation has made some parts of the review somewhat unusual in that they involve a lengthy discussion of a small number of papers.
Quantitation of intratumoral thymidylate synthase expression predicts for disseminated colorectal cancer response and resistance to protracted-infusion fluorouracil and weekly leucovorin.

PURPOSE Response rates to fluorouracil (5-FU)-based therapy remain low. As new, active agents are being tested, information regarding specific intratumoral genetic determinants of chemotherapy sensitivity or resistance can be used to plan therapy rationally. Intratumoral thymidylate synthase (TS) quantitation may be among the most important determinants of sensitivity or resistance to 5-FU. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty-six disseminated colorectal cancer patients had measurable tumor biopsies for polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based determination of TS mRNA pretreatment. Protracted infusion of 5-FU 200 mg/m2/d for 21 days with weekly intravenous leucovorin 20 mg/m2 each cycle was given. After two cycles, responses were evaluated. Response data were correlated with independently determined intratumoral ratios of TS/beta-actin mRNA for each patient. RESULTS TS/beta-actin ratios were successfully obtained for 42 patients (91%). TS/beta-actin ratios ranged from 0.3 x 10(-3) to 18.2 x 10(-3) (median, 3.5 x 10[-3]). Twelve patients (26%) responded to treatment (median TS/beta-actin ratio, 1.7 x 10[+3]). Thirty-four patients did not respond (median TS/beta-actin ratio, 5.6 x 10[-3]). No patient with a TS mRNA level greater than 4.1 x 10(-3) responded. The median TS/beta-actin ratio (3.5 x 10[-3]) significantly segregated responders from nonresponders (P = .001). Median survival for patients with TS/beta-actin ratios < or = 3.5 x 10(-3) was 13.6 months; for patients with TS/beta-actin ratios greater than 3.5 x 10(-3), it was 8.2 months (P = .02). CONCLUSION For this cohort, the intratumoral TS/beta-actin ratio had a statistically significant association with response and survival. This relationship for other 5-FU schedules remains unknown. Confirmation of these data in a larger patient population could lead to determination of therapy for disseminated colorectal cancer based on a specific intratumoral molecular parameter.
Pulmonary "hypersensitivity" reactions induced by transfusion of non-HL-A leukoagglutinins.

Abstract In two cases of normovolemic pulmonary edema associated with whole-blood transfusion, clinical manifestations included abrupt onset of chills, fever, tachycardia, dyspnea and cough. Cyanosis and hypotension occurred in the more severe case, and bilateral pulmonary infiltrates without confirmatory evidence of circulatory overload were present in both. Antibody reacting with recipient leukocytes was identified in the donor serum in both cases by the capillary agglutination technic but not by a standard lymphocyte microcytotoxicity method. Characterization of the antibody in Case 1 revealed that it detected a specificity that was probably not directly related to the HL-A locus, the neutrophil antigens NA1, NB1, NC1 or the 5a–5b locus. Although over five years had elapsed since the last pregnancy, both the responsible donors were multiparous, raising concern about the use of whole blood from multiparous donors particularly when multiple transfusions must be administered.
Transporter-mediated drug interactions: clinical implications and in vitro assessment

Although they are less frequently compared with the reported cases of CYP-mediated drug interactions, clinically significant transporter-mediated drug interactions, which are mainly based on efflux transporter or P-glycoprotein data, have been reported. Unlike the CYP-mediated drug interactions that can be readily defined by inhibition or induction of CYP enzymes, the evidence for the so-called transporter-mediated drug interactions is often less conclusive. The difficulty in defining transporter-mediated drug interactions is due mainly to the interplay between transporters and drug-metabolizing enzymes in drug disposition, and the lack of specific and potent inhibitors for each transporter and enzyme. An important lesson learned from animal studies is that transporter inhibition has a much greater impact on the tissue distribution of drugs than on the systemic exposure of drugs measured in plasma. The potential risk of transporter-mediated drug interactions might be underestimated if only plasma concentrations are monitored.
Self‐nonself discrimination by the complement system

The alternative pathway (AP) of complement can recognize nonself structures by only two molecules, C3b and factor H. The AP deposits C3b covalently on nonself structures via an amplification system. The actual discrimination is performed by factor H, which has binding sites for polyanions (sialic acids, glycosaminoglycans, phospholipids). This robust recognition of ‘self’ protects our own intact viable cells and tissues, while activating structures are recognized by default. Foreign targets are opsonized for phagocytosis or killed. Mutations in factor H predispose to severe diseases. In hemolytic uremic syndrome, they promote complement attack against blood cells and vascular endothelial cells and lead, for example, to kidney and brain damage. Even pathogens can exploit factor H. In fact, the ability to bind factor H discriminates most pathogenic microbes from nonpathogenic ones.